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Jealousy, That Absurd Green Monster Vienna
Theater an der Wien
06/02/2026 - & June 5, 7, 9, 11, 14, 16, 19*, 2026
Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Lady Magnesia, Op. 112
Josefine Göhmann (Lady Magnesia), Peter Kirk (George), Jacob Philips (Adolphus Bastable), Wilma (Phyllis)
Bohuslav Martinù: Zweimal Alexander, H. 255
Josefine Göhmann (Armande), Peter Kirk (Oskar), Jacob Philips (Alexandre), Timothy Eldin (Das Porträt), Wilma Kvamme (Philomène)
Wiener KammerOrchester, Irene Delgado-Jiménez (conductor)
Anna Bernreitner (stage director), Manfred Rainer & Hannah Ollinger (sets & costumes), Franz Tscheck (lighting), Steffi Wieser (choreography), Christian Schröder (dramaturgy)
P. Kirk, J. Philips, J. Göhmann (© Herwig Prammer)
With its double bill of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Lady Magnesia and Bohuslav Martinù’s Alexandre Bis, Theater an der Wien offered an amusing evening, less about tidy operatic storytelling than the pleasures of theatrical distortion. Both one‑act operas began with the same provocation – a husband suspects his wife of infidelity – but they veer off into very different regions of absurdity.
In Weinberg’s opera, George correctly suspects his wife is unfaithful. Initially intent on stabbing her, he decides to poison her lover Adolphus instead. He then engages in an absurd conversation with his unfaithful wife, feels sorry for the poisoned lover and attempts to save him by having him ingest lime. He starts with pieces of the ceiling and then the limestone bust of his wife. By the end, Adolphus transforms into a living statue.
In Martinù’s opera, Alexandre too suspects his wife has a paramour. Armande has been resisting the advances of young Oskar. Alexandre pretends to go on a trip and returns disguised as his American cousin Alexandre Bis. Under this guise, he seduces his own wife. After that episode, Armande’s bourgeois scruples are compromised and she yields to Oskar’s advances.
Anna Bernreitner’s production understood that the success of such a pairing lies not in smoothing over its strangeness, but in sharpening it. What emerged at the Kammeroper was a gleefully stylized, intermittently brilliant, musically powerful evening. Both works enjoy an unconventional kind of humour. Written in 1975, Lady Magnesia, based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 farce Passion, Poison and Petrification, is bitingly British, though its composer was a Pole who chose to become a Soviet citizen. Alexandre Bis, written in 1937 by the Czech composer Martinù while in Paris, to a libretto by French writer and journalist André Wurmser, has a typically French flavour of the théâtre de boulevard variety.
Bernreitner’s production was at its best when it trusted the material’s perversity. Given the absurd humour in both works, it’s best not to psychologize either, but rather treat both as artificial constructions: games of jealousy, role‑play and projection in which emotional truth is always filtered through parody. The physical language of the evening was correspondingly heightened. Characters enter and pivot like marionettes, react with exaggerated stillness or spasmodic alarm, and inhabit a world whose comic logic is one of overstatement. In Lady Magnesia, this worked particularly well because Weinberg’s score itself seemed to hover between menace and burlesque. Bernreitner allowed the tension between murderous intent and drawing‑room absurdity to remain unresolved, and that ambiguity gave the first half of the evening its edge.
Bernreitner’s strongest directorial instinct was her refusal to underplay the silliness. In Lady Magnesia, Adolphus Bastable’s transformation into a quasi‑statue and the arrival of bizarre, intrusive stage images – most notably the surreal giant hand descending from above – do not attempt to “explain” the opera’s oddness; they intensify it. In Alexandre Bis, where Martinù’s farce is even more dependent on a world of masks and substitutions, the production became broader, brighter and more self‑consciously artificial. The singling out of the portrait figure, the use of outsized visual markers and the overall cartooning of gesture all pushed the second half toward a comic‑book surrealism. One could occasionally feel the machinery of the concept working a little too hard. Bernreitner’s staging keeps testing how far these operas can be stretched without snapping, and that experiment is almost always theatrically alive.
