Scott Cantrell

SAN FRANCISCO – No opera has music more gorgeous – more brilliantly colored, more lusciously textured, more passionately yearning – than Die tote Stadt. So why is it so rarely performed?

Well, the title, "The Dead City," may be a little off-putting. And Erich Wolfgang Korngold's youthful masterpiece needs two lead singers, a soprano and a tenor, who can sing – and sing and sing – over high-cholesterol orchestrations that make Wagner sound like Mozart. The soprano also has to be visually plausible as a dancer. With Korngold mainly remembered for his second career as a film composer, we seem to have settled on Richard Strauss as the representative of late-romantic Austro-German opera.

There was talk of a Dallas Opera Die tote Stadt during Karen Stone's tenure as general director, but the idea seems to have left with her. In the meantime, blessings on San Francisco Opera for mounting its own first performances.

The Willy Decker production, first seen at the 2004 Salzburg Festival, isn't the subtlest. And Torsten Kerl isn't the dream tenor for the opera, his tone steely on top and in Wednesday's performance fraying noticeably in the third act. And pasting the first two acts together overloads the front end.

But Emily Magee's Marietta is a tour de force, by turns flibbertigibbet and femme fatale, singing lustrously and expressively throughout. Lesser roles are well sung, too. With conductor Donald Runnicles both embracing and carefully managing a score that can easily get out of hand, the orchestra plays magnificently.

Based on a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach, Die tote Stadt, premiered in 1920, is about a man pathologically obsessed with his dead wife, Marie. When Paul meets a woman named Marietta who physically resembles the dead Marie, he transfers his obsession to – or confuses it with – the new woman.

Intoxicated with her sexual power over men, Marietta mocks Paul's shrine to Marie – portraits and a hank of hair – even as she seduces him. Marietta's actor friends provide first a playful interlude – à la Zerbinetta and company in Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos – but later egg on Marietta's mock resurrection. At the beginning and end of the opera, Paul's friend Frank tries to shake him out of his madness, but in the second act he becomes a nasty rival for Marietta's affections.

In the end, the betrayals and grotesqueries prove to have been a bad dream. Marietta stops by to pick up roses she left behind, with little response from Paul, who finally realizes he must leave both the physical dead city, Bruges, and the psychological one that has imprisoned him.

Given both story and music that are a bit over the top, Die tote Stadt could benefit from a subtler production than Mr. Decker's, here staged by Meisje Hummel. Ms. Magee is entirely credible, but Mr. Kerl resorts to every tired operatic gesture in the book. Turning the maid Brigitta's resignation into a crucifixion is heavy-handed in excelsis, and the houses gliding and whirling by in Act 2 are a bit much.

But designer Wolfgang Gussmann supplies striking images, notably Paul's room with black walls half covered with fading writings. Deft lighting is by Wolfgang Göbbel.

And this is a rare chance to see a wonderful opera.Plan your life

Die tote Stadt repeats at 7:30 p.m. Thursday and 2 p.m. Oct. 12 at War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. $15 to $290. 415-864-3330, www.sfopera.org.

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