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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2012
Responses to Korngold's 1920 opera Die tote Stadt have long been filtered through the lens of his later Hollywood career. To do so, however, not only risks misunderstanding the relationship between these two different spheres of the composer's output, but also ignores the opera's complex positioning within the gender discourses of early twentieth-century Vienna. This article offers a corrective to the clichéd view of Korngold the ‘pre-filmic’ opera composer by arguing that, in its treatment of the characters Marie and Marietta, Die tote Stadt draws on a tradition of ‘strangling blonde’ imagery from the nineteenth century in order to critique the gender theories of Otto Weininger (1880–1903), which were still current in the 1920s. As such, in its concern with the nature of femininity, Die tote Stadt also draws our attention to the modern woman who had just entered the composer's life, Luise (Luzi) von Sonnenthal.
2 A recent exposé of this role can be found in Franklin, Peter, Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Recent contributions include Stollberg, Arne, Durch den Traum zum Leben: Erich Wolfgang Korngolds Oper ‘Die tote Stadt’ (Mainz, 2004)Google Scholar; Steinberg, Michael P., ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Operatic Modernism’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 36 (2006), 629–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goose, Benjamin, ‘Opera for Sale: Folksong, Sentimentality and the Market’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 133 (2008), 189–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, most recently, Cheng, William, whose article ‘Opera en abyme: The Prodigious Ritual of Korngold's Die tote Stadt’, this journal, 22 (2010), 115–46Google Scholar, challenges convincingly the opera's perceived political neutrality and naivety.
4 See van der Lek, Robbert, ‘Concert Music as Reused Film Music: E.-W. Korngold's Self-Arrangements’, trans. Swithinbank, Mick, Acta Musciologica, 66 (1994), 78–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Winters, Ben, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood: A Film Score Guide (Lanham, MD, 2007), 48–9Google Scholar.
5 See Hayworth, Peter, Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times (Cambridge, 1996), I, 150–1Google Scholar.
6 Irving Kolodin, quoted in Carroll, Brendan, The Last Prodigy: A Biography of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (Portland, OR, 1997), 330Google Scholar.
7 Olin Downes, ‘Heifetz Features Work by Korngold’, New York Times, 28 March 1947.
8 Paul Hume, ‘“Exaggerated” Korngold Symphony’, The Washington Post, 25 August 1974.
9 Hans Rutz, ‘E. W. Korngold: Symphonische Serenade’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (March 1950), 164–5.
10 Andreas Liess, ‘Die Österreichische Moderne’, Muisca, 4 (February 1950), 51.
11 ‘Am häufigsten begegnet man Korngolds Namen heute wohl als Bearbeiter klassischer Wiener Operetten, die er für Reinhardt besorgte, oder im Vorspann bei manchem amerikanischen Film.’ Karl Robert Brachtel, ‘In Memoriam: Erich Wolfgang Korngold’, Musica, 12 (February 1958), 104–5.
12 Fischer, Jens Malte, ‘Das befremdende Hauptwerk: Erich Wolfgang Korngolds Das Wunder der Heliane’, in Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Wunderkind der Moderne oder letzter Romantiker?, ed. Stollberg, Arne (Munich, 2008), 199Google Scholar.
13 Taruskin, Richard, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford, 2005), IV, 550Google Scholar.
14 Ibid., 551.
15 ‘Films – A New Dimension for Opera’, New York Times, 20 April 1975.
16 Peter G. Davis, ‘Lights, Action, Korngold’, New York Times, 24 March 1974.
17 Peter G. Davis, ‘A Noble Failure and a Hokey Success’, New York Times, 16 November 1975. The Korngold, needless to say, was the latter.
18 ‘Erich Korngold: Genius or Mere Talent?’, Daily Telegraph, 28 January 2009. Similarly, Edward Seckerson talked of Nadja Michael (Marie/Marietta) as having ‘the confident air of a glamorous Hollywood starlet ripe for recognition’ (The Independent, 29 January 2009) with Neil Fisher opening his review with ‘This was the night that Hollywood came to Covent Garden’ (The Times, 29 January 2009).
