Even though she is a celebrated operatic star with many brilliant coloratura roles in her repertoire, Diana Damrau is also a versatile performer in many other styles of vocal music, including concert arias, art songs, pop standards, and songs from musicals and movies. Because she embraces such a wide range of material with affection and technical ease, she is able to move gracefully between the worlds of Viennese operetta, Broadway show tunes, and music from Disney films, with only the slightest indications from her well-supported vocal production and crisp diction that she is much better known for her performances of Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, and Strauss.

In one of Johann Strauss' waltzes, a dream operetta couple of the 70s returns: Ingeborg Hallstein and Rene Kollo. Wiener Blut, filmed in 1971, is a thoroughly Viennese production whose strengths guarantee unadulterated operetta enjoyment: Beautiful voices, natural acting, more committed to the film than the opera stage and a cast of operetta stars even in supporting roles: Among others, Dagmar Koller, Ferry Gruber and the unforgettable Viennese original Fritz Muliar can be seen and heard.

Johann Strauss Junior’s second operetta, Der Carneval in Rom, premiered in 1873 only one year before Die Fledermaus, and while the music is enjoyable enough, with several nice tunes, there is little in the score to presage the gorilla blockbuster soon to come. For one thing, Strauss wrote the music in the more romantic style of light opera because the work was originally scheduled to be mounted at the Vienna court opera, a place of more serious mien than the Theater an der Wien, then the home of the comic-oriented Viennese operetta.