Librettos and Librettists

Viennese cafés were the nerve centres of production. An undated engraving by Sigmund von Skiwirczynski depicts no fewer than twenty-four operetta luminaries positioned around a few tables in the Café Museum, labelled ‘The Fixed Stars of Viennese Operetta, Surrounded by Their Satellites’.⁴ During the silver age, the fixed stars of librettos included Victor Léon, Leo Stein, Alfred Grünwald, Julius Brammer, Robert Bodanzky, Alfred Maria Willner, Fritz Löhner-Beda and Heinz Reichert. Many operetta librettos were written in such cafés, where ideas and information were traded and collaborations made and broken. Librettists were typical café-goers: bourgeois, educated and almost all Jewish.⁵ When embarking upon an operetta, most librettists worked in pairs, one taking primary responsibility for the plot structure and spoken dialogue (Prosa) and the other writing the verse song texts, and both critiquing each other every step of the way – a process that ensured a degree of quality control but also homogenization. Dialogue librettists often began their careers as playwrights, and song-text librettists as poets or songwriters, but the division was not absolute. Some librettos were the production of a single author (most often Victor Léon, the most influential, prolific and experimental of all Viennese operetta librettists), and some are credited to three or more.

Relatively few operetta librettos were original subjects though as plots became more formulaic over the course of the twentieth century newly invented librettos became more common. The most popular source was, by far, middlebrow theatre, particularly French boulevard theatre such as that of Meilhac and Sardou. This genre was in fact the equivalent of operetta in spoken theatre: it was targeted at a similar audience and sometimes even played in the same theatres.⁶ These plays’ tidy plots, conventional character types and decisive endings (usually finishing with marriage) became the template for many operettas. Librettists also based operettas on short stories or novels or fitted historical figures or events into an operetta format.

Sometimes the source was credited, but often, in the interest of preserving more of the royalties for the new librettists, it was not; librettists hoped their sources would be obscure enough not to be noticed. Such ghosting was well known enough to be frequently joked about in theatrical circles. Shadow sources ranged from yet more French plays to a novel by a ‘Spanish writer who has been dead for more than thirty years’.⁷ Were the librettists to be caught stealing, they could be met with legal action by the original authors or their estate. The ‘foreign basic idea’⁸ that was credited with the plot of Die lustige Witwe was recognized immediately by critics as Meilhac’s familiar play L’attaché d’ambassade, though Meilhac’s estate sued the librettists only after the operetta became a massive hit and there were prodigious sums to be had.

Composers

Operetta resists the auteur framework, but composers, nonetheless, are usually identified as the single most important figure in an operetta’s composition and production. (Librettos were usually written first and then marketed to a composer.) Most nineteenth-century operetta composers had little formal compositional training, their backgrounds usually being in groups such as salon orchestras and military bands. In the silver age, however, most composers came to operetta after conservatory study as art music composers and thus possessed larger compositional toolboxes. After completing their training, almost all of their biographies continue in fits and starts and odd musical jobs that typify most early careers in composition. Many operetta composers also tried their hand at writing opera, with varied results. Along the way, they discovered a knack for writing in a popular style and turned to it full time.

The first operetta composer to have a background in art music composition was Richard Heuberger, best known to scholars as second-stringer to Eduard Hanslick at the Neue Freie Presse and as the director of the Singakademie and Wiener Männergesang-Verein.⁹ After training as an engineer, Heuberger studied composition with Robert Fuchs in Graz. Of his many operettas, his only major success was Der Opernball in 1898, one of the most important works of the transitional period between the golden and silver ages. Unlike Heuberger, Franz Lehár and Leo Fall were both military bandmasters in the Austro-Hungarian armed forces as well as orchestral composers; Fall, Oscar Straus and Emmerich Kálmán all came to operetta after first experimenting with cabaret songs (Straus and Fall in Berlin, Kálmán in Budapest). But all had studied at conservatories and written some ‘serious’ music before delving into operetta.

It should be noted that the post-conservatory experiences that led these composers to operetta – conducting in provincial theatres, orchestrating light music, working in military bands and playing for cabarets – were hardly unique, and in fact identical to the background of many of the era’s composers of art music. Mahler conducted numerous operettas in his early career, as did Webern.¹⁰ Alexander Zemlinsky worked as an orchestrator and also served as Kapellmeister at the Carl-Theater for two seasons; Zemlinsky’s orchestration of Heuberger’s Der Opernball amounted in some places to co-authorship, as Karl Kraus even noted publicly.¹¹ (Although Kraus implied that Heuberger required assistance due to a lack of technical skill, the evidence suggests that poor time management was an equal if not greater factor.)¹² Even Arnold Schoenberg worked for the Über-Brettl cabaret in Berlin and orchestrated operetta (inspiring his Brettl-Lieder).¹³

Whereas both Schoenberg and Mahler seem to have looked back at their periods in light music with fondness, other composers saw it as a period of indentured servitude before their true talents were recognized. Webern, for example, associated operetta with toil in the provinces, referring to operetta as ‘Dreck’ (muck).¹⁴ While it should not be surprising that assistant conductors and orchestrators were not allowed space to demonstrate their creativity or that working conditions in provincial theatres were often bad, these poor experiences are vital background for the same composers’ later condemnations of operetta.

Orchestration

As noted above, many operetta composers did not orchestrate their own work, though Franz Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán and Leo Fall, three of the most notable composers of the silver age, did. Some abstained due to, as Kraus implied, a lack of musical education, others due to lack of interest (operetta orchestration was often routine) or lack of time (as in the case of Der Opernball). Kálmán, Lehár and Fall all managed to do so and were abetted in their later careers by the luxury of time. Additionally, their fame was grounded in their handicraft and original voices – in which their command of the orchestra played an important role.

The issue of orchestration was a sensitive one for operetta insiders, a delicate topic in the operetta industry’s collective quest to be taken seriously as artists. In July 1926, an article in Die Stunde asked, ‘Who orchestrates Viennese operettas?’ The anonymous writer reports that a prominent unnamed Viennese music critic would, at the next assembly of the Association of Playwrights and Composers, demand that the names of anonymous orchestrators be listed in theatre programmes.¹⁵ This was motivated, the article detailed, less by a desire to give credit to the unnamed than to expose the many prominent operetta composers who were not capable of orchestrating their own music ‘because they cannot master the art of instrumentation’ (‘weil sie die Kunst der Instrumentations nicht beherrschen’) and to laud the real masters who could – Lehár, Kálmán and Fall, described as the ‘matadors of Viennese operetta’. The article goes so far as to name Vienna’s most popular orchestrators: conductor Oskar Stalla, Nico Dostal (later a successful composer himself) and ‘der Musiker Kopsiva’.¹⁶ No specific clients are named, though Stalla is described as having contracts with four prominent composers for the next season. It is unclear if the promised confrontation ever came to pass.

Templates

The basic recipe for a silver-age operetta was largely established by the success of Die lustige Witwe in 1905, as were the smaller-scale genre conventions. Some of these conventions existed well before Witwe, the most important earlier watershed moment being Johann Strauss Jr’s Der Zigeunerbaron (1885). However, in the twentieth century their deployment became more predictable.

