Jewish Difference and Recovering ‘Commedia’: Erich W. Korngold’s ‘Die tote Stadt’ in Post-First World War Austria

Commedia dell’arte re-emerged in the early twentieth century to become a means for Europe’s assimilated Jews to process the conditions of modernity by non-serious means. Yet, existing scholarship on Erich W. Korngold’s Die tote Stadt tends to focus on the protagonist Paul with respect to the doppelgängers Marie/Marietta, spotlighting the psychodrama of Acts I and III but overlooking the overtly theatrical episodes of Act II’s extended commedia dell’arte sequence. The opera’s ‘Schlager’ (hit songs) offered old-world comfort to its post-First World War Viennese audience. Nevertheless, the commedia dell’arte scenes were significant in terms of advancing an affirmative politics for war-torn Vienna’s assimilated Jews, precisely because of how deliberately noisy they appeared in opposition to the world of Catholic harmony. Placing side by side Wagnerian symbolism and commedia dell’arte—that is, ingredients from Christianity and contemporary popular Jewish theatre—Korngold’s opera asked timely questions of the Jewish citizenry in Austria’s First Republic