radio klassik Stephansdom broadcasts four complete operas every week — a unique quality in itself — and this summer the station will be devoted to the operas of two great German composers in recognition of a few anniversaries.

Carl Maria von Weber died on 5 June 1826, two hundred years ago, at the age of 39. Despite that relative youth, by the time of his death Weber had become perhaps the most accomplished composer of German romantic opera, producing several operas, some of which remain in the repertory today. radio klassik Stephansdom will broadcast seven Weber operas in their entirety in June, including his most famous opera Der Freischütz and two complete recordings of his one-act comedy Abu Hassan. More information about this mini-Weber-festival can be found here.

Weber was a profound influence on Richard Wagner, a man not fond of acknowledging influences outside of himself. The 150th anniversary of the opening of Bayreuth takes place this August, and during that month and the month of July radio klassik Stephansdom devotes the larger segment of its programming to Wagner, and specifically his Ring cycle. Both the Solti and von Karajan Ring cycles will be broadcast in their entirety through those two months, along with special programming from Stefan Mickisch that examines over 200 motifs in the Ring and a six-part special series by Markus Vorzellner on the origin story of the tetralogy. (Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg will also be broadcast on 23 June; one can also expect broadcasts of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony [which opened the Bayreuth Festival on 13 August 1876] and selections from Tristan ünd Isolde, perhaps my favorite Wagner opera, if not my favorite opera of them all.) More specific information here.

I can now see how I’ll be spending the summer — along with dedicating myself more diligently to improving my German so that I can enjoy more fully the rest of rkS’s programming. A full June-August schedule of radio klassik Stephansdom’s opera programming can be found here. More on that fine Vienna institution radio klassik Stephansdom here.

Tomorrow’s opera from radio klassik Stephansdom is Eugen D’Albert’s Tiefland, which premiered in Prague in 1903. A verismo opera nodding, as the genre does, towards a gritty realism, Tiefland is largely set in a village mill and is described in MusicWeb International as follows:

Tiefland tells the story of Marta, a poor young woman who is the mistress of the local landowner Lord Sebastiano. Sebastiano has money troubles, so is about to marry an heiress, and thus needs to expunge the local notoriety associated with keeping a mistress. He plans to have Marta marry his naïve shepherd Pedro, so that she can live nearby and still serve as his mistress. However, his plan fails when Marta and Pedro actually fall in love, and Sebastiano’s manipulation is revealed. The opera ends in a physical struggle in which Pedro strangles Sebastiano, and then escapes with Marta up into his beloved mountains, and away from the corrupting lowlands.

D’Albert, a noted pianist, was born in Glasgow in 1864 but emigrated to Germany, where he was a student of Franz Liszt. He wrote 21 operas, and his romantic history seems just as prolific as his musical career: he was married six times and died in Riga in 1932, where he was pursuing a divorce from his sixth wife. Tiefland also has the dubious distinction of being the only opera to be adopted to film by Leni Riefenstahl. Says the Wikipedia page for the opera: “The best-known film adaptation of the opera was by the German director Leni Riefenstahl, with Riefenstahl herself playing Marta. The film, begun in 1940, but not released until 1954, used Roma slave labor from a German transportation camp for some of the extras, many of whom were sent to Auschwitz before the end of the war.”

So: a true curiosity, more produced today in Europe than in the United States, and not often there. radio klassik Stephansdom will broadcast a 2002 recording of the opera, with the ÖRF Radio Symphonie Orchester Wien conducted by Bertrand de Billy. You can hear it tomorrow, February 23, at 2:00 pm Eastern time here.