Miroslav Srnka’s Voice Killer: a harrowing descent into madness and musical extremity

By any standard, Miroslav Srnka’s new opera Voice Killer, commissioned by MusikTheater an der Wien, is not easy. Neither subject matter nor the musical language extend a hand to the listener – yet it leaves an indelible impression. An opera that explores the deranged psychology of a real World War 2-era serial killer who murdered women to “capture” their voices, Voice Killer is more psychological excavation than linear narrative, more spectral soundscape than melody.

The real-life case of Edward J Leonski – a US soldier stationed in 1940s Melbourne – provides the foundation for Tom Holloway’s libretto, a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness text rejecting exposition in favor of a disjointed psychological portrait. The result is a haunting, often uncomfortable listening experience. Srnka’s score is unrelenting in its intricacy and abstraction, eschewing traditional harmonic development for dense, textural layering. One could even argue the opera takes place in the murky space between sound and tense silence.

The opening sets the tone: a photo of Leonski smiling benignly dissolves into a drawn-out moment of disconcerting quiet, broken only by the singer’s eerie counting backwards from 40 and a contorted laugh. In formidable form, Klangforum Wien, instead of entering with sweeping lines, sneak in with hushed, ghostly textures, barely registering as music in the conventional sense.

Srnka demands extraordinary things from singers and players alike. Instruments and voices are pushed to the edge of their timbral possibilities – bowed percussion, breathy flutters from winds, and scraped strings abound – forming a sonic collage that is as unsettling as it is arresting. The use of extended techniques is almost exclusive and the precision with which these fragments are layered is remarkable, as well as how voices and instruments are made timbrally equivalent. The effect is one of claustrophobic intensity, a hallucinatory aural space in which time and reality bend and fray. That the performers could navigate this labyrinthine score is itself an achievement. That they did so with such expressive commitment is astonishing.

Chief among the standouts was soprano Holly Flack as Pauline, the second of the killer’s three victims whose performance was exceptional. Her voice soared into the stratosphere with crystalline clarity, producing electric bell tones with ease. Her mastery of vocal color and control in the most extreme registers was virtuosic, yet never ostentatious. In a piece where the voice represents both agency and victim, Flack managed to embody both, capturing fragility and bravura in equal measure.

As the murderer, bass-baritone Seth Carico was chilling. Srnka writes for the role in a way that fractures the vocal identity – leaping from eerie falsetto to aggressive baritone and back again, often in the span of a phrase. Carico delivered this with remarkable flexibility and disturbing intensity. His voice became a site of psychological rupture, both disarming and repulsive. The remaining soprano roles – Caroline Wettergreen and Nadja Stefanoff – were likewise impressive, forming a spectral trio of victims whose lines often shimmered in surreal counterpoint above the murky instrumental backdrop. The Arnold Schoenberg Chor likewise deserves praise for navigating brutally complex ensemble writing, blurring lines between speech, noise and song.

Cordula Däuper’s direction was what made the abstraction emotionally legible. With ingenious use of layered stage levels, gauzy scrims and video projections, Däuper transforms the stage into a fractured memory palace. Projected texts serve as both surtitle and commentary, introducing documentary fragments – police files, victim letters, news clippings – that anchor to the real world. This dramaturgical strategy not only contextualizes the action but counterbalances the aural abstraction with specificity. Particularly effective is the visual layering: rooms and images emerge from darkness only to vanish moments later, echoing the opera’s fractured timeline and Leonski’s descent into delusion. Däuper’s production neither explains the killer, nor attempts to romanticize or soften the violence; instead, it examines through a lens that feels clinically precise, yet resonant.

For some, Voice Killer will be a tough sell. At 100 minutes without intermission, with scarcely a trace of melody or rhythmic stability, it asks a great deal from its audience. But this is precisely its power. Srnka and Holloway refuse to aestheticize horror; instead, they immerse us in its mental and sonic logic. In an era awash in true-crime media, Voice Killer serves as a sobering counterpoint, an artistic autopsy of our fascination with violence and voice. It is also unique in interrogating the medium of opera itself. By centering the voice – its beauty, its vulnerability, its manipulation – within a narrative about a man who murders to possess it, Srnka confronts opera’s most cherished symbol.

The final image, with the victims stepping into the role of the killer’s defense, underscores this thematic inversion. Justice becomes absurd theater and the stage a site of recursion, where trauma is dissected and displayed but never resolved. Despite, or perhaps because of its challenges, Voice Killer is a deeply compelling, meticulously crafted work. It may not uplift, but it sears itself into the memory. And in its most harrowing moments, it achieves something rare in contemporary opera: it makes us listen differently.