Der Wildschütz

Village school teacher Baculus has shot a buck and thus set off a train of unmitigated chaos. A baron pretends to be a stable boy and a baroness disguises herself as a peasant girl. A count falls in love with his own sister and a countess falls in love with her own brother. In this wild confusion of game hunters and womanisers, everyone is chasing after their own interests, until finally the voice of nature calls everyone involved to reason.

Albert Lortzing was probably a greater talent in the theatre than anyone else in the first half of the 19th century. As an actor, singer, conductor, librettist and composer, he not only had a sure feeling for dramatic effect and what worked on stage – he also unerringly appealed to the tastes of his audience, but without pandering to them. On the contrary, in his works, he unmasked bourgeois, self-satisfied bogus moral standards and aristocratic immorality; and yet, despite his bitingly sharp wit, he always remained graciously charming and exercised his social criticism through appealingly lovable stage figures. Lortzing based his »Wildschütz« [Game Hunter] on August von Kotzebue's successful play »Der Rehbock oder die schuldlosen Schuldbewussten«, transformed it into a fast-paced, exhilarating opera libretto packed with comic situations and provided it with the most mature music of his composing career. The audience at the first performance in Leipzig, on New Year's Eve 1842, were able to enjoy the performance of a substantial comic opera, which never simply sets out to please and in which the brilliant theatrical practitioner made effective use of all the conventions of the stage clichés and traditions of the time. In the production by the Austrian director Georg Schmiedleitner, the affectionately cutting comedy of mistaken identity about love and desire becomes a strangely sophisticated theatrical pleasure, even today.

Programmheft DER WILDSCHÜTZ Leseprobe