It must be said up front that, whatever reservations one might have about Korngold as a musical dramatist, the new production of Violanta at the Deutsche Oper Berlin was one of the finest stagings to appear in any Berlin house in recent years. That the opera also received a suitably opulent performance from Sir Donald Runnicles and a well-balanced trio of principals seemed almost surplus to requirement; David Hermann’s deceptively simple and flawlessly executed staging drew us effortlessly into the eponymous character’s spiral of self-examination and, in doing so, offered an eloquent reminder that even a mediocre story can be elevated in the retelling.
Violanta was Korngold’s second opera – written when he was only seventeen – and its success paved the way for his later, more ambitious operas Die tote Stadt and Das Wunder der Heliane. While few would deny Korngold’s ability to blend the musical modes of his time – primarily intoxicating post-Wagnerian passions, but with nods to Strauss, Zemlinsky, and the second Viennese school – into a potent musical concoction, one might equally lament the fact that he was writing at a time when the love-and-death fascination of late-romantic German opera and the sex-and-violent-death prurience of Verismo had conspired to create a formula for operatic success that has not aged especially well.
Broadly speaking, the plot – set in fifteenth-century Venice – concerns the titular Violanta, whose sister was seduced and abandoned by Alfonso, the prince of Naples (in a convent, no less; the shame!) and subsequently committed suicide. Violanta, consumed with a desire for revenge, convinces Alfonso, who happens to be in Venice for the carnival, to come to a secret meeting, where he will be killed by Violanta’s husband Simone, a prominent military captain; when she meets Alfonso, however, she realises she loves him and allows herself to be killed by her husband so that she may be purged of her shameful desire. (A less-implausible take on the revenge-turns-to-passion story arc can be found in Giordano’s Fedora, which also received an excellent recent production at the Deutsche Oper).
If the action sounds suspiciously silly on paper, the production – much like the Deutsche Oper’s captivating Heliane from a few years back – demonstrated that committed performances and a well-directed staging can go a long way to redeeming a flawed work.
Korngold: Violanta. Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor. David Hermann, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, February 2026. © 2025 by Marcus Lieberenz / Deutsche Oper Berlin.
And David Hermann’s staging was about as good as they come: if some of his previous stagings have indulged a streak of ironic distancing and meta-theatricality – occasionally at the expense of narrative – his Violanta revealed a master storyteller at the height of his powers.
This is not to suggest that the staging was in any way traditional: there was nothing obviously Venetian in the costumes, nor in the magnificent set, a circular space detached from any recognisable reality that nonetheless played a crucial role in delineating Violanta’s turmoil. Instead of offering a straightforward retelling or retreating into conceptual inaccessibility, Mr Hermann managed the nearly impossible task of transforming an unconvincing libretto into a wholly compelling psychological drama.
At just over an hour and a quarter Violanta is comparably brief – it was performed originally as a double-bill with Korngold’s earlier one-acter The Ring of Polycrates Three Orchestral Pieces, op. 6.
These extra works gave Mr Hermann the time to establish Violanta’s despair more fully. The lute piece, an attempt by her husband to ease her from her disconsolate silence, was met with contempt, while the pantomime that played out during the Berg piece illustrated just how long Violanta had been locked in her hermetic torpor (as well as introducing the quickly-abandoned sub-plot of the soldier who falls in love with Violanta while guarding her). It was only the arrival of a troupe of dancing revellers on their way to the carnival that shook the catatonic Violanta to life.
The introductory scenes of the opera proper were largely expository in nature – a series of dialogues between Simone and his household staff establishing the reasons for Violanta’s silence – and the drama only really took off during the scene in which Violanta convinces Simone to murder Alfonso.
From there, however, the action snowballed towards its tragic (but also vaguely redemptive) denouément with thrilling efficiency. A handful of clumsy moments in the libretto – Simone’s tortured acceptance of his wife’s plan, or Alfonso’s eye-rolling sob-story, which placed the blame for his serial womanising squarely on – you guessed it – his parents) detracted only mildly from the taut intensity that the music and staging conspired to create.
The set, by Jo Schramm, was more than just visually stunning: the space, a tilted circular stage floating in an expanse of black and accentuated by another circle suspended above, provided the opening scenes with an allegorical placelessness that gave the onstage interactions a ritual charge while tacitly acknowledging that the opera’s nominal setting contributes absolutely nothing to the drama.
But in the opera’s final section – from the moment Violanta meets Alfonso – the set became inseparable from the action. From the centre of the circular floor emerged a series of rooms arranged in a kind of corkscrew, and the characters moved from one to the next in a constant downward spiral. The journey through the rooms may have been a fairly obvious representation of Violanta’s examination of her inner self – she encountered spectres of family and faith en route to the repressed sensuality that lay at the heart of her desire – but it was no less effective for it.
Indeed, the set (which also provided the final bars with an immensely satisfying final image) was a perfect example of how space and story can engage in a mutual process of deepening.
Korngold: Violanta. Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor. David Hermann, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, February 2026. © 2025 by Marcus Lieberenz / Deutsche Oper Berlin.
While the early parts of the story are populated with an assortment of minor figures, the success of the opera depends largely on Violanta, Alfonso and Simone, and on this evening all three received performances that were consistently engaging and occasionally something greater.
In her earliest scenes as Violanta, Laura Wilde seemed somewhat subdued, and some of the subtleties in her performance struggled to make it past the orchestra’s wall of sound and into the auditorium. But the time of her meeting with Simone, however, she was fully in command of the character, and during the course of her long scene with Alfonso, she built steadily and patiently towards a climactic moment of self-realisation.
Mihails Culpajevs was a compelling Alfonso, even if he was never entirely able to dispel the notion that Violanta was just another in a long series of amorous conquests. Indeed it was the very qualities that distinguished his vocal performance – the graceful ease of phrasing, and the ability to shift effortlessly from the pathos of his childhood to his newfound ardour for Violanta – that contributed most to the sense of Alfonso as a slick, well-practiced cad. His concerted efforts to seduce Violanta were, nonetheless, one of the evening’s vocal high points.
At the more earnest end of the spectrum, Ólafur Sigurdarson was a superbly sympathetic Simone. His authoritarian treatment of his household seemed born of genuine frustration at his wife’s silent implacability, and in his stirring duet with Violanta, he suggested a level of internal strife that transcended the libretto’s somewhat schematic treatment of the character.
Although Korngold’s music was highly praised in its day, his operatic scores now seem very much of their time, skilfully contrived tapestries of grand emotion that remain largely free of the subtle ambiguities or gentle ironies that might have rendered them more credible to audiences of the future.
However, none of this mattered to Sir Donald Runnicles, who approached the music with such affection that it was difficult not be charmed. The orchestra sounded especially attuned to Sir Donald’s vision, and what emerged was a heady rush of agreeable opulence and highly charged moments that were no less enjoyable for their obviousness.
But if the orchestra and singers provided the evening with its beating heart, it was Mr Hermann’s staging that gave it its necessary focus, fashioning the opera’s errant emotions into a compelling drama. The libretto of Violanta may not withstand any kind of close scrutiny, but for the duration of this production, one was forced to set their reservations aside and surrender to the pleasures of a well-told story.
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