Performer: Elvira Soukop

Summer in Austria is about fleeing from the oppressive heat of the city and attending cultural events. Every hamlet where a musician of note spent the night, ate a meal or used the toilet seems to have its own little music festival. Located about 25km outside of Vienna, Baden is the closest escape.

You may not know too much about Berlin operetta, but even when you’re not a native German, chances are high that you know Berlin’s unofficial anthem “Berliner Luft”, or “Berlin Air”. Chances are that you can also sing and dance along to waltzes and non-military marches whose choruses go “Luft, Luft, Luft” or “mop, mop, mop”.

Humperdinck called his greatest hit a “Kinderstubenweihfestspiel” (a festival play for the consecration of the nursery) and the course of time has proven this joke appropriate: while Parsifal around Easter is the high point of the year for Wagnerians, Hänsel und Gretel at Christmastime is for everybody (including all those who claim they can’t stand Wagner and ignore the influence he had on Humpe