"The Vienna Rite," by Judith Berkson, at Roulette The Vienna Rite From left, Gavriel Savit, Aram Tchobanian, Judith Berkson, Bo Chang, Lana Cencic, Allyssa Lamb and Ian Greenlaw in this chamber opera about the 19th-century cantor Salomon Sulzer. There were plenty of reasons to travel to Roulette in Downtown Brooklyn on Friday evening for the premiere of Judith Berkson's chamber opera, "The Vienna Rite," about Salomon Sulzer, the 19th-century Austrian cantor who reformed synagogue music and befriended Schubert. Ms. Berkson, a cantor herself, writes her own liturgical pieces. She has given arresting renditions of jazz standards and Schubert lieder and has composed atmospheric miniatures for voice and keyboard. Yet the same elements that give her solo work an enigmatic, awkward grace - close harmonies, an introverted performance style, the modest colors of a Wurlitzer organ - are magnified to unflattering effect in her first opera. Occasional moments of inspired choral writing were delivered without conviction and left to dissipate in an anemic production full of dramatic voids. The excellent baritone Ian Greenlaw, as Sulzer, made the most of the monotonous lines given him but was sabotaged at every turn by Ms. Berkson's score. According to Ms. Berkson the ghost of Schubert "hovers" over the work, but in truth it is Sulzer who is disembodied here. The opera's three scenes show a synagogue choir rehearsing and eventually performing a service Sulzer composed in 1828. But except for one brief quotation, the music is Ms. Berkson's, including a motet setting of Psalm 130, sung in unintelligible German, that skillfully weaves delicate counterpoint with dense chromatic harmonies. Another scene shows the choir playfully singing an arrangement of Schubert's String Quintet in C. Two male characters, the composer Ignaz von Seyfried and the Kapellmeister Joseph Drechsler, comment admiringly on Sulzer's efforts, but there is little sense of the conflicting forces of tradition and innovation that could have given "The Vienna Rite" dramatic heft. The score pits three electronic keyboards against a percussion trio, with players on both sides recruited from the contemporary-music ensemble Yarn/Wire. The keyboards often take on the guise of an organ, an instrument controversial in synagogue music, or emit the bleating sound of 1980s synthesizers. The percussionists perform in black shirts and trousers with red sashes across their chests, evoking the nationalist fraternities of German and Austrian universities. Sometimes a single snare drum accompanies Sulzer's liturgy like a heckler. Perhaps the drummers were there to foreshadow the Holocaust, which would tear a gash through the symbiosis of Jewish and German-speaking cultures that Sulzer embodied. But in an opera in which Sulzer's music is ventriloquized by the experimental sounds of Ms. Berkson, it sometimes sounded as if she were heckling herself.