JEWISH DIFFERENCE AND RECOVERING ‘COMMEDIA’: ERICH W. KORNGOLD’S ‘DIE TOTE STADT’ IN POST-FIRST WORLD WAR AUSTRIA

narrative-driven music drama. The opera’s choice of laughter over severity, ambiguity over rigidity, and fantasy over allusion was profound for its assimilated Jewish audiences in post-war Vienna: it allowed them to emerge from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire, nostalgic, bereaved, but laughing. ABSTRACT 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 doppelga¨ngers 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

His fate shifts, however, when he encounters and becomes infatuated with Marie's doppelgänger, Marietta (Act I). Confused by his own change of heart and jealous of Marietta's social circle, in a dream Paul strangles Marietta to death with a lock of Marie's golden hair, which he has kept in a quasi-religious shrine (Act III). Early twentiethcentury Vienna was enthralled by femme fatale characters, such as Richard Strauss's Salome, Frank Wedekind's Lulu, and Otto Weininger's generic type Woman. The figure of Marietta is therefore key to Die tote Stadt. Current reiterations of the opera's storyline nevertheless tend to focus too narrowly on Paul with respect to Marie/Marietta, spotlighting the psychodrama of Acts I and III but overlooking Act II's overtly theatrical commedia dell'arte sequence. 12 Yet when the father and son duo reworked Bruges-la-Morte into their own Die tote Stadt, they not only gave new names to Rodenbach's main characters, they also created new parts-commedia dell'arte ones, 'Paul's friend Frank and Marietta's theatrical companions'-which can only be found in the opera. 13 The commedia dell'arte characters critically allow Korngold's assimilated Jewish peers to understand the opera as intrinsically of Vienna by transporting them from the canal city of Bruges to the canal city of Venice, which, as Ben Winters argues, is 'a location with a long-standing cultural relationship with the composer's adopted hometown of Vienna'. 14 No doubt in part because the Habsburgs ruled Venice for half of the nineteenth century, Venice had inspired Viennese writers such as Hofmannsthal to imagine it over and again. 15 While Korngold's own Violanta (1916) is already set in Venice, there had also been a 'Venice in Vienna' amusement park in the Austrian capital (which I shall come back to). 16 Moreover, even though there remains a separation between current scholarly research into the connection between commedia dell'arte and Viennese theatre, and Jewish theatre's importance in post-war Vienna, 17 the mutual historical actors in these (Princeton, 2010), 163-94, especially at 173-8; Ben Winters, 'Strangling Blondes: Nineteenth-Century Femininity and Korngold's Die tote Stadt', Cambridge Opera Journal, 23 (2012), 51-82. 12 Despite their rich analyses of Die tote Stadt, scholars of the opera have often bypassed Act II's commedia dell'arte. See, for instance: Hutcheon and Hutcheon, 'Orphic Rituals of Bereavement' (even though they discuss Marietta's dance from Meyerbeer's Robert le diable, p. 119); Lee, 'Portraits, Identities, and the Dynamics of Seeing in Berg's Operatic Sphere'; and Winters, 'Strangling Blondes' (in an attempt to disentangle Die tote Stadt from a reception informed by Korngold's Hollywood career, Winters focuses on the symbolic weight of the opera). 13 Regarding name changes, as Sherry Lee and Sadie Menicanin observe, 'Hughes is renamed Paul, his unnamed dead wife is christened Marie, his housekeeper is called Brigitte rather than Barbe, and his wife's lookalike, the dancer Jane, becomes Marietta'. Lee and Menicanin, 'Acoustic Space, Modern Interiority, and Korngold's Cities', in Daniel Goldmark and Kevin C. Karnes (eds.), Korngold and His World (Princeton, 2019), 67-87 at 77. 14 Ben Winters, 'Korngold's Violanta: Venice, Carnival, and the Masking of Identities', in Nicholas Attfield and Ben Winters (eds.), Music, Modern Culture, and the Critical Ear (London, 2018), 51-71 at 52. 15 Ibid. 53. Hofmannsthal produced a number of works set in Venice, 'from his Casanova-inspired verse-play of the 1890s, Der Abenteurer und die Sängerin (The Adventurer and the Singer) and his essay of 1908, A Memory of Beautiful Days, to Andreas, his unfinished Venice-set novel.' In the wider German literary landscape, there is also Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912). 16 Winters, 'Korngold's Violanta', 53-5. 17 For a connection between commedia dell'arte and Viennese theatre, see Katherine Arens's discussion about the 'Viennese Volkstheater studies-chief among them Reinhardt-allow me to complete a picture where commedia dell'arte and Jewish theatre enabled assimilated Jewish artists to participate in an Austrian society that was actively reframing its identity in the aftermath of the war. Die tote Stadt, of course, was first performed in Germany instead of in Austria: the German double premiere took place in Hamburg and Cologne in 1920 (4 December) and the Austrian debut in Vienna in 1921 (10 January). That order of appearance was not coincidental. 18 As the German Jewish journalist Heinrich Eduard Jacob observed, 'as early as 1922' there was a need for Austrian Jewish artists to do well in Germany before they could succeed in Austria. 19 The opera's delayed Viennese production connotes that necessity of German critical approval. However, I contend that Vienna's-specifically, Vienna's assimilated Jewish-audiences recognized Korngold's opera as decidedly theirs when it finally reached the Wiener Staatsoper. 20 Commedia dell'arte's boisterous, slapstick humour enabled Die tote Stadt to grapple with an interconnected web of antisemitic issues, particularly that of noise. Indeed, questions of 'Jewish' sounds sit at the heart of this article. I am interested in First World War and post-war Gentile prejudice against Jewish intonation and hence Jewish 'noise'. But more importantly, I am concerned with how members of Vienna's assimilated Jewish community participated in making audible 'Jewish difference' (to borrow Silverman's term), with intonation functioning similarly to gender and class in the cultural production of post-war Austria. 21 Because Korngold's protagonist Paul declares at the end of Die tote Stadt his intent to leave Bruges, the site of his obsessions, this post-Wagnerian opera may appear to be a straightforward and even conservative story about the rehabilitation of a recognizably Jewish man: one who may be read as weakened and 'degenerate', 22 but who ultimately re-enters society, as a man should. Yet Paul arrives at his decision after having experienced the distinctively different sound world of Act II. That order of events informed how the opera's audiences participated in its final normative turn. Indeed, commedia dell'arte allows Die tote Stadt to evade fully submitting itself to Austria's dominating Catholic culture and to instead reach for something new.