19 ‘Between Marie and Marietta? Korngold, Opera and Film’, Royal Opera House programme book for the UK première of Die tote Stadt (2009), 31–4.
20 See Giger, Andreas, ‘Tradition in Post World-War-I Vienna: The Role of the Vienna State Opera from 1919–1924’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 28 (December 1997), 189–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Giger identifies the 1936 Viennese production as the last. See ‘A Matter of Principle: The Consequences for Korngold's Career’, The Journal of Musicology, 16 (1998), 557. The opera was revived with a full production by the Bavarian State Opera under Robert Heger in 1955.
22 Arne Stollberg has related that recent productions he has seen in Zurich (dir. Sven-Eric Bechtolf), Venice (dir. Pier Luigi Pizzi), Geneva (Nicolas Brieger) and Frankfurt (Anselm Weber) dropped the Hollywood imagery (personal correspondence, 2010). Willy Decker's 2004 Salzburg production, which has travelled all over the world (including performances in San Francisco, Amsterdam and at Covent Garden) uses no obvious cinematic imagery, but its use of expressionistic twirling houses in the opera's dream sequence could easily be related to 1920s expressionist German cinema, in particular Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920).
23 For details of the Düsseldorf and Spoleto productions, see: www.playbillarts.com/features/article/5173.html and http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/1997/giugno/27/Kim_Novak_rivive_Spoleto_altre_co_0_97062715163.shtml (accessed 10 December 2009).
24 Boileau, Pierre and Narcejac, Thomas, The Living and the Dead, trans. Sainsbury, Geoffrey (London, 1956)Google Scholar.
25 Hitchcock himself noted ‘The perfect “woman of mystery” is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic.’ See Spoto, Donald, The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (London, 1983), 398Google Scholar. Moreover, Spoto goes on to observe: ‘The belief that any beautiful woman was a deception, a cheat, and a dangerous seduction of spirit and body caused a simultaneous attraction and repulsion in [Hitchcock] that created his own spiritual vertigo.’
26 Volkmar Fischer, DVD booklet, Die tote Stadt (ArtHaus Musik 100 343), 16–17.
27 McKee, David, ‘Die tote Stadt. Erich Wolfgang Korngold’, Opera Quarterly, 20 (2004), 314CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 The hair-strangling act can admittedly prove difficult to stage. Of the Deutsche Oper production in January 2004, Uwe Schneider noted: ‘I will not say much about the production by Philippe Arlaud, because his ideas said nothing about the work. The clumsiness of the production overall was highlighted by the audience burst[ing] out laughing when Paul had to strangle Marietta to death.’ See www.operajaponica.org/archives/berlin/berlinletterpast04.htm (accessed 16 December 2009).
29 The entirety of the second act and the procession of the third were projected onto the stage. See Korngold, Luzi, Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Ein Lebensbild von Luzi Korngold (Vienna, 1967), 34Google Scholar. Luzi notes that Erich came back ‘enchanted’. This also marked Richard Tauber's first appearance in the role of Paul. The landmark 1975 production at New York's City Opera, directed by Frank Corsaro and starring Carol Neblett and John Alexander, also used films (by Ronald Chase) projected onto a scrim at the front of the stage. See Harold Schonberg, ‘City Opera “Tote Stadt” Exploits Film Technique’, New York Times, 3 April 1975.
30 See Goose, ‘Opera for Sale’.
31 Franklin, Peter, ‘Underscoring Drama – Picturing Music’, in Wagner & Cinema, ed. Joe, Jeongwon and Gilman, Sander L (Bloomington, 2010), 61Google Scholar. Franklin was responding to Paulin, Scott D., ‘Richard Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity: The Idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the History and Theory of Film Music’, in Music and Cinema, ed. Buhler, James, Flinn, Caryl and Neumeyer, David (Middletown, CT, 2000)Google Scholar. Paulin criticised (rightly) the misunderstanding of Wagnerian leitmotif but, as Franklin argues, was in danger of inscribing a kind of ‘art’ status to which film music might aspire.
