or The Triumph of Life
With his novel *The Dead City of Bruges*, the Belgian Symbolist Georges Rodenbach published a fin-de-siècle bestseller in 1892: Drawing parallels to the once-flourishing Flemish trading city, now in the throes of decline, he tells the story of the young widower Paul, who clings so emotionally to his happy past and his deceased wife that he even believes in her return in the form of another woman. He embarks on an affair that turns into a surreal and traumatic experience—and thereby frees him from his emotional obsession.
Many, including Arthur Schnitzler and Alfred Hitchcock, drew inspiration from the material, whose operatic adaptation made the 23-year-old Viennese composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold an overnight star in 1920; Puccini regarded him as “the greatest hope of new German music.” The plot bears an unmistakable resemblance to Sigmund Freud’s ideas: “The dead send us such dreams when we live too much with and within them,” realizes the protagonist, for whom this (nightmare) dream ends happily with a “Triumph of Life”—which is also the opera’s original title.