NOISE AND 'JEWISH DIFFERENCE'
The 'accusation of the Jews as noisemakers', as Ruth HaCohen writes, began in early Christianity with Christian notions of 'harmonious sounds'. 23 Such anti-Jewish hostility intensified at the fin de siècle and further escalated during and after the First World War, with phrases such as 'Lärm wie in einer Judenschule' regularly deployed in Vienna as both a way to underline Jewish presence and as a complaint against unwanted sounds 18 Korngold's previous two operas were also premiered in Germany: Der Ring des Polykrates and Violanta were presented as a double bill in Munich, Staatsoper, 28 Mar. 1916. 19 25 This image of Jewish male loquaciousness was manifest in the realm of psychoanalysis and, surviving the war, it became an often-unwelcome trope in medical-political debates on veterans' welfare. This trope was unpopular even when it came from a leading neurologist such as Hermann Oppenheim, a resolute advocate for men suffering from war-related traumatic distress. 26 Oppenheim's professional rivalry with the Gentile Max Nonne culminated in 1916 at the annual meeting of the German Neurological Association. The Jewish physician was accused of encouraging a 'pension commotion' (Rentenkommotion), which was widely reported in the press, including in Vienna's Neue Freie Presse (for which Julius Korngold wrote). 27 Similarly, the Austrian historian Hannes Leidinger writes about the cries of the battlefield and of the military hospitals, and the hard-line military doctor Julius Wagner-Jauregg's attempts to silence these nervous breakdowns. 28 The sonic dimension of health care became a punitive site where 'Jewish' differences were to be corrected. Fears for what the sounds of war could do to men's health were, as James Mansell argues, transferred onto anxieties about the potential injuries that urban noise could inflict on city dwellers after the war. 29 The 'traumatic soundscape' of the war, Mansell suggests, prompted an entire wave of writers to pay attention to their 'descriptive repertoire' of sound, which had 'replac[ed] vision as the predominant mode of perceiving the world in literature'. 30 Virginia Woolf 's Mrs Dalloway (1925), for example, vividly foregrounds the auditory rather than the visual. 31 Indeed, the Lieutenant Colonel and literary scholar James H. Meredith asserts that Woolf 's rich descriptions of sounds are evidence of how Londoners at large, and not just veterans, had become sensitive to noise: 'To a weary citizenry, the sights and noise of postwar London resemble a battlefield.' 32 Similarly in Austria, in that 'battlefield' at home, whether a Viennese Jew was a maker or a victim of noise, he found himself always subjected to Gentile aurality and in danger of being heard as emasculated. Jews found themselves, then, as Joy Calico states in her interrogation of noise and power in early twentieth-century Vienna, always on the losing side of debates about 'who gets to make noise and who gets to name noise'. 33 The Jewish subject was either excessive in externalizing his feelings, or deficient in withstanding the pressure of something as immaterial as the vibrations of air. He was, as it were, always 'too Jewish'. Korngold's Paul is one such subject: the secluded Paul speaks to himself, dreams, and appears easily upset by noise in the opera's lively commedia dell'arte episodes.
When Erich and Julius Korngold adapted Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte, they emphasized the role of sound in the storytelling. 34 The idea of noise became a means through which their opera asserted 'Jewish difference' amid Vienna's intensifying antisemitism after the war. Sensing increasing anti-Jewish animosity, Julius Korngold himself had suggested in October 1914 that Jewish composers such as Schoenberg should 'be modest' ('[sich] bescheiden') and delay their 'nerve-wracking' ('nervenzerrüttende') intervention ('Wirkung') until after the war. 35 He thus advocated a late Romantic repertory, which informed his son's music. 36 Yet to assert 'Jewish difference' was to engage with-even to claim-that difference rather than to deny it, 37 such as when Schoenberg directly confronted the anti-noise complaints against him. Instead of yielding to demands for Jewish silence, Schoenberg turned the critique of his noisiness squarely on its head by launching a lawsuit against the Gentiles who created a noisy commotion at the infamous 1913 'scandal' concert. 38 Die tote Stadt's music exhibited the late Romantic characteristics that were fundamental to Erich Korngold's reception, and which Julius believed to be the 'right' kind of music in resource-scarce and politically intense wartime. Yet the opera straddles sounding 'late Romantic' and sounding 'noisy'-or fitting into its Catholic surroundings and finding a new identity through popular Jewish theatrical practices. It participated in audible Jewish difference through its little-discussed middle act.
