Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Weber: Euryanthe

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Carl Maria von Weber's Euryanthe (1823) was intended to build upon the success of his famous Der Freischütz. Euryanthe contains much beautiful music. Its overture is occasionally performed in concert situations, but the opera itself very rarely. No one who has heard it in its entirety could doubt the boldness of Weber's conception. It's his only opera that is sung throughout with no spoken dialog.

Euryanthe is also a classic example of a truly great operatic work that was ruined by a horrible libretto. Because he was a nice guy, Weber befriended the second rate poetess Helmina von Chezy and commissioned her to write him a libretto, since he knew she was hard up for money. Remember, she was the playwright of Rosamunde, Fürstin von Zypern, the play for which Schubert provided his famous incidental music. That play was a big flop at its premiere in Vienna. The results were the same for Euryanthe, the opera, in its initial Viennese production. Critics condemned the libretto and praised the music. Since then Euryanthe has been hacked up in an attempt to compensate for its bad book. Weber himself had to rewrite the text extensively, but to no avail. In more recent times the opera has been restored to the form in which Weber originally set the text to music.

Way back on Sunday, October 20, 1985 I presented an EMI recording of Euryanthe issued stateside on Angel stereo LPs. It was made in 1975 with the musical resources of the Staatskapelle Dresden and Chorus of Radio Leipzig under the direction of Marek Janowski. It featured a stellar cast of singers, among them the American soprano Jessye Norman and Swedish tenor Nicolai Gedda.

There's another older recording of the opera in its restored state. It was taped in 1957 in the broadcast studios of Radio Berlin. The young Kurt Masur was conducting the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. The German Relief label has issued on compact disc a series of these Radio Berlin recorded broadcasts from the post-WWII era, some taped in monaural sound, some in very early stereo. The sound quality of this particular Relief CD issue is remarkably good.