32 Franklin, Seeing Through Music, 38.
33 This reputation suffered in later years partly as a consequence of Korngold's refusal to espouse the more radical strains of modernism. Nazi restrictions on his music and his later embrace of Hollywood mass culture completed the job. See, for example, Giger, ‘A Matter of Principle’.
34 This was published in 1913 as Das Trugbild.
35 Rodenbach, Georges, Bruges-la-Morte, trans. Mosley, Philip (Paisley, 1986), 11Google Scholar.
36 Ibid., 61.
37 Mosley, Philip, ‘The Soul's Interior Spectacle: Rodenbach and Bruges-la-Morte’, in Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays, ed. Mosley, (London, 1996), 33Google Scholar.
38 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 5.
39 Ibid., 77.
40 Space does not allow me to comment on the opera's extensive Catholic imagery, nor on the connection of Bruges with an anti-modernist nostalgia. For the latter, see Pudles, Lynne, ‘Fernand Knopff, Georges Rodenbach, and Bruges, the Dead City’, The Art Bulletin, 74 (1992), 637–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 They had already briefly met in 1911 or 1912.
42 Luzi Korngold, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, 26.
43 Ibid. Luzi notes that he thought for a moment before announcing his choice of music.
44 Ibid., 36. All translations my own.
45 Ibid., 33.
46 Ibid., 43.
47 Lee, Sherry D, ‘“….deinen Wuchs wie Musik”: Portraits, Identities, and the Dynamics of Seeing in Berg's Operatic Sphere’, in Alban Berg and His World, ed. Hailey, Christopher (Princeton, 2010), 169Google Scholar.
48 See Stollberg, Durch Traum zum Leben, and Lee, ‘“….deinen Wuchs wie Musik”.
49 Stollberg, Durch den Traum zum Leben, 79.
50 Rodenbach, Georges, Le Mirage: Drame en Quatre Acts (Paris, 1901), 165Google Scholar.
51 Stollberg, Durch den Traum zum Leben, 87.
52 Stollberg notes similarities with the contemporary dream narratives of August Strindberg's Ein Traumspiel – first performed in Vienna in 1917 – and Richard Beer-Hofmann's novel Der Tod Georgs (ibid., 175 and 265). We could also, of course, find filmic parallels, not least in the 1944 Fritz Lang film The Woman in the Window, which also used a dream narrative to explain away a respectable professor of psychology's covering up of a murder committed in self-defence. Prof. Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) is tempted into an act of licentiousness by the double (Joan Bennett) of a woman whose portrait he admires – while his wife and family are on holiday.
53 Ibid., 162. Helmut Pöllmann, on the other hand, notes the influence from Viennese operetta in this ‘happy end’ (and, in particular, Lehár's Zigeunerliebe). See Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Aspekte seines Schaffens (Mainz, 1998), 64–5.
54 Stollberg, Durch den Traum zum Leben, 191. These are paralleled within the dream narrative through the characters of Fritz and Pierrot (essentially the same character, but whose initials reveal their roots in the characters of Frank and Paul). Michael Steinberg has also recognised that Paul appears to have read Freud's essay. See ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Operatic Modernism’, 644.
55 Freud, Sigmund, ‘Fetishism’ quoted in Evans, Jessica and Hall, Stuart, eds., Visual Culture: The Reader (London, 1999), 325Google Scholar.
56 Janine Ortiz argues that modernist opera is defined by confronting the issues raised by psychoanalysis. See ‘Violanta: Korngolds Aufbruch in die Moderne’, in Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Wunderkind der Moderne oder letzter Romantiker?, ed. Stollberg, Arne (Munich, 2008), 157Google Scholar.
57 Sengoopta, Chandak, Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna (Chicago, 2000), 120Google Scholar.
58 de Balzac, Honoré, Balzac's Contes Drolatiques; droll stories collected from the Abbeys of Touraine, trans. Sims, G. R., 2 vols. (London, 1874), II, 25Google Scholar.
