Tiefland (opera)

Tiefland (or The Lowlands) is an opera in a prologue and three acts by Eugen d'Albert, to a libretto in German by Rudolph Lothar. Based on the 1896 Catalan play Terra baixa by Àngel Guimerà, Tiefland was d'Albert's seventh opera, and is the one which is now the best known.

Tiefland was first performed on November 15, 1903 at the Neues Deutsches Theater in Prague, with only limited success. Part of the reason for the lukewarm reception may have been because the house's leading dramatic tenor, Wilhelm Elsner, had died suddenly not too long before the opera's premiere, forcing another singer to learn and perform the role of Pedro in a relatively short amount of time.

For its next performance, Tiefland was revised by D'Albert and revived in Hamburg and Berlin in 1907, where it played to long runs. Its American premiere took place at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on November 23, 1908 with Emmy Destinn and Erik Schmedes in the two leading roles.

The opera is fairly regularly performed in Germany and Austria, with recent new productions at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden in April 2007, the Volksoper Wien in October 2007 and at Deutsche Oper Berlin, with Torsten Kerl as Pedro and Nadja Michael as Marta, in November 2007. Performances outside German speaking countries have tended to be more sporadic. Tiefland was performed at the Ankara Opera House in 1951 in a production directed by Carl Ebert with Semiha Berksoy as Marta. It also received a major revival at Washington Opera in 1995 with its first major US production in 81 years, conducted by Heinz Fricke and directed by Roman Terleckyj.

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