Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957) is regarded as one of Hollywood’s most famous film composers. His opera ‘Die tote Stadt’ became a resounding success immediately. The libretto, a many-layered and disturbingly morbid love drama between Paul, mourning for his dead wife Marie, and Marie’s spitting image Marietta, is based on the 1892 symbolist cult novel ‘Burges-la-Morte’ by Georges Rodenbach. The score rises to this fantastical material by using montage techniques: lyric episodes, salon romances and Italian arias, embedded in a symphonic context, are woven together into a composition which reviews said induced a drug-like effect. The highly acclaimed Strasbourg staging by Inga Levant creates a suggestive spectacle somewhere between Hollywood and Fellini, while the orchestra, under the direction of Jan Latham-Koenig, with Thorsten Kerl and Angela Denoke in the leading roles, offers a shimmering yet differentiated experience of sound.