Das Gefieder Des Huhnes

The composer (Johann Gottfried) Carl Loewe is familiar to music lovers of the 20th and 21st centuries above all as the writer of important ballad scores, of which Edward, Erlkonig, Herr Oluf, and Archibald Douglas are well-known examples. His songs Die Uhr or Heinrich der Vogler were or are popular hits, especially in a bygone heyday of salon music and educated bourgeois culture. Loewe wrote more than 400 songs. But the same Carl Loewe also write six operas, two symphonies and two piano concertos as well as a total of 17 sacred and secular oratorios, all of which have fallen into oblivion. With the present oratorio, the Arcix Vocalisten, led by Thomas Gropper, are vehemently opposed to oblivion.

The composer (Johann Gottfried) Carl Loewe is familiar to music lovers of the 20th and 21st centuries above all as the writer of important ballad scores, of which Edward, Erlkönig, Herr Oluf and Archibald Douglas are well-known examples. His songs Die Uhr or Heinrich der Vogler were popular hits, especially in a bygone heyday of salon music and educated bourgeois culture. Loewe wrote more than 400 songs. But the same Carl Loewe also wrote six operas, two symphonies and two piano concertos as well as a total of 17 sacred and secular oratorios, all of which have fallen into oblivion.

René Kollo stars in this 1974 atmospheric film-version of Lehar's beloved operetta by the noted Viennese director Arthur Maria Rabenalt. Kollo - whose father and grandfather were both operetta composers and who began his own career in light music - plays Prince Sou-Chong, the role that made a celebrity of another 20th-century tenor, Richard Tauber, and provided him with his most famous song. As performed here by René Kollo almost half a century later, "Dein ist mein ganzes Herz" remains the musical highlight of this colorful romance set in Vienna and the Far East.