Das Land des Lächelns (Land of Smiles)

Dein ist mein ganzes Herz (You are my heart’s delight)

Lehár could turn to the Hungarian musician in him whenever it suited him - as he did in Zigeunerliebe (Gypsy Love) in 1910 and Wo die Lerche singt (Where the Lark sings) in 1918 - but he did not share Kálmán’s long-term obsession with gypsy music. He was happy to set his operettas just about anywhere - most famously of all in the Pontevedran Embassy in Paris in Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) in 1905 but also, to place only a few of them, on a mountain top in the Alps, in Brussels, in Vienna, in Spain, in Italy, in St Petersburg, in Alsace-Lorraine, in Switzerland and, in his last stage work, in North Africa.

As for Das Land des Lächelns, it is set in both China, “the land of smiles,” and Vienna, to which city the heroine Lisa returns after finding life in Peking intolerable in spite of her love for her Chinese husband Prince Souchong. First performed in Berlin in 1929, it owed much of its success, like several other Lehár operettas of the period, to the composer’s partnership with the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber. “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz” (You are my heart’s delight) - in which Souchong protests his exclusive love for Lisa in spite of insisting on fulfilling his duty to take four Chinese wives - was written specially for Tauber and offers perhaps the most famous example of the surging romantic line of the characteristic “Tauber Lied.”