![]() 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. From the description of Franz Lehar calling card manuscript, 1914 Jun 3. Like Offenbach, Lehár longed to write a serious work, one without the usual happy ending. Austrian composer of operettas, including The Merry Widow. 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. ![]() © 1996-2001.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. His greatest success in this field came with The Merry Widow (1905).Īccepting the improbabilities and shortcomings of many operetta librettos, Lehár resolved to 'create real people, and to depict them in such colours that they might actually have lived among us' thus were born such consummate works as Paganini (1925), Friederike (1928), The Land of Smiles (1929) and Giuditta (1934), each of them crafted for the legendary lyric tenor Richard Tauber.įranz Lehár died at Bad Ischl, Austria, on 24 October 1948, aged seventy-eight, leaving the world a legacy of some thirty stage works, besides numerous songs and orchestral items. His first opera, produced in 1896, was a failure, but with a posting to Vienna Lehár recognised that his easy gift for melodic writing might lend itself more to the world of operetta. Young Lehár's formal musical studies were followed by a period of military service, during which he played the violin in the band of the 50th Austrian Infantry Regiment, conducted by his father, before becoming a military bandmaster in his own right. Born on 30 April 1870 in Komárom, Hungary, Franz Lehár was the eldest child of the military bandmaster and composer Franz Lehár senior (1838-98). ![]()
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