A silver-age operetta generally centred on two couples. The ‘first couple’, played by the leading man (a low tenor or high baritone) and leading woman (soprano) are usually somewhat older and experienced in life and given music that was relatively demanding in vocal terms. The younger couple, a soubrette and a lighter ‘bon vivant’ or buffo tenor, are usually younger characters with less demanding singing parts, given more comic business and are often asked to do a great deal of dancing. (Die lustige Witwe is exceptional in this regard.) While the singers of these roles were often younger as well, some performers spent their entire careers in second-couple roles. The supporting roles generally include several Komiker, purely comic characters both male and female, some singing and some only speaking. There were even specific divisions of Komiker and Komikerin, such as the komischer Alter or komische Alte, the funny elderly person (such as Njegus in Die lustige Witwe and Mariza’s and servant Tschekko in Gräfin Mariza).¹⁷

Plot structure was also honed to perfection. Operettas were organized into three acts, opening with an overture or prelude followed by an introductory scene in a public setting in which a supporting character introduces the situation. The leading man and woman both sing entrance songs, and the secondary couple receives some material as well. The first act closes with a large finale, usually on an upbeat note with an acknowledgement of love between each couple. The second act opens with a large dance number including local colour, replicating Die lustige Witwe’s Vilja-Lied, and subsequently features ornate twists and turns in the plot.

In the tradition of the ‘well-made play’, these plot confusions often involve props or ‘devices’ such as letters, keys, miniature portraits, fans or lockets. There are usually one or two duets for the leading couple, and the act ends with the silver age’s most grandiose achievement: the infamous Act 2 finale. This is the operetta’s most ambitious musical structure and contains a melodramatic twist to end the act on a note of tragedy and pathos.¹⁸ Third acts often read as afterthoughts, vestigial structures that quickly tie up the plot. Their existence was frequently credited to a theatre’s imperative to sell refreshments during a second intermission, though eliminating the second intermission would also threaten the second-act finale.¹⁹ To maintain some interest, a new character known as the ‘dritter Akt Komiker’ is occasionally introduced, who tells topical jokes that have little or nothing to do with the rest of the plot, a throwback to the jailer Frosch in Die Fledermaus. A few lively musical numbers, often including dance, and a quick resolution of the plot finish up the operetta. There is no major Act 3 finale, merely a brisk reprise of an earlier number as a ‘Schlussgesang’ (closing song). See, for example, Kálmán’s Die Csárdásfürstin (1915) or Franz Lehár’s Eva (1911).²⁰

These constructions were entirely self-conscious, and audiences and critics were as aware of them as composers and librettists. Operetta critics often attacked the dependence on ‘Schablone’ (stencils), but it seemed that this predictability was what audiences wanted. The authors’ skill was demonstrated in the use and development of these conventions. Were the waltz themes memorable? Was the instrumentation refined? How exciting was the twist in the second-act finale? Audiences expected certain thrills out of the operetta, and the authors were judged based on their ability to deliver the known features in a novel or satisfying way. Dramatic and musical patterns and habits that were for critics a mark of inartistic, mass production were, to operetta fans, beloved conventions of the genre.

Theatres and Productions

The Viennese theatres where operettas were produced were licensed private commercial enterprises, designated ‘k.u.k. [imperial] Privattheater’. Vienna had a seemingly insatiable appetite for performances, and, until the economic crises of the 1920s and the spread of sound film, more and more theatres were built. Theatres rarely closed down entirely, but they frequently changed artistic direction.²¹ While names often remained the same, programming constantly changed with fashions, ownership and artistic direction. For example, the Raimundtheater opened as a German nationalist Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn enterprise in 1893, became a spoken-word theatre in 1896, a home for visiting operetta troupes in 1900 and, finally, in 1908, was taken over by the management of the Theater an der Wien.

The closer a theatre was to the city centre, the wealthier an audience it could attract, the more media coverage it would receive in major newspapers and the higher ticket prices it could command. For operetta, the most prestigious stages were the Carl-Theater (whose name was not standardized and often appears as Carltheater) and Theater an der Wien, located in the Vorstadt but not far from the glittering centre. The Johann-Strauss-Theater, situated very near the Theater an der Wien, joined this elite rank when it opened in 1908. Further afield in the suburbs were the Theater in der Josefstadt, the Lustspieltheater and the Neue Wiener Bühne, playing similar, sometimes more mixed programmes with somewhat lower prices – and lower production values.²²

The seating capacity of theatres varied; the Theater an der Wien was the largest at 1,859 spectators (reduced from its nineteenth-century capacity due to a renovation that replaced the roof and eliminated the top level), while the Carl-Theater and Johann-Strauss-Theater both accommodated around 1,200. The orchestra rosters of the three most important theatres hovered around forty-two members in 1910, while the less prestigious theatres averaged around thirty-five; however, it seems unlikely that all the members were playing on any given night. By the lean year of 1929, the Theater an der Wien’s roster had dropped to eighteen musicians and the chorus to a mere ten.²³ Theatres also kept complete musical personnel on payroll including conductors, assistant conductors (often aspiring or semi-successful composers), accompanists and copyists.

Theatres maintained their own workshops for the construction of sets, costumes and props (with the occasional dramatic backdrop outsourced to one of the city’s scenic painters) and kept large stocks of items which were recycled for less prestigious premieres. Whether a work received the investment of new sets and costumes or not was taken as an indication of faith from the management in the work’s chances for survival.²⁴ Operettas were even featured in fashion spreads in the ladies’ section of newspapers, where women could take cues on the latest styles from what glamorous stars like Betty Fischer or Louise Kartousch wore onstage.²⁵

Economics and Publication

At some point in the composition process of a new operetta, the composer and librettists signed a contract with a theatre. In a typical contract, the royalties were divided evenly between composer and librettists, with the composer receiving half the authors’ portion and the two librettists splitting the other half. Contracts often included provisions for profits from sheet-music sales and later contracts included recordings, the rights for performances outside Vienna and film adaptations. Wilhelm Karczag and the Theater an der Wien in particular strove to create a vertically integrated operetta industry. Karczag (and his successor, Hubert Marischka) ran his own publishing house, Karczag-Verlag, which printed the scores of many (though not all) of the operettas his theatre premiered. The firm also received a cut from recordings. Sometimes Marischka even negotiated a share of the proceeds for himself.²⁶

Although this enabled the theatre to reap a healthy profit from successful works, it eventually developed into a risky model. In the 1920s, when expectations for visual opulence rose, the theatre made extremely high investments in new productions. The upfront costs could not be recouped by ticket sales in Vienna alone and required revenue from other cities, sheet music and recordings. The catch was that only a work that gained the reputation of Viennese success would bring in this additional cash. A work that flopped or was only a moderate success in Vienna could result in catastrophic losses. Ultimately, this proved ruinous.

