Bizarro Zemlinsky opera needs an ironic touch of the Wilde
The Little Opera Theatre of New York has a curious production titled Zemlinsky’s Zimmer/Zemlinsky’s Room, which opened Thursday night at BAM Fisher and runs through the weekend.
It’s an evening of music from Alexander Zemlinsky that’s sort of an opera, and sort of not. Or, it’s an opera inside of a frame that can be viewed from both front and back.
Inside that frame is Zemlinsky’s one-act opera Eine florentinische Tragödie, which is based on A Florentine Tragedy, a play that Oscar Wilde left finished when he died in 1900. It was translated into German and Zemlinsky wrote his own libretto, premiering his piece in 1917. It’s a curious story, a weird fable about the merchant Simone (baritone Eric McKeever) his wife Bianca (soprano Mary-Hollis Hundley), and the visiting Prince of Florence, Guido Bardi (tenor Michael Boley). The plot is a love triangle that turns violent and ends in reconciliation.
But that’s not the start of Zemlinsky’s Room. There’s a prelude of other music from the composer, his song “Maiblumen blühten überall,” for soprano and string sextet, an excerpt from his Second String Quartet, and the song for tenor, “Liebe Schwalbe.” With the entire performance inside the stage set for the opera and establishing the whole evening as a dramatic event, this music frames the mood and hints at some of the dramatic elements. And both are quite odd.
In the first song a man dies in a field; the second is a love song. Love and death are the evening’s moods, on an elegant stage with a velvet daybed and projections of ornate designs and street scenes from fin-de-siècle Vienna. They are the moods that we immediately identify from that era and Zemlinsky’s music, which combines elegant technique and fervent emotions. He briefly taught Schoenberg, and Mahler conducted his work. Zemlinksy’s style sits somewhere in between, more controlled than the others but still reaching into complex and hermetically personal emotional states. Unfortunately, he’s simply not as communicative a composer as those peers, his music often sounding like it’s coming from one remove.
The singers and musicians, conducted with energy and precision by Tiffany Chang, did their best to bridge this gap. Though the strings suffered some intonation problems, they produced a lovely sound, especially when muted, and the chamber orchestra had fine balances.
For a short opera, Simone is a demanding part, with almost constant vocal activity and with the onus to drive almost the entire drama. McKeever sounded slightly constrained at first, but quickly warmed up and opened up, and his fluid phrasing and articulation were involving. The closet thing to an aria in the piece is a short solo section for Bianca, and Hundley sounded marvelous in this, her dramatic soprano full of color and emotion—along with the rattling resolution of the drama, this was the most compelling moment of the night.
Boley was a fascinating choice for this. He has a heldentenor quality, and was strong and musically fine Thursday night. But the casting was part of the insoluble puzzle that this production is. One cannot hear this voice in this music and plot without thinking of Die Walküre. And though the music is very different, this is a Wagner-esque monologue/dialogue opera that is also supposed to be a realist, human-scale drama. While the self-dramatizing psychology of Zemlinsky’s time may seem a good fit in 2025, this was yet another frame, and more distance from the audience.
There was also the strong feeling of a disconnect between Wilde and what Zemlinsky does to his work in Eine florentinische Tragödie. Taken straight, the story is both Wagnerian and also teetering on the brink of slapstick, yet Zemlinsky takes it very, very straight. There’s no hint of Wilde’s satire, his gimlet eye on social manners. This is reinforced intensely by the supertitles, which are literal English translations of the German libretto, without any vernacular adjustments—Simone is a “Chapman,” for example—with the grammar of German, turning the story into something that is observed while only a little felt.
Without any sense of satire, the turn the drama takes at the end feels nutty and weird. It’s camp but doesn’t know that it’s camp. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s also camp placed under a glass, with an unintended clinical quality, which makes for a weird evening of a weird opera.
Zemlinsky’s Zimmer/Zemlinsky’s Room continues with alternating casts through Sunday. lotny.org
