Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Strauss: Die Fledermaus; Vaughan-Williams: Hodie

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Just as Handel's Messiah oratorio has been linked to Christmas, so the ebullient Viennese operetta, Die Fledermaus (1874), with its grand ball in the second act, harmonizes perfectly with New Year's Eve festivities. Then there's the hangover third act with its association with New Year's Day. Also associated with the January First holiday is the annual concert given in the hall of the Musikverein in Vienna, which features the music of "The Waltz King," Johann Strauss, Jr. That live broadcast from Radio Austria goes out worldwide to lovers of operetta everywhere.

Die Fledermaus is the most famous example of the genre from its Golden Age, and it's Strauss's undoubted masterpiece. It has been much recorded, and over four decades of lyric theater broadcasting I have presented a number of fine and often historic recordings of it available on disc, like the gala 1960 recording in early stereo sound with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera Chorus. That original Decca recording in Pristine Audio CD reissue went over the air on New Year's Day Sunday of 2017.

Of even greater historic interest is the 1950 monaural taping, with the native Viennese conductor, Clemens Krauss, leading the same illustrious orchestra and chorus. It was Krauss who in 1940 began the tradition of the New Year's Day radio concerts. Decca's CD reissue of the 1950 Clemens Krauss Fledermaus I broadcast previously, not at the New Year, but on Sunday, August 22, 1993. It includes the beautiful singing voice of soprano Hilde Gueden as Rosalinde. She would reprise the role a decade later for Karajan in his masterful and echt Viennese interpretation. Also singing in the 1950 Krauss recording are the now historic voices of tenors Julius Patzak as Eisenstein and Anton Dermota as Alfred.

There's almost no spoken dialog in this old mono recording, shortening its length of airplay so as to permit broadcast of an additional seasonal favorite of mine in its hour-long entirety: Ralph Vaughan-Williams's Hodie Christrmas cantata (1954), in the 1964 stereo recording for EMI, with Sir Adrian Boult directing the musical forces.