Christoph Graupner - Dido, Königin von Carthago (2010)

1. Dido, Königin von Carthago I		1:05:34
2. Dido, Königin von Carthago II	  50:41

Dido, Königin von Karthago - Salomé Haller - Soprano
Anna, der Königin Dido Schwester - Jutta Böhnert - Soprano
Juno / Iris / Mercurius / Venus - Anna Prohaska - Soprano
Menalippe, Prinzessin aus Ägypthen - Doerthe Maria Sandmann - Soprano
Aeneas, Fürst der Trojaner - Colin Balzer - Tenor
Achates, des Aeneas getreuer Freund - Thomas Volle - Tenor
Juba, Printz von Tyrus - Holger Falk - Baritone
Hiarbas, Königin von Numidien - Nils Cooper - Bassbaritone
Chor - Wiebke Kretschmar, Dorothe Ingenfeld, Nils Giebelhausen
Elbipolis Barockorchester
Florian Heyerick - conductor 

Thursday, 15 April 2010 ; Konzerthaus Berlin

Christoph Graupner’s Singspiel for Hamburg, Dido, Königin von Carthago (1707), was quite new to me. It is one of those curious – to our ears, yet not necessarily to those of the time – works written in German and Italian, standard Italian arias doing their thing whilst the action was largely advanced in the vernacular. I should certainly be keen to learn more. The Egyptian princess Menalippe’s ‘Holdestes Lispeln der spielenden Fluthen’ proved vividly pictorial. One could almost see – one could certainly hear – those rippling waters through ravishing instrumental playing. This may be too early and the wrong country too, but Poussin more than once came to my mind. When later Prohaska turned to the Queen of Carthage herself, we heard first a German accompagnato (‘Der Himmel ist von Donner Keylen schwer…’) followed by its Italian aria, ‘Infido Cupido’. This was very much music written and communicated in the terms of early eighteenth-century opera seria. Hearing it in this particular context, we understood both its roots in earlier opera and much of what distinguished it from its predecessors too. Prohaska’s stylistic awareness is never a sterile thing, ‘dogma’ in the slightly misleading popular understanding of the term; it is and here was always put to expressive, dramatic use. Much the same might be said of her performance of the tempest aria that ensued: of a genre yet not over-determined by it. ---Mark Berry, operatoday.com

Christoph Graupner (13 January 1683 in Kirchberg – 10 May 1760 in Darmstadt) was a German harpsichordist and composer of high Baroque music who was a contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Philipp Telemann and George Frideric Handel.

After he died, Graupner's works fell into obscurity for a number of reasons. His manuscripts became the object of a long legal battle between his heirs and the rulers of Hesse-Darmstadt. A final court decision denied the Graupner estate ownership of the music manuscripts. The heirs were unable to obtain permission to sell or publish his works and they remained inaccessible to the public. Dramatic changes in music styles had reduced the interest in Graupner's music. On the positive side however, the Landgrave's seizure of Graupner's musical estate ensured its survival in toto. Fate was not so kind to J. S. Bach's musical legacy, for example. Another factor that contributed to Graupner's posthumous obscurity was that, unlike Bach, Graupner had very few pupils other than Johann Friedrich Fasch to carry on his musical legacy. As critic David Vernier has summed up, Graupner is "one of those unfortunate victims of fate and circumstance - a contemporary of Bach, Handel, Telemann, etc., who has remained largely -- and unfairly - neglected." ---JosefinaHW, talkclassical.com

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