Cynics and cowards, look away now!

KORNGOLD: DAS WUNDER DER HELIANE

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Naxos

Erich Korngold’s philosophically pretentious yet sensually magnificent fairytale Das Wunder der Heliane, or “The Miracle of Heliane”, suffered at the outset from bad timing.

It was first performed in 1927 in Hamburg, when operas such as Berg’s Wozzeck and Strauss’s Intermezzo, based on gritty themes or drawing on real modern life, had just come into fashion. A symbolist drama in which the unjustly imprisoned Heliane uses her magical powers to resurrect a saintly nameless stranger and bring the power of love to a benighted kingdom seemed to belong to an irrelevant pre-war sensibility.

Das Wunder der Heliane is also very expensive to stage: it requires a large cast and two superlative singers for the leading roles, as well as an immense orchestra of over a hundred players.

So despite Korngold’s enormous European celebrity and the huge popularity of his opera Die tote Stadt, this work had been pretty much forgotten by the time the Depression kicked in, when the composer was blacklisted for being Jewish.

In the Nineties, however, in the wake of a movement to revisit and reassess music banned by the Nazis, Das Wunder der Heliane began to attract interest again, mainly through a recording on the Decca label and several concert performances in Vienna, Amsterdam and London.

This new DVD recording presents one of its first fully staged post-war productions, in a lavish staging from the Deutsche Oper Berlin, sparely and intelligently directed by Christof Loy in a setting that evokes Hollywood courtroom dramas of the Forties, with a cast led by the American soprano and tenor Sara Jakubiak and Brian Jagde, both of them totally committed throughout, pulsing a strong electric charge into their erotic love duets. The supporting cast, led by baritone Josef Wagner as Heliane’s tormented husband, is excellent too.

The performance is conducted with all the necessary fullblooded fervour by

Marc Albrecht, and Korngold’s score emerges in all its richly chromatic, glittering tonality and overheated intensity.

It’s not an opera for the faint-hearted or cynical, but anyone with a taste for the decadent world of Strauss’s Salome and Die Frau ohne Schatten will be as enthralled as I was. Covent Garden, can you take note?