The rediscovery of music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold — a star composer of 20th-century operas and film scores who, by 1976, was already lamented as a victim of critical “Establishment snobbery” — continued on Friday at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater. There, performers from the Mannes School of Music at the New School presented his 1940s operetta “The Silent Serenade,” originally bound for Broadway and only now receiving its United States premiere in English.
It was winningly melodic, rhythmically crisp and successfully funny on the level of political sketch comedy — all without being doom-coded or poisoned by irony. It offered sexiness sans vulgarity.
The conductor, Cris Frisco, led an adroit pit band of 11 instrumentalists (Kyle Glasgow, doubling on clarinet and tenor saxophone, was a standout). Korngold’s music can swing quickly between old-world Viennese sweetness, Mahler-influenced angst and some vintage cinematic balladry. There’s a reason you’ll find the contemporary piano phenomenon Yunchan Lim offering a bit of this work as an encore, and in a version similar to Korngold’s own playing (and humming). The tunes here are lovely.
On Friday, “The Silent Serenade” was affectingly sung by artists still in their training years. Most impressive was Dasha Tereshchenko, a Canadian mezzo-soprano who sounded well supported in all registers, as Silvia Lombardi — a famed actress engaged to Lugarini, the authoritarian prime minister of the operetta’s fictional Naples. Tereshchenko brought great comic timing to all her dialogue scenes and physical comedy. And her “Till Tonight” — known as “Ohne Dich” in the German edition — provided promising glimpses of luster.
Silvia is more of a fit for her dressmaker, Andrea Coclé (sung by the baritone Sean Seungho Cha, with a pleasant ring in his tone). Yet he’s a bit timid: the type to serenade Silvia, silently, while pacing outside her window. That low-volume stalking transpires on the same night that Lugarini, Silvia’s buffo-dictator fiancé — played with fantastic, mustachioed bluster by Dmitry Mironov — escapes a thwarted bombing, and that Silvia finds herself kissed by a masked intruder. (Or is she? The plot involves some twists.)
A reporter with flexible ethics, state security officials and assistants fill out the cast. Another singer of note on Friday was the baritone Enes Pektas; his rendition of “Caretto’s Song” — a patter number for the long-suffering chief of police — elicited waves of laughter from the audience.
“The Silent Serenade” has been described as a “blend of opera, operetta and revue.” That’s a wide remit, so while the Mannes production’s choice to avoid amplification was bold, it was also worthwhile. The balance between pit and stage was generally strong. Ensemble diction sometimes proved muddy for the broader cast, but the featured vocal soloists brought poise to their individual numbers.
Emma Griffin’s staging was charming and included some smart choices that could help you forget you were watching something produced on a tight budget, in a rented venue. One of her most innovative moves involved the visual framing of Mironov’s prime minister with a tastelessly gilded picture frame carried around by underlings — a lightness in line with the work’s treatment of insecure leaders who constantly project power.
The production will be streamed on the Mannes website on March 23, and it will be a prime opportunity for newcomers to get to know Korngold. Perhaps best known as the Jewish émigré composer who showed Hollywood how to do lushness properly (influencing the likes of John Williams), he also wrote grand, turbulently erotic operas like “Die Tote Stadt” and “Das Wunder der Heliane” before fleeing Austria in the 1930s.
But Korngold also had a pronounced side of light music, as when he created new versions of Viennese morsels by Johann Strauss II. Mannes Opera channeled that Korngold with success on Friday. And its ability to claim a United States premiere has its roots in the operetta’s troubled genesis — with the existing English- and German-language versions reflecting the composer’s interest in having the piece catch on wherever it could.
That German version — “Die Stumme Serenade” — has not been much in circulation, but at least it has been recorded twice: once on radio, conducted by Korngold, and more recently this century on the CPO label. English-speaking audiences, even those willing to translate CPO’s German libretto, haven’t been as well served as they are by the Mannes show.
This is the kind of material — along with, say, the American musicals of Kurt Weill — that a great many people might find effervescent in a casual, home-theater environment. Korngold wrote film soundtracks for Warner Bros., compelling scores for movies like “Deception” and “Between Two Worlds.” What if Netflix, no longer buying that production company, used the money it just saved to capture a show like “The Silent Serenade”?
Netflix could license Korngold’s music and give its cast a comfortable amount of rehearsal time, resulting in something fizzy and joyous for evenings at home across the world. But I’m not holding my breath, and neither should you. Which means you absolutely should consider streaming the “The Silent Serenade” from Mannes.
The Silent Serenade
Performed at Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, Manhattan.
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