Mannes Opera to Showcase U.S. Premiere of Korngold’s ‘The Silent Serenade’
By David SalazarMannes Opera at The New School College of Performing Arts will present the U.S. premiere of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “The Silent Serenade” (Die Stumme Serenade) on March 13 and 14, 2026, at 7:00 p.m.
Performances, set to take place at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater in New York City, will feature Daria Tereshchenko, Megan Barker, Gaeun Song, Sean Seungho Cha, Enes Pektas, Thomasluke Flórez-Mansi, Dmitry Mironov, Nik Lutomski, as well as Christina Seo Young Kim, Mia Farinelli, and Zoe Brooks.
The Mannes Opera production is presented in English and is curated by Managing Artistic Director Emma Griffin, who will also direct the show. Cris Frisco conducts.
Written in the late 1940s, “The Silent Serenade” is a comic operetta based on a short story by Austrian writer Raoul Auernheimer. Conceived for Broadway, the work blends operatic writing with elements of mid-20th-century American musical theater and Hollywood film music. The plot centers on romantic intrigue and mistaken identities, with political satire woven into the narrative.
“We’re thrilled to bring a forgotten piece of New York history back to the stage,” Frisco said per an official press release. “This work has had a remarkable journey—from New York to Germany and now home again—and it invites us to reconsider Korngold’s career at the crossroads of classical and popular music, a tension that still resonates today. At Mannes, with our incredible composition faculty, we’re deeply engaged with those questions. As an educational institution, we can offer a rare space to ask whether this work holds together in the 21st century. While we regularly present contemporary opera and world premieres, it’s not every day that we have the opportunity to give the American premiere of a major 20th-century European composer’s work.”
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