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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