Lehár: Giuditta.
Christiane Libor, Laura Scherwitzl, Nikolai Schukoff, Ralf Simon, Mauro Peter,
Christian Eberl, Rupert Bergmann; Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks and Münchner Rundfunkorchester conducted
by Ulf Schirmer. CPO. $33.99 (2 CDs).
Giuditta was Franz Lehár’s
final and favorite stage work. He would live another 14 years after its première in 1934, but aside from a few
additions he made in 1937 to Der Graf von
Luxemburg, he would create no further operas, or opera/operetta blends,
which is what his later works had become. Giuditta
was a success when first staged – ratcheting up more performances, at inflated
ticket prices, than Richard Strauss’ Arabella
in the same season and the same venue. That was the Vienna State Opera, where
Lehár had vainly wished since
the start of his career to stage one of his works. So for the composer, this
was a significant triumph. He even had the full score published – a rarity, and
a measure of how good he considered Giuditta
to be. Yet the work marked the end of more than Lehár’s own composing career: in a very real sense, as the Nazis
consolidated power in Germany and reached into Lehár’s Austria, it marked the end of the sort of world in which Lehár’s music could be created. Soon enough,
many Jewish or Jewish-ancestry musical figures associated with the non-Jewish
composer would be scattered: tenor Richard Tauber and co-librettist Paul
Knepler into exile, co-librettist Fritz Löhner-Beda to eventual death at Auschwitz, and non-Jewish conscientious
objector Jarmila Novotná – who created the title role – into exile as well.
Sumptuously orchestrated, written
at considerable length (with more than two hours of music), having a grander
instrumental sound than any other work by Lehár, and with several “Tauber arias” intended to display the
tenor’s much-admired voice, Giuditta
has turned out to be remembered mostly for a soprano aria, the title character’s erotic waltz evocation, Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiß.
And it is by any account a strange work. This is not for the reasons usually
cited, that it is a pale imitation of Carmen,
with a titular femme fatale who woos
a soldier away from duty, and that it is neither fully operatic (whether
through-composed or with recitatives) nor fully an operetta. For one thing,
Giuditta is not, at first, a seductress with a series of lovers: she is
unhappily married, and she runs off with Octavio seeking true love, which makes
her about as unlike Carmen as possible. Giuditta eventually becomes a demimondaine only after Octavio leaves
her to fulfill his military duty – the opposite of what Don José does in Carmen. And while the feckless and cowardly Octavio does eventually
desert the military and seek out Giuditta, his supposed passion does not even
rise to the level of confronting her, much less stabbing her. It is also worth
pointing out that Carmen, exactly
like Giuditta, was written as a work
with spoken dialogue and music – a fact listeners forget because Bizet’s opera
is nowadays invariably staged with the recitatives written by Ernest Guiraud.
In addition, it is useful to
note that being a demimondaine was
not, in Lehár’s world, a
barrier to romantic love: back in 1911, he had written Eva, in which the title character becomes worthy of her lover and
of lasting happiness only after spending time in the demimonde. And her lover’s name? Octave! So the later, failed
Octavio may seem like the opposite of the successful earlier Octave – except that
the composer himself, trying to come to terms with the fast-changing world of
the 1930s, said that the most happiness anyone can hope for is to be as
resigned to life as Octavio is at the end of Giuditta, regarding all that has been good in his past as merely a
fairy tale.
Worse was to come in the
world after Giuditta, but this is a
sufficiently depressing attitude to explain much of the neglect of Lehár’s final, generally rather dour work.
Giuditta is also a very difficult piece
to stage, having been designed for an opera house where sumptuous productions
were the norm. And it is difficult to sing, too: the principals’ roles require
more vocal heft and quality over a greater range than do most parts elsewhere
in Lehár. All this explains the
paucity of complete recordings of Giuditta
– and the very high hopes interested listeners will have for the new one on
CPO, conducted by Ulf Schirmer and using the same orchestra (with, of course,
many different players) featured in the 1980 recording starring Edda Moser and
Nicolai Gedda and conducted by Willi Boskovsky. With Schirmer at the helm, and
Christiane Libor as Giuditta and Nikolai Schukoff singing Octavio, vocal expectations
here are particularly lofty: both principals handle Wagner roles, after all,
Libor as Brünnhilde and Isolde
and Schukoff as Parsifal and Siegmund. Indeed, in their high-powered moments in
Giuditta, both are excellent. But in
between, their interest seems to flag; or perhaps Schirmer’s does, and he fails
to motivate them to handle their dialogue with the same involvement and intensity
they offer for their “big” set pieces. The result is a pair of distinctly
uneven performances – very, very good when they are good, and very bland
otherwise.
The “second couple” here –
Lehár did preserve that
traditional element of operetta – has less happy casting. Both Laura Scherwitzl
as Anita and Ralf Simon as Pierrino are simply ordinary: their singing has no
individuation, and neither does their speaking – they make no real attempt at
characterization, much less charm. This is a particular problem in Giuditta because the story itself is so
problematical. Giuditta’s motivation for leaving her husband is understandable,
although her reasons for marrying him in the first place are never given, and
he loves her enough both to defend her honor when it is impugned and then to
become searingly angry when the rumors about her prove true (Rupert Bergmann does know how to emote). But Octavio is
so feckless, capriciously asking Giuditta to flee with him (to Africa, no
less), setting up happy housekeeping in the mode of La Traviata, then getting his marching orders, refusing to tell
Giuditta, being discovered, deciding to desert for love, but being afraid of
being branded a traitor and therefore not deserting, eventually deserting
anyway, then being afraid to confront Giuditta, and so on, that it would take a
far better actor than Schukoff to give the audience any sympathy for him. Indeed,
the final scene, “some years later,” when Giuditta is a committed but unhappy demimondaine and Octavio is, of all
things, a lounge pianist, comes across here as simply pathetic. Actually, one
basic problem with Giuditta is that
at best it offers pathos, certainly not tragedy and not even effective
melodrama: not much actually happens
in this work.
As for CPO’s packaging of
the recording, it is simply a disgrace. There is no libretto and no offer of access
to one online. There is no way for non-German speakers to follow the dialogue.
The synopsis is ridiculously sketchy and outright inaccurate in several places.
The whole release is so shoddy that it comes across as a throwaway, and
whatever else Giuditta may be, it is
not that. The best things here are the Libor and Schukoff performances of the
“big” numbers; the very fine recorded sound of this live performance from 2012;
and the excellent orchestral playing throughout – if only the singers had consistently
delivered at this level! For all those reasons, this Giuditta is very much worth having for fans of Lehár – many of whom may be unfamiliar
with it, so thoroughly has it sunk into obscurity. But Giuditta does not here receive what it has never gotten and still
deserves: a recording offering a really first-rate, truly operatic performance
delivered with the intensity of, say, a particularly compelling Carmen.