Publication was an important step for lasting success in operetta. Successful composers had standing contracts with publishers and published all of their work; new composers sometimes waited until they achieved fame. When an operetta was published, it became available to the general public in a variety of forms, including piano-vocal scores, piano solo arrangements with the text printed above the music but without a separate vocal line (Klavierauszug zu zwei Händen mit unterlegtem Text) and piano four hands with text. As well as the complete operetta, publishers also issued editions of excerpts, such as individual hit songs and short medleys of the most popular numbers. Potpourri arrangements for salon orchestra were also an important means of dissemination beyond the theatre.

After an operetta’s premiere, the final version of the text was printed as a Regie- und Soufflierbuch (direction and prompt book) or Vollständiges Soufflierbuch mit sämtlichen Regiebemerkungen (full prompt book with complete production notes). These librettos were not offered for sale to the public, as their copyright stated explicitly, but were rather available only on loan or rental to other theatres producing the works. (The public could purchase a shorter libretto containing only the song texts.) This controlled the operetta’s circulation, so the publisher could better collect royalties.²⁷ The text contains detailed notes on the original production’s design and staging, which theoretically were to be replicated by provincial theatres to the greatest extent possible. Choreographies were sometimes published separately. The original staging was considered an integral part of the work, akin to the words or music, and the director responsible for the staging is noted prominently on the cover. But it is clear that for foreign stages directors adapted works for local taste and resources and that this versatility was important to its international appeal. For example, Stefan Frey surveys the international success of Die lustige Witwe, including the implications of changing casts, localized humour and eventual sound recordings and film.²⁸ Printed librettos and staging manuals should not be considered definitive records of any production.²⁹

Censorship

Strict censorship was legally mandated for all licensed Viennese theatres until 1919. An operetta’s spoken dialogue was first prepared in a typescript that was submitted to the police censor in duplicate for approval around a month before the premiere. The censor read the libretto, underlined any objectionable sections in red pencil on both copies and wrote a short summary and report on all the problems. One copy was returned to the theatre, the other was – thankfully for future scholarship – retained in the police’s archive. The libretto was then approved for performance on the condition that the librettists adopt the censor’s alterations. The law explicitly included visuals, music and gestures as well as spoken text.

Typically for the empire, the primary goal of the censor was to maintain public order and the appearance of harmony. The office had been established by an order issued during the Metternich era, on 25 Novembe 1850. Theatres were prohibited from ‘That which, in historical context, violates the need for public peace and order, that which insults public decency, shame, morality, or religion’.³⁰ The censor forbade several specific categories of activity: directing the actors to perform any illegal action; displaying a lack of loyalty or respect for the state or the imperial house; disparaging patriotism, mocking or displaying hatred of any nationality, religion or social class; insulting public decency, godliness or morality; any display of real Catholic vestments or imperial uniforms; and libel against any living people.³¹ While this may seem sweeping, few scripts show many signs of the red pencil. Librettists were familiar with what was allowed and what was not and rarely seem to have pushed the envelope. This did not mean, however, that the censor’s rules did not play a large role in the subjects chosen.

The office of the police censor was eliminated following the empire’s dissolution. In an interview with the theatre magazine Komödie, mayor of Vienna Jakob Reumann described the censor as ‘the remnant of the old police state’, now outdated, and said that he believed that ‘the good taste of the public’ would serve as sufficient regulation for stage production.³² Whether there was actual freedom of expression, however, was questionable: an article in Die Stunde from 1926 entitled ‘The censor is dead! Long live the censor!’ pointed out that while the formal censorship process had ceased, the police still wielded the power to shut down any production deemed out of order and that any statement against the state or offence against public decency would prompt immediate action. (The anonymous author gives no specific examples.³³) But operettas depicting real monarchs became common – such as Im weißen Rössl, Madame Pompadour and Kaiserin Josephine – ironically, nostalgic reminders of an era when they would have been disallowed onstage.

Critics and Criticism

Reviews were published in newspapers the day following premieres and were found in the theatre and arts section. Many of the critics responsible for these reviews were enmeshed in operetta society: several wrote librettos themselves and others penned biographies of composers, and conflicts of interest were common.³⁴ While some reviews were anonymous, in most papers, critics were identified by their pseudonym (usually a few consonants from their surname).

Vienna had a notoriously large number of newspapers during this period.³⁵ The most prolific coverage of operetta could be found in the Neues Wiener Journal, considered the most gossipy and female-targeted of the major broadsheets. A paper’s theatre coverage occasionally betrayed the publication’s overall political orientation, though most critics did not often espouse a prominent political agenda beyond bland centrist Liberalism. The more ideologically extreme papers are more easily labelled, such as the German nationalist Reichspost and the socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung (whose critic David Josef Bach is one of the most consistently interesting).

The most influential critics of the first decade-and-a-half of the twentieth century were Ludwig Karpath of the Neue Wiener Tagblatt and Leopold Jacobson of the Neues Wiener Journal, whose names and opinions were frequently cited by composers and librettists. In the 1920s, Julius Bistron and Ernst Decsey become more prominent. Table 12.1 lists the major critics of operetta from 1900 to 1930.

Most reviews follow the same format. Operettas are first judged by their ability to fulfil the basic goals to amuse and divert (critics often mention whether the audience seemed to be enjoying themselves). Other basic requirements include the libretto’s pacing and plot twists, the composer’s ability to write a waltz, very often the quality of the orchestration (ironic since many operetta composers did not do this themselves) and the charisma, singing and dancing abilities of the actors. In longer reviews, critics endeavour to place the operetta in the context of its creators’ previous works. Composers receive the most attention. They are assumed to have particular strengths, weaknesses and identities, their mastery of the Viennese idiom is usually remarked upon and, if the composer in question was not native Viennese (as the majority of the major silver-age composers were not), his attempts to convince in what was considered a quintessentially Viennese language are assessed for their success.

Critical and public opinion often converged. Some works, however, were critical successes but popular flops; the opposite (critical flops and popular successes) was not common until the growth of the much-maligned revue operetta in the 1920s. For those critical of operetta as a whole – writers from more literary or serious musical circles who were generally not reviewing it on a daily basis – this collusion of criticism and market was one sign that marked operetta as non-art. Ultimately, it was the popular vote that determined how long an operetta would remain on the schedule.

Audiences

It is difficult to determine exactly the precise demographics of operetta audiences, but some details can be gleaned from contemporary accounts. While theatres did offer subscription tickets, the fixed box society of major opera houses did not exist in operetta theatres, nor did the quasi-patron power of those box holders. Some hints as to demographics can be picked up from the magazine Komödie, subtitled ‘Wochenrevue für Bühne und Film’. In 1921, Komödie published a list of readers who had won a contest. Eighty-four readers in all are listed as winners, with their names and addresses supplied. Out of this number, the largest number, 57 per cent, lived in the suburban Vorstadt, between the Ringstrasse and the Gürtel; 37 per cent lived outside the Gürtel and the remaining 6 per cent lived inside the Ringstrasse in the Innere Stadt. This reinforces the oft-stated assumption that the most devoted operetta audience was the middle class and lower middle class.³⁶

Due to the city’s demographic changes in the late nineteenth century, the distribution of operetta audiences changed as well. In 1902, on the threshold of the silver age, Max Graf recorded a transformation of operetta taste over the past few decades, powered primarily by the streetcar.³⁷ While nineteenth-century Vienna had been a patchwork of neighbourhoods, public transportation now tied the city together, and its population was more likely to claim an identity as Viennese or as an immigrant rather than allegiance to their home district. In Graf’s view, this had a chilling effect on operetta. While the audience had greatly expanded from a small circle of connoisseurs to a mass form, quality had decreased. What once was individual and specific – ‘the wit of Offenbach, the grace of Johann Strauss, the melodic cleverness of Millöcker’ – had, according to Graf, become mass-produced and generic, lowered to the folk music of a Viennese Heuriger.

