“Ich soll ihn niemals, niemals mehr sehen” from Die Kathrin Op.28 (1939)

Die Kathrin, Korngold’s last opera has had an unfortunate career. Its first misfortune was that the story that inspired it – from a novel about a romance between Kathrin, a German servant girl, and François, a French soldier, during the First World War – proved to be politically unacceptable in the Vienna of the late 1930s. The libretto had to be updated to 1930 and the setting relocated to France, with Kathrin still a servant girl but François now a wandering minstrel doing his national service – all of which makes Kathrin’s first-act decision to renounce him far less crdible than it originally was. Anyway, Kathrin’s letter aria, “Ich soll ihn niemals, niemals mehr sehen,” in which she writes to François to tell him she cannot see him any more, remains the highlight of a generally attractive score. Sumptuously orchestrated and set in a manner somewhere between Richard Strauss and Puccini, it is one of Korngold’s finest lyrical creations.

Although the opera ends happily, incidentally, with Kathrin and François re-united five years later, the work itself has enjoyed no corresponding change of fortune. After its scheduled opening in Vienna in 1938 was cancelled, because of the composer’s Jewish origins, it was not very successfully first performed in Sweden in 1939 and has had only one revival, in Vienna in 1950, since then.