The desire to regain the voice of his mother is the motive for an American soldier to murder three women. Miroslav Srnka has made a fascinating opera from this. “Voice Killer” receives its premiere in June 2025 at MusikTheater an der Wien.

It is a strange criminal case which the Czech composer Miroslav Srnka has found for the subject of his new opera, his sixth. In 1942 the 24-year-old US-American soldier Eddie Leonski, who was stationed as a Private on a military base in Melbourne, murdered three young women, seemingly at random. The murderer was caught relatively quickly and sentenced to death by an American court martial, not least so as to nip in the bud any possible conflicts between the military and the civilian population. No matter how banal the case appears at first glance, it still exerts a certain fascination on the Australian public to this day. The young age of the murderer, the three completely random victims, and not least the murderer’s obsession with female voices have ensured that this serial murder has become part of Australian collective memory.

But it is not the murder case itself which interests Miroslav Srnka. “Voice Killer” is neither a murder mystery, nor does the historical background of the Second World War play a role. “The before and after the murder is the most interesting”, says Srnka, who has composed his opera to a certain extent from the perspective of the perpetrator, without justifying or excusing his deeds. It is not the external events which Srnka sets to music, but the internal, the intellectual world and above all the emotional world of the Private, who is nameless in the opera, and his victims, Pauline, Ivy and Gladys. The plot, based on a libretto by Tom Holloway, is therefore not centred on the murders themselves, but the situations in which the perpetrator and victims encounter each other.

The three sections of the stage work correspond with the three women whom the Private meets; the murders, however, take place in the interludes, which Srnka calls “Blurs” where the boundaries between reality and dream become indistinct. These Blurs, with their metrically free music, effectively open time for a separate theatrical time, are hazy in-between worlds which are slowly dissolved with the layer of the real outer sections of the opera. On the one hand the Blurs reflect the stream of consciousness of a psychologically ill serial murderer, on the other hand, overall “Voice Killer” reflects the mechanism of the media exploitation of “spectacular” serial murders in which the person of the perpetrator is subsequently transfigured into a tragic hero. Miroslav Srnka sets a complicated refraction of reality against this, in which the figure of the Private is brought in and at the same time held at a distance. Part of this narrative strategy is the figure of Gallo, his best friend, who witnesses his development into a murderer and at the same time just does not realise it is happening. With the help of this character, initially created purely as a sidekick, the opera raises questions about our own perception of injustice and responsibility in a society. Society itself is constantly present in the form of the chorus, and each character basically emerges from the collective of the chorus. Densely concentrated 24-part washes of sound define the long exposition, and instruments only join in much later. During the course of the opera, the role of the chorus changes; singers become characters in the piece, the crowd, the mob. 

Perhaps the most important motif in “Voice Killer” is the human voice. Srnka places the phrase “Wer singt, kann nicht atmen” [“Those who sing cannot breathe”] as a motto at the beginning of his score. With this, he refers on the one hand to an essential experience of singing – breathing is a prerequisite for singing, but every breath interrupts the singing – and on the other hand to the connection between singing victims and their fatal strangulation.  In each of the three deadly encounters the American soldier asks his future victim to sing for him, for in each of the women he is seeking the voice of his own mother whose lullabies brought him a moment of comfort as a child in the midst of a dysfunctional family. The futile wish to regain the voice of the mother is the reason for making contact with the women, but also the reason to kill the singing women. It is all the more logical for Srnka that the mother herself, who only appears as a distant memory in the opera, is the only character who does not sing, but is cast in an acting role. 

Conversely, it is precisely the voice which makes the Private – apparently like his historical role model – into an outsider, a “weirdo”. The transition of the voice into falsetto, the uncontrolled giggling, shrill laughter alienate other people and are nevertheless an indispensable part of his identity. This musical division of the character is also a dramaturgical division: “The low baritone voice is what society expects from a man. The high falsetto voice is what is different about him, something which is rejected by others as strange”, explains Miroslav Srnka. For the women, especially for Ivy and Pauline, he has written in a higher, almost stratospheric tessitura.

The complicated structure of the opera, the blending of levels of reality and dream, of trauma and wish fulfilment, is held together through a concept of time found in the score: “Voice Killer” has no linear progression of time, but a spiral-shaped course with accelerations and decelerations. In the very long and slow exposition, which Srnka describes as a “motionless uneasiness”, the listener is drawn into events and grows closer to the work’s unique approach to time and expression. The transitions into the individual scenes of the opera are designed as a constant progression from chronological order to timeless noise – and then back again. The culmination of these “time loops” over the the entire length of the 100-minute work is the third murder committed by the Private. At this moment, in which the crime, arrest, judgement and execution coincide, all the narrators and time levels of the opera come together. 

“Voice Killer” receives its premiere on 13 June 2025 in the newly-renovated MusikTheater an der Wien, which has also commissioned the work. The orchestra is the Klangforum Wien, and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir sings the complex choral part of the work. Baritone Seth Carico sings the title role and Julian Hubbard that of his friend. The three murder victims are sung and acted by Caroline Wettergreen, Holly Flack and Nadja Stefanoff. The cast also includes singer Stephan Loges as the father and the actress Kate Strong in the role of the mother. The American Finnegan Downie Dear conducts the work, and the director is Cordula Däuper. 

Kai Weßler (MusikTheater an der Wien)
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson – from [t]akte 1/2025)