Lehár: Der Göttergatte – Schönherr

Somewhere in the vaults of Austrian Radio there must be a filing cabinet marked “operettas nobody asks for,” and Der Göttergatte has clearly been living there since 1945, when this broadcast was made under conditions we can only guess at: Vienna half in ruins, the war grinding to its close, and here is an orchestra dutifully sawing away at Jupiter’s philandering.

The mythology is Offenbach’s rightful turf, not Lehár’s. Orphée aux enfers got there first, and got there better, because Offenbach actually believed in mockery, the can-can as demolition of Second Empire pomposity, gods reduced to gossiping bureaucrats. Lehár was constitutionally incapable of that kind of bite. He was a melodist of yearning and moonlight, a man who found his true voice the following year with The Merry Widow and never really looked back at burlesque. So Der Göttergatte sits there in 1904 like a rehearsal for a play he decided not to write. A car with a chauffeur. A lift ascending to Olympus. Cute ideas. But the wit needed for this sort of thing wants a composer who distrusts sentiment, and sentiment is the one thing Lehár could never distrust.

Still, the overture is a genuine pleasure: marches strutting past waltzes, a wink of burlesque swagger, then that unmistakable melting into schmaltz that only Lehár could manage without embarrassment. You can practically smell the rosin and gaslight of the old Theater an der Wien in it.

The interpretation itself is a curious document rather than a satisfying listen straight through. Two discs, and a large chunk given over to spoken dialogue, dense, arch, and, for anyone without fluent Viennese-inflected German, a genuine slog. Max Schönherr leads the Wiener Rundfunkorchester with the unhurried confidence of a man who has conducted this repertoire a thousand times and could do it half-asleep. There’s an ease to the string portamento, a soft-grained, almost powdery sheen to the winds, that you simply don’t hear from modern bands anymore. It died out sometime around the Currentzis era, this sound, this way of leaning into a tune rather than attacking it.

Liesl Andergast’s Juno has warmth and a bright, slightly steely top that cuts nicely through the ensemble numbers. Franz Borsos, as Jupiter, gets the plum of the evening, the roguish “Cupido-Lied,” delivered with just the right needling charm, equal parts seduction and self-satisfaction. It’s the best five minutes of the piece, and you understand immediately why it’s the one number that occasionally escapes the operetta’s obscurity and turns up on compilation discs. Anton Dermota, later a Salzburg Mozart stalwart, is oddly wasted as Amphitryon. His tenor sounds constrained by material beneath his gifts, though there’s no faulting the diction.

The real find, if there is one, comes in the duet “Wächst du, Liebchen?”, a lilting, unhurried waltz-song that stops the comic machinery dead and lets Lehár be Lehár for four minutes. Heart on sleeve, strings sliding into each phrase like they’re reluctant to let go of it. That’s the composer we actually came for.

CPO pads the second disc with bonus material that, frankly, outshines the main event. Richard Tauber’s “Du und ich sind füreinander bestimmt,” from the film Grossfürstin Alexandra, is worth the price of admission by itself: that unmistakable half-sob in the voice, the way he leans on a top note without ever quite bullying it. Ester Réthy’s “Wien, du bist das Herz” has real silvery poise. And there’s Lehár himself on the podium with the Wiener Philharmoniker, a documentary curiosity if not a supreme interpretive one. Composers conducting their own music rarely produce revelatory results, but the tempo choices tell you something about how he heard his own tunes breathe.

Should you buy it? If you already own the Decca and EMI Lehár staples, The Merry Widow under Matačić, or Bonynge’s shimmering Land of Smiles, and want the last corner of the catalog filled in, yes, with the caveat that you’ll be doing more archaeology than listening. The engineering is what you’d expect from 1945 radio transcription: boxy, a bit congested in tuttis, occasional surface hiss that no remastering fully banishes. This isn’t a Merry Widow in waiting. It’s a sidebar, a “what if,” an operetta that shows us exactly why Lehár found his real subject the following year and stuck to it for the rest of his life. Curiosity value: considerable. Repertoire value: modest. CPO deserves credit for excavating it regardless. Somebody has to, and better a slightly foggy broadcast tape than nothing at all.