Lehar: Friederike

It's one of the best-known love stories in the history of German literature: the brief but intense affair between the young Goethe and the 17-year-old Friederike Brion, daughter of a Strasbourg parish priest. Germany's national poet as an operetta tenor? Conservative thinkers were horrified, but Léhar's sensitive singspiel - a genre that Goethe himself was fond of - avoids the crowing gestures typical of operetta and combines a copy of a historic style with simple songs and carefully nuanced instrumentation. So much so that even the sceptics came around… In the 1981 first recording Adolf Dallapozza as a passionate Goethe and Helen Donath, touching as Friederike, "bring out all the richness and variety of the score".