Venus in Seide - Spiel auf...

Robert Stolz was the last major survivor from the heyday of Viennese operetta. Although he died little more than twenty years ago, and although he was so much of our time as to win two Oscars for his work as a composer in Hollywood, he too had been drafted into the service of operetta before the First World War. And he went on writing for the stage until he was well into his eighties, completing no fewer than sixty-five operettas or musicals as well as hundreds of songs and dozens of film scores. The most popular number in his operetta Venus in Seide, which was first performed in Zurich in 1932, is Spiel auf deiner Geige das Lied von Leid und Lust (“Play on your violin the song of pain and joy”), a song inspired in the heroine of the piece, a Polish-Hungarian Princess, by the sound of a gypsy violin.