Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Lehar: Wo die Lerche singt

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Among Franz Lehar's many bittersweet operettas of his later period, this one is really obscure. It is the only one of his twenty two stageworks to premiere not in Vienna or Berlin, but in Budapest. Titled in Hungarian A Pacsirta, its 1918 production in the capital city of Hungary was an immediate hit and shortly thereafter it went on to Vienna, where it was reset in German language as Wo die Lerche singt and became even more popular. War weary Hungarian and Austrian audiences alike found in "Where the Lark Sings" a sweet diversion from the woes of the collapsing Hapsburg empire. (Thinking of birds, Lehar's librettists Willner and Reichert also wrote the German language original of Puccini's La Rondine, "The Swallow.")

For an awful long time there had been only one recording ever made of Wo die Lerche singt. Of great historical interest, it documents a studio performance broadcast over ORF Radio Austria in 1942, with Lehar himself conducting. The WWII era broadcast was preserved on very early Magnetophone magnetic tape. The old aircheck tapes were digitally upgraded and issued in CD format through the Bel Age record label. I broadcast the Bel Age discs on Sunday, March 9, 1997. It was a joy to discover that there's a new German CPO label recording of the operetta, available as of 2014 on two silver discs. This one captures the audio part of a revival stage production at the 2013 Lehar Festival in Bad Ischl, Austria. Marius Burkert conducts the Franz Lehar Orchestra and Lehar Festival Chorus, with a cast of Central European vocal soloists. The Hungarian-style melodies Lehar wrote for "Where the Lark Sings" are ravishing. Let your ears savor them on a laid-back late summer's afternoon.