From Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in several not so easy leaps

July 23, 2017 at 8:05 pm (books, Film and television, opera)

It begins with an achingly beautiful duet: “Marietta’s Lied” from Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt:

Korngold based this opera on Bruge-La-Morte, a short novel written by a Belgian, Georges Rodenbach, in 1892:

It tells the story of Hugues Viane, a widower overcome with grief, who takes refuge in Bruges where he lives among the relics of his former wife – her clothes, her letters, a length of her hair – rarely leaving his house.

From the Wikipedia entry for the book.  The following is from that same source:

The novel influenced many later writers, including W.G. Sebald. The plot of the book may also have influenced the French crime novel D’entre les morts by Boileau-Narcejac, which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Vertigo in 1958.

D’Entre les Morts (Among the Dead) came out in 1954. The authors  were Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud; the latter wrote under the pseudonym Thomas Narcejac.

Of course, that passage above has a decidedly speculative ring to it: “…may also have influenced“…. James Gardner makes the same suggestion, though, in a 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Incarnating the World Within.”

Vertigo is one of my favorite films.