The Koblenz Idea

Plenty of European cities are luring tourists with serious music this summer, but Koblenz (pop.: 92,000) has a different idea. Koblenz offers a big pontoon stage on a quiet inlet of the Rhine, bleachers ashore for 3,000 spectators and snack bars plastered with Coca-Cola signs. It promotes itself as "The City of the Operetta Festival." The single operetta to be staged all this summer: a jazzed-up version of Johann Strauss the Younger's A Thousand and One Nights.

Koblenz keeps it largely a home-town production. The local Rhine Philharmonic, a 40-piece orchestra, is the musical backbone of the performance. Koblenz' young singers and budding ballerinas make up the cast of 200, and 40 strapping youngsters, male & female, of the Poseidon Swimming Club perform in the aquacade act. For the top roles, some talent had to be imported. Of one guest performer, a Koblenz official proudly reported: "Oh, he's first class. He sometimes even sings on the radio."

The basic idea seems to be that it doesn't matter what the boys do to Strauss so long as they keep it lively. The rotating stage is decked out with a gay jumble of pagodas and minarets, Arab palaces and Venetian gondola landings. Costumes flash across the stage with colorful irrelevance: sultans look like Dalai Lamas, girls in Balkan skirts wiggle through Egyptian belly dances, men gotten up as Chinese coolies chant Viennese versions of Moslem music.

The acts are as cheerfully muddled as the setting. The "spirit of Aladdin's lamp," a hefty chorine, turns Aladdin into a white spitz dog, which pops out of a passing boat. As the star attraction, four water maidens push a water-borne platform on which a trim, silver-skirted ballerina does a lotus dance. The whole thing ends with singers diving off the stage into the river, and with blubbery "eunuchs" being tossed out of boats. The Rhine takes it all with hardly a murmur.

So far, the show has been selling out every night. The attitude of the Koblenz city fathers: let Edinburgh, Salzburg and Bayreuth have the heavy stuff. At the present rate, the City of the Operetta Festival can expect 100,000 customers by the end of summer.

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