OFFENBACH : LA GRANDE-DUCHESSE DE GÉROLSTEIN

Radio New Zealand Concert network
Sunday 9th of September 2012 at 3 - 5.20 pm

OFFENBACH: La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein
an opera buffa in three acts and four tableaux
La Grande Duchesse... Béatrice Uria Monzon
Fritz............................. Sébastien Guèze
Wanda......................... Laurence Guillod
Général Boum.............. Jean-Philippe Lafont
Prince Paul................... Frédéric Longbois
Baron Puck.................. Stuart Patterson
Baron Grog.................. Marcin Habela
Népomuc..................... Jean-Pierre Gos
Iza................................ Carole Meyer
Amélie......................... Céline Mellon
Olga............................. Céline Soudain
Charlotte...................... Lauranne Jaquier
Lausanne Opera Chorus, Lausanne Sinfonietta/Cyril Diederich
recorded in Salle Métropole, Lausanne by Swiss Radio, Geneva

PROLOG 
PHOTOS
LIBRETTO (French)

You might think you do not know this one, but the overture is played over the radio often, and many of the tunes will be recognizable from it.
   I find that I have the recording (in a big box with two large discs) among my collection of Offenbach operettas from the same source: Le Capitole de Toulouse, with Michel Plasson as conductor; but this time the soprano is the glorious Régine Crespin, who was a beautiful Brünnhilde along the way in her career, and she is really out of the box (nice picture of her inside the handbook); Mady Mesplé (Wanda) and Alain Vanzo (Fritz) are in the company, too.
   So I have a libretto, French with German and English translations, with three different introductions in the three languages, and synopses (for the synapses); but the helpful Wikipedia article provides plenty of introductory material (PROLOG).
    Recently I have acquired La Duchesse de Chicago (by Kalmán), properly Die Herzogin von Chicago, on video disc, with subtitles (but no booklet), which I must investigate soon. She is shown holding a military man in her hand, so there must be some similarity with Offenbach's Grand Duchess, and her Private Fritz, whom she promotes further and further up the officer ranks as she falls ever more deeply in love with him, till she finds out about Wanda. Then she marries the prince she had rejected initially.
   She is aged twenty, and she is an orphan, and having seen Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance "orfen", including last Sunday, and the play he makes on orphan and often, I should remark that Richard d'Oyley Carte put The Grand Duchess on at his Savoy theatre in 1897, and W.S. Gilbert was there on opening night; his last collaboration with Sullivan (the English Offenbach) was (believe it or not, but you had better believe it) The Grand Duke, and it had not gone down well (well, actually it had gone down extremely  well, as a fiasco).