The idea of parading, reclaiming 'Jewish difference', may appear to arise from a present-day identitarian sentiment. 39 However, it has historical precedents, specifically with respect to how the use of theatre recovered political ground negotiating Jewish self-representation in a public forum. I refer above to the studies connecting commedia dell'arte with Jewish theatre in the context of early twentieth-century Vienna. I shall flesh out that historical context more fully here, first by reaching further back into history. In her examination of Jewish commedia dell'arte performance in early modern Mantua, the theatre scholar Erith Jaffe-Berg provocatively suggests that Jewish actors felt free enough to subvert existing anti-Jewish elements of the commedia dell'arte tradition within their own performances of the commedia dell'arte. 40 As Jaffe-Berg argues, Jewish actorswhose craft already heavily relied on the comedic-strategically engaged with Mantuan Christian actors' commedia dell'arte tradition so as to ensure the Jewish community's survival during the exclusionary era of the Counter-Reformation. 41 The Jewish troupes' 34 Indeed, contextualizing Die tote Stadt in terms of 'twentieth-century metropolitan life in all its acoustic complexity' (p. 69), Lee and Menicanin suggest that 'it is likely that the potential for an acoustic realization of Rodenbach's imagined spaces played a significant role in selling Korngold on the project of composing and staging the dead city' (pp.  involvement with commedia dell'arte granted them membership in Mantuan society as long as they provided lavish and self-financed carnival entertainments. These performances were financially punitive because they were only possible through taxation within the Jewish community. 42 They nonetheless enabled mutual influences between early modern Mantua's Jewish and Gentile commedia dell'arte actors, who were both travelling (hence itinerant, if not always overtly persecuted) people. 43 As early as the Renaissance, Jews found an expressive space in theatre where there were possibilities 'to self-fashion', 44 to shape narratives of 'Jewish difference'. Indeed, theatre continued to be a space for Jewish self-fashioning in early twentiethcentury Vienna. While the expansive literature on 'Vienna 1900' describes how 'Jewish participation was carefully circumscribed' in the city, Jewish theatre-immensely popular among both Jews and non-Jews-opened up possibilities to play with the politics of Jewish citizenry. 45 Influential Jewish writers, including Richard Beer-Hofmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, explored Austrian identity at the intersection of 'Viennese modernism', popular Jewish theatre, and commedia dell'arte. 46 Closer still to Korngold's world, Schoenberg's venture into fin de siècle cabaret culture and his Pierrot lunaire (1912) attest to how popular Jewish theatre and commedia dell'arte influenced music of Korngold's youth. 47 Notable too is Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos (1912/1916), which, like Die tote Stadt, juxtaposes commedia dell'arte with a Wagnerian-toned 'opera seria' and whose opera-within-the-opera is likewise a story about fidelity and overcoming grief. The fact that it was Hofmannsthal rather than Strauss who wished to undertake the project further suggests how significant the coexistence of a multiplicity of diverging worlds was to Vienna's assimilated Jews when it came to the question of collective mourning and recovery. 48 Julius Korngold reviewed 'Ariadne II' when it premiered in Vienna. 49  Die tote Stadt's 'Schlager' (hits) offered old-world comfort to its audience many times over. Yet because of the nexus of contemporary commedia preoccupations, Die tote Stadt is 42 Ibid. 128. 43 Ibid. 124. Jaffe-Berg explicitly writes that 'commedia dell'arte became an important model for emulation within Jewish performance' and vice versa (pp. 123-4). 44 Ibid. 125. 45  and sees herself-'Is that not she herself ? The same shawl, the same lute?' 56 Marietta leaves for her rehearsal as Hélène in Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable. Split between fidelity to Marie and desire for Marietta, Paul has a vision where Marie beckons… While Act I already calls attention to the opposition between death and life, the opera's often overlooked middle act intensifies that polarity by introducing commedia dell'arte characters to Korngold's otherwise post-Wagnerian opera. In Act II, Paul's 'vision continues', finding himself 'in front of Marietta's house' at night. One moment, he sees Brigitta, his 'old and loyal housekeeper', appearing 'as a novice among a group of Beguines' because of 'his breach of faith to Marie'. At another moment, he becomes jealous of Frank, who is about to enter Marietta's house. Most importantly, Korngold writes: 'Laughing and singing, members of Marietta's troupe now approach in boats. Paul withdraws and listens unseen.' A new and initially light-hearted dream unfolds with the merriment of a commedia performance. Marietta play-acts the resurrection scene from Robert. Yet her 'mockery of resurrection … has completely outraged [Paul]'. He tells Marietta that 'in her he loved only his dead wife', leading Marietta to challenge 'her dead rival' by going 'to her house … to banish the ghost forever …'. 57 The morning after, Marietta 'stand[s] triumphantly' before Marie's portrait in Act III. She makes fun of Paul's reverence for the procession passing outside, demanding that he kiss her. Paul struggles with his conflicting emotions and argues with Marietta. In turn, Marietta declares: 'The fight is on-life against death.' She discovers Marie's hair and ridicules it, angering Paul, who eventually 'strangles her with the braid' until Marietta is dead like Marie. Paul's vision ends with him waking up 'to find everything untouched'. Marietta returns after having just turned a corner to fetch her forgotten umbrella and Paul's earlier gift of roses. Yet Paul decides that he 'will not see her again' and will leave Bruges instead, for 'A dream of bitter reality has destroyed his fantasy …'. In my reading of the opera, Marietta plays a crucial role in Paul's recovery, not because his eventual dreamt murder of her triggers a rude awakening, but because, even when Paul is difficult, Marietta is consistently warm and playful. The allure of her body ultimately pushes Paul to commit murder in his dream. Yet throughout the opera, Marietta's commedia energy counterbalances the violent force that Paul's dreamt murder carries. Marietta is significant to Paul because, as Ben Winters asserts, she is 'very much alive', embodying 'the triumph of life' in the opera's original 'working title' ('Der Triumph des Lebens'). 