Many operetta artists maintained that it was those in the gallery who made or killed an operetta, not the voices of the critics or even those who purchased the more expensive seats. Proportionately, this seems possible, since there were many more cheap seats than there were expensive ones. The silver age’s tendency towards Serienerfolgen – hit operettas that ran for years at a single theatre – certainly encouraged writing for large audiences. Serienerfolgen also required a theatre to draw a largely new group of audience members every single night, akin to a modern Broadway megamusical.³⁸

Conclusion

As in the field of opera research, the multimedia nature of operetta can make its study a confusing experience. Due to operetta’s popularity and liminal role in the Germanic musical establishment, these sources are plentiful but are frequently scattered between departments in major libraries, often split between music and theatre collections. Several important archival collections, notably papers of librettist Alfred Grünwald and the photographic collection of librettist Victor Léon, are located in the United States (at the New York Public Library’s Billy Rose Theatre Collection and Harvard University’s Houghton Library, respectively). Sometimes these texts tell conflicting stories, surviving from various stages in the artistic process or concerning an ephemeral performance whose exact character will always remain a mystery. But the very plenitude of this written record and its occasional contradictions can provide a dynamic, lively view of a largely forgotten art form, one which is only beginning to be mined by scholars.

Production and Reception of Operetta in Nineteenth-Century Italy

From the 1860s, French touring companies, such as the much celebrated Grégoire brothers, as well as Italian troupes began to adapt, produce and perform French operettas – in French as well as in Italian – in Italy. That Italian critics found these early imports difficult to define in regard to their generic characteristics and perceived quality is immediately clear if we consider the terminology they used to discuss them. When Lecocq’s opéra bouffe Les cent vierges premiered in Paris in 1872, an Italian critic for the Gazzetta musicale di Milano called it ‘an opera buffa’, whereas when the same work opened at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan in 1874 it was called a ‘vaudeville’. Another extremely successful opéra comique by Lecocq, La fille de Madame Angot, was dismissed as ‘a French buffoonerie’, a ‘parody that came from France … the most French if not the most ungraceful of all’.² However, when Lecocq’s opéra comique Les prés Saint-Gervais was performed in London in 1874, an Italian critic wrote that this was ‘overall, an operetta that belongs more to the elegant genre of the opéra comique’.³ While the presence of dialogue was clearly a strong defining element, it seems clear also that the perceived quality of the work could contribute to a definition. Only a few selected French imports could aspire, in fact, to be compared to Italian genres. Offenbach’s Madame l’archiduc, for example, is praised by a critic for the Gazzetta musicale di Milano as ‘a jewel’, its music really worthy of an opera buffa.⁴

Examining the rise of operetta in Italy, Carlotta Sorba argued that ‘Italian versions of French operettas developed immediately both their own more comic side as well as a greater emphasis on word and mime compared to music, thus distancing themselves from the Italian operatic tradition, with which it was particularly difficult to compete’.⁵ The distinct nature of French operetta in Italy was reflected in the system of production. Venues for spettacoli d’arti varie, variety shows, began to be purpose-built during the 1870s, attracting large crowds of paying audiences, who sought varied and light-hearted forms of entertainment at low prices. The Teatro dal Verme, which would see the Italian premiere of La vedova allegra in 1907, could host also clown and circus acts, acrobatic and equestrian displays and magic shows, and later the French import ‘cabaret’ as well as operetta, opera buffa and ‘main stream’ opera. La Scala, on the other hand, the temple where the increasingly codified operatic canon was consecrated, remained impermeable to the charms of operetta. And the same differentiation of venues according to repertory can be observed in other Italian cities.

The audiences of operetta in Italy during the 1860s and 1870s are often described as rowdy and loud, responding to silly gags with ‘guffaws’. Even a bolt of lightning that hit the stage during one of the performances of La figlia di Madame Angot at the Teatro dal Verme was received with laughter, prompting a critic to comment that ‘the audience, used to the school of the daughter of Madame Angot, does not have respect for anything anymore and started laughing even at lightning. This is definitely the century of parody.’ The same critic seems amused and surprised to learn that at the Teatro dal Verme, ‘the clients’ (not il pubblico but gli avventori, italics in the source!) could not only smoke but also drink beer during the shows. Operetta, after all, was considered pure entertainment and could not aspire to be considered art. Therefore, the audience was encouraged to attend operettas only if ‘they wanted to be amused for a couple of hours’.⁶

The audience’s misbehaviour was apparently caused by what some critics considered as an extremely lascivious kind of theatre that relied on easy, vulgar and often sexual, innuendos. Again describing Lecocq’s Les cent vierges in Paris in 1872, a critic for the Gazzetta musicale di Milano argues that ‘honest women don’t dare go to the theatre anymore’ since the French librettos of these days had become so obscene that they caused them to blush.⁷ When Le cento vergini finally arrived in Milan in 1874, another critic confirmed: ‘it was said that it was immoral: let us actually say it is lewd, which is something else. It does not corrupt anything, but at times it can become nauseating.’⁸ It was not only the lasciviousness of the story but also the apparently nonsensical nature of many operettas that offended the critics’ good taste, as a critic observed about Offenbach’s Le corsaire noir:

As for the music, if in some cases critics were generally positive about two or three key numbers, usually dances like cancan, csárdás and waltzes, some operettas received harsh reviews, as for example Offenbach’s aforementioned Le corsaire noir in the Gazzetta di Milano in 1872:

Part of the reason for the uncompromising criticism had to do with the quality of the translations, very often deemed inadequate to convey the true verve of the original, as well as of the performances, which were described as having a very ‘distinct flavour’ compared to those of opera seria: ‘the chorus sang out of tune, Chambéry, great artist, went off board with his gags in utter bad taste … Signora Faivre did very well, and has a more robust voice that is more in tune than what we are used to hear in French theatre.’¹⁰ According to many critics, the only redeeming feature of many French operettas was that they were increasingly staged by Italian companies who could afford performers ‘born and bred in the Milanese musical entourage’, therefore delivering a more reliable result. According to Sorba, it is in this context that we have to understand Friedrich Nietzsche’s well-known comments on the lack of elegance of French operettas when they were performed in Italy:

Thus, operetta in Italy prompted very contrasting reactions: while audiences of the final few decades of the nineteenth century voraciously consumed the adaptations of French operettas and the increasing number of Viennese operettas that followed, taking great pleasure in the light, overly licentious and seemingly nonsensical plots, some critics condemned the genre as an attack on propriety and moral decorum.

