Tiefland is German verismo with a disconcerting flavour of operetta to it. The plot is melodramatically gamy (evil baritone Sebastiano has been having his wicked way with downtrodden Marta for years; now wishes to marry her off so that he can contract a profitable wedding but still proposes exercising his droit du seigneur over her; rustic tenor bumpkin chosen for the role of complaisant husband turns out to be not quite the patsy both Sebastiano and Marta take him for; happy ending, would you believe?), and it is no surprise to learn that Puccini once toyed with it. He dropped it on learning that d'Albert had the rights, but I suspect that he would ultimately have found its mingling of Cavalleria rusticana with The Maid of the Mountains (with Rose-Marie, indeed, one of whose tunes is un-nervingly pre-echoed in the nearest thing d'Albert's score has to a love duet) unworkable.
It is of the essence of the plot that Pedro (the noble simpleton; could he have been called anything but Pedro?) is from the highlands, where men are men and emotions are plain but real, whereas Marta and Sebastiano are of the corrupt plain, the Tiefland. The two must be characterized somehow: the highlands (sheep country) by pastoral clarinet and cor anglais and by a would-be lofty (in fact quite decent) lyrical melody, the lowlands by a great deal of peasant picturesqueness (which is where operetta comes in; no doubt d'Albert intended the village women who mock Marta to sound emptily heartless and malign, but they are Rose Maybuds and Little Buttercups, every one of them). To sweeten the pudding still further, there is an ingenue-role for a little girl, Nuri, whose function in the drama is to act as everyone's confidante and to reflect upon what she hears with childish naivety; whenever she appears, with her innocent but slightly sugary pipings (she is played in this recording by a soprano who sounds not a day over 12), the plot stops for five or ten minutes of ersatz-Humperdinck.
These elements lie uncomfortably alongside the fairly rank sex'n'violence which is the real meat of the opera, and for which d'Albert seems rather less well-equipped than for evocations of pastures and village greens. He is not bad at basic vehemence, quite good at heightened narrative (the dialogue nips along very briskly and syllabically indeed) and his melodic invention is sometimes appealing. d'Albert is occasionally numbered among Wagner's disciples, but apart from some clever motif-juggling (invariably in the orchestra; the singers are busy narrating) and a flagrant lift from the Johannistag monologue in Die Meistersinger, his Wagnerism is skin-deep. Mascagni plus a pinch of Sullivan (d'Albert's first teacher, after all) and a ladle-full of Millocker or Ziehrer would be a closer definition of his curiously hybrid style.
The best moments are mostly Pedro's: his Act I monologue, telling of his life among the flocks (Richard Tauber once recorded it) has a hint... well, yes, of Wagner in his lighter vein, or of Strauss's Barak reduced to a cameo. His scene at the end of that act, proud and confident in his love though coldly rejected by Marta, is sincere and even touching. Her monologue contains so much quasi-recitative narration that there is little room for sustained lyrical eloquence, but the utterances of the coarsely coloured pasteboard villain strongly suggest that complex or deep emotions were not within d'Albert's range. It is an operetta with pretensions beyond its means, really, but pretty enough and worth a recording, if not a place in the repertory.
This recording derives from a television film of a quarter of a century ago. Schock is in splendid form as Pedro: how good to be reminded that there were once German tenors of charm, forthrightness and security. Strauss is touchingly earnest as Marta and Feldhoff does the vocal equivalent of twirling his moustache and glaring through his monocle with great vigour. No weak links elsewhere in the cast, and Hans Zanotelli sounds as though he has been conducting and loving the work all his life. The recording is dryish, with the voices placed so far in front of the orchestra that they seem to inhabit a different acoustic, but on the whole the case for Tiefland is very capably put.'