58 Her existence as a dancer allows her to represent the 'arte' (dancing and acrobatics) of the commedia dell'arte, the lively physical ethos of which she boldly displays in front of Paul. 59 Indeed, as Korngold establishes in Act I, in the tension between commedia dell'arte and Catholic symbolism-between, to put it crudely, Jewish enjoyment and Catholic guilt-Paul's responsiveness to Marietta evidences Die tote Stadt's privileging of life over death. Marietta is distinct from everything that has transpired in the opera 56  before her entrance, in her laughter (the first heard in the opera), 'uninhibitedness', and the 'free manner of the theatrical world'. 60 Musically, too, just as Marietta steps into Act I, Scene v, her difference is signalled through the sonorities of glockenspiel, triangle, and harps-instruments that will define the sounds of the commedia dell'arte sequence in Act II. Since Marietta's famous Lute Song ('Glück, das mir verblieb'; b. 668 ff.) has been discussed extensively elsewhere and since my focus is Act II, I will simply call attention to the presence of the lute, which-as an instrument common in commedia dell'arte-anticipates Act II's theatrical display and the life-affirming force of Marietta's troupe. 61 At bar 741 ff., when Marietta's Lute Song suddenly gives way to the merriment of her thespian peers Gaston, Juliette, and Lucienne from outside the window, Marietta shows us that she runs after life with little hesitation, chasing the musical pulse created by the actors' walking sticks and umbrellas (see Ex. 1). In response to the actors' joyous and nonsensical 'diridon' (b. 751 ff.), Paul instinctively withdraws inside himself, showing that it is not the city of Bruges that is 'dead', but rather his own interior.
Act I, Scene vi critically reveals, then, that what Marie's world symbolizes-death, devotion, and confinement-is something suspect, from which Paul should escape. Marie (whose name, given by the Korngolds, is French for Mary) stands in for the old Catholic world that the assimilated Jewish community of Vienna no longer found viable in the aftermath of the First World War. The stage darkens for Scene vi, taking the audience into Paul's dream world, where Marie's apparition steps out of her portrait and, like one of Wagner's foreboding Norns, warns Paul against deserting her. Marie's descending-second intervals of 'Paul' recall the Wagnerian interval of 'woe' frequently sounded in the Ring (bb. 1064-5). The sul tasto strings and muted horns also help to create the 'very solemn, ceremonially mysterious, otherworldly' sound world surrounding Marie. 62 It is hard to remain unaffected by the weight of Marie's command as she   64 The libretto and vocal score printed in 1920 both state that it is Marie who delivers those words 'from [behind] the misty veils' before she 'disappears completely' and out of the mist steps Marietta. 65 Marie and Marietta are, of course, sung by the same singer, who should-at this point of the opera-be donning the same costume. However, in response to that appeal of 'See …', Paul desperately answers not Marie but 'Marietta!' (bb. 1215-16). Despite the fifty-eight bars between Marie/Marietta's urging and Paul's cry, Paul not only names Marietta but might also have heard Marietta at the end of Act I, revealing his own desire to escape Marie's melancholic grip. Indeed, in the new study score from Ernst Eulenberg Press (an imprint of Schott Music, Korngold's publisher), that final phrase is unmistakably assigned to Marietta, with her name spelt out in full (see Ex. 3); editorial decisions were made, as Christian Hoesch, the head editor at Schott Music, explains, following consideration of 'performance material newly issued by Schott Music on the basis of the first printed edition'. 66 I belabour this point of whether Paul hears Marie or Marietta at the end of Act I because Paul's hearing of Marietta here can yield a profound rereading of Marietta as a 'warm-blooded' (her words), life-affirming force instead of a destructive femme fatale. Even acknowledging the presence of ambiguity at this point of the opera is hermeneutically productive. Thus, to the words of Life comes to claim you, a new love beckons-See, see and understand the orchestra eases, ushering in Marietta's less strained register that is one octave lower than Marie's persistent demand of 'Unsere Liebe'. This moment (especially from 'See …') provides Paul temporal, harmonic, and psychic relief by giving way to an ever-greater sense of spaciousness with 'solemn calm' (bb. 1150-1), 'getting wider and wider, increased in expression' (bb. 1154-5) in secure tonalities. 67 Even when Korngold omits to specify that phrase as Marietta's, he lets her claim the rest of the scene, as he writes in the stage direction: 'The background lights up, one suddenly sees in place of Marie Marietta [,] dancing seductively in the theatre in flowing fantasy-dance costume', to the expression markings of 'suddenly extremely lively dance tempo, the rhythm sharply marked' (b. 1160 ff.). 68 There is (also at b. 1160 ff.) an offstage military marching band with triangle, cymbals, tambourine, military drum, and bass drum playing a 4+4 eight-bar phrase, ushering listeners to a Mahleresque luxuriant waltz (b. 1199 ff.). The waltz's increasingly hurried frenzy-interrupted by Paul's Sprechgesang-like cry of 'Marietta!'-leads to a 'still quicker, Bacchanalian dance'; its liveliness is obviously meant to be seductive.

