THE COUNT OF LUXEMBOURG

Operetta in three acts by Franz Lehár

It is well known that, in the early twentieth century,marriage to a singer did not befit a nobleman’s station, no matter how dubious he might have been. Prince Basil Basilovich, who has left his Russian homeland and moved to Paris for business reasons as well as the women, is well aware of this, having fallen for the singer Angèle Didier, the star of Paris’s cabaret heaven. The prince comes up with a simple trick to circumvent social barriers and marry his beloved. With the help of half a million francs and a little pressure, he quickly persuades the impoverished Count René of Luxembourg, a philanderer and bohemian, to marry Angèle. Thus elevated to the status of nobility, the plan is for her to divorce René after a period of three months, clearing the path for Basil to marry her. So far so good. But as so often in operetta, nothing turns out the way you’d expect …

With the success “The Merry Widow,” Franz Lehár agreed to compose another work for the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. “The Count of Luxembourg” was wildly acclaimed at its première in November 1909 and indisputably made Lehár the most popular composer of the so-called Silver Era of operetta. The music to “The Count of Luxembourg” shows the composer at his finest. The libretto by Alfred Maria Willner and Robert Bodanzky with its grand parties, the carnival scene at the beginning, and the enraptured duet of Angèle and René were extremely well-suited to Lehár’s musical creativity.

Whether bohemians, noblemen, models or singers, each character in “The Count of Luxembourg” pretends to be more than he is. Matthias Oldag, back at the State Operetta after his 2003 production of Offenbach’s operetta “Orpheus in the Underworld,” takes this tension between appearance and reality even one step further. A special highlight of the show is the début of cabaret artiste Birgit Schaller from the “Herkuleskeule” stage in Leuben. The nouveau-riche and marriage-happy Russian Countess Kokozova not only provides for more intrigues, she also contributes to the operetta’s dénouement, and this with a very unique sense of humour. “Herkuleskeule” director Wolfgang Schaller has written a new scene especially for her, picking up on the plot of the Lehár operetta in a comical way while making the work more relevant to the present. Countess Kokozova, in the new Dresden production, is thus a genuine third-act comedian in the tradition of Frosch