But there were also those who took a different stand, such as the Italian intellectuals known as Scapigliati (literally ‘dishevelled’).¹² The movement, inspired by the ideals of German Romanticism and the French vie bohème, sought a renovation and rejuvenation of Italian culture starting from a refusal of tradition and rules that represented in their eyes the old and tired culture of the pre-Risorgimento upper classes. Antonio Ghislanzoni, intellectual, music critic, author of librettos and member of the Scapigliatura, writing in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano about Offenbach’s La bella Elena in 1866, remarked on the conservatism of Italian audiences as well as of poets and composers, suggesting that operetta could in fact become the vehicle for a profound social renovation, if only Italians were open to the possibilities offered by this genre:

Crossing the Generic Boundary: Critics’ Responses to ‘Silver-Age’ Operetta

As French and Viennese operettas became increasingly successful in Italy, audiences, theatres, impresarios and a number of companies began to specialize in productions of the genre. In what many saw as an attempt to compete with opera and cross the generic boundaries that separated the two, foreign operetta productions became progressively more lavish and expensive to produce, causing a critic in 1909 to complain that prices were now as high in the venues for operetta as those to attend operas at La Scala: ‘This [Teatro dal Verme] cannot be called a theatre for the people since daily commendator Sidoli promises soirées élite or at least high life … to the poor mob there is nothing left now but … La Scala, at least on the evenings at reduced prices … This is more than ever the world upside-down.’¹⁴ This trend reached a climax with the arrival of so-called ‘silver-age operetta’ and in particular with the premiere of the Italian adaptation of Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe in Milan in 1907. The undisputed success and immediate popularity of La vedova allegra – which received over 500 performances on its first run – sparked lively discussions among critics on the nature of operetta. Writing soon after the premiere of La vedova allegra, critic Marco Ramperti expressed his concerns: ‘This art form is nearing its end … It has become comic opera, choreographic review, musical comedy, féerie, anything but operetta. Actors’ spontaneity is extinct like authors’ originality. Terrasse is the successor of Audran and Lecocq. Dall’Argine is all the riot in Italy. Lehár is acclaimed in the land of Strauss.’¹⁵ When Ramperti published the long article that included this extract in the Gazzetta teatrale italiana, operetta in Italy was certainly not dead. The article was published in June 1907 and La vedova allegra had opened just a few weeks before at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan, taking the city by storm. Indeed, after a slow start and a somewhat lukewarm critical reception, La vedova allegra was to become one of the most successful operettas ever performed in Italy, reviving enthusiasm for the genre, creating expectation for more Viennese operettas and infusing energy in a new generation of Italian composers. Around the same time, the adaptations of works from the previous decades were still going strong, with Sidney Jones’s The Geisha and Franz von Suppé’s Donna Juanita attracting large crowds.

To be sure, Ramperti did not argue that operetta was approaching the end of its journey in Italy. In fact, operetta – both foreign and Italian – was to maintain its levels of popularity well into the 1910s and 1920s. Instead, the article reveals a profound anxiety about the transformation that operetta was undergoing at that moment, particularly the transition from ‘golden-age’ to ‘silver-age’ operetta, as critics already defined it at the time. Operetta was, according to Ramperti, going through an identity crisis because it had lost two fundamental characteristics that kept it always fresh and light-hearted: actors’ spontaneity and authors’ originality. In his argument, the names of Lecocq, Audran and Strauss represent the golden age and appear in sharp contrast to those of Claude Terrasse, Lehár and the Italian Luigi Dall’Argine, whose 1904 ‘grandiose operetta-féerie’ Dall’ago al milione garnered great audience approval.

It is clear that in Ramperti’s view, operetta had lost its comic verve, the caricature effects of the variety show, the improvisation and naturalness of the performers that characterized French and Viennese operettas in Italy during the last quarter of the century. It had, to use an image widely popular at the time, reached its phase of decline, its silver age. Ramperti emphasizes the ‘vulgarity’ of operetta – in the original sense as the entertainment of ‘common people’ – with a heavily gendered comparison with a young licentious girl, dressed in rags and charming just because of her energy and joy:

Golden-age operetta was not concerned, Ramperti argues, with morality and proper behaviour until it was transformed by the ‘censors’ of the bourgeoisie into a grand dame, clad in fake jewels, rich fabrics and the most fashionable dresses. The effect was devastating for the young girl, now ‘unrecognizable’. That Ramperti was thinking about early French operetta is clear also from his next comparison, this time between operetta and the two ‘gamins de Paris’ Friquet and Gavroche:

By wanting to appropriate, tame and ‘moralize’ operetta, the bourgeoisie was now depriving it of its freshness and replacing it by ‘artistic dignity and human propriety’ and the rich and luxurious costumes of one of the most influential men of theatre of the time whose vision changed the history of operetta in Italy, Luigi Sapelli, known as Caramba. Bourgeois values, sentimentality and lack of spontaneity were making operetta dangerously similar to opera, at this time in search of a new identity itself, and this meant the death or at least the decline of the genre.

Some critics, however, did not share Ramperti’s fatalistic position. Giovanni Borelli, writing in Teatro illustrato in March 1907, just weeks before the premiere of La vedova allegra, welcomed the creation of the ‘Compagnia Stabile d’operette’ of Milan that would produce La vedova as the sign of the beginning of a new phase for musical theatre in Italy. ‘La Scala’, he argues, ‘could not give us anything better than this’, referring to the beauty of costumes and sets.¹⁶ What Ramperti saw as the sign of the inevitable decline of operetta – its loss of peculiar characteristics and desire to assimilate elements from the high-opera tradition – was actually for Borelli a reflection of the increasing importance operetta was acquiring on the Italian musical theatrical scene. Among the elements operetta was borrowing from opera, in addition to magnificent costumes and sets, were also an increasing number of singers who were inexorably migrating ‘from the lyric scene to the much disrespected operetta’, ‘a warm and much livelier place’.

And in what seems like a direct response to criticism on the lines of Ramperti’s, Borelli argues that:

Despite their differences, Ramperti and Borelli agree on a fundamental point: the repertory of operetta needed to find a new path if it wanted to survive. ‘One should rather wish that the repertory’, argues Borelli, ‘little by little, could be purified, renewing and aligning itself with a propriety that, in the genre, would not exclude art.’ ‘Neither Paris nor Vienna give us a viable author anymore. Originality, what is that? The simple sparkle of the composers of operetta is something of lost times’, writes Ramperti, pointing to the anxiety that if Paris and Vienna could not offer anything new, operetta was destined to disappear from the Italian stage, thus assuming that Italians would not be able to fill the gap that the demise of French and Viennese operetta would leave. The two articles are emblematic of the two main critical stances around operetta that brewed in the intellectual circles of the late nineteenth century and came to the forefront at the beginning of the so-called ‘silver age’ of operetta. Both articles seem to point to a moment of transition and the need for a renewal for the genre. And a new generation of Italian composers was to take on the task.