ACT II: COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE TO THE FORE
Act II immerses us further within Paul's dream. Paul's vision continues, and the composer asks his audience to imagine the events taking place in this act to occur several weeks after the events of Act I. 69 The orchestral interlude that precedes Act II once again confronts listeners with music of Wagnerian solemnity, reinforcing the opposition between a Wagnerian-toned realm and a quasi-popular, anti-Wagnerian, and anti-Catholic domain that I argue connotes Jewishness. Indeed, while the Beguines of Bruges in Scene i represent both the deadness (of the dead city) and Catholic religiosity, Paul's dream is at once immensely noisy and sensitive to noise. Rodenbach's reputation as a symbolist writer has shaped both popular and scholarly readings of Die tote Stadt as similarly symbolist. Ben Winters, for example, has identified in his readings of Die tote Stadt the 'Catholic symbolism of Bruges' as well as the 'strangulating hair symbolism', which is 'a particularly potent symbol in nineteenth-century art and literature'. 70 The parts of the opera that closely adhere to the original narrative might be read as symbolist. The scenes and characters that exist only in Korngold's operatic adaptation, however, are not. Rather, they act as a critical-commedia-opposition to symbolism, which Martin Green and John Swan locate in 'the operas of Wagner and the poetry of Wagner enthusiasts like Mallarmé'. 71 Commedia dell'arte functioned as a means through which early twentieth-century Central Europe reacted to French and Wagnerian symbolisms and their penchant for 'solemnity'. 72 Korngold subjected his listeners to an aural oscillation between a Wagnerian-inflected symbolism of religiosity and what has been established from the outset, in the figure of Marietta, as a commedia dell'arte mode of articulation. 67 'mit feierlicher Ruhe', 'Immer breiter werdend, gesteigert im Ausdruck', and 'breit'. 68  While Scene i articulates through Brigitta's appearance as a beguine a withdrawal into memories and the comfort that comes with such withdrawal, 73 Scene ii disrupts Paul's desire to retreat into an idealized past unsuitable for his present. Taking place in Scene ii is Frank's revelation that he, too, is involved with Marietta, thereby rupturing his friendship with Paul. Making explicit the commedia lens through which audiences should view Paul's dream, Korngold has Frank frame himself with commedia dell'arte images. The stage direction indicates that 'the moon', an element intimately connected with Pierrot, 'comes out of the clouds'. 74 Immediately, responding to Paul's 'pain and shame' (bb. 267-8) at having fallen for Marietta, Frank asserts Marietta as a force of life and describes his own role as functionally aligned with hers. Thus, he declares that she 'wants complete (volle) fulfilment' (bb. 287-8; the underlined 'volle' is further accented when it is restated at b. 290) and that Paul's existence between life and death is unfulfilling for her. 75 Here, Korngold has the glockenspiel (b. 288 ff.) and harps (bb. 291-2)-instruments that have hitherto been silent-follow Frank, banishing the gloom of the earlier chromatic and oscillating staccatissimi. Most importantly, Korngold assigns Frank a meta-discursive position by letting him assume the position of a Pierrot (with Paul cast as a second Pierrot and Marietta a Columbine). Frank sings: 'Dreaming in our secret longing, we are enthralled by her, and we are Pierrots [plural] who adore her, and she is Columbine who seduces us, enslaves us-.' 76 The orchestra is drastically reduced to only the strings, creating a 'mysteriously hast[y]' effect with highly chromatic two-bar patterns, which intensify as the initially pp strings slowly ascend and crescendo while they nervously sound tremolo on the bridge (bb. 317-28). Just as early twentieth-century evocations of commedia dell'arte reflected contemporary anxieties about the turbulent historical moment, Frank's references to commedia characters send Paul into greater vocal and psychological unease. While the music accelerates as if swirling into a grotesque waltz, Paul's vocal expression intensifies, developing from 'alienated [and] disrupted' (b. 329), to 'excited' (b. 335), and from 'shaken' (b. 344) to eventually 'shrieking' (b. 356). 77 Scenes i and ii of Act II differ in their respective preoccupations with Catholicism and commedia dell'arte archetypes. Yet both scenes prepare for the arrival of Scene iii's extended commedia dell'arte performance. Recall here the glockenspiel and harps mentioned above: their toy-like timbres constitute a commedia mode in Die tote Stadt. Of course, associations of fantasy, play, and enchantment with instruments such as the glockenspiel would already have been known through Mozart's Magic Flute, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, and, to an extent, Strauss's Ariadne. This commedia mode has already lightened Paul and Frank's tense exchange in Scene ii, where the darker timbres of cellos and basses (often marked 'morendo', dying away) musically denote the ponderous solemnity reminiscent of Wagner (and especially Parsifal). Indeed, Scenes i and ii each prepare for the arrival of Scene iii by ending with orchestral colours and tonal harmonies that Korngold has already associated with commedia dell'arte to anticipate the beginning of Scene iii. For instance, the piano and the celesta boldly ring out arpeggiated chords of E flat and D flat, first nearing the end of Scene i in bars 249-50 and then towards the end of Scene ii in bars 370-1, signalling Scene iii's musical world of commedia whimsies. Korngold further elicits listeners' anticipation for the commedia dell'arte performance as the flutes' whole-tone descents in bars 377-8 and bars 381-2 look forward to the same whole-tone descents-now reinforced by the even brighter piccolos-in bars 392-3 and, a few steps lower, in bars 396-7, unfurling Scene iii.
