Someday we're going to have to have a very serious discussion of the question: is it really okay for a composer to be named "Ralph?" (I know the box calls him "Ralf," but the entire rest of the internet thinks it's "Ralph") Yes, you're going to throw Vaughan Williams at me, but I don't think that necessarily excuses it. Yes, I'm a big fan of Williams, but isn't necessarily an excuse. Besides, I'm pretty sure a lot of people just assume his first name is "Vaughan," so he's kind of an edge case at best.
Well, that's for another day. For this day, is this operetta. So there's Operabase, where supposedly you can see statistics about most performed operas and stuff, but I really truly cannot figure out how to use it. It may be that I'm just a big ol' dope, or it may be that at some point they altered their site and kind of broke it. Who knows. But I DID find this, where some person reproduces an Operabase top-hundred list of performances from 2005 through 2010. These things are of course pretty arbitrary, but still fun. It includes one entry that isn't an opera any way you slice it (Verdi's Requiem; great piece of music, but definitely not an opera); of the remaining ninety-nine, there are, somewhat surprisingly, five (only four now) that I haven't seen. All towards the bottom of the list, all operettas, but that is no excuse! Of the other four, two are J. Strauss, one Kálmán, and one Lehár. But Benatzky is the only composer I'd never heard before, so I went with this one. And THAT is the thrilling tale of how I came to see Im Weissen Rössl ("At the White Horse Inn").
Anyway. The plot is very overstuffed, so I'm certainly not going to cover it in detail. That would not be useful for anyone. There's this inn somewhere in the Alps, run by Josepha, a young widow with whom the head waiter, Leopold, is fruitlessly in love. There are various guests, particularly the industrialist Wilhelm Giesecke and his daughter Ottilie. There's also Dr. Siedler, the lawyer of Giesecke's competitor (are lawyers doctors? Apparently they are), who falls in love with Ottilie. And also there's Sigismund, the son of Giesecke's business rival, who shows up and has his own romance with Klärchen, the daughter of a random tourist. AND ALSO, Franz Joseph shows up for an extended cameo. Yes! The emperor (and the guy who plays him is the spitting image of the picture on FJ's wikipedia page)! Anyway, all the romances work out, and there you have it.
When I say "overstuffed," one piece of evidence is the way there are THREE couples, rather than the more normal two, and their stories don't integrate very well, if at all. Siedler and Ottilie in particular get almost no screen time. But whatever, man! Sure, it's frivolous stuff, but that's the point! I feel like operettas tend to date more than regular operas, though I'm not sure why--they're both of their times, after all. But the general foofaraw is a lot of fun, and the music is infectious. You can see why it was the ninety-fifth-most-performed opera from 2005 through 2010.
This performance is, as the box indicates, from Seefestspiele Mörbisch, an open-air festival every year which apparently specializes in operettas--at any rate, this is the third I've seen from them. They always do things up real fancy, so it's mostly a delight. And the festival this year runs from July eighth to August fourteenth! RIGHT NOW! And I'm MISSING it, dammit! Well, I only have two complaints here: first, there's Zabine Kapfinger, who plays Josepha, and who...well, I'm not about to judge her entire career based on one performance, but her singing here is a bit shaky. At one point, believe it or not, she is called upon to yodel, a task with which she struggles valiantly but by which she is ultimately defeated. And my other complaint is that Marco Jentzsch as Siedler looks very much like nobody's favorite smarmy white-supermacist shithead Tucker Carlson. Actually, far too many people's favorite. And actually actually, why do you even HAVE "favorites" in this category? You weird creep. But hey, not Jentzsch's fault. Mostly, probably.
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