Franz Lehár (1870-1948) was incontestably one of the foremost masters of the operetta. He abounded in creative ideas, was a supreme craftsman, a temperamental musician whose artistry flowed in his blood, and a dramatist who succeeded in breathing genuine life into the hackneyed figures of the operetta genre. His most popular operettas were premiered between 1925 and 1929. These were the works whose wealth of ideas and emotionally florid, sometimes even sentimental, melodies brought them greater fame than the brilliant early works such as “The Count of Luxembourg” (1909) and “Gypsy Love” (1910) – save for “The Merry Widow” (1905), his most popular operetta of all. The works of this second creative period were also conceived with one particular singer in mind: Richard Tauber. The most typical works of this period are “Paganini” (1925), “The Czarevitch” (1927), “Friederike” (1928) and “Das Land des Lächelns” (1929). Among Lehár’s later operettas, “Das Land des Lächelns” has been particularly successful. It revels in color and rhythmic liveliness and the peculiar harmonies and melodies echo the exoticism of the Chinese setting.
Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gipsy Baron)
Next to “Die Fledermaus”, “The Gypsy Baron” is Johann Strauss’s most popular operetta. The libretto gave Strauss the chance to revel in such contrasting musical forms as the csárdás and the Viennese waltz. The style of the lied forms and ensembles is so original and finely balanced that the “Gypsy Baron” can truly be called a comic opera. Among the leading names of the stellar cast are Wolfgang Brendel, Ivan Rebroff, Janet Perry, Ellen Shade, Martha Mödl and, in his debut role, Siegfried Jerusalem as Sándor Barinkay.
Die schöne Helena (La Belle Hélène)
Just as in “Orpheus in the Underworld”, this opera-travesty by Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) also uses an ancient Greek subject as a means of caricaturing contemporary social and political issues. The main target of Offenbach’s barbs are the unscrupulousness and moral decline of France’s “Second Empire”. The action of the ancient saga of gods and heroes is stripped of its loftiness and parodistically reduced to an ironic display of very human motivations, weaknesses and excesses. “The ambivalence of Offenbach’s genius emerges here more clearly than in any other of his works – a genius that masters with the same skillfullness all the facets of musical expression: emotion and intellect, romance and parody.” (Bernard Grun, Cultural History of the Operetta)