Loewe: Die Drei Wünsche

Opera no 58

Loewe: Die Drei Wünsche

Soloists

Rundfunkorchester des SWF

Peter Falk

I enjoyed the Loewe ballads in last year’s project https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/12/blog-post.html . I know that he was a prolific song composer but I hadn’t realised that he had also written operas. In fact he wrote 5 but this was the only one which was ever performed. In reality is more like a Singspiel than an opera - essentially it is a series of individual numbers connected by dialogue. I wasn’t expecting anything too serious but in fact this is a very light-weight piece which for its time must have seen rather old-fashioned. There is little here that couldn’t have been written a generation earlier. That’s not a criticism of course- on its own terms the piece works well. One senses that Loewe was happiest with the song form rather than anything more symphonic and there is nothing here which looks forward to the development of German opera into the middle years of the 19th century. An enjoyable listen but I didn’t think that it had the characterfulness of the Lortzing opera which preceded it in this series.