“The whole world is a jest, man was born a great jester…” So goes the brilliant conclusion to Verdi’s Falstaff, an opera inspired by Shakespeare’s beloved comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor. The virtuosic score requires a particularly talented cast, not to mention a truly exceptional conductor. Herbert von Karajan perfectly fits the bill, and this performance featuring the Wiener Philharmoniker and an all-star group of singers is clearly worthy of Verdi’s powerful work, a masterpiece whose comic facade thinly veils the complex and sometimes even tragic characters’ struggles.
Der Rosenkavalier
Herbert von Karajan began conducting operas at the age of 21, and continued doing so throughout the rest of his long and prestigious career. A great admirer of Richard Strauss’s music, Karajan’s interpretation of Rosenkavalier demonstrates reveals his great familiarity with the work as well as hinting at the pleasure he took in conducting the work. His creative team, including Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Kurt Moll, Agnes Baltsa, Gottfried Hornik, Janet Perry, and Heinz Zednik, remains to this day one of the most spectacular solo distributions the work has ever enjoyed. Legendary for his rigorous approach to rehearsing and performing, the maestro took on the roles of artistic director, music director, and even became involved in certain aspects of filming.
Die Fledermaus (The Bat)
The corks pop and the champagne flows in this sparkling production of Johann Strauss’s world-famous operetta with the ensemble of the Bavarian State Opera. Carlos Kleiber conducts Strauss’s music with a temperament, vigor and sensuality that bring to mind contemporary reports on Johann Strauss’s own conducting style: “His whole body was conducting – the hands, head, eyes, torso and feet of the master”. But Kleiber can also invoke another inspired model and predecessor for his interpretation: in 1894, Gustav Mahler conducted the work at the Hamburg Stadttheater, lavishing his usual care and precision on it and paving its way into the repertoire of all major opera houses.
Bach, Coffee Cantata BWV 211
In this concert, Nikolaus Harnoncourt reveals something of the mystery and fascination of Bach’s compositional art in the domain of non-sacred music. With his Concentus musicus Wien and the vocal soloists Janet Perry, Peter Schreier and Robert Holl, Harnoncourt interprets Bach’s delightful “Coffee Cantata”. “In my view, Bach is a total musician. No matter in what musical domain he lands, he immediately deploys his full resources and creates the greatest music that is imaginable in his time in this respective domain. […] I feel that sacred and secular music are of equal value in the lives of all significant composers, because an important composer of that time was a believer, and he didn’t make any distinction between the spiritual and the secular. In his secular life, he is just as pious as in his spiritual one, and when he eats and drinks, when he lives and loves, he is as much of a Christian as when he goes to church to pray on Sunday. He considers life as a whole, and he will write a symphony or a dance for the greater glory of God to the same extent that he would a Passion. […] German musicians… repeatedly attempted to combine the dance-like, short-winded style of French music with the eruptive, spontaneous and passionate, wild style of the Italians. The result was a well-pondered, ‘composed’ music – the Germans of that time called it ‘worked out’ – and when one hears these expressions, and knows who the greatest master of this music was, namely Bach, then one can say: this music is ‘worked out’ music. But in reality it is fulfilled music, music which comes from the innermost and the highest of man.” (Nikolaus Harnoncourt)
Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria
In a rare display of unanimous praise, international music critics rated this cycle one of the greatest operatic events of its time. Although Monteverdi played a truly important role in the development of opera, only few major opera houses have ventured to present these three Baroque masterpieces. Years of intensive study by conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, not only of the transmitted scores but also of the instruments used in Monteverdi’s time, were necessary to provide a basis for the exceptionally high standard of the Zurich productions. Just how meticulously Harnoncourt and the celebrated stage director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle prepared themselves is made partly clear by the fact that the orchestra exclusively played original 17th-century instruments and specially-made copies for these productions. This in turn meant that each of the 39 members of the -awaited expansion of the standard opera repertoire had successfully been realized. What makes the Monteverdi cycle a unique project is the certainty that it can never again be repeated with quite the same quality and feeling.
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.
Zigeunerliebe
Franz Lehár (1870-1948) found remarkably expressive and brilliantly colorful sounds for the drama and romantic moods of this unique topic. The style was decisively influenced by the familiar cadence of Hungarian gypsy music in the composer’s native country. This is not only evidenced by the csárdás rhythms or the inclusion of the cymbalom in the arrangement, but above all by the many pronouncedly melancholy hues of the melody and harmony produced by the use of minor keys. After “The Merry Widow” and “The Count of Luxembourg”, “Gipsy Love” is Franz Lehár’s third most successful operetta. After its triumphant Vienna premiere in 1910, it was performed, for example, at the Empire Theater in Darjeeling, at the foot of the Himalayas! The location shots in our production were filmed in Austria’s Helenental and Vienna Woods.