A failed magician, a family on the brink of disintegration, a frustrated singer and a liberal dose of German romanticism: these are the key ingredients of Manfred Trojahn’s La Grande Magia, given its world premiere at Dresden’s Semperoper last weekend. The result is 90 minutes of feather-light, well-made, witty new opera, on the bent edge of narrative coherence, pleasingly lyrical yet dutifully complex.

Librettist Christian Martin Fuchs has distilled and reconstructed Eduardo de Filippos’ play of the same name into a warped family saga, with lives that intersect and fragment round the unsuccessful magician Otto Marvuglia. Most of the original is lost in translation, leaving a handful of confused characters and a rough outline of minimal action. Marvuglia makes Marta disappear more completely than intended. She runs off with Mariano, leaving husband Calogero to go quietly mad, sold on Marvuglia’s line that we create our own reality. Trojahn has set Fuchs’s deconstructive text to delicate music that is heavily influenced by Strauss and Berg, creating a bittersweet little tragicomedy with no happy end.