Since Trove Thursday began in 2015, I’ve tried to post a wide breadth of works. However, Chris’s Cache has lately featured mostly mainstream operas, so for the near future it will again mix things up with lesser-known pieces like today’s helping of Lortzing.

Surely the composer who wrote his own libretti must have imagined that audiences would associate his work with Der Freischütz which premiered twenty years earlier. However, most of Lortzing’s sprightly works lack the darker aspects so prominent in Weber’s more popular masterpiece.

I missed my chance to attend a Lortzing opera earlier this year when I was in Halle for the annual Handel-Festspiele. In nearby Leipzig where Wildschutz premiered in 1842, the Oper was presenting Hans Sachs but my baroque commitmentsprevented me from catching it.

Has anyone seen a Lortzing singspiel? If so, it would likely have been Der Wildschütz, Zar und Zimmermann, or even Der Waffenschmied which the Theater an der Wien revived several years ago with Günther Groissböck leading the cast.

Lortzing: Der Wildschütz oder Die Stimme der Natur (with narration, no dialogue)

Baronin Freimann: Dagmar Schellenberger
Gräfin von Eberbach: Lioba Braun
Gretchen: Jeanine Thames
Nanette: Gisela Uhlmann
Graf von Eberbach: Bo Skovhus
Baron Kronthal: Michael Schade
Baculus: Roland Bracht

Conductor: Leopold Hager
Kinderchor der Bayerischen Staatsoper
Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks
Münchner Rundfunkorchester
Munich
19 April 1998
Broadcast

Wildschütz can be downloaded by clicking on the icon of a cloud with an arrow pointing downward on the audio player above and the resulting mp3 file will appear in your download directory.

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