Count of Luxembourg: “Fancy Free”

Franz Lehár’s next popular success after the Gold and Silver Waltz was his operetta The Merry Widow which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1905. The Count of Luxembourg, written for the same Viennese theatre four years later, was clearly intended to appeal to the same audience - which it did, in a big way. It too is set in Paris and features an idle young Count who has the luck, rather than the guile, to end up with the woman he loves.

Having recklessly spent the family fortune, René Count of Luxembourg is living with a painter friend in Montmartre and is so short of money that when the Russian Prince Basil Basilowitsch offers him 500,000 francs to go through a form of marriage with a singer called Angèle Didier he willingly accepts without even seeing her. Since the whole point is that by marrying him Angèle becomes a Countess and will then, after a quick divorce, be entitled to marry Prince Basil, he can see no harm and only profit in the scheme. What he does not foresee is that, although there is to be a partition between them at the ceremony, as they exchange vows and rings through a gap in the screen, he and Angèle will fall in love with each other. In the end of course, after much unlikely good fortune, Angèle and René become a real married couple and Basil marries a real Countess.

Angèle’s aria “Fancy Free” comes from the point in the first act where she is just about to go through with her mock marriage to René. Quite happy to become a Countess now and a Princess only three months later, she has no objection at all to the arrangement. If she seems a little uncertain in the introduction, as she begins her pretty little waltz tune (with discreetly frivolous colouring from the glockenspiel) she betrays no such apprehension, still less as she goes on to take the opportunity to demonstrate the quality of her voice.