Lehár Festival Bad Ischl 2023 | GoComGo.com

Lehár Festival Bad Ischl 2023

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Lehár Festival Bad Ischl 2023

The largest operetta festival in Austria opens the 2023 season with a real firework of music, dance and passion, with a master operetta meeting a great revue. In the charming town of Bad Ischl, where Franz Lehár wrote his immortal works, the light cheerfulness of the operetta is still in the air today.

For the past sixty years, operettas have been played here with quality and verve at the festival, which is steeped in tradition. The Lehár Festival Bad Ischl spoils its guests every year with operetta performances by different composers.

Short description of the operettas 2023:

Lehár Festival Bad Ischl, photo 1

MADAME POMPADOUR by Leo Fall
Madame Pompadour is an operetta in three acts by Leo Fall (1873-1925). The libretto was written by Rudolf Schanzer and Ernst Welisch. Leo Fall's swinging, easily catchy melodies alternate with tender, soulful musical numbers. The premiere took place on September 9, 1922, in Berlin with Fritzi Massary in the leading role as Madame Pompadour.

Lehár Festival Bad Ischl, photo 2

THE BIRD HANDLER by Carl Zeller
With The Bird Trader, which premiered in 1891 at the Theater an der Wien, Carl Zeller (1842-1898) and his librettists created one of the most successful operettas of their time, indeed of the genre as a whole. This is probably also due to the fact that the ingredients of this well-constructed musical comedy of mistaken identity are perfectly balanced on stage: lots of rural idylls, plenty of folksiness, a strong pinch of eroticism, a good portion of feeling, and lots of catchy melodies like I'm Christel from the Post and of course roses are given to each other in Tyrol.

Lehár Festival Bad Ischl, photo 3

SCHÖN IS DIE WELT by Franz Lehár
Schön ist die Welt is an operetta in three acts by Franz Lehár.
World premiere: December 3, 1930, in the Metropol-Theater Berlin (Germany).
The operetta is an autograph adaptation of Franz Lehár's operetta "Finally Alone" from 1914, based on a text by Alfred Willner and Robert Bodanzky.

About the Lehár Festival Bad Ischl

The Lehár Festival Bad Ischl is a theater festival primarily devoted to the performance of operettas in the Upper Austrian spa town of Bad Ischl.

The organization of a summer festival, which would present light music and operetta, was considered from about 1950. The performance of musical entertainment theater has had a tradition in Bad Ischl since the time of Emperor Franz Joseph . Operetta festivals developed from the tradition of summer theater for spa guests.

Lehár Festival Bad Ischl, photo 1

The Second World War not only meant that there were hardly any artists specializing in operetta, such as those that emerged from the numerous operetta houses in Vienna, which were also closed during the period of the so-called theater deaths, but there were also none in Bad Ischl adequate venue more.

Already at the beginning of the 1950s there were plans to hold a summer festival. Bad Ischl was predestined to become a focal point of the music theater scene - after all, the imperial city could look back on a long tradition of summer theatre. In addition to the Salzburg Festival, which focuses on drama and serious music, future operetta festivals should be held in Bad Ischl.

However, the actual implementation of the operetta festival in the 1950s failed because, according to the initiators, there was a great lack of sufficiently selected artists in Austria at the time. In addition, there was no venue. At the end of the 1950s, however, the International Society for the Care and Promotion of the Operetta “Die Operetta” was founded as a preparatory measure. The association should devote itself to the task of reviving the operetta and setting up a documentation center.

Lehár Festival Bad Ischl, photo 2

The operetta festival kicked off with the constitutive general meeting of the association “Die Operetta” on April 29, 1961. The honorary patrons of the society were chamber singers Maria Jeritza-Seery and Manfred Mautner-Markhof, and the president was actor Josef Meinrad.
The festive evening was a mixture of lectures on the subject of Bad Ischl and its relation to the operetta. A three-hour celebratory concert entitled “The operetta is alive” was then presented.

Lehár Festival Bad Ischl, photo 3

Eduard Macku took over the musical and artistic direction as well as the directorship of the first "Operetta Weeks". In addition to Kálmán's "Die Csárdásfürstin", three works by Ischl's honorary citizen Franz Lehár were on the program: "Paganini", "The Land of Smiles" and "The Merry Widow". The then 57-year-old Johannes Heesters was the darling of the audience in his prime role as Count Danilo on stage. The program was supplemented with an operetta ball and a music festival in honor of the composer Johann Strauss. The final concert on August 27, 1961, entitled "Operetta Melodies of Today", presented works by living Austrian operetta composers.

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