United States ‘Zemlinskys Zimmer/ Zemlinsky’s Room’: Soloists, Orchestra of the little OPERA theatre of ny / Tiffany Chang (conductor). BAM Fisher, Brooklyn, 7.6.2025. (ES-S)
Zemlinsky – ‘Maiblumen blühten überall’; String Quartet No.2 (excerpt); ‘Liebe Schwalbe’; Eine florentinische Tragödie
For two decades, the little OPERA theatre of ny (LOTNY) has quietly built a reputation as one of New York’s most intrepid champions of neglected operatic repertoire. Working on an intimate scale with inventive staging and chamber orchestrations, the company has consistently brought overlooked works – by both canonical and lesser-known composers – into focus. Their latest project, ‘Zemlinskys Zimmer / Zemlinsky’s Room’, continues this mission with a moody, elegantly curated collage built around Alexander Zemlinsky’s one-act opera Eine florentinische Tragödie. Staged at BAM Fisher and prefaced with songs and an instrumental excerpt, the production offers not just a revival but a kind of psychological portrait: a meditation on the composer’s obsessions, the fin-de-siècle imagination and how opera, by transforming crime into ritual, can make it disturbingly palatable – lending it a strange and unsettling beauty.
At the heart of the program lies Eine florentinische Tragödie, a one-act opera based on Oscar Wilde’s A Florentine Tragedy – a play likely missing its opening scene but otherwise complete in its dramatic arc. Though Wilde left no explicit source, the story’s swift reversals and fatal resolution echo the tone of Boccaccio’s Decameron, where desire, deceit and violence often converge in stylized moral parables. Wilde’s tone, however, is characteristically ambiguous – coolly detached and laced with satire. Zemlinsky’s approach could not be more different. Composed on the eve of World War I, his score responds with psychological urgency and decadent intensity, heightening every emotional contour through post-Romantic chromaticism.
Set in Renaissance Florence, the opera follows the merchant Simone, who returns home to find Bianca, his wife, entertaining a visiting prince, Guido. What begins as a strained exchange of pleasantries quickly escalates: Simone flatters, provokes and ultimately kills the prince in a duel – only for Bianca to turn admiringly to her husband in the final moments. In under an hour, the opera traverses a landscape of betrayal, erotic cruelty and murderous catharsis with expressionist intensity.
Before the opera begins, ‘Zemlinsky’s Zimmer’ opens with a composite prologue: three standalone works that set the emotional and conceptual stage for what follows. Each introduces textures and psychological motifs that later erupt with operatic force. In ‘Maiblumen blühten überall’, soprano Mary-Hollis Hundley, accompanied by a string sextet, delivers a surreal lied in which erotic longing shades into nightmare, culminating in the image of a lover burned alive in a sunlit cornfield. It is a jarring miniature that hints at Bianca’s divided affections and the opera’s final embrace. A fragment of Zemlinsky’s String Quartet No.2 follows, played as Simone wanders silently through projections of fin-de-siècle Vienna – trams, storefronts, religious façades – his figure reduced and displaced within the city’s architecture. Finally, in ‘Liebe Schwalbe’ (‘Dear Swallow’), an unnamed character – a spectral prefigurement of Guido – sings a carpe diem exhortation that will later ring with tragic irony.
All three selections are performed within the same richly appointed interior used for the opera: a podium strewn with Oriental rugs, period chairs and a settee. The unified atmosphere – Seth Reiser’s set, Kylee Loera’s projections and Lara de Bruijn’s costumes – conjures a stylized psychological space that feels more Vienna Secession than Renaissance Florence. This setting not only links the prologue and the opera visually but also establishes a tonal continuity. What first appears to be a loosely structured sequence of scenes gradually takes on deeper emotional coherence. By the time the opera begins, we are already immersed in grief, estrangement, foreboding and latent violence.
Though often overshadowed by more radical contemporaries, Alexander Zemlinsky occupies a uniquely ambivalent position in early twentieth-century music. A teacher of Schoenberg, admired by Mahler and once mentored by Brahms, Zemlinsky stood at the fault line between Romanticism and modernism, between psychological saturation and formal restraint. His music combines rich chromaticism with emotional volatility, but it stops short of atonality. The lied ‘Maiblumen blühten überall’, with its dream logic and apocalyptic eroticism, feels like a premonition of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, composed a decade later and premiered under Zemlinsky’s baton in 1924. But where Schoenberg dissolves narrative and tonal center entirely, Zemlinsky remains tethered to recognizable form even as it begins to unravel. Eine florentinische Tragödie distills this tension: an overheated chamber drama rendered in dense textures, expressive ambiguity and a musical language that heightens without exaggerating. Zemlinsky was already writing from a place of personal and aesthetic marginality, a fact only intensified by his later exile and neglect. In this production, that marginality becomes part of the drama itself – suffusing the score not just with beauty and darkness, but with the charged air of something barely held together.
Under Chang’s baton, the cast brought conviction and nuance to a score that demands both force and finesse. As Simone, baritone Eric McKeever delivered a performance of stamina and psychological nuance. The role is nearly continuous, and McKeever carried its weight with focus and clarity, his phrasing attentive to the text’s shifting registers of sarcasm, violence and despair. Soprano Mary-Hollis Hundley, having already opened the evening with haunting presence, sang Bianca with warmth and power, most strikingly in her brief solo passage – arguably the opera’s emotional apex. Tenor Oswaldo Iraheta portrayed Prince Guido in lighter shades, adding a degree of vulnerability to the role, especially in contrast to the physical and vocal authority of Simone. Unfortunately, his vocal output wasn’t always secure, and his German left something to be desired. Roland Freisitzer, credited with the chamber reduction, retained much of the original’s dense harmonic weave while allowing for greater transparency and intimacy in BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space. Despite some imprecisions in the strings, the ensemble shaped the score with care, and Chang led with firm pacing and close attention to balance, particularly in the opera’s more volatile ensemble passages.
Philip Shneidman, LOTNY’s artistic director, approached the opera with restraint, drawing emotional intensity from the performers rather than imposing interpretive excess on the staging. He treated the final reversal – Bianca’s embrace of Simone – not as a climactic twist but as an inscrutable gesture, letting it pass without emphasis, which only deepened its strangeness. It is the kind of production that not only revives a rare work with intelligence and care but leaves one eager to see what ‘little’ corner of the operatic repertoire the company will bring to light next.
Edward Sava-Segal
Production:
Director – Philip Shneidman
Set & Lighting – Seth Reiser
Costumes – Lara de Bruijn
Projections – Kylee Loera
New chamber orchestrations – Roland Freisitzer
Cast:
Simone – Eric McKeever
Bianca – Mary-Hollis Hundley
Prinz Guido Bardi – Oswaldo Iraheta