A hungry man steals a pineapple, a cop busts him, and forevermore their fates intertwine. Sounds almost like a riff on Les Miz, doesn’t it? But no, we’re talking Kurt Weill’s Der Silbersee, composed to a libretto by the Expressionist playwright Georg Kaiser. It received simultaneous premieres in Leipzig, Magdeburg, and Erfurt three weeks after the Nazis seized power. Two weeks later, the Nazis banned it, and less than three weeks after that, Weill fled the country, never to return. His last German opera is a mongrel affair, heavy on book scenes but shot through with musical numbers in a jumble of popular and traditional styles. A jittery jail-cell meditation on Odysseus and the Sirens might just stick with you forever, and as for the shimmering, delusional finale—it’s almost too poignant to bear. The Chicago premiere stars the tenor Chaz’men Williams-Ali as Severin, the Jean Valjean of the tale, opposite the bass-baritone Justin Hopkins as Olim, his repentant Javert. —Matthew Gurewitsch