Paul Lincke’s “Frau Luna” – A Radio Recording from Cologne on CPO

There is no real shortage of Frau Luna recordings, the Paul Lincke classic from 1899 has always worked well as a collection of great songs on cast albums, even though most offer orchestral arrangements that have nothing to do with the original sound-world of pre-WW1 Berlin. Now, cpo has released a 2006 concert performance of Frau Luna from the WDR radio station in Cologne, conducted by Helmuth Froschauer.

It’s probably related to the new series on cpo which has Ernst Theis present orchestral music by Paul Lincke with the Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt. While we get overtures and intermezzi from his many stage shows there, on volume 1 and 2, this new disc based on a concert performance in Cologne lets us hear Lincke’s most famous stage hit with vocalists.

Like with many other WDR productions, this one, too, uses opera singers, which sets this Frau Luna apart from various previous cast albums. The Luna recording with Ingeborg Hallstein as the goddess of the moon has tv personalities such as Harald Juhnke and Beate Granzow, plus Edith Hancke, they sing the hits with a more cabaret style voice (and sound stunning). They communicate well with the listener, and have great charisma, they are still enormous fun to listen to, even if the orchestra is re-arranged in a questionable 1970s way.

In the 1954 recording from the NDR radio station, with Anneliese Rothenberger as a ravishingly young Frau Luna, the cast is also operatic, but it has more vocal glamour than Cologne offers with Maria Leyer, Karl Fäth and many others – including René Kollo, somewhat past his prime but still interesting to hear. (And a lot better than most recent Helden tenors with operetta aspirations.)

So, should one get this new version? It’s an attractively packaged 20 tracks version, it lets you hear the immortal songs and ensembles in a straight forward way, with a full symphony orchestra, instead of the smaller band that Lincke had in 1899 at the Apollo-Theater on the shady end of Berlin’s Friedrichstraße. (Near the prostitutes at Hallesches Tor, a mere few meters away.)

Given a choice, I’d rather see the Tipi am Kanzleramt production of Frau Luna, it was streamed during one of the Corona lockdowns, but never released on DVD. No CD version was issued either, sadly. If you have the old Rothenberger version you might not “need” the new cpo one, on which nothing remarkable happens in terms of a return to the 1899 glory of the show.

The version presented here, as elsewhere, is a mix of various later expanded versions, it’s not the original one-acter which no one has bothered to record yet.

By the way, the (in)famous large-scale version from Nazi times – which played at the Großes Schauspielhaus, renamed “Theater des Volkes” – is discussed in the new book “Dein Tänzer ist der Tod”: Das Berliner Theater des Volkes im Nationalsozialismus, by Sabine Schneller and Guido Hermann. It’s a publication dealing with the history of the Friedrichstadt-Palast, richly illustrated and truly thrilling to read (and look at).

It’s certainly a must-have for operetta fans, not just because of Paul Lincke. You get to see posters and production photos from various famous shows, but also images of operettas that are mostly forgotten today.