59 Luzi Korngold, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, 41.
60 Donoghue, Daniel, Lady Godiva: A Literary History of the Legend (Oxford, 2003), 112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 See Häfele, Karl, Die Godivasage und ihre Behandlung in der Literatur, mit einem Überblick über die Darstellungen der Sage in der bildenden Kunst (Heidelberg, 1929)Google Scholar.
62 Le Rider, Jacques, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, trans. Morris, Rosemary (Cambridge, 1993), 1Google Scholar.
63 Stollberg has also noted the parallels with mourning and fantasy found in Hofmannsthal's play Der Weisse Fächer (The White Fan, 1897). See Stollberg, Durch den Traum zum Leben, 20.
64 Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity, 82.
65 Paul dreams on the night of his friend Georg's death, and, as Le Rider points out, ‘The two most important [dreams] involve a return to the feminine element in the two forms most typical of the 1900s: the willowy, pre-Raphaelite woman and the menacing femme fatale, the Astarte.’ Ibid., 141. The parallels with this novel are also noted by Stollberg, Durch den Traum zum Leben, 265.
66 Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity, 90.
67 Robertson, Ritchie, ‘Gender Anxiety and the Shaping of the Self in some Modernist Writers: Musil, Hesse, Hofmannsthal, Jahnn’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel, ed. Bartram, Graham (Cambridge, 2004), 57–8Google Scholar.
68 Sengoopta, Otto Weininger, 62.
69 Luft, David S., Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (Chicago, 2003), 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Canetti recalled that during the 1920s his intellectual friends in Vienna continually discussed Kraus, Weininger and Schopenhauer. See Sengoopta, Otto Weininger, 145. Sherry D. Lee also notes that a new edition of the book appeared almost every year from 1903 to 1932. See Lee, Sherry D., ‘The Other in the Mirror, or, Recognizing the Self: Wilde's and Zemlinsky's Dwarf’, Music & Letters, 91 (2010), 205n26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
70 Sengoopta, Otto Weininger, 2.
71 The physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach argued strongly against anything that was beyond the reality of sensation, such as the notion of the self (‘Das Ich ist unrettbar’). See ibid., 24–5.
72 Ibid., 1.
73 Ibid., 58.
74 Quoted in Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Otto Weininger, or, “Woman Doesn't Exist”’, New Formations, 23 (1994), 99Google Scholar.
75 Sengoopta, Otto Weininger, 59.
76 Weininger's influence on composers has been explored in numerous places. In addition to those discussed here, other contributions include: Busch-Salmen, Gabriele, ‘“Menschenliebe im allerhöchsten Sinne”: Zu den Frauenrollen in Hans Pfitzners Bühnenwerken’, in Frauengestalten in der Oper des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Ottner, Carmen (Vienna, 2003), 116–34Google Scholar; Ermen, Reinhard, ‘Der “Erotiker” und der “Asket”: Befragung zweier Klischees am Beispiel der Gezeichneten und das Palestrina’, in Franz Schreker (1878–1934) zum 50. Todestag (Aachen, 1984), 47–57Google Scholar; and Kramer, Lawrence, ‘Fin-de-siècle Fantasies: Elektra, Degeneration and Sexual Science’, this journal, 5 (1993), 141–65Google Scholar.
77 Quoted in Brown, Julie, ‘Otto Weininger and Musical Discourse in Turn-of-the-Century Vienna’, in Western Music and Race, ed. Brown, (Cambridge, 2007), 88Google Scholar.
78 Žižek, ‘Otto Weininger’, 97.
79 Fischer, ‘Das befremdende Hauptwerk’, 205.
80 See Lee, ‘The Other in the Mirror’, 205.
81 Fischer, ‘Das befremdende Hauptwerk’, 205. Heliane is based on Hans Kaltneker's Die Heilige. It features a blonde woman (Heliane) so pure and virtuous that her marriage with the Ruler has never been consummated. When Heliane is accused of adultery with the Stranger – whom she admits she loves, and in front of whom she appears naked (seemingly in all innocence) – her innocence is ‘proved’ by the resurrection of the punished Stranger. She is, nevertheless, murdered by the Ruler, who realises he can never possess her.
