When Germany’s ultra-conservative Offenbach crusader Peter Hawig – who in a recent Jacques Offenbach Society newsletter remarked that “tying” the
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No, this is not scheduled as a mid-summer treat to coincide with the various operetta festival productions in Austria: the
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The original composer chosen für Die lustige Witwe by authors Leo Stein and Victor Léon was: Richard Heuberger. After he
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There’s a wonderful interview with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in which she talks about her student days in Berlin. She mentions that
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Kálmán’s Faschingsfee started her phenomenal career abroad, to be exact: in Budapest and New York City. First the show premiered
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You’ll forgive me for saying this, but provincial Brandenburg and the city of Frankfurt an der Oder (next to the
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“The Gay Hussars”? I admit, the title of the 1909 Broadway version of Emmerich Kalman’s first operetta hit Tatájárás caught
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Ah yes, another Fledermaus recording. As if there aren’t enough already, right? Well, actually, this one from the NDR Radiophilharmonie
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Before the building of railways into London from the rest of south-east England in the third quarter of the nineteenth
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Nature or nurture – that’s the central question in this charming social experiment operetta in three acts by André Messager.
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Kálmán composed Kaiserin Josephine after his ‘regular’ first night theater, the Theater an der Wien, had gone bankrupt as a
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You know it’s Korngold alright from the very first bars: it’s an explosion of sound, hyper-intense like the opening of
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The effect of Ivor Novello’s music on me was immediate: I remember the first time I heard his songs on
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Any week now, John Yap’s company, JAY Records, is going to release a recording of Ivor Novello and Christopher Hassall’s
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Yes, they are very famous and widely known: Lehár’s operettas as recorded by the Nazis, often with stellar casts, offering
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So here it is, finally: the live broadcast of Marc Minkowski’s performance of La Périchole with his Les Musiciens du
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It’s not exactly a secret that Johann Strauss was a great dance music composer. Before he turned to operetta in
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Before the dawn of the phonographic era and before iTunes came along you had to either go to the theater
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You might remember the CD series The Broadway Musicals of… created, written and hosted by Scott Siegel. They started, thematically,
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When Eduard Künneke presented his syncopated Der Vetter aus Dingsda in Berlin 1921, it was quite revolutionary to have so
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Munich’s recently renovated and re-opened Gärtnerplatz Theater just offered a brand-new staging of The Chocolate Soldier, in the original German
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After the success of The Gondoliers in December 1889, D’Oyly Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan had a well-publicised disagreement because Gilbert
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Next year the world will celebrate the 200th birthday of Jacques Offenbach. After having dedicated themselves to Hervé and his
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It’s interesting how you can have a full cast recording sitting on your CD shelf for decades, and it never
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Leo Fall’s one-act operetta Brüderlein fein premiered in the notorious basement cabaret of the Theater an der Wien, called “Die
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Recently, gender and diversity Prof. Simon Dickel gave an interview on Deutschlandfunk talking about his new book Queer Cinema which
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The sensational success of Jacques Offenbach in Second Empire Paris and internationally, in the 19th century, has many reasons. One
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Back in 1997, Michael Miller, the chair of the Ohio Light Opera Board of Directors, and president of the Operetta
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It’s an unusual coupling, to say the very least: Anneliese Rothenberger and Max Hansen in one recording? The hairspray-star of
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The Austrian composer Richard Heuberger was born in Graz in 1850, trained as a railway engineer, then moved to Vienna
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Erik Charell, the director of the original film version of Der Kongress tanzt, labored long and hard to bring his
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We need to talk about Offenbach, seriously and right now. Is it a sign of our gender-queer times that of
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If you like your operettas exotic, grand, over-the-top and as a total blast, you will probably love the overture to
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I really don’t listen much, these days, to show recordings. Especially new recordings of my beloved older shows. Those, in
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You could call this year’s Vogelhändler at the Mörbisch Festival a kick-ass production – or an erect middle-finger in the
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Early Lehár operetta seems to be en vogue this season, on record at least. Here is a new release on
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