Die tolle Heirat von Laló

In a fever-dream Vienna of waltz echoes and peeling gilding, Laló—half-buffoon, half-poet—stumbles from pawn-shop to parlour clutching a moth-eaten dress coat and a forged letter of credit that promises a dowry fatter than the Danube is long. His quarry: the widowed mill-owner’s daughter, a porcelain-blond wraith who has already buried two suitors in the family crypt and now clutches a lapdog instead of a prayer book. Around this central pair swirls a carnival of creditors, matchmaking aunts, a defrocked priest who moonlights as a palm-reader, and a regiment of bankrupt counts living on boiled potatoes and ancestral portraits. The betrothal dinner, staged in a candle-lit salon where every shadow looks like an unpaid bill, collapses into a danse macabre of revealed IOUs, a missing emerald ring, and the sudden appearance of a creditor dressed as a ghost of the defunct groom-to-be. The final reel dissolves into a snow-storm of confetti—once banknotes—while Laló, coatless and rosy with schnapps, waltzes alone on a deserted fairground carousel, his laughter echoing like coins spinning on marble.