Giuditta: “Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiss” (My lips give such hot kisses)

Giuditta is the opera that crowned Lehár’s long life in the musical theatre. Too serious to be termed an operetta and first performed on no less distinguished a stage than that of the Staatsoper in Vienna in 1934, it is Austria’s equivalent to Carmen. Its heroine, a dancer of mixed Spanish and Moroccan blood, is married to an elderly Spanish maker of bird cages. Not surprisingly, when invited by a handsome young army captain to accompany him to his garrison town in North Africa, she goes with him. In the fourth scene, separated from her lover and unaware that he is in the audience, she is performing in a cabaret at the Alcazar. And what does a Spanish-Moroccan cabaret artist do when attempting to seduce a rich English lord in the Alcazar night club? Well, what else could she do but dance and sing a Viennese waltz? The North African local colour applied to the introduction to the full version of the song does not disguise the place and time of origin of the slow waltz at the heart of it.