200000 Taler

Boris Blacher was one of the most important and most widely performed composers in post-war Germany. In his 1969 opera “200 000 Taler” (200 000 Thalers) he adapted a comedy by famed and popular Jewish author Scholom Aleichem and created a sophisticated milieu study around tailor Schimele Soroker and his family who come to great fortune by winning the lottery.

This 1970 recording of the world premiere production stars a stunning Martha Mödl as Soroker’s wife and Günter Reich in the role of the shrewd tailor. Director Gustav Rudolf Sellner leads his fine cast meticulously through the comic and self-ironic material and supports the cliché-less score that Blacher conceived for Aleichem’s characters. Heinrich Hollreiser conducts the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin with insight and musical mastery. As the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote after the premiere, “Blacher discovers forces and notions that move our century within the naive, unpretentious literary material at hand. … Without ever using Jewish melodies this score creates a kind of folklore of a setting that is fully Blacher’s own. Here lives a new style.

Die tote Stadt

In 1920s Germany, Erich Korngold’s work was considered “degenerate” and banned. Eventually, in 1934, he left for Hollywood. There, he made a name for himself as a film composer and only rarely wrote great works for the stage. Many of his quite successful operas, composed between 1913 and 1927, stopped being performed after World War II. Among these was his perhaps most significant work, Die tote Stadt (“The Dead City”), which was performed again for the first time after a long hiatus in 1955 in Munich. Further productions followed. Nevertheless, Götz Friedrich’s version of 1983 for the Deutsche Oper Berlin was only the fifth new production of the opera after 1945. Thanks to it, the work became established in the repertoires of many other opera houses, if only as a curiosity.

In the production at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1983, James King, who debuted at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1961 and had a great interest in the role, starred as Paul; the internationally renowned singer Karan Armstrong as Marietta; and William Murray as Frank.

Josephs Legende

“Composed to a libretto by Harry Graf Kessler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and premiered by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes in the summer of 1914, Strauss’ Josephs Legende was one of the earliest cultural casualties of the First World War. The leads in John Neumeier’s production from 1977 are terrific, especially the sensational Judith Jamison as Potiphar’s Wife. The Wiener Philharmoniker sounds sumptuous and conductor Heinrich Hollreiser keeps the drama from dragging without getting in the way of the dancers.” (James Leonard, ALLMUSIC.com)