Hunger, guilt and violence drive a haunting Der Silbersee at Chicago Opera Theater

Kurt Weill and Georg Kaiser’s Der Silbersee (‘The Silverlake’) has never been an easy work to classify. Somewhere between play, opera, and political fable, this 1933 hybrid resists the tidy categories that make theatrical works digestible. Chicago Opera Theater’s recent production embraces this essential ambiguity and builds its strength from it. Billed as ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ the work unfolds in cold, clear light. What begins as biting social satire gradually thaws into something lyrical and unresolved. Weill’s score grows increasingly hauntingly melodic as the narrative spirals inward.

The history surrounding Silbersee matters. The premiere came less than three weeks after Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933. Germany’s political climate was already darkening. For both Weill and Kaiser, this would be their last production in the Weimar Republic before exile. Weill fled in March 1933 and eventually settled in the United States while Kaiser settled in Switzerland. It is a final artistic statement from two men standing at the edge of an abyss they could not fully see.

Silbersee belongs to the category of a play with music. The work runs nearly three hours, split between dialogue and song. COT’s production retained the original German text, cutting some spoken dialogue to preserve the delicate transitions between speech and singing. This choice proved wise. Without it, the hybrid form might have collapsed into something more familiar and less strange.

The story reads like a fevered parable of Weimar-era poverty and moral paralysis. Severin, an unemployed man driven by hunger, leads a robbery at a grocery store. In a moment of impulsive defiance, he steals a pineapple. Olim, a policeman, shoots and wounds him. Haunted by remorse, Olim wins a lottery jackpot and destroys his report of Severin’s transgression. He installs the recovering Severin in a decaying castle, keeping his identity secret. Severin seethes with hatred toward his unknown assailant while Frau von Luber, a scheming fallen aristocrat, seizes control of the estate and fortune before casting both men out into the winter night. Only at the frozen Silverlake does reconciliation arrive, ambiguous and transcendent.

What makes this narrative absorbing is its refusal to resolve into neat moral categories. The policeman is not simply a villain. The victim is not simply innocent. The world is capricious in its cruelty and willfully blind, yet redemption remains possible. This moral tension runs throughout Weill’s score, which asks his performers to hold contradictions in balance.

COT’s production captured the darkness superbly. The stage opened with a grave being dug, an effigy of hunger destined for burial. Drab costumes exuded despair. Blue-gray sets were bathed in projections of gnarled trees. The only vivid color came from the grocery shop’s shelves of tempting fruit. This palette of bleakness dominated the evening more than any attempt to root the performance in a particular historical moment. Director Lawrence Edelson wisely allowed the fable to speak for itself. James Lowe conducted with admirable clarity from the pit. The orchestra colors were vivid, angular, and uncompromising. Weill’s modernism does not reach toward prettiness. It cuts.

Finding a cast that can handle the piece’s dramatic demands  remains one of this work’s central challenges. It demands actors who sing and singers who act, all to a high standard. Most productions settle for compromise by focusing on acting or singing. COT’s ensemble did not. Justin Hopkins sang Olim with dark gravitas, capturing the weight of unintended violence and desperate compensation. Chaz’men Williams-Ali brought a searching lyricism to Severin’s role, his tenor voice perfectly calibrated for longing and anger. Ariana Strahl voiced Fennimore, Frau von Luber’s  warm-hearted niece, with an encouraging lyrical soprano that provided crucial tonal contrast. She counterbalanced the darker inflections of her male counterparts, though her rendition of Weill’s famous ‘Ballad of Caesar’s Death’ might have benefited from a grittier attack and sharper diction.

Dylan Morrongiello and Leah Dexter completed the cast. Morrongiello inhabited two roles with distinction: first as the lottery agent crooning about wealth’s corrupting allure, and later as Frau von Luber’s unscrupulous accomplice. Dexter brought veiled menace to the opera’s principal villain, playing the scheming aristocrat with conniving purpose. Dexter understood that malice works best when delivered with restraint.

At the evening’s end, Olim and Severin walk onto the frozen lake, guided by Fennimore and urged by a chorus singing fidelity to humanity. They disappear into redemption or death; Weill does not tell us which. The work refuses easy solace even as it insists on mercy. It is a farewell from a composer leaving everything behind, written in the last moment when speech was still possible–before the curtain fell.

Originally published on Seen and Heard International

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Around Chicago:

Kathy Key at Third Coast Review

“It was delightful to see soprano Leah Dexter as the wicked and hilarious Frau von Luben. I have seen her in Fire Shut Up in My Bones, and another COT favorite, She Who Dared. I liked everything about her character, particularly when she canoodled with Baron Laur (Dylan Morrongiello). Morrongiello also plays the Lottery Agent with great flair. The aria is a highlight of singing and performance. Their singing and interactions were spot on. Dexter has a grand soprano in addition to some Margaret Hamilton and Cloris Leachman stirred in. Morrongiello had that Sergeant Schultz thing going on, and I was there for it. These characters skewer the cruelty and pomposity of the ruling class.”

John von Rhein at Chicago Classical Review

“But it is the guilt-ridden Olim who is the central protagonist, and bass-baritone Justin Hopkins, a fine singing actor who has taken on a variety of Weill roles, inhabits his (mainly) spoken part with sympathy and conviction. He makes us privy to the workings of the policeman’s conscience while managing the long stretches of spoken text with good German enunciation.”