Next month the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) turns once again to the German baroque for its centerpiece: Reinhard Keiser’s 1705 opera Octavia.

As a preview, Chris’s Cache casts its net widely to include a late comic work by Keiser, Der låcherliche Prinz Jodelet; Carl Heinrich Graun’s better-known Montezuma; a concert of arias by Georg Kaspar Schürmann, Keiser, Georg Philipp Telemann, and George Frideric Handel sung by Sandrine Piau, plus a dazzling Joan Sutherland bonus.

Like many early German operas, Octavia actually has a much longer name: Die römische Unruhe, oder Die edelmütige Octavia which was followed the same year by Die kleinmütige Selbst-Möderin Lucretia oder Die Staats-Torheit des Brutus!

My first exposure to this repertoire was the second LP of a two-record set called “A Festival of Baroque Opera” conducted by Richard Bonynge which included highlights from Montezuma (which was written to an Italian libretto) and Bononcini’s La Griselda. I remember that the first side of the Graun LP ended with Sutherland’s “Non han calma” which I’m including from a pirate recording of a live 1968 concert.

The French performance of Montezuma features Jennifer Larmore in the title role and Ewa Malas-Godlewska as his queen. The Polish soprano may be best known for being one-half of the voice (American countertenor Derek Lee Ragin was the other-half) of the title character in the flamboyant biopic Farinelli.

When I visited Hamburg for the first time in 2023, I looked for the site of the Gänsemarkt, the fabled opera house where so many important operas of the time premiered, including Octavia. The opera house functioned from just 1678 to 1738, so today there’s a plaque on the public square in Neustadt near the Gänsemarkt subway station commemorating the opera.

BEMF always includes in its biennial program chamber operas; this year a Telemann double-bill of Pimpinone and Ino.

Keiser: Der låcherliche Prinz Jodelet

Laura: Inga Kalna
Isabella: Julia Sukmanova
Erminde: Gabriele Rossmanith
Julia: Tamara Gura
Jodelet: Jan Buchwald
Fernando: Jörn Schümann
Frederic: Moritz Gogg
Henriquez: Michael Smallwood
Octavius: Andreas Hörl
Nicolo: Christoph Genz
Eduard: Christoph Pohl
Sanchez: Wilhelm Schwinghammer

Conductor: Alessandro De Marchi
Hamburgischen Staatsoper
22 February 2004
Broadcast

Graun: Montezuma

Eupaforice: Ewa Malas-Godlewska
Pilpatoe: Maria Bayo
Erissena: Catherine Napoli
Montezuma: Jennifer Larmore
Ferdinand Cortès: Isabelle Vernet
Narves: Anne-Sophie Schmidt
Teseuco: Jean-Luc Viala

Ensemble orchestral de Paris
Conductor: Jan Latham-König
Salle Pasteur, Montpellier
17 July 1990
Broadcast

Graun: Montezuma, “Non han calma”

Joan Sutherland
Conductor: Richard Bonynge
Indiana University
23 February 1967
In-house recording

Arias from Schürmann’s Ludovicus Pius, Keiser’s Croesus & Prinz Jodelet, Telemann’s Orpheus, and Händel’s Almira plus instrumental music by Telemann

Sandrine Piau
Akademie für Alte Musik
Theater an der Wien
20 October 2008
Broadcast

Each of these early German vocal works 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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