Heuberger: Der Opernball
Grade: A– 1898: two Parisiennes and a housemaid secretly invite each other’s partners to the Paris Opera ball and… c’mon, you can guess the rest. It’s Christmas: you don’t want Götterdämmerung. You want luxury, you want tunes and you want irresponsible fun. Richard Heuberger’s waltz-operetta Der Opernball is basically a deluxe box of musical liqueur chocolates, and it’s never been easier to guzzle the lot. Heuberger was a moonlighting music critic (he famously remarked that Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht sounds ‘like someone smeared the score of Tristan while the ink was still wet’), and he was working to a tight deadline. But good things happen under pressure, and at least one