Scene iii opens onto a music-theatrical world explicitly labelled 'Burlesk, fantastisch' (b. 392): those descending whole-tone runs from the flutes and the piccolos now suggest the circus as they are playfully joined by the harps' ascending glissandi and the strings' semitone-semitone-tone patterned pizzicati (bb. . To escape in full the Wagnerian-toned expressions of death of the previous two scenes, the music moves in a more light-hearted and fast-paced 6/8 time as opposed to the soberer 4/4. The moon that is characteristic of commedia dell'arte reappears as the stage directions clearly indicate 'Moonlight', awaiting the entrance of Marietta's players onto the stage. 78 Their offstage merriment is audible before they are seen onstage. The performers effectively transition aurally and spatially into Paul's dream world of Bruges as the entourage's boats move them 'through the canal' to centre stage. 79 By calling for 'Rich, colourful variation in positions and groups. Light effects', Korngold's stage directions emphasize the buoyancy and colourfulness that is essential to this scenic atmosphere. 80 The material objects presented at the opening of Scene iii confirm Marietta's 'dance troupe' as of commedia dell'arte. 81 The costumes-Lucienne's and Julietta's ballet clothes as well as Fritz's Pierrot outfit-provide audiences with a glimpse of the variety-show nature of their troupe. Moreover, Pierrot's possession of a lute at his entrance is particularly significant. We have already encountered this instrument when Marietta sings the 'Lute Song' in Act i. While her 'Lute Song' anticipates Pierrot's lute in Act II, scene iii, Pierrot's carrying his lute also retrospectively affirms Marietta's membership in the commedia world and her role, as a force of life, in the opera. Act II, Scene iii contains six 'numbers', adhering to a structuring format common in popular theatrical spaces, including commedia dell'arte, variety shows, and Jewish theatre:  Marietta's troupe thus make their entrance at bar 400, and they-Juliette, Lucienne, Victorin, and Graf Albert-quite literally burst onto the scene, exclaiming 'in high spirits' and calling the audience 'to Venice' (bb. 423-7). 82 Their high-spiritedness renders their roles self-referential and even meta-discursive, and Korngold even has Graf Albert call out to the 'director' Victorin 'A splendid stage décor!', to underscore the overtly 'staged' quality of their entrance. 83 Indeed, the canal city they lead us into is not the silent Catholic Belgian town of Rodenbach's novel. Rather, it is the Adriatic island city, home to the commedia dell'arte, whose staginess highlights the set's affinity with the miniature Venice staged in Vienna's Prater, familiar to Korngold's Viennese audience (see Fig. 1). 84 The extremely popular 'Venice in Vienna' theme park, moreover, used its sophisticated Venetian setting (the most realistic of its kind in Europe at the time) for music-theatrical performances. 85 Amid its fabricated Venetian 'palaces, canals, gateways, piazzas, bridges, houses, boulevards, and even a small convent'-a mise en scène comparable to that of Die tote Stadt's middle act-Korngold's Viennese public found on their doorstep 'an opulent and playful testing ground for all kinds of contemporary theatrical and musical presentations for a wide popular audience ( space for public debates amid a post-war desire for a pan-German-if not a pan-European-identity instead of a self-enclosed Austrian nationalism. Marietta therefore refers to Pierrot as a German from the Rhine as she summons him for a Viennese waltz (bb. 662-4), 99 featuring, as Cheng describes, 'lilting dactylic metre of the text, sweeping arpeggios in the harp, an abundance of notated vocal portamenti, and the overall elastic rhythms of the music' (b. 692 ff.). 100 Audiences might even have heard an imprint of Vienna's dance hall in the Pierrot Lied, given Korngold's preoccupation with reorchestrating Johann Strauss's operettas for the Vienna theatre in the 1920s. 101 Pierrot's waltz became a political commentary: just as the dance halls' streams of waltzes permitted, or rather required, participants to change partners and to continue, Korngold's Jewish audiences were asked to move, to carry on, even when faced with impossible challenges of anti-Jewish hatred. The next, and most substantial, music number materializes in the troupe's rendition of the supernatural ballet scene from Meyerbeer's immensely popular and influential Robert le diable. While Hugues in Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte mistakenly believes that the Helene onstage (Jane) enacts his dead wife's resurrection, Paul actually realizes his illusion on witnessing Marietta's play-acting. Meyerbeer's 'Resurrection' motif is heard at this point in Die tote Stadt. And Korngold's engagement with Meyerbeer's Robert, as Steinberg boldly argues, deliberately offered a Jewish-and self-consciously extravagantrepresentation of a Catholic display. 102 Robert had been reproduced numerous times over the course of the nineteenth century, including via Wagner's use of the ballet scene's tonal structure for Parsifal's Act II, which features Klingsor's trickery, the Flower Maidens' seduction, and Kundry. 