Whereas Weinberg’s piece contains a darker and stranger undertow, Alexandre Bis, by contrast, thrived on display. Its machinery of disguise, flirtation and self‑deception positively welcomed a stylised, over‑bright theatrical language, and Bernreitner gave it exactly that. The result is that the second half of the evening felt freer and more tonally assured, while the first remained the more interesting but slightly less settled creation. Another major factor is the quality of the music. Martinù’s is as brilliant as ever, whereas Weinberg’s is as contrived as much of his output, a pale imitation of Shostakovich, with jazzy elements evoking a certain “modernity”.
The excellent performers, however, gave the whole evening its shape and authority. At the centre of the performance was soprano Josefine Göhmann, who sang both Lady Magnesia and Armande, proving the indispensable pivot of the double bill. As Lady Magnesia, she made the character more than a mere comic target. There was poise in the way she rode Weinberg’s angularity, and her singing had not only a sensual warmth, but also a steely alertness that prevented the character from dissolving into caricature. In Alexandre Bis, she morphed into a lighter mode, more quicksilver, and was even more persuasive. Armande’s flirtatious self‑discovery, half provoked and half invented by the men around her, is mirrored in Göhmann’s vocal manner. She brightened the tone, sharpened the rhythmic play, and brought a near Mozartean suppleness to Martinù’s music. In both works, she dominated the stage not by volume, but by a combination of vocal poise and drama, not mere intelligence.
British baritone Jacob Phillips was equally important to the evening’s success, since he needed to negotiate two very different types of comic masculinity. As Adolphus Bastable in Lady Magnesia, he was a wonderfully adaptable presence, able to look solemnly ridiculous without ever forcing the joke. Vocally, he brought focus and a clean, alert line that cut neatly through the ensemble textures. In Alexandre Bis, he had the harder task of sustaining a farce built on impersonation and jealousy, and here his singing acquired more swagger and a more extroverted comic profile.
British tenor Peter Kirk, moving from Sir George in Lady Magnesia to Oskar in Alexandre Bis, provided a strong masculine counterweight. He morphed from the caricaturally jealous Sir George into the lightweight seducer Oskar. As Oskar he relaxed into a more openly comic idiom and became an enjoyably lubricious presence. The vocal production remained firm, but the performance lightened physically and rhythmically, which helped the second opera’s erotic farce feel genuinely airborne.
Swedish mezzo Wilma Kvamme, cast as Phyllis and Philomène, had an instinct for supporting the scene without disappearing into it, with her singing consistently vivid and cleanly projected. English bass‑baritone Timothy Edlin, as the portrait figure in Alexandre Bis, made an oddly memorable impression, despite the role’s structural marginality. Amusingly, the singing portrait was the compromise the librettist provided Martinù in lieu of the requested singing cat.
What ultimately bound the evening together was the conducting of Irene Delgado-Jiménez, who shaped the scores with a clear sense of each. Weinberg’s Lady Magnesia requires a conductor who can preserve its brittle surface energy while allowing its darker harmonic shadows to register, and Delgado-Jiménez did exactly that. She kept the score moving, but not at the expense of colour; jazz‑inflected interruptions, sudden lyric swells and deliberately abrasive shifts of tone all registered vividly. In Martinù, she found a lighter touch without turning the music into mere froth. Rhythms spring, textures breathe, and the score’s neo‑classical elegance remains audible beneath the stage business. The Wiener KammerOrchester responded with alert, stylish playing throughout, and the orchestra’s contribution was crucial in ensuring that the evening never collapsed into visual whimsy alone.
One is grateful to experience two rare operas in a house that has long specialized in the offbeat corners of the repertoire. This double bill felt like a pointed reminder of what chamber opera can do when it is cast, conducted and staged with conviction. It made the case not just for two neglected one‑act operas, but for a kind of music theatre that embraces risk, oddity and tonal instability. That is a case worth making, and on this occasion, it was made with style.
Ossama el Naggar
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