![]() ![]() ![]() With a superb cast and an excellent conducting by Fabio Luisi this is without any doubt the best video production currently available. ![]() Andreas Homoki’s staging focusses on the characters and their emotions. In this successful Zurich production, Das Land des Lächelns remains what it is: a romantic operetta. Klaus Grünberg, set and lighting designer To emphasize the operatic elements, he condensed the piece, cutting several secondary roles and shortening dialogues. Homoki lets the plot take place in a Paris Variété theater from the 1920s, complete with show staircase and heavy curtains. Fabio Luisi and Andreas Homoki also know that the genre of operetta requires particular care – which is why they have assumed personal responsibility for this production. He has an equal partner in Julia Kleiter, who plays the role of Lisa. For the new production of this operetta, world-class tenor Piotr Beczala returned to the Opernhaus Zürich as Sou-Chong. And Schock floats a high C# at the end.“Always smile and always be cheerful, always satisfied, no matter what happens, smile in spite of your sorrows and a thousand aches and pains,” sings Prince Sou-Chong, thus introducing the fundamentally melancholic tone of “Das Land des Lächelns” (The Land of Smiles), which even has a tragic ending in store. Popp could be celestial, especially in those early years. A bit brisker and less sexy, but so beautiful. You can practically hear the waxed moustache in his tenorial ardor.Īnd for the curious, here’s the young Lucia Popp with the veteran Rudolf Schock. Friedrich was a much-employed singer during the war years, with a voice whose limitations remind me of Tauber (a similarly mouthy, boiled-beef timbre) but a rock-solid technique and dyed-in-the-wool sense of style. Gueden’s voice was a fixture of my early record-listening, a radiant, free-flowing sound, occasionally a bit blowsy and disorganized-perfect for GIuditta. She is partnered by the doughty tenor Karl Friedrich. Here’s my favorite recording of it, with the young Hilde Gueden sounding luxuriantly post-coital. The sexy tango Lehár wrote is not exactly a North African dance, but is evokes the liberation of these two European ex-pats, newly freed from the shackles of small-town Italy and marriage. But we’re dipping into the full heat of their romance with the Act II duet “Schön wie die Sommernacht.” Giuditta has left her basso buffo husband and run away to North Africa with her army officer lover Octavio. Its most famous number is the soprano aria “Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiß,” sung by the heroine in the fourth tableau after her love affair with the tenor has run its course. The fizz went out of the cocktail, and “Giuditta” disappeared. After the Anschluß, its two box-office stars Jarmila Novotna and Richard Tauber left Vienna. It used a large orchestra and received a big send-off: 120 radio stations broadcast the 1938 premiere, and the show got 42 performances in its first outing. ![]() “Giuditta” was as close as he came to a grand opera. Like Offenbach, Lehár longed to write a serious work, one without the usual happy ending. In the meantime, we can still float on the cream of Lehár’s music, which evokes erotic heat with the best of them. The ethos of these works may have passed their use-by date, though some clever stage director may once again find a contemporary relevance in them. I have seen only one of Lehár’s pieces onstage, the ubiquitous Merry Widow which I used to call The Merry Window because I found it so empty. Once hugely popular, these old-fashioned operettas have largely faded from view. His stage-works create a world of unmarried blonde women, tenors whose lasciviousness skirts the overtly creepy, and a passel of supporting players who are usually less wealthy and less Viennese. When it comes to high-calorie, high-fat romance, there’s no one quite like Viennese operetta icon Franz Lehár. The final group of songs in Act I of “ The Art of Pleasure” is simply called “Romance,” and that gave me an opportunity to program the steamy duet “Schön wie die blaue Sommernacht” from Lehár’s Giuditta. ![]()
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