It’s not every teenager whose first full-length opera triggers a bidding war, but such was the good fortune of Erich Korngold (1897–1957). A double bill of one-acts in Munich when he was not yet 20 left audiences so eager for more that his next effort, the full-length Die tote Stadt, booked simultaneous premieres in Cologne and Hamburg, with innumerable international productions following. Based on the Belgian novelist Georges Rodenbach’s symbolist (some will say kitsch) classic Bruges-la-Morte , Die tote Stadt unfolds in the eponymous “dead city” of Bruges, where our hero Paul cultivates an obsession with the memory of his wife, who died at a young age years before. The plot thickens when a dancer by the name of Marietta shows up—a dead ringer for the dead Marie. The rise of the Nazis rang down the curtain on Die tote Stadt on German stages, Korngold being Jewish, but the composer landed on his feet in Hollywood, where his lushly melodic, lavishly orchestrated soundtracks set a standard for “movie music” that has never been surpassed (he could compose, as it were, in Technicolor even when the film stock was still black and white). Since his death, sporadic revivals have established Die tote Stadt as a morbid but heady confection of considerable magnetism. Andris Nelsons, music director of the Boston Symphony, brings to these concert performances a flair for Korngold’s feverish sensibility and a handpicked cast led by Brandon Jovanovich as Paul and Christine Goerke as the character puzzlingly listed as Marietta/Marie. —Matthew Gurewitsch