Many vinyl records are invaluable documents of their time, and hardly any series shows this as clearly as the Cologne recordings in the Electrola Collection. The re-release of these classics and rarities has met with an enthusiastic reception from  music-lovers and critics alike, and after the change from EMI Classics to Warner Classics the series is being continued under the name 'Cologne Collection'. The new additions cover opera and operetta, choral music and Lieder as well as the very first concerto recording made by top clarinettist Sabine Meyer.

It's one of the best-known love stories in the history of German literature: the brief but intense affair between the young Goethe and the 17-year-old Friederike Brion, daughter of a Strasbourg parish priest. Germany's national poet as an operetta tenor? Conservative thinkers were horrified, but Léhar's sensitive singspiel – a genre that Goethe himself was fond of – avoids the crowing gestures typical of operetta and combines a copy of a historic style with simple songs and carefully nuanced instrumentation. So much so that even the sceptics came around.

In the 1981 first recording Adolf Dallapozza as a passionate Goethe and Helen Donath, touching as Friederike, "bring out all the richness and variety of the score".