Italian Operetta

Not everyone in the early twentieth century saw operetta as a dying genre and La vedova allegra as its swansong. Mascagni, writing in July 1918 about his future plans, reflected on the status of musical theatre in Italy and on the impact La vedova allegra had on the Italian musical scene:

The arrival of a more sensual, romantic, decadent and refined style of operetta towards the end of the nineteenth century, combined with increasingly sumptuous and sophisticated productions and a more established group of singers who specialized in the genre, posed a challenge to the world of opera in Italy, which was undergoing some major shifts in its post-Verdian phase. This opened a new path for the development of Italian operetta. Many opera composers of Mascagni’s generation, including Puccini, Leoncavallo, Giordano and Mascagni himself, had to come to terms with the fact that operetta was no longer the ‘Gavroche’ of the Italian musical theatrical world. But most importantly, they had to come to terms with the fact that the worlds of opera and operetta were sharing more and more characteristics, also as an effect of many of the reforms of opera brought about by the popular verismo movement.¹⁸

One should only think about Puccini’s La rondine, a work that premiered at the theatre of Monaco in 1917 and that divided Italian critics and audiences because of its perceived hybrid nature between opera and operetta, for its apparently light plot and a profusion of ‘international’ dance rhythms including waltz, foxtrot and polka.¹⁹ Or, consider Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Zazà (1900), ‘a mix of opera and operetta’, after which he wrote a number of other similarly experimental works between 1910 and 1919. Looking back at the model of Offenbach’s mythological plots, Umberto Giordano wrote Giove a Pompei in 1921, and, after an early, unsuccessful attempt in 1885 with Il re a Napoli, in 1920 Mascagni wrote the operetta Sì, a more accomplished work on a libretto by Carlo Lombardo. By venturing – more or less convincingly and with more or less conviction – into the world of operetta, Italian composers were now recognizing it as a legitimate product of the Italian musical theatrical tradition.

To be sure, starting in the 1860s, translations of French works had already stimulated an early production of Italian operettas. These combined elements of the French model – frivolous and at times absurd plots, licentious innuendos, the integration of dance rhythms and numbers – with local elements, and particularly the use of dialects, a fair amount of couleur locale, sources inspired by Italian literature and elements of the canzone popolare, relying greatly on the acting and improvisatory skills of its interpreters. In addition to opera buffa and foreign operettas, therefore, Italian audiences could also enjoy works such as El Granduca de Gerolstein by Enrico Bernardi and Cletto Arrighi (1879), a parody of Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein in Milanese dialect, Er Marchese der Grillo (1889) by Giovanni Mascetti in Roman dialect, and Funicolì Funicolà (1921) by Arturo De Cecco in Neapolitan dialect, to mention only a few.

But it was not until the early twentieth century that Italian composers decided to engage with operetta on a more systematic basis. After 1910, companies of operetta proliferated around Italy and also began to export operettas in the Italian language abroad, especially to Latin America, where Italian immigration had already created a market. At this time the number of theatres and venues devoted mostly to operettas – particularly in Milan, Turin, Rome, Naples and Palermo but reaching also smaller centres and provinces – increased and a few periodicals dealing exclusively with operetta were founded. Milanese publishing houses such as Ricordi, Suvini-Zerboni, Sonzogno and Lombardo and the Neapolitan Curci began to sense an appealing financial advantage in supporting the market for operettas. Giulio Ricordi himself – who had played such a fundamental role in the Italian operatic world of the previous years, publishing and promoting the music of Giuseppe Verdi, among others – tried his luck with the composition of an operetta, La secchia rapita (1910), under the pseudonym of Jules Burgneim.

Some of the most successful operettas performed in Italy between the 1910s and 1930s were not truly and completely Italian. At this time of increasing nationalistic and anti-Austrian feeling, many reputedly Italian works were artful adaptations of operettas in the German language, among which were many operettas by Lehár and Kálmán, made more palatable for the audience by disguising them as Italian. Carlo Lombardo, composer, librettist, publisher, impresario, producer but most importantly translator and author of adaptations, owed much of his fortunate and controversial career to his adaptations of such works, which at times were sent on to the Italian stages under his own name, with little or no effort to clearly establish their authorship. ‘Lombardo’s’ La Signorina del cinematografo (1915) was an adaptation of an operetta by Carl Weinberger, and Bruno Granichstadten’s Majestät Mimi became the quite successful La Duchessa del Bal Tabarin (1915) by Léon Bard, one of the pseudonyms used by Lombardo.²⁰

Despite the persistence of Mitteleuropean works and Italian operettas that continued to use them as models, the years during and immediately following World War I saw also the production of arguably the most original and successful Italian operettas. Following upon the successes of verismo operas, these works showed an attempt to return to more realistic and sincere plots, still relying on the couleur locale that had characterized the first Italian operettas of the 1860s. Among them, the works of Giuseppe Pietri, particularly his Addio giovinezza (1915) and Acqua cheta (1920), were hailed as the heralds of the new-born genre of Italian operetta. Together with others such as Il re di Chez Maxim (1919) and Scugnizza (1922) by Lombardo and Mario Costa, and Virginio Ranzato and Lombardo’s Il paese dei campanelli (1923), this strand of operetta ‘forgets champagne, cocottes and viveurs, paillettes and glitter, and talks about seamstresses, students, youngsters full of life, strong and resilient mothers, fathers with a heart full of goodness’ against the backdrop of small and picturesque Italian towns or cities such as Turin, in Addio giovinezza, or Naples, in Scugnizza, vividly painted through the use of Neapolitan melodies.²¹ And, as ‘paillettes and glitter’ and ‘cocottes and viveurs’ are replaced by everyday men and women struggling with mundane reality and honest and simple feelings, the waltzes and csárdás leave room for the more fashionable rhythms of foxtrot, jazz and tango, but also for the melodies and art songs with folk inflections that gave this music a distinctively ‘Italian’ flavour for a nation in need of a new musical tradition and cultural identity.

The decline of Italian operetta coincided with the rise of the rivista, or revue, brought about by those extraordinary performers, in particular the tenors and soubrettes, who had been the main agents responsible for the continued popularity of operettas during the years immediately following World War I. Now able to negotiate more remunerative new positions, first in a growing light-entertainment industry and later on radio and television, many featured also in film versions of the most successful Italian operettas. If Italian audiences also kept a memory of many of these works, thanks to the adaptations that reached their home through the screens of their televisions, Italian critics and musicologists, such as Fausto Torrefranca, continued to dismiss operetta as the inferior form of musical theatre in Italy. The negative connotation of the term operetta became so predominant that during the 1930s and still today the expression ‘da operetta’ is used figuratively to indicate a ‘ridiculous institution, event or personage lacking credibility’.²²

And yet, today this neglect seems utterly unjustified. Operetta played a particularly meaningful role in the Italian cultural arena at a juncture of profound social, political and cultural transformations for the nation, from the creation of a unified Italian state well into the inception of fascism. During these decades, which also encompassed very significant changes in the long-standing Italian operatic tradition, foreign as well as Italian operetta created a stimulating terrain for the articulation of critical discourses about music and national identity, in addition to offering broad strata of society welcome entertainment and an alternative to the increasingly codified operatic canon.