82 Ibid., 206.
83 Lee, “‘….deinen Wuchs wie Musik’”, 174.
84 Other examples include Kramer on Elektra (‘Fin-de-siècle Fantasies’) and Lee on the Infanta in Der Zwerg (‘The Other in the Mirror’).
85 This line was cut in the Willy Decker production mounted at Covent Garden in 2009, and some productions attempt to imply Paul's suicide, undercutting this positive ending. In the 1983 Deutsche Oper TV production, James King's Paul ends by contemplating a cocked revolver (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA8jXx_Gp3Q, accessed 30 September 2011), while the Opéra National du Rhin production is even more overt: after singing a final reprise of the Lute song (‘Glück das mir verblieb’), Paul is handed a knife by the devil (Frank) and slits his wrists, smearing the blood over a door marked ‘No Exit’. See Cheng, ‘Opera en abyme’, 143–4.
86 Gitter, Elizabeth G., ‘The Power of Women's Hair in the Victorian Imagination’, PMLA, 99 (1984), 936CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
87 Ofek, Galia, Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (Farnham, 2009), 14Google Scholar.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid., 110–11.
90 Poe, Edgar Allan, Selected Tales (London, 1994), 64Google Scholar. Other examples include the virtuous blonde-haired Clara of Wilkie Collins's Basil (1852), while the voluptuous and sexually active Margaret is dark haired.
91 Ofek, Representations of Hair, 62.
92 Browning, Robert, Selected Poems, ed. Karlin, Daniel (London, 2004), 17–18Google Scholar.
93 Popovich, Barry L., ‘Porphyria is Madness’, Studies in Browning and His Circle, 22 (1999), 60Google Scholar.
94 The word ‘porphyria’ indicates the purple urine that accompanies the disease.
95 Popovich, ‘Porphyria is Madness’, 59.
96 Reported by Dr Robert Darling Willis in December 1810. See ibid., 62.
97 Poe, Selected Tales, 81.
98 Indeed, as David McKee notes, the 2001 Rhin production appears to suggest that Paul has also murdered Marie. See McKee, ‘Die tote Stadt’, 313.
99 Katharine M. Rogers argues that Thackeray's early work challenges many of the stereotypes of female characterisation – evidenced in his exasperation with the ‘good’ Victorian woman, and his sympathy with more complex female characters – but suggests he gradually succumbed to convention. See ‘The Pressure of Convention on Thackeray's Women’, The Modern Language Review, 67 (1972), 257–63.
100 Ofek, Representations of Hair, 188.
101 Ibid., 193.
102 Stoker, Bram, ‘The Secret of the Growing Gold’, Dracula's Guest and Other Stories (London, 2006), 70Google Scholar.
103 Other tales of strangulating hair (though not necessarily blonde) can be found in Erckmann-Chatrian's tale of ‘The Jet-black Tress’ (Hours at Home, 10 [1870]) and Eugene Lee-Hamilton's poem The New Medusa (1882) in which a man having saved a woman from the sea has a nightmare of strangulation and wakes up to find her hair around his neck. He beheads her, not knowing whether he is a murderer or an avenger against evil.
104 See Allen, Virginia M., ‘“One Golden Strangling Hair”: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Lady Lilith’, The Art Bulletin, 66 (1984), 286Google Scholar.
105 McGann, Jerome, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost (New Haven, CT, 2000), 160n16Google Scholar. The model is Alexa Wilding, which was a late change in Lady Lilith at the request of a patron.
106 See Allen, ‘One Strangling Golden Hair’, 292–3.
107 Quoted in ibid., 285–6.
108 When his young wife, Elizabeth Siddel – known for her beautiful hair – died in 1862, Rossetti is said to have placed a manuscript of his poems in her coffin next to her unbound locks. In 1869, wanting to market himself more as a poet than a painter, and needing to retrieve the work, he had the body exhumed in a scene that Pamela Bickley calls ‘worthy of Edgar Allan Poe’: significantly, rumours soon circulated that Lizzie's hair had grown in death to fill her coffin, and that the exhumed manuscript retained strands of Lizzie's hair. See Pamela Bickley, ‘Rodenbach and the Pre-Raphaelites’ in Royal Opera House programme for Die tote Stadt (2009), 44.
