Performance History
The new operetta premiéred at the Carltheater on 26 October 1899, almost five months after Strauss' demise. Franz Jauner staged the costly project. Jauner anticipated great success at its premiére but was dejected when the work only survived 30 consecutive performances before making way for Sidney Jones' critically acclaimed operetta The Geisha. On 23 February 1900, Jauner shot himself at his desk at the Carltheater after his financial gamble with Wiener Blut failed, effectively bankrupting him.
After five years, however, the famed Theater an der Wien mounted a production of the operetta. With a slightly different libretto and musical arrangement, it caught the public eye and has since retained its popularity on stages around the world. In 2007 English Touring Opera performed a new concert production of Wiener Blut at venues throughout the United Kingdom.
Read more about this topic: Wiener Blut (operetta)
Famous quotes containing the words performance and/or history:
“What avails it that you are a Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”
—Henry Geldzahler (1935–1994)