Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Lehar: Opera

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

This coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday in the traditional Christian calendar and marks the beginning of the forty-day penitential period of Lent leading up to Easter. Before the Lenten fast gets underway there's Mardi Gras, "Fat Tuesday," celebrated in New Orleans, it's true, but it's also the carnival day all over Catholic Christendom.

During Lent in Catholic Europe (and in Protestant lands, too). the opera houses closed down for the duration, and sacred oratorio replaced staged musical performance. On this pre-Lenten Sunday, let's have some fun and listen to a silly operetta by Franz Lehar, Cloclo (1924). This tuneful Viennese lyric comedy has a hit number, the foxtrot "Ich habe La Garçonne gelesen." The premiere of Cloclo was a theatrical triumph as big as that of Lehar's well-beloved "Merry Widow." Cloclo is the name given to the archetypal flapper. She's a Parisian dancer, a sexually liberated young woman courted by the mayor of a provincial French town.

Lehar's Cloclo was quickly adapted for performance in London, Berlin, and elsewhere in Europe, and it was filmed, too, but it passed out of the repertoire during the Second World War. Cloclo was revived onstage at the 2019 Lehar Festival at Bad Ischl, which was once Lehar's summer home outside Vienna. Marius Burkert leads the Franz Lehar Orchestra and Chorus of the Bad Ischl Lehar Festival, with a cast of seven vocal soloists. The German CPO record label released Cloclo on two compact discs in 2020.