Erich Wolfgang Korngold's last opera Die Kathrin: a long-overdue American premiere.
Support our largest Reclaimed Voices Series project to date as we present the long-awaited American premiere of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's last opera, Die Kathrin. This neglected masterpiece features Korngold's lush orchestrations and masterful vocal writing. Our multi-media performance will take place in April 2022 at the Reva and David Logan Center, on the University of Chicago campus.
Die Kathrin was Korngold’s last opera. He began working on it in 1933, when he was engaged in re-orchestrating some of the classic operettas of Johann Strauss Jr. and Leo Fall. At this time, Korngold had also begun working in Hollywood with Max Reinhardt on the film score for A Midsummer Night's Dream.
While in Hollywood, he continued to work on Die Kathrin for a 1938 Viennese premiere. Unfortunately, the original text, depicting a love story between a German woman and a French soldier in the French-occupied Rhineland, was destined to run afoul of Nazi censors. His wife Luzi changed elements of the story in the hope that the performance would still take place. But a performance of an opera by a Jewish composer was out of the question in Germany or Austria. With the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 the Vienna premiere was cancelled. Korngold and his family were now exiles living in Hollywood.
The opera received its European premiere in Sweden in 1939, where it was given an overtly harsh and anti-Semitic review. To make matters worse, Die Kathrin was almost lost forever when the Nazis broke into Korngold’s villa to destroy his work. Michael Haas, in his book, Forbidden Music, writes: “Weinberger [music publisher] employees broke into the cellar, recovered what was left of the manuscript, and returned it to Korngold by interleaving sheets between pages of Beethoven, Mozart, and other acceptably ‘Aryan’ composers and posting them to the composer in California.”
Our U.S. premiere will be sung in German with English supertitles.