On behalf of the Humboldt Institute in Berlin, we had the pleasure of digitizing the original conducting score of the opera “Die Tote Stadt” (“The Dead Cit”) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold .
With a high-resolution medium format camera, we photographed the almost 450 pages of the century-old music score in our studio .
The opera was written in 1919 in collaboration with the composer’s father, Julis Korngold, who wrote the libretto. “The Dead City” premiered with great success in Germany in December 1920. Because of Korngold’s Jewish origins, the work was banned from German and Austrian theatres from 1933 onwards and was largely forgotten. Since the end of the 1960s, however, it has been performed regularly again, including at the Vienna State Opera, in whose archive the original score can still be found today.
Korngold was only 23 years old at the time of the premiere of the Dead City and was considered a “child prodigy”. Even before the National Socialists came to power, Korngold emigrated to Hollywood and became a star with the composition of film music. His music earned him two Oscars for Best Original Score and three other Oscar nominations.
