Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Wagner, Die Meistersinger: Act Three; Fall: Paroli

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

The longstanding problem with broadcasting the operas of Richard Wagner is their length. Some of them simply won't fit into my three-and-a-half-hour timeslot. The only way to accommodate them is to broadcast the complete opera in two broadcasts on two successive Sundays. This I had done to accommodate Parsifal on Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, 2013. Over two Sundays I did the same for a long German baroque opera, Telemann's Der Geduldige Sokrates. Last Sunday for a second time I presented the first two of the three acts of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868).

The last time I presented Die Meistersinger this way was on two Sundays in September, 2014. You heard a historic recording made live on stage at the Metropolitan Opera, January 15, 1972. That was actually an air tape of a radio broadcast from the Met. Thomas Schippers conducted the Met's orchestra and chorus and bass-baritone Theo Adam starred as Hans Sachs.

Listen today to Act III, in a recording made live in concert performance at the Philharmonie Hall in Berlin, June 3, 2011. Marek Janowski was directing the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, and bass-baritone, Albert Dohmen, sang the role of Sachs. Released on four Pentatone CD's in 2011, this Meistersinger anticipated the two-hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth and 1813.

The German Pentatone label launched a bicentennial recording project that would give the public the ten best known operatic masterpieces of Wagner in state-of-the-art sonics and with singing casts made up of the finest Wagnerian voices of our time. All ten recordings in the series originated at the Philharmonie with Janowski on the podium. I have already broadcast several of the operas is in the Pentatone series.

Keep listening after the concluding third act of the Wagner opera for later operatic fare - something that falls into the general category of Viennese operetta. The Austrian Leo Fall (1873-1925) was a contemporary of operetta great Franz Lehar. Today, Fall is overshadowed by the Hungarian Lehar but in his own time he possessed equal fame and his works were as popular as Lehar's. I have broadcast recordings of Fall's operettas fairly recently: The Rose of Stambul (1916) on Sunday, July 13, 2014 and Madame Pompadour (1922), his last operetta, on Sunday, May 17, 2015.

Paroli, also first called Frau Denise (1902) is one of Fall's earliest lyric theater pieces. It's not an operetta per se, but a one act comic opera that premiered at a cabaret theater in Berlin. The story of Paroli has some of the elements of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro," only here the philandering count (or marquis) is stymied by being locked up in a tower.

Paroli was recorded in the Philharmonie Hall in Cologne in March of 2012 under the auspices of West German Radio Cologne. Axle Kober directed the broadcast house orchestra and chorus of the West German Radio Cologne. The German CPO label released Paroli on a single compact disc in 2015.