103 Meyerbeer fell victim to Wagner's essentializing accusation of 'inauthenticity', as someone who offered something other than his own cultural heritage as 'a Berlin-born Jew' (an accusation that might also be applied to Reinhardt's Salzburg efforts). 104 The fact that Marietta is a performer-a dancer-in an opera by Wagner's loathed and disparaged predecessor is too clearly a point to be made here. Korngold in many ways rendered grotesque Wagner's complaints about the elaborate 'Jewish' venture of the grand opera. 105 Korngold's musical reference to Meyerbeer already demonstrated 'a certain sophisticated operatic cosmopolitanism', but his manoeuvring of a commedia dell'arte troupe for an extra-Germanic operatic quotation doubly underscores a post-war cosmopolitan impulse for Austrian Jews' 'dreams of Europe'. 106 The commedia dell'arte troupe exits as self-referentially as it enters. The performers, led by Marietta, have shown themselves to be playful, warm, and a force of life against death and even violence. Ultimately, Die tote Stadt presents more than late Romantic lyricism, though it absolutely offers that too. Instead, the opera boldly flirts with elements that appear to fall outside the bounds of a 'post-Wagnerian' opera. Korngold manoeuvred the position of being both a victim of antisemitism and an artist with creative agency, dispelling the anti-Jewish negativity embodied in the opera's crime of sexual murder for something that in time became transformative. Indeed, Korngold marshalled the delicate balancing act on behalf of the Viennese Jews, to understand where and how they belonged in post-Imperial Austria through exploring a particular commedia dell'arte mode of existence, ironic and playful in its undermining of power. What Die tote Stadt demonstrated is a tolerance, and perhaps even a yearning, for ambiguity, hybridity, and play, reflecting the strengths and resourcefulness of Vienna's assimilated Jewish community. What remained after the commedia dell'arte troupe's exit might feel as phantom-like as Marie's apparition; the troupe, however, has changed the shape of Paul's psyche. CONCLUSION Korngold's biographer Brendan Carroll contends that the composer was uninterested in his Jewishness and instead favoured Catholicism. 107 In a place where Catholicism intimately shaped governance and state funding into the 1920s, and where antisemitism was written into institutional bureaucracy, Korngold's position was unsurprising in this regard. Such an identity was born out of a legacy of Jewish survival that evolved from following the dictates of a Catholic environment; scholars of fin de siècle Vienna including Jacques Le Rider, Carl E. Schorske, and Lisa Silverman give a number of examples of such assimilated Jews participating in Catholic culture. 108 The reorganization of political space since the First World War, however, made audible the intolerance of the former empire's Catholic metropolis. 109 Die tote Stadt, then, materialized both as score and performance surrounded by waves of violence towards Jews, who were scapegoated for the loss of the war. While Die tote Stadt's protagonist could-and likely would-be read as 'Jewish' because of his allegedly excessive and hence emasculating emotional expressions of grief, Korngold's opera presents no explicit 'Jewish content'. I have nonetheless argued that it actively participated in taking control of audible 'Jewish difference', confronting headon prejudices about Jewish sentimentality and frivolity. 110 Subverting or even directly challenging Gentile conceptions of Jews, the assimilated Jews-Korngold, Reinhardt, and even Hofmannsthal-who had previously been uninterested in their Jewishness turned to Jewish culture to fashion a wide-reaching republican self-understanding for all Austrians. 111 Indeed, Korngold's fellow assimilated Jewish critics paid keen attention to the opera's commedia dell'arte elements. They heard 'Jewish difference' in Die tote Stadt and situated the comedic players squarely in Vienna in the aftermath of Europe's first total war. A pertinent example is the musicologist and music critic Elsa Bienenfeld, who wrote about the opera's Viennese premiere in the Jewish-founded newspaper Neues Wiener Journal. 112 Hearing commedia dell'arte as a source of hope and renewal, Bienenfeld remarkably began her feuilleton by celebrating first and foremost the lively scenes of Act II, the performers that she would name as not only 'Gaukler' (itinerant entertainers) but also explicitly 'Italian commedia dell'arte' artists. 113 No less importantly, while Bienenfeld praised the opera's 'marvellous scenes, enchanting sounds, a joyous richness of colours', she unambiguously declared that Korngold 'does not submit himself to Wagner's theatre'. 114 She even protests against complaints directed at Die tote Stadt to further distance Korngold from Wagner, writing: 'The eternal grumblers have already come forward accusing him [Korngold] for not turning to Tristan or Palestrina.' 115 Bienenfeld openly resisted the propensity of late Romantic Austro-German opera for symbols of death and ritual in the Wagnerian vein. Instead, to her, between commedia dell'arte and Wagnerian symbolism, Die tote Stadt granted glimpses into a different way of knowing, through which Korngold's fellow Viennese Jews might helpfully explore their continued existence after the First World War.
