In the mid-1970s, when the revival of Korngold’s music got underway, not even the most ardent enthusiast can have imagined that one day all of his operas would be given commercial recordings. That, however, is what has been achieved with this, the first modern performance and recording of his last stage work.
Die Kathrin is separated by ten years from its predecessor, Das Wunder der Heliane. Between Heliane which was first performed in Hamburg in 1927, and Die Kathrin which was scheduled for a premiere in Vienna in 1938, Korngold’s career had changed. From being the wunderkind of the 1910s, he had developed into the film composer and arranger of large-scale operettas. If Heliane is the most grandiose of his operas, Die Kathrin is the most unpretentious; Korngold had thought of labelling it a folk-opera.
The story is simple. The hero, Francois, is a singer who has been conscripted into the army. He falls in love with Kathrin, leaving her pregnant. She loses her job, follows him to Marseilles, where in a vaguely Tosca-like plot-twist Francois is implicated in the murder of the villain, who has actually been shot by one of the cabaret girls. Five years pass, Francois returns to find Kathrin and his child. The opera ends with a rapturous love duet.
The music is full of typically lush Korngold scoring, and a soaring love theme, in the tradition of Die Tote Stadt. In the night-club scene, obligatory in any 1930s opera, there are two catchy numbers, and Korngold brings in such fashionably jazzy instruments as a trio of saxophones and a banjo.
Before the Nazi takeover of Austria, both Jan Kiepura and Richard Tauber had been approached to sing Francois, and Jarmila Novotna was cast in the title-role. The production, which was to have been conducted by Bruno Walter, was cancelled. The world premiere in Sweden took place in 1939, but was quickly forgotten in the rising tide of the war. Eventually the work was produced in Vienna in 1950 – with Maria Reining as Kathrin – but Korngold’s style was so completely out of fashion by then that it lasted only eight nights. That seems to have been that until BBC Radio 3 mounted this concert performance as part of the Korngold Centenary celebrations in 1997.
The cast is exceptionally strong. Melanie Diener has just the right weight of voice for Kathrin, and David Rendall makes Francois into a very positive hero. In the night-club scene, Lilian Watson and Della Jones are suitably exotic as the good-time girls, while Robert Hayward conveys the nasty side of things as Malignac. Martyn Brabbins brings out the essentially Puccinian side of the score; in its structure the opera resembles La rondine more than a little: verismo didn’t die with Turandot. Devotees of Korngold’s music won’t need any encouragement. Those with a taste for tuneful, romantic opera, sometimes bordering on operetta, should give it a chance.'