Customer Reviews

Lehár: Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) ~ Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Having heard quite a number of performances, this recording is still the one that I will go back with great pleasure. Gedda and Kunz are simply gorgeous. The meltingly beautiful love duet between Gedda and Emmy Loose has never, never have been matched. Kunz's Danilo makes all the authentic tenor Danilos sound like a little boy. Kunz's charming, gently seductive voice was made to sung this role. Schwarzkopf is in better voice here than in the remake and she too beat pretty much all the competitors (with the possible exception of Hilde Gueden). Emmy Loose's lovely voice adds extra glory to the wonderful cast. Ackermann's conducting may not have the incisiveness of Matacic, but has a beautiful, nostalgic atmosphere that is quite appropriate for the music. The recording is in mono, but has a fine warm quality, unlike many of the metallic sounding digital recordings. In short, this is a gem!

Listeners who want to hear the very best recording of perhaps the best Viennese operetta should listen to this one. Gedda, Schwarzkopf,and Loose are splendid, but Kunz's witty, warm combination of dialog and singing provides the spice wich makes this an extremely satisfying performance.

This older CD issue of EMI's 1953 Merry Widow is out of print but extremely cheap here at Amazon Marketplace. The sonics are favorably comparable to the latest remastering, in large part because the original sonics are fairly mediocre to begin with.

This classic portrayal from Schwarzkopfdoesn't need any more accolades, but I wanted to say how much joy it has brought me over the years. I have bought several modern Widows, too, but thrown them all away. This gem will be remembered as long as the work itself, and it's all the more amazing since Schwarzkopf never performed in a staged operetta of any kind.

I came late to Schwarzkopf's mono Merry Widow under Otto Ackermann, which finds her in even more ecstatic voice than in her acclaimed stereo remake. Many listeners may prefer Erich Kunz, whose Danilo is mellower and less fiercely temperamental than that of Wachter in the later set. No one should miss either recording, given the shortfall of joy these days.

This a famous recording and a widely-beloved one. It displays the charm and effervescence of the Vienna State Opera in the artistic glory days of the post-War period. All the principal singers are justly famous and the performance is a landmark against which all subsequent performances must be measured. All this would normally justify a five-star rating.

While the performance is a landmark, it seems to me that it falls well short of perfection.

Charm and effervescence are certainly present, but they should not be mistaken for authentic tradition. When this recording was made, the Merry Widow was a relative newcomer to the repertory of the Vienna State Opera, which in earlier days had taken a very top-lofty attitude toward such trifles as mere operetta. (The great Richard Tauber had been forced to defend himself against that very attitude. "I don't do operetta," he had declared, "I do Lehar!")

Elizabeth Schwarzkopf offers an unforgettable portrait of Hanna Glavari. But it is obviously a very, very studied portrait. Frankly, I'd be happier with a Merry Widow who is less thoughtful and a great deal more merry.

Nicolai Gedda sings beautifully, gloriously sailing over the high-lying role of Camille. But consider Camille in dramatic terms. He is a rich, lovesick, not very bright young man who is under more or less continuous strain because he has little understanding of what is going on around him and who loses the love of his life (or at least of his weekend) at the end of the show. Ideally, some stress should show up in his singing. It does not with Gedda.

Emmy Loose is perhaps the least-remembered member of this cast. She is terrific here as Valencienne.

Erich Kunz was a baritone who achieved well-earned acclaim in the operas of Mozart and Richard Strauss, as well as fame in operetta. In appraising his Danilo, I find myself in hearty agreement with the opinion often expressed by Mr. Kolenkhov in Kaufman and Hart's You Can't Take It with You: "Confidentially, he stinks." Kunz was simply not up to singing the tenorish line of Danilo as written by Lehar, so the part was lowered for his benefit. That is bad enough, but why would the worldly and witty widow waste even two minutes of her time on Kunz's charmless, snarling, whining, drunken lout of a Danilo? That she would give her money AND herself to such a distasteful wretch is inconceivable. Kunz is ubiquitous in German language operetta recordings of his era. He is passable as the revenge-minded Dr. Falke in Der Fledermaus but hopeless as a romantic lead. Nevertheless, that is how he was cast in operetta after operetta. The Austrians must have heard or seen something attractive in him. I do not.

The mono sound on the recording is very good for its time and acceptable in ours for anyone who does not obsess over the mere mechanics of sound reproduction.

I'm sorry - I know that most people revere this recording, and I agree that Schwarzkopf sings beautifully (although I think she characterizes much better on the later stereo recording)- but I really don't think it's recommendable. My 2 major gripes are that (a) the sound is now very boxy, and (b)- a point that nobody ever seems to mention - the most famous number in the score "Lippen Schweigen" (or "Love Unspoken") is cut. Go to the later recording with von Matacic conducting beautifully for a much better and more complete version of Schwarzkopf's Merry Widow!

This is an energetic preformance (in German) which is crisp and delightful. Dialog between musical sections is spoken. ADD is not as deep and clear a sound as DDD. The New Sadler-Wells recording (Wordsworth, Smith, Harrhy, et al) beats this, in my opinion, despite Gedda and Schwarzkopf.

I'm sure this is a good recording--if you really want the German dialogue interrupting the music. I love some of the music (from selections discs) from the Merry Widow and wanted to hear all of it. Unfortunately, some or all of the German dialogue sits between the songs. When I buy Oklahoma or My Fair Lady, I don't want to hear the actors speaking in between songs, and I don't want to hear spoken dialogue in German either. It's very annoying, to me anyway. Additionally, I thought some of the singing was much more mannered in this production than other versions I prefer.