109 Gitter, ‘The Power of Women's Hair’, 950. The lines read: ‘All the threads of my hair are golden, / And there in a net his heart was holden.’
110 Allen, ‘One Strangling Golden Hair’, 288.
111 Quoted in ibid., 290.
112 As Baldwin, Robert W points out. See ‘Letters’, The Art Bulletin, 67 (1985), 317Google Scholar.
113 ‘Mélisande's Hair, or the Trouble in Allemande: A Postmodern Allegory at the Opéra-Comique’, in Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Smart, Mary Ann (Princeton, 2000), 170Google Scholar.
114 The Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs (London, 1928), 40.
115 Cooper, Wendy, Hair: Sex, Society, Symbolism (London, 1971), 213Google Scholar.
116 See Ofek, Representations of Hair, 74.
117 Hair could also be incorporated into jewellery, and was even used for art: at the British Great Exhibition of 1851, for instance, likenesses of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and all the royal children were created in hair. See Cooper, Hair, 227.
118 de Maupassant, Guy, ‘A Woman's Hair [La Chevelure]’, in The Complete Short Stories, 3 vols. (London, 1970), II, 208Google Scholar.
119 Ibid., 211.
120 Ibid., 212.
121 Rodenbach, Le Mirage, 168.
122 Pamela Bickley argues that ‘Rodenbach, like his most famous illustrator Khnopff, formed part of the symbolist coterie of fin-de-siècle artists and writers who found inspiration from across the channel.’ Bickley, ‘Rodenbach and the Pre-Raphaelites’, 41.
123 With its prominent fourths and dotted ending, the hair motif also shares a great deal with the rising-fourths motif of Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony, Op. 9. Its rhythm might also be seen as deriving from the last words of Rodenbach's novel, which are uttered by Hugues repeatedly to the cadence of bells: ‘morte … morte … Bruges-la-morte’ (Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 78).
124 Paul's contemplation of this shrine in scene 3 likewise invokes the hair motif repeatedly, where it is heard in flute and glockenspiel.
125 The Naxos recording 8.660060-1, for instance, cuts large parts of his narrative.
126 When Marie appears to Paul at the end of Act I, the motif is heard when she refers to the hair she has left behind to guard him (rehearsal 91 plus 5). Here, however, it is heard in trombone, rhythmically disguised and pianissimo (and is as a result virtually inaudible in many recordings).
127 Baileyshea, Matt, ‘The Struggle for Orchestral Control: Power, Dialogue, and the Role of the Orchestra in Wagner's Ring’, 19th-Century Music, 31 (2007), 3–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
128 Derny, Nicolas, Erich Wolfgang Korngold ou L'itinéraire d'un enfant prodige (Geneva, 2008), 62–3Google Scholar. Stollberg labels the motif ‘Paul's conscience’. See Stollberg, Durch den Traum, 309. It is also a motif that Korngold used many times in his subsequent film scores, as a ‘death motif’. See my Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood, 30–1.
129 As Rossetti's sonnet makes clear, Lilith is also associated with the rose, a flower with which Paul welcomes Marietta (though Lilith's roses are commonly white rather than the red rose of Marietta). Marietta's use of the lute (at the insistence of Paul to link her with his portrait of Marie) also connects the female characters with another Rossetti femme fatale in ‘A Sea-Spell’. In this poem, and the picture that accompanies it (again using Alexa Wilding as a model), a siren lures a fated mariner accompanied by her lute.
130 Sengoopta, Otto Weininger, 144.
131 See Jessica Duchen's blog: http://jessicamusic.blogspot.com/2009/02/die-tote-stadt-news-in-brief.html (accessed 11 December 2009).
132 Steinberg, ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Operatic Modernism’, 637.
133 Other contemporary operas with similar themes and settings include Max von Schillings's Mona Lisa (1915) and Franz Schreker's Die Gezeichneten (1915).