Day 348
Marschner: Der Holzdieb
Soloists
Southwest radio orchestra
Hans Gierster
Marschner is a composer I much admire. I know Hans Heiling and Der Vampyr well (the latter was another opera performed by the Nottingham University Opera Group before I became a student there) and I have also heard his opera Der Templar und die Jüdin, which is based on Scott’s Ivanhoe.
This opera was new to me. I thought that it was delightful. It was very much towards the lighter end of Marschner’s output. It had none of the big dramatic gestures and gothic elements of his two most famous opera, but was very much in the tradition of Weber and the singspiel. Essentially it was a series of musical numbers linked by dialogue. The whole things is quite short (less than an hour) but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Marschner has a real melodic gift and sense of invention.
Marschner wrote a dozen or so operas but the four I have mentioned in this post appear to be the only ones which have been recorded. This particular one was from a radio broadcast in the 1960s - the dialogue seems to be performed by different actors to the singers and they appear to have been placed in a completely separate studio with a quite different acoustic. But it is the only recording of the opera that there is and despite its imperfections it did give a good account of the piece.
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