N.N.
Operetta Research Center
21 September, 2011
It’s a mile stone in operetta publishing, you might say: the Wiener Volksliederwerk (WVW) in cooperation with a whole list of Austrian institutions and the publishing house Doblinger has issued a two-volume set of all the songs ever written by Hermann Leopoldi. Roughly 800 pages total, all songs in alphabetical order. With a foreword by Georg Kreisler and Roland Jos. Leop. Neuwirth.
The cover of ther two-volume Leopoldi edition.
Not only is it great to have these songs ready for performance in such an attractive and complete edition. It’s also interesting that famous titles such as the “Buchwald March” – composed with Fritz Löhner-Beda in the concentration camp Buchenwald – are included. Placed right before “Bummeln durch Wien”, without any further comment.
Both volumes are available at 60 Euro, total price.
It would be desirable, that soon similar editions of other composer’s chansons came out too: how about the entire song catalogue of Ralph Benatzky? Werner Richard Heymann? Oscar Straus? Friedrich Holländer? They all wrote many individual songs that are in many cases difficult to get hold of today. Perhaps the WVW can tackle at least the Austrian composers – and cooperate with archives such as the Akademie der Künste in Berlin?