Edita Gruberova - Strauss: ARIADNE AUF NAXOS, Zerbinetta's aria, Washington DC, 1979 High E6

THE SONGBIRD: Edita Gruberova (1946 - 2021) is so strongly associated with the role of Zerbinetta that I am pleased to be able to include this early-career performance, not currently available on UA-cam, in my "net full of Zerbinettas." She performed Zerbinetta more than 200 times across a span of 36 years, 100 of these were in Vienna -- her first in 1973 and her last in 2009. This live performance is from the Kennedy Center in Washington DC when the Vienna State Opera was on tour in November 1979. Karl Böhm is conducting.
Gruberova was born in Bratislava. She was a child soprano prodigy and made her operatic debut as Rosina in 1968 in her hometown. She auditioned in 1969 for the Vienna State Opera, which engaged her for the 1970 season and her star began to rise quickly in her signature roles of Queen of the Night and Zerbinetta. These roles in particular launched debuts at many of the top opera houses in the world in the 1970s. In the 1980s she began to expand her repertoire into Italian bel canto roles and continued to dominate international operatic stages and appear regularly in commercial recordings. In the 1990s, she started her own commercial record label (Nightingale Classics) and continued to add heavier bel canto works to her repertoire and discography. Her final full operatic performance was in Munich in 2019 (51 years after her debut) and her full retirement from singing professionally was announced in September 2020, at the age of 73. She passed away on October 18, 2021.
THE MUSIC: Richard Strauss's opera "Ariadne auf Naxos" premiered twice. The first was in 1912 in Stuttgart where it was conceived as a short opera to accompany a new adaption of Moliere's play, "Le Bourgeois gentilhomme." This version was performed in other cities over the next year (Zurich, Munich, Prague, and London), but the play/opera hybrid concept proved ineffective (and way too long at over six hours). Working with his librettist/partner Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Strauss refashioned the opera as a stand-alone work with a newly added prologue, which premiered in this new form to success in Vienna in 1916. This version of the opera was quickly embraced by critics, artists, and the public -- it has since been recorded commercially many times and is performed regularly around the world. Only rarely have there been staged or even concert productions of the earlier 1912 version and there is only one commercial recording. "Ariadne" is one of my absolute favorite operas -- I love its witty libretto, its satiric character archetypes, its intriguing themes about art, and Strauss's simply astounding music. Zerbinetta's grand aria "Grossmächtige Prinzessin" is arguably the most daunting coloratura showpiece ever written -- incomprehensibly so in the longer, higher 1912 version, but still insane in the 1916 version. It's not just long at nearly 12 minutes; it doesn't merely contain a full armada of coloratura vocal acrobatics (trills, cadenzas, scales, filigree, high notes, wide leaps, and so on); it's not only the freewheeling harmonic structures -- no, this scene demands a level of virtuosic musicianship and theatrical flair that is simply unmatched. Zerbinetta is a coloratura soubrette on steroids! In this scene and role, Strauss invented an entirely new musical language to exploit the unique glories of the coloratura soprano voice. He revisited this proprietary mode of highly gymnastic vocalism a few other times afterwards: in the art song "Amor" (1918), with Fiakermilli in "Arabella" (1933), and for Aminta in "Die schweigsame Frau" (1935).