About the work
Lady Magnesia is a one-act comic chamber opera by Mieczysław Weinberg to his own Russian libretto after George Bernard Shaw's short play Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction (1905). Weinberg composed it in 1975 but never saw it performed; after a concert performance in Liverpool in 2009, the staged premiere followed on 2 February 2012 at Theater Erfurt.
Plot
Sir George Fitztollemache means to stab his sleeping wife Lady Magnesia in a jealous rage because she is having an affair with the servant Adolphus. When Adolphus turns up instead, George poisons him with soda water from a "gazogene" device - a farcical mix-up comedy for just four solo voices.
Cultural significance
Unlike most of Weinberg's operas, this one drops his usual existential themes and instead, following Shaw, pokes fun at operatic convention itself. Long unperformed, the chamber piece was rediscovered only as part of the wider Weinberg revival after 2000 and is now part of several Weinberg retrospectives, including in Erfurt, Vienna and Munich.