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From:  Karen Mercedes <dalila@R...>
Date:  Wed Jan 30, 2002  7:56 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist] The Doleful Prima Donna

On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Dolphin aura wrote:

> Can someone tell me the story line to "the doleful
> prima donna" and also where to find it???
> Thanks in advance.

The song is from Karl Milloecker's operetta DER ARME JONATHAN (POOR
JONATHAN), one of his less successful operettas (his big success came from
his earlier operetta's DER BETTELSTUDENT, GASPARONE, and DIE DUBARRY).

Milloecker was Johann Strauss Jr.'s biggest rival during The Waltz
King's lifetime. "The Doleful Prima-donna", specifically, is the
translation of that song that was performed by Marilyn Hill Smith on one
of her TREASURES OF THE OPERETTA recordings (on Chandos). The original
German version is "Ach, wir armen primadonnen" (which is also the
title of Edita Gruberova's operetta recording, on which she sings the
song in the original language in an even more dazzling tour-de-force
version than Hill Smith delivers in English; the CD is on Nightingale
Classics). You can actually hear a snippet of the Gruberova performance
online at:

http://www.nightingaleclassics.com/n_opere.htm

There is also a delightful recording of the original German song by Lotte
Schoene, on the Nimbus/Prima Voce recording LOTTE SCHOENE AND RICHARD
TAUBER IN OPERETTA. Unfortunately, Nimbus didn't post a RealAudio of the
song on their incredibly wonderful website.

The "plot" of the song is that the opera prima donna manages to display
her incredible talents despite having a nasty, persistent cold (and the
sound effects of that cold are part of the "schtick" of the song).

The operetta DER ARME JONATHAN was Milloecker's last, and represents the
culmination of his brief but very successful 12-year career as an operetta
composer. For a plot synopsis (sorry - I can't give you one) of the whole
operetta, I suggest you seek out (in your library, not online) Traubner's
OPERETTA, THE VICTOR BOOK OF OPERETTA, or a similar "operetta dictionary".

Karen Mercedes
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html
***************************************
What lies behind us, and what lies before us
are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson




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