During the past two weeks Christine and I were in Leipzig to see our daughter and family. While there, we took in cultural events not available to us in West Kerry. Leipzig is a great musical town going all the way back to Johann Sebastian Bach who was Kapellmeister at the St. Thomas Church there. We attended the German opera Martha by Friedrich von Flotow (1812-1883) in nearby Dessau and a wonderful performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at the Leipzig School of Music.I have written about Thomas Moore in a previous post. The melody of his well-known song, The Last Rose of Summer, is the leitmotif of the opera Martha. Introduced in Act 2, the lovely and plaintive melody represents the young lovers’ longing. It seems that popular airs were often introduced informally to operas in the middle of the nineteenth century as show-pieces for the singers. In Martha the custom is perpetuated. There is a beautiful horn solo of the melody, very delicately played for this performance by our son-in-law, Paul Goodman. The song is sung twice, once by the female lead Lady Harriet Durham, soprano and then later by the male lead Lord Tristan Mickleford, tenor.
The Mikado was delightful and I must say that the translation into German worked very well. It was especially poignant for a place that was formerly behind the iron curtain to make a parody of the unbridled power of state officials. We were surprised to find that Sullivan who was of Irish/Italian decent did his musical training in Leipzig and spent several years there.
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