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How often does a student opera company get to stage the U.S. premiere of a work by a major 20th-century composer? Erich Wolfgang Korngold composed The Silent Serenade at a time when Broadway musical/operetta crossovers were more in vogue than they are today. Korngold was and is best known for his indelible film scores (Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, etc.). His modern-classical music is something else entirely. And Mannes Opera just shared still another side to this amazingly versatile Austrian-born composer, with the first U.S. staging of a work that back in the 1940s got bumped off the golden road to Broadway and landed in a ditch of obscurity.
It turns out The Silent Serenade (Die stumme Serenade in the original German), Korngold’s Opus 36, with a libretto by Victor Clement, is great fun – at least in this colorful, big-hearted production. Korngold and Clement fashioned its absurd grand-opera-worthy plot into a screwball comedy with great 1920s-style songs.
The Mannes production featured solid, well-trained voices that (mostly) filled the spacious Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College in New York City. Director Emma Griffin’s slick staging played up the comedy, the talented cast displaying acting skills to match their voices. Mannes Opera’s music director Cris Frisco conducted an excellent, roughly dozen-strong student pit orchestra.
The ridiculous plot revolves around a famous Neapolitan actress, Silvia Lombardi, and her besotted but shy dressmaker, the fashion designer Andrea Coclé. Dasha Tereshchenko had star quality to spare as a glamorous star emboldened with a strong soprano, adeptly shaped phrasing, and a hilarious sashaying manner. Baritone Sean Cha was a strong and charming Andrea, his singing rich and vibrant, though his accent made his spoken lines hard to understand. (The show has many spoken-word scenes. Supertitles accompanied the songs, but were very hard to read. Fortunately, the story is so silly it didn’t deplete the fun if the details got lost at times.)
There’s a bedroom break-in and a failed bombing. There was the funniest depiction of a political revolution I’ve ever seen. There is even, appropriately for the venue (John Jay College of Criminal Justice), a (show) trial. Costume designer Terese Wadden worthily met the challenge of the fashion-industry setting with a rackful of colorful dresses for Silvia; for Louise (the shiny-voiced Gaeun Song), the head model at the Salon, who gets the show’s most striking, striped dress; and for three other models who harmonized nicely both vocally and visually.
Camden Gonzales’ choreography was fairly basic but charming and era-appropriate. Indeed the whole production made me feel like I was at a Broadway theater back in the 1940s or even earlier. It’s hard to imagine the show not being a hit had the Shuberts staged it as planned.
The Music
The rhythms at the start of the Overture recall the exciting motifs of Korngold’s movie scores, but for the most part the music is cheery revue-style fare, though at a high level, heavy on heartfelt solo numbers and romantic duets. “Silent Serenade,” the Andrea-Silvia duet near the top of Act Two, has some gorgeous chord changes; here Cha’s singing had an especially droll sappy-romance ring that made me picture someone like Ezio Pinza in the role. “Till Tonight,” Silvia’s number before what she thinks will be her last meeting with Andrea, shines as perhaps the best song in the show.
Louise and scrappy reporter Tony Borza (able tenor Thomasluke Flórez-Mansi) have two sharp numbers together in their subplot romance. Song’s voice didn’t carry over the orchestra as the other leads’ did, but her bubbly overall performance won us over nonetheless.
Dima Mironov put on such an exaggerated Italian accent as Prime Minister Lugarini, Silvia’s cartoonish blowhard of a fiancé, that I couldn’t understand many of his lines. But the audience ate him up. Enes Pektas as Caretto, the Chief of Police, had just one number but it’s a doozy, a patter song that recalls Gilbert and Sullivan. Pektas made it another crowd-pleaser.
Given the unabashed old-fashionedness of the music and the show, one couldn’t have asked for a much better production. And down to the smallest role the student performers impressed. The Silent Serenade from The New School’s Mannes Opera ran March 13 and 14, 2026.