In her elevation of the anti-Wagnerian, the quasi-popular, hence arguably the Jewish, in the opera, Bienenfeld read Paul's dream through the lens of psychoanalysis, describing Paul's loss and trauma this way: In the scenes of wistful grief and lustful feelings lies in an absolutely theatrically gripping parable the reflex of painful battles … against death and neglect… . It is a heartrending farewell when the bereaved husband at the end of the opera deserts the room of his treasured relics. Through the adaptation [Umdichtung], the composer opened up rich and, in stark contrast, swinging moods; found situations that complied with his inclinations to eruptions of red-hot eroticism; and had in the unreality of the dream play the [basis] on which the lively and colourful agility of his music could unfold in unbound freedom. 116 The word 'Umdichtung' needs further elaboration: it means adaptation in this context but it can also be understood as reworking, or recasting. Calling forth psychoanalytic ideas about dreaming, remaking, and healing, Bienenfeld's 'Umdichtung' should be understood as her reading Paul reliving and remaking his memory drastically differently 112 Bienenfeld, 'Die tote Stadt', 3-4. 113 Ibid. 4. 'eine Gauklerszene, die das dramatische Scherzo der Oper bildet, mit vielen Figuren, wie eine italienische Commedia dell'arte'. 114 Ibid. 3. 'Prachtvolle Bilder, zauberische Klänge, ein jauchzender Reichtum von Farben' and 'Dieser junge Erzmusikant unterwirft sich nicht dem Theater Wagner'. 115 Ibid. 4. 'Schon melden sich die ewigen Nörgler, die ihm vorwerfen, dass es kein Tristan und kein Palestrina sei, dem er sich zuwendet. Was will man denn? Der Sturm einen Jugend braust hin! Wer kann sagen, wohin diesen jungen, herrlichen Künstler diesen Urmusiker noch sein Dämon führen wird!' 116 Ibid. 3. 'In den Bildern von sehnsüchtiger Trauer und wollüstigen Empfindungen liegt in einem allerdings nur theatralisch packenden Gleichnis der Reflex des schmerzlichen Kampfes, der stets von dem Ü berlebenden gegen Tod und Vergessen gekämpft wird. Wer hat nie das Bild eines geliebten Toten mit allen Kräften der Erinnerung wie ein Lebendiges festhalten wollen, wer hat es nicht im Strome des Daseins entgleiten sehen? Es ist ein ergreifender Abschied, wenn der trauernde Gatte am Schluss der Oper den Raum seiner geliebten Reliquien verlässt. Durch die Umdichtung eröffnete der Komponist ergiebige und in starken Gegensätzen schwingende Stimmungen, fand Situationen, die seinen Neigungen zu Ausbrüchen glühender Erotik entgegenkamen, und hatte in der Unwirklichkeiten des Traumspiels die Unterlage, auf der sich die lebhafte, farbige Beweglichkeit seiner Musik in ungebundener Freiheit entfalten konnte.' through his dream, of which commedia dell'arte plays a significant part. His Catholic-toned surroundings and experiences are recast in a different-more readily Jewish-light. Paul wakes up and is absolved of a murder that he has not actually committed. Just as Paul's voyeuristic eavesdropping on Marietta throughout Act II's commedia suggested a selfaware stance, distanced from the action he observed, Korngold granted his audiences the same privilege as observers of a safely enclosed fantasy, to process and negotiate the kinds of tensions that they, as part of the assimilated Jewish community in Vienna, would probably have heard and found relevant to their own personal circumstances. In the process, it allowed a different-traditionally secondary-story to emerge, reframing questions of aurality and even ethics.
Paul awakens ready to leave his self-isolation and return to society. There is a whole set of critiques about masculine norms, the management of emotions, and capitalist production to be offered about Paul's return to a society in which he has been too weak to participate. We might even read his departure from Bruges as a compromise made in the subjectivity of a Jewish man, fitting himself once again to what was demanded of him. Yet the question to ask about Die tote Stadt might not actually be Sander Gilman's provocative rhetorical question, 'Can Jews make music in a Western context?', which he poses in his interrogation of long-held cultural beliefs about Jewish intonation and Jewish music-making. 117 Instead, a more productive question here might be why Korngold quite deliberately went out of his way to include, in the middle of a post-Wagnerian opera, a commedia dell'arte performance seemingly unrelated to-and unnecessary for-the rest of the opera. Humour and laughter had been important parts of Jewish culture, as strategies of survival for a historically persecuted and migratory community. Indeed, Die tote Stadt's fantastical dream indicated a deliberate claiming of a space that had often been denied to Korngold's fellow Viennese Jews. In other words, Die tote Stadt allowed its protagonist to 'see and understand'-to dream and process his trauma-by accommodating a mode of performance incongruent with the narrative-driven music drama. The opera's choice of laughter over severity, ambiguity over rigidity, and fantasy over allusion was profound for its assimilated Jewish audiences in post-war Vienna: it allowed them to emerge from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire, nostalgic, bereaved, but laughing.

ABSTRACT
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 oldworld 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