La belle Helene (Sung in German)

Conductor: Allers, Franz

Orchestra: Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra

Chorus: Sundfunkchor Stuttgart

Achilles: Serafin, Harald

Agamemmnon: Kraemmer, Hans

Ajax I: Ballmann, Dieter

Ajax II: Ballmann, Hans-Jurgen

Bacchis: Rethel, Simone

Helena: Moffo, Anna

Kalchas: Rebroff, Ivan

Menelaos: Meinrad, Josef

Paris: Kollo, Rene

Producer: Hohlfeld, Horant

Set Designer: Krauss, Gerd

Costume Designer: Urbancic, Elisabeth

Choreographer: Hofgen, Lothar

Television Director: Ambesser, Axel von

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Date of Production: 1974

Playing Time: 01:50:29

Catalogue Number: A05004529

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Just as in Orpheus in the Underworld, this opera-travesty by Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) also uses an ancient Greek subject as a means of caricaturing contemporary social and political issues. The main target of Offenbach's barbs are the unscrupulousness and moral decline of France's "Second Empire". The action of the ancient saga of gods and heroes is stripped of its loftiness and parodistically reduced to an ironic display of very human motivations, weaknesses and excesses. "The ambivalence of Offenbach's genius emerges here more clearly than in any other of his works - a genius that masters with the same skillfullness all the facets of musical expression: emotion and intellect, romance and parody." (Bernard Grun, Cultural History of the Operetta)