Aria of Giuditta (Giuditta)

Giuditta was Lehár's last stage work and the first operetta to be given its premiere at the Vienna State Opera: it opened there on 20 January 1934, with Richard Tauber and Jarmila Novotná, and the first night was relayed live by some 120 radio stations across Europe and the United States. Lehár called it a musical comedy and wrote it for an opera house — a larger orchestra, a through-composed manner, and an ending in which the couple part. Within four years his librettist Fritz Löhner-Beda had been deported; he was murdered at Auschwitz in December 1942.