Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Herbert: Naughty Marietta; Vives: Bohemios

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

The music of the popular American lyric theater always figures in my mix of summertime lyric theater programming. The "March King", John Philip Sousa, (1894-1932) wrote American operetta quite successfully. His most popular operetta, El Capitan (1895) got an airing on this program from Zephyr CDs twice before on Sundays in 1999 and 2016.

Victor Herbert (1859-1924) also helped to transform the European operetta into the uniquely American musical. Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910) was a gigantic hit. Oscar Hammerstein commissioned a "a creole comic opera" for his Manhattan Opera company. The plot of Naughty Marietta is pretty slender, with confusing romantic entanglements, and it all seems pretty damned brainless today. But Herbert's musical score has one hit number after another. Naughty Marietta was so popular it was adapted in 1935 into an MGM movie starring cinematic singing icons Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy.

The first-ever musically complete recording of Herbert's reconstructed Eileen (1917) was made in 1997 by Ohio Light Opera. I broadcast the Newport Classic CD release of Eileen on Sunday, August 3, 2003. Now it's the turn for the reconstructed complete original score of Naughty Marietta. A concert version of all this music was performed and recorded in 1990 at the Baird Auditorium of the Smithsonian museum in Washington, DC (Sousa's hometown). The musical resources were under the direction of James R. Morris. The Smithsonian finally released this vintage recording to the public in CD format in its American Musical Theater Series (Harbinger Records, 2021). Keep listening for excerpts from Herbert's 1914 musical, The Only Girl, as performed by Light Opera of New York (Albany Records CD, 2015).

Last month I devoted an entire afternoon of programming to the zarzuela, the popular lyric theater genre of Spain, akin to European operetta and not unlike the American musical comedy. Bohemios (1904), by Amadeo Vives (1871-1932) dates from the same period as Naughty Marietta, and enjoyed a similar big success. Its story is based on the same French novella by Henri Berger that inspired Puccini's La Bohème, only it's a romantic comedy throughout, with no tragic ending, and no Mimi dying of consumption. Bohemios was recorded musically complete in 1993 for release through the French Audivis Valois label. Like the Smithsonian's Naughty Marietta recording, Bohemios lacks spoken word dialog. Antoni Ros Marba conducts the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife with the Coro Polifónico de la Universidad de la Laguna, and seven vocal soloists.