The King of Diamonds

Without Ludwik Śliwiński (1857–1923), who was responsible for operetta productions in Warsaw from 1890 until 1915, the Nowości would literally not exist. For the first ten years of his leadership, operettas were performed in Mały and Nowy theatres, where they had to compete with performances of operas and ballets and other stage shows. Teatr Mały, particularly, was not very good for operetta performances: its capacity was 500, the seats were uncomfortable and the stage was too small.¹⁰ Śliwiński set himself a goal to find a dedicated home for operetta in Warsaw where it could be performed all year around on its own terms. It took eleven years, 350,000 roubles and an investor who, to complete fundraising for the new theatre, found the missing 27,000 roubles somewhere in Russia.¹¹ Of course, the advantage of building a new theatre according to the last word on technology and design was immediately obvious when ecstatic reviews started to pour in. It also meant that operetta productions in Warsaw could successfully compete with those in Europe. The audiences in the Nowości could see all the new works of European operetta, many of which enjoyed enormous success, quickly reaching a hundred performances.

Śliwiński was quick to bring productions from Vienna and Berlin, adapting them for Polish audiences. In his Encyclopedia on the Musical Theatre, Kurt Gänzl often refers to Budapest as the first city to stage foreign-language productions outside Germany. There is no mention of Warsaw, but often it was the first city where German operettas were performed after Vienna. Such was the case with Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe (Wesoła wdówka), Der Graf von Luxemburg (Hrabia Luxemburg), Zigeunerliebe (Miłość cygańska), Gräfin Mariza (Hrabina Marica) and Oscar Straus’s Ein Walzertraum (Czar walca).

Śliwiński was an excellent organizer and director with extensive international networks, using them to promote the work of the theatre by always inviting important people from the industry to general rehearsals and performances. He also programmed operettas by Polish composers, including such works as Noskowski’s Don Kiszot (Don Quixote), Duniecki’s Paziowie królowej Marysieńki (Queen Marysia’s Page, still performed in Poland), and Rapacki-syn’s Pajacyki (Clowns) and Chwila szczęścia (A Moment of Happiness).¹²

Śliwiński was involved in every aspect of the staging: designs, costumes, lighting and stage directing. He also adapted operettas by translating them and writing new texts to suit Polish sensibilities. In fact, during his directorship, it was mainly Śliwiński, together with the two operetta singers and directors, Wincenty Rapacki-syn and Adolf Kitschman (1864–1917), who adapted operettas for Polish audiences. It is even more impressive, then, to learn that between 1910 and 1914 Śliwiński directed seventy-eight operettas.¹³ He livened up operettas with current jokes and parodies, making critics wonder if some of his innuendos and double entendres transgressed the boundaries of propriety, as was the case with Gilbert’s Cnotliwa Zuzanna (Die keusche Susanne).¹⁴ In 1914, Poliński praised him for bringing Die lustige Witwe back to Warsaw in a sumptuous production and for refreshing its beautiful melodies ‘with the aid of technology, extremely carefully and enchantingly presented and directed’.¹⁵ One critic compared Śliwiński’s production of Paul Lincke’s operetta Wenus w Warszawe (Venus auf Erden) to the one he saw in Berlin six years earlier, stating that the Polish version was so great ‘that the director from Berlin should visit us to learn from Ludwik how operettas should be produced. I want to be fair, so I will admit that Berlin’s version was impressive, but ours is amazing.’¹⁶

Śliwiński made the Nowości into a very much-loved institution in Warsaw, an integral part of life in the city and its popular culture. The building and the singers, as well as himself, were even immortalized on a set of playing cards. Only a few well-worn cards remain, on one of which Śliwiński can be seen as the King of Diamonds.¹⁷

The Queen of Diamonds

Of course, as important as the new theatre and its talented director were, they alone would not be enough to create operetta. An integral part of the recipe was the singers, who were also actors and dancers, and who, together with Śliwiński, put on dazzling shows that made them rich and famous.

Wiktoria Kawecka (1875–1929) was one of the most famous operetta performers in Warsaw. The daughter of an employee of the Warsaw Government Theatres, she made her debut on 14 February 1893 in Millöcker’s Student źebrak (Der Bettelstudent). Five years later, she was an undisputed operetta prima donna in Warsaw.

Kawecka achieved fame beyond Poland as both operetta and opera singer and was in high demand as a guest artist in Russia, where she often performed in some of the most prestigious theatres. Her popularity in Russia came in handy in 1909, when she faced her first serious competition from Lucyna Messal, who took her crown as the Warsaw prima donna. Kawecka decided to remove herself from the scene rather than compete with her younger rival, spending almost ten years in St Petersburg, where she had little competition, performing leading operetta roles both in Polish and Russian in the famous Theatre Bouffe.¹⁸ There was even a theatre built especially for her in St Petersburg, called Crystal Palace, where she sang her favourite roles.¹⁹

Kawecka was a gifted singer with excellent technical command. Critics raved about the colour, scale, range and power of her voice, together with her intricate phrasing and range of dynamic nuance, and a particular talent for the artistic whistle. Kawecka’s most successful appearances in the Nowości include the roles in Lehár’s Wesoła wdówka (1906), Jarno’s Krysia leśniczanka (Die Försterchristel, 1909), Oscar Straus’s Czar walca (Ein Walzertraum, 1909), Fall’s Królowa miliardów (Die Dollarprinzessin, 1909), Rozwódka (Die geschiedene Frau, 1909), Sidney Jones’s Gejsza (The Geisha, 1909), Lehár’s Cygańska miłość (Zigeunerliebe, 1909) and Kálmán’s Manewry jesienne (Tatárjárás, 1910). This is how Ludwik Sempoliński described Wiktoria Kawecka at the height of her fame in 1909: ‘Adored by the public, she was called the “nightingale of Warsaw”. Beautiful, with sparkling eyes, with a beautiful voice and acting talent, she also became famous for her ability to whistle, with which she totally charmed the audience during her performances of Wesoła wdówka [Die lustige Witwe], premiered in Warsaw on 16 October 1906.’²⁰ Her voice was so famous that its strength was compared to that of Adelina Patti, and there were even rumours that after her death, American researchers bought her vocal cords in order to find out what made her voice so powerful.²¹ Kawecka recorded for Syrena Records, and some still survive that feature her famous artistic whistle.²²

Kawecka was also nicknamed ‘the queen of diamonds’ because of her passion for collecting diamonds, gifted to her by her many admirers. One of her many devotees was the confectioner Edmund Gwizdalski, who built her a new villa, Versal in Skolimow near Konstancin. It is not surprising that Kawecka managed to open her own theatre Vaudeville in 1921 and could easily afford her expensive hobby: playing roulette in Monte Carlo.

