The Loreley is one of the most famous figures of the romantic era, and even
today the massive rock in the Rhine is notorious for threatening the
river’s skippers with shipwreck. The legendary female figure with her
seductive beauty today no longer haunts the river, but her story continues
to resonate in the imagination. In 1861, when he was a mere twenty years
old, Max Bruch, a Rhinelander born in Cologne, devoted an opera to the
Loreley, a work based on a libretto by the great Emanuel Geibel himself.
This opera in four acts is only rarely performed and until now has never
been recorded on CD. The Munich Radio Orchestra will now change this state
of affairs: in a concert performance initiated by cpo the orchestra
presented the work under the conductor Stefan Blunier, who was the General
Music Director of the City of Bonn – that is, in the vicinity of the
Loreley – when the recording was produced. The marvelous Michaela Kaune
interpreted the title role in a top-quality performance, and Thomas Mohr
was her male counterpart. Bruch set the Loreley story, in which everything,
both in ambience and action, constituting a »Grand Romantic Opera« (thus
the work’s subtitle) is present, in a highly romantic musical language. It
is not without reason that Hans Pfitzner lent his support to this forgotten
gem throughout his life.