Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Heuberger: Der Opernball; Zeller: Der Vogelhandler

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Besides the "Waltz King" Johann Strauss, Jr. in operetta's Golden Age in the later nineteenth century and Franz Lehar in the Silver Age of the earlier twentieth century, there were other significant but less famous composers at work in the genre. There was, for instance, Richard Heuberger (1850-1914), a native of Austria's other big city, Graz, to the South of Vienna in the province of Styria. He's known to posterity as a "one hit wonder," although he wrote other such works with little success.

Der Opernball premiered in 1898 at Vienna's Theater an der Wien, where Lehar's Der Graf von Luxemburg was first staged a few years later. (So many other hit operettas got their start there.) Der Opernball could be said to be a knockoff of Die Fledermaus at the end of the genre's Golden Age. It has the masked ball in common with Strauss' Golden Age model, also the mistaken identities and a married couple seeking a night of freedom from each other. And, like Die Fledermaus, the whole general plot is derived from a French play. Heuberger's score is tuneful throughout, and it had a big hit number, "Gehen Wir ins Chambre Separée." An Americanized version of this operetta made it to Broadway in 1912. There are actually several recordings and videos of this now rather obscure piece of vintage Viennese lyric theater. The latest recording was made for the German CPO record label. Der Opernball was revived at Oper Graz in 2016. Marius Burkert led the Graz Philharmonic Orchestra and the chorus of Graz Opera. The CPO release does include the spoken German language dialog that was heard from the stage in live performance.

The two CPO CDs both have skimpy timings, so we fill out the lyric theater time-slot with a second unfamiliar work from operetta's golden era. Carl Zeller (1842-1898) was another one of those lesser known composers who made a significant contribution to the genre. Again, like Heuberger, he is remembered today through one work only, his greatest success Der Vogelhandler (or, "The Bird Seller", 1891). For a recorded performance of Zeller's beautifully melodic work we need go but a short distance East of Vienna to the lakeside village of Morbisch, which lies right on the border between Austria and Hungary. Every Summer at Morbisch an operetta festival is held on a pavilion with open-air stage. Der Vogelhandler was staged at the 2017 Morbisch Lake Festival. Gerrit Priessnitz conducts the Morbisch Festival Orchestra and Festival Choir. Der Vogelhandler comes to us on a single generously-timed Oehms Classics compact disc.