Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Richard Bonynge - Kálmán: Die Herzogin von Chicago (1999) CD-Rip

This is an excellent spoof/satire of all things American with a side swipe at impoverished European royalty and the operetta genre to boot. Deborah Riedel is absolutely magnificent both in her acting and her singing. Her intentional horribly bad American accent in German is absolutely hilarious and is exactly the way so many Americans speak German although never so completely and swiftly. Yet when she sings, her German, of course, is impeccable and unaccented for, after all, she is an opera singer and will go only so far to dumb down. Unfortunately the way she and the Americans are portrayed is still accurate today - as boorish, rich, conceited, arrogant, indifferent to European ways and to European culture, embracing poor taste in art and music = the "ugly" American.

Endrik Wottrich has become one of Germany's premier tenors specializing in Wagner opera and, while his voice does usually carry a certain characteristic very slight back of the throat sound, here he intentionally adopts an "Hungarian" style of singing producing a noticeable glottal gap sound. I must marvel at his ability not just to sing this way but to do it relatively consistently. But rest assured this is really NOT his normal voice.

One of the charms of this operetta is the mixing of the languages which adds greatly to the overall fun and cleverness. Watch the Covent Garden DVD of Die Fledermaus with Kiri Te Kanawa and Ben Luxon in a grand, wild ride of mixing English, German, Italian and French for a thoroughly enjoyable and exciting time. Mixing languages can lead to some humorous and slightly inapt usage - For example, at one point someone tells Mary in English, "You are in the picture", which is the literal translation of the German expression - "Du bist im Bilde". Yet we English speakers do not say "IN the picture" to mean we understand something. We say "You GET the picture". So here the German authors literally translated the German saying into English but by so doing actually did NOT capture the precise and meaningful English expression. Knowing more than one language is fun and even educational.