After the successful Danish premiere of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (August 2009), The Danish National Opera once again presents, in August 2010, a masterpiece from the great opera repertoire that people have not previously been able to experience in Denmark: Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt. With its extremely expressive style the opera is a milestone in the late-romantic German opera repertoire after Wagner and Strauss. The music as well as the dramaturgy point towards the great epic movies which became the popular art form of the 20^th century.

“Die tote Stadt is about the loneliness of deep sorrow, about the dark side of life when we are struck by an existential crisis where the meaning of life and death itself fills and tortures our soul. Never has this theme been more present or relevant than in our seeming welfare society”, Artistic Director Giordano Bellincampi states. Hallucinations, thrills and reality get tangled up in this surreal drama of one of the 20^th century’s most breathtaking operas. “With its intense, psychological plot and ingenious music Die tote Stadt is a performance worth experiencing”, Bellincampi ends.