When she died in Warsaw during one of her performances, her fortune was valued at five million zloty (approximately 50 million zloty today, i.e. 10 million pounds or 15.5 million dollars).²³ Kawecka’s grave is a spectacular monument, adorned with a statue which shows her just about ready to walk on to the stage. It was made by a famous Warsaw sculptor Bartołomiej Mazurek (1856–1937). Even one of the most celebrated operetta singers of all times, Richard Tauber, has only a modest grave stone in a London cemetery. Today, one of the streets in Warsaw carries her name.

The Tragic Diva (or Ah, Those Panties)

Kazimira Niewiarowska (1890–1927) was famous not only for her singing but also for her daring performances. She appeared topless, she sang with a live snake around her neck, and she danced a tango on a tray placed on the heads of eight male actors. She also starred in several films with titles as mischievous as her own stage antics: Ah, te spodnie (Ah, Those Panties, 1914) and Kiedy kobieta zdradza meza (When a Woman Betrays her Husband, 1924).

Already famous before World War I, after the outbreak of the war she left Poland and went to work in Russia, where alongside performing she also studied the art of acting pioneered by Nemirovich-Danchenko. The esteemed director even worked with her in his MKhAT (Moscow Art Theatre) studio on several operettas, including the role of Klarette in Lecocq’s Córka pani Angot (La fille de Madame Angot), an operetta given at least 200 times.²⁴

With this valuable experience she returned to Warsaw in 1922, and immediately caused a sensation. Even Lucyna Messal, who reigned in the Nowości during her absence, for a while found herself in Niewiarowska’s shadow. It is not difficult to see why: Niewiarowska brought with her from Russia a number of new approaches to her art, which consisted of considerable risk-taking and crossing the boundaries of what was acceptable on stage at that time. Witold Filler wrote that in one of the performances she smeared her body in various places (including the shoes) with phosphorescent liquid, so-called radian, which she ordered directly from the Folies-Bergère. Such tricks served her well, because they put a great deal of distance between her and the current Warsaw divas, Lucyna Messal and Elna Gistedt.²⁵

In fact, Niewiarowska became known for designing her own stage costumes, creating outfits that showed off the best features of her figure or, indeed, finding ways to show even more flesh than the censors would allow. She called for a nationwide discussion about theatrical reforms, which included the ‘striptease effect’ – specially designed costumes that included see-through dresses made from pink and lilac gauze, adorned with forget-me-nots – and new, daring and sensational press advertisements, which she used on her own programmes, and in her own theatre.²⁶ Chic costumes and risky ‘no-costumes’ in clever and diverse advertisements helped Niewiarowska to conquer Warsaw.²⁷

In 1923 she was even immortalized in the nude, in a painting by one of her contemporaries, the Polish artist Leonard Winterowski (1868–1927). The painting can be found in online gallery records under various titles: sometimes as Akt Aktorki Kazimiery Niewiarowskiej and sometimes as Niebieska wstążka (Blue Ribbon).²⁸ She freely used it on her programmes, causing a wave of excitement in the audiences, particularly the male faction, who opened them as they sat down to enjoy her performances.

In 1925 she founded her own Teatr Niewiarowska in Warsaw, where she appeared for a short while with Wiktoria Kawecka. Having played with metaphorical fire in her adventurous career, she was finally burned by real flames, dying from extensive burns caused by spilt alcohol, which she was using to clean her gown. Her death was even reported in The New York Times.²⁹

The Nightingale of Warsaw

Lucyna Messal (1886–1953) started her career as a dancer, performing in 1904 in Johann Strauss’s Ach, ta wiosna (Frühlingsstimmen). She found success as a singer in the role of Safia in Johann Strauss’s Baron cygański (Der Zigeunerbaron) on 24 March 1909 in the Nowości.³⁰ After that performance she was hailed as a new operetta prima donna of the Warsaw Government Theatres, and the two divas, Kawecka and Messal, performed together, with their first collaboration being Straus’s Czar walca on 22 April 1909. Very soon, however, Messal took Kawecka’s crown completely, forcing her to retreat from appearing in Poland for a decade. Messal became the legend of Polish operetta, adored by the audiences for her beauty and her voice. In her repertoire were more than fifty roles from such operettas as Oscar Straus’s Czar walca and Rozwódka (both 1909), Kálmán’s Manewry jesienne (1910) and Bajadera (1923); Lehár’s Hrabia Luxemburg, Cygańska miłość (both 1910), Wesoła wdówka (1911), Ewa (1913), Biały mazur (1921), Frasquita (1924) and Paganini (1927); Gilbert’s Cnotliwa Zuzanna (1911); and Granichstaedten’s Orłow (1925).

Lucyna Messal, together with Józef Redo (1876–1942), introduced the tango for the first time in Poland on 28 October 1913, in Jacobi’s Targ na dziewczęta (The Marriage Market). Redo was a popular Polish singer, who was nicknamed the ‘king of tango’, and a photograph of Messal and Redo in the tango embrace appeared on many operetta-related publications and postcards (see Figure 15.3). His phonogenic voice made him a very popular recording artist on Syrena records.³¹

Figure 15.3 Lucyna Messal and Józef Redo

Like many of her contemporaries, Messal also recorded for Syrena Records, and appeared in many films. The 1938 film Szczęśliwa trzynastka (Lucky Thirteen) is available on YouTube, where she can be seen in a cameo role as a pianist and singer called Wanda.³² Messal on film provides the link to the past of Warsaw and its operetta stars.

Messal also left Poland at the outbreak of World War I, but unlike Niewiarowska and Kawecka, she came back to Warsaw as soon as it ended and was tumultuously welcomed back by the audiences. She resumed her role of the prima donna of the Nowości, combining it with extensive touring, which took her to the famous stages in Warsaw, Lublin, Lodz, St Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna and Budapest.

In 1929 she opened her own theatre, Operetta Lucina Messal, where she performed with Kazimiera Niewiarowska until Niewiarowska’s tragic death. In the 1930s she was a popular guest artist in numerous cabarets and revues, including the Happy Evening, Hollywood, Chameleon, Prague Eye and 8.15. During the German occupation, she opened her own bar in the centre of Warsaw, opposite the church were Chopin’s heart is said to be kept. She outlived both Niewiarowska and Kawecka by a considerable number of years, cementing her reputation as one of the most prominent operetta singers in Warsaw and Russia.

Should These Instruments Be Allowed to Call Themselves Strings?

The Nowości had its own orchestra of thirty-three players, but it was a dull jewel in the otherwise glittering crown of Warsaw operetta, and many critics commented on its sorry and neglected state. In 1908, for example, the famous Poliński wrote after the premiere of Fall’s Księżniczca dolarów (Die Dollarprinzessin) that ‘instead of a harp, we heard hideous trembling sounds, coming out of such an old clavicembalo’,³³ while another complained that it was a travesty to replace the harp with an instrument ‘to which we cannot even give a name’.³⁴ In 1909 one reviewer called for the theatre to replace the instruments that do not have the right to call themselves strings.³⁵ These criticisms continued for almost ten years, and it is surprising that such an attentive, enterprising and dedicated director as Śliwiński did not improve the state of the orchestra. This could have been the result of the theatre directorate having little interest in offering financial support for the orchestra