Paul, the obsessive widower in Erich Wolfgang Korngold's opera "Die Tote Stadt" ("The Dead City"), lives a solitary life amid a homemade shrine filled with relics of his dead wife. He calls it the Temple of the Past.

In addition to its role in the drama, that shrine offers a poignant emblem of the composer's own life and career.

If ever a musical genius was betrayed by history, it was Korngold. Born too late and gone too early, he spent his days uncomfortably out of step with the times.

As a young man, he lavished an incomparable inventive and technical gift on works written in a lush, late-Romantic idiom - a style of music that had already begun to lose steam when he started composing. As a refugee from Hitler, he was central in creating the orchestral sound of midcentury Hollywood, only to find this achievement all too easily derided.

And by the time either strand of his output had begun to garner the respect it was due, Korngold was dead. He died in 1957 at the age of 60, convinced that both his efforts and his talent had been in vain.

"Die Tote Stadt," which will begin its first San Francisco Opera run at the War Memorial Opera House on Tuesday night, was the pinnacle of Korngold's success, a work so eagerly awaited that its 1920 world premiere took place simultaneously in Hamburg and Cologne. Other performances swiftly followed - in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Amsterdam, New York - and the acclaim was unanimous.

Korngold was 23 years old. Fate would never be so kind to him again.

Fate, however, had already been bountiful with her gifts in making young Korngold one of the most astonishing prodigies the musical world had ever known. For sheer precocity, only Mozart and Mendelssohn were in his league.

The younger son of Julius Korngold, Vienna's most powerful music critic, Erich established himself as a wunderkind right from the start. He wrote piano music at age 6 and an entire cantata at 9; songs, chamber music and orchestral works followed in his teenage years.

The influence of his father was something of a mixed blessing. Julius Korngold could undoubtedly open doors for his gifted offspring - at 10, Erich was brought to Mahler for the great man's seal of approval - but also bequeathed him the envy and enmity of many in Vienna's viciously tight-knit (and often anti-Semitic) musical world.

Most tellingly, the elder Korngold - not unlike the elder Mozart - transformed his son's artistic activity into a psychologically fraught arena. By turns laudatory and domineering, Julius made sure to insert himself as much as possible into his son's musical career.

The result was an awkward stylistic tug-of-war in which the young composer's more venturesome instincts constantly ran up against his father's more conservative tastes.

To listen to Korngold's earliest works - the two Piano Sonatas, the Piano Trio or some of the songs - is to be dumbfounded, both by his technical assurance and by the energy with which he explored the outer reaches of the late-Romantic harmonic realm. Yet there is a sense of inhibition at work there as well, the feel of someone taking pains not to push too hard against the prevailing boundaries. As far as the young Korngold strayed beyond the stylistic world of Mahler and Richard Strauss, he always made sure to be home in time for supper.

Based on a lurid novel by Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach, "Die Tote Stadt" perfectly exemplifies this inner struggle. The protagonist's obsession with his dead wife is shaken when he encounters another woman - young, beautiful and amorous - who is the spitting image of his lost love. Is it merely coincidence? A supernatural visitation? Or a chance at redemption?

The libretto was cobbled together by the two Korngolds, father and son, writing under the pseudonym "Paul Schott" (Paul after the protagonist, Schott after Korngold's publisher). It follows the source up to a point, but does an abrupt shift at the very end.

Unlike the original, in which the protagonist murders his new love interest to put her on the same footing as his wife, the opera concludes with a sigh of relief - the murder was only a dream! Now Paul, cleansed of his obsession, can leave the past behind and get on with his life.

It's a cogent moral, but leaving the past behind is not such an easy task - as Korngold would soon learn all too clearly. The score of "Die Tote Stadt" is in some ways the acme of a fragrant, nostalgia-steeped tradition that made its home in Vienna and was already looking over its shoulder as the 20th century began its inexorable march toward tyranny and genocide.

Korngold went on to compose a vaster and even more perfumed opus - the elaborate 1927 opera "Das Wunder der Heliane" - but other forces were already in play.

In 1934, Korngold visited Hollywood to write a score for the film version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" directed by his old collaborator Max Reinhardt, and stayed on to write other film scores. Within a few years, the rise of Hitler and the Nazis put any hope of returning to Europe out of reach until the war was over.

Yet during his Hollywood years, Korngold showed enormous artistic resilience, applying the stylistic habits and principles of the late-Romantic stage to the creation of an entirely new - and influential - musical genre. In his scores for such films as "Captain Blood," "The Adventures of Robin Hood," "The Sea Hawk" and "Kings Row," Korngold transferred the melodic profusion, plush harmonies and intricate orchestral textures of his early operas to a canvas where they were just as effective as ever without seeming so out of date.

The postwar years were the hardest, as Korngold struggled to recapture some of the acclaim and adulation of his youth. He wrote concert works - concertos for violin and cello, a broad and elaborate Symphony in F-Sharp - only to see their Romantic utterances met with incomprehension and even derision. Even his hopes for reviving some of the old theatrical successes were shattered.

The past decade or two have seen a reawakening of interest in his music - primarily the film scores, but also the concert and stage works of his youth and his final years. For him, though, that interest came too late.

During Korngold's lifetime, there was no way to turn back the clock, no way to revisit the heady artistic ferment of prewar Vienna that had provided him with both an aesthetic worldview and the most memorable successes of his life. Like the title figure in his best-known opera, that city was gone for good.

DIE TOTE STADT: Erich Wolfgang Korngold's opera opens Tuesday at the War Memorial Opera House and runs through Oct. 12. $15-$290. (415) 864-3330,