from Eine Frau, die weiss, was sie will (1932)

Ich bin eine Frau, die weiss, was sie will

Jede Frau hat irgendeine Sehnsucht

Ninon

Men might be “méchant,” as Schubert’s disgruntled maiden put it, but there are some fairly naughty women in the Lott repertoire too, not least the liberated heroine of Oscar Straus’s Eine Frau, die weiss, was sie will. This was something like the fiftieth of sixty or so operettas by a composer who, far from being an ‘s’ short of a Strauss, enjoyed a phenomenal success in the musical theatre in a career covering well over half a century and several distinct stylistic epochs - from the turn of the century to between the wars and into the post-war period too. A big success in Berlin in 1932, Eine Frau, die weiss, was sie will (libretto by Alfred Grünwald after Verneuil) had several particularly seductive numbers for Straus’s favoured soprano Fritzi Massary, including Ich bin eine Frau, die weiss, was sie will and Jede Frau hat irgendeine Sehnsucht. The implication of the flatteringly moderate self-portrait she offers in Ich bin eine Frau, die weiss, was sie will - in a provocative tango rhythm - is that she knows not only what she wants but also how to get it. Even so, her revealing slow foxtrot Jede Frau hat irgendeine Sehnsucht is modesty itself in comparison with Ninon, a tribute to the celebrated seventeenth-century courtesan (and intellectual) Ninon Lenclos, who is easily the most wicked person in today’s programme. Ninon actually was banished to a convent, by the way, but not one dedicated to a male order and not for very long.