Opernabend: Trouble at the mill

Leni Riefenstahl (yes, that Leni Riefenstahl) as Marta in Tiefland.

Tomorrow’s opera from radio klassik Stephansdom is Eugen D’Albert’s Tiefland, which premiered in Prague in 1903. A verismo opera nodding, as the genre does, towards a gritty realism, Tiefland is largely set in a village mill and is described in MusicWeb International as follows:

Tiefland tells the story of Marta, a poor young woman who is the mistress of the local landowner Lord Sebastiano. Sebastiano has money troubles, so is about to marry an heiress, and thus needs to expunge the local notoriety associated with keeping a mistress. He plans to have Marta marry his naïve shepherd Pedro, so that she can live nearby and still serve as his mistress. However, his plan fails when Marta and Pedro actually fall in love, and Sebastiano’s manipulation is revealed. The opera ends in a physical struggle in which Pedro strangles Sebastiano, and then escapes with Marta up into his beloved mountains, and away from the corrupting lowlands.

D’Albert, a noted pianist, was born in Glasgow in 1864 but emigrated to Germany, where he was a student of Franz Liszt. He wrote 21 operas, and his romantic history seems just as prolific as his musical career: he was married six times and died in Riga in 1932, where he was pursuing a divorce from his sixth wife. Tiefland also has the dubious distinction of being the only opera to be adopted to film by Leni Riefenstahl. Says the Wikipedia page for the opera: “The best-known film adaptation of the opera was by the German director Leni Riefenstahl, with Riefenstahl herself playing Marta. The film, begun in 1940, but not released until 1954, used Roma slave labor from a German transportation camp for some of the extras, many of whom were sent to Auschwitz before the end of the war.”

So: a true curiosity, more produced today in Europe than in the United States, and not often there. radio klassik Stephansdom will broadcast a 2002 recording of the opera, with the ÖRF Radio Symphonie Orchester Wien conducted by Bertrand de Billy. You can hear it tomorrow, February 23, at 2:00 pm Eastern time here.

In pursuit

Update, February 23: You can watch the first episode of In Pursuit here. I have also corrected the number of episodes of Philadelphia: The Great Experiment below.

Although I write a great deal about Vienna here, I was born in — and soon will be moving back to — Philadelphia. I don’t think it would do me any good to compare them with each other, but they must have more than my affection for them in common. In any case, I’ve written a great deal about Philadelphia in the past, and you can read that here.

I suppose that one of those traits is that each plays a unique role in history, roles which exhibit affinities: Vienna in Europe, Philadelphia in the United States. Sam Katz’s History Making Productions has followed up Philadelphia: The Great Experiment, its excellent 13-part series about Philadelphia, with In Pursuit: Philadelphia and the Making of America, an examination of Philadelphia’s place in history, from the establishment of the city in the seventeenth century to its genius loci today.

The first episode premiered last night at the National Constitution Center and begins streaming today; the others will follow shortly. Credit where credit is due: all ten episodes were directed by Andrew Ferrett and written by author and historian Nathaniel Popkin. You can read more about the series in this Philadelphia Inquirer article (gift link) by Mike Newall. The trailer for the first episode (and we still don’t have an answer to its final question) is below.

Opernabend and World Radio Day

A memory of childhood: The crystal radio kit.

It’s an all-Mozart-opera Valentine’s Day coming up tomorrow. On Philadelphia’s WRTI-FM at 1:00 pm Eastern time, you can enjoy a 1986 Metropolitan Opera production of Idomeneo, featuring Frederica von Stade and Hildegard Behrens and conducted by Jeffrey Tate. A hour later on Vienna’s radio klassik Stephansdom at 2:00 pm, Richard Schmitz will review a variety of productions of La Clemenza di Tito, featuring interpretations by conductors such as René Jacobs, Charles Mackerras, Pinchas Steinberg, Christopher Hogwood, and John Eliot Gardiner. A new production of Tito is coming up next month at the Wiener Staatsoper, so it’s a good time to revisit what’s been done with it in the past. Both broadcasts are available for the streaming.

Today is also UNESCO’s World Radio Day. “It is a Day to thank broadcasters for the news they deliver, the voices they amplify and the stories they share,” reads the Web site, and although they’re looking at the heinous use of AI in the medium, it still provides food for thought. I’ve been a radio enthusiast since I built my first crystal radio set as a kid, and in high school I hosted a few “High School Hours” that ran on WAZL, the local AM station. (I was told by the DJ who was running the show, Scott McAndrews, that I had a very good voice for radio — something I’ve often been told since then — which makes me think I may have missed my calling.) I also spent a year as the president of my college radio station, and in the early 1990s, when I lived in Central Europe, the BBC World Service and especially ÖRF’s late, lamented English-language broadcast Blue Danube Radio on shortwave got me through more than a few evenings.

Although television beat out radio as the most popular broadcast medium many years ago, and podcasts have revived the form somewhat, I still retain a weakness for it. Like many kids my age, I enjoyed tuning in to distant radio stations on my small transistor radio when I was 10 or 11 or so, and I think what is best about it is the sense of connection that it engenders between the broadcasters and their listeners, especially when the broadcast is live. First, of course, is the feeling that you’re one of many people listening to the same broadcast in real time, a feeling of community. But second, and maybe just as important, is the sense that there’s a personal relationship between the DJ or radio personality and the individual listener, however many dozens, hundreds, or thousands of miles may be separating you in distance — in time, you’re somehow listening to the same things together. The great radio personalities like Jean Shepherd exploited this personal connection in a way that no podcast or television show could emulate, which testifies to the uniqueness of the medium.

So I lift my glass to radio today. I’m not sure anybody else is celebrating, but if they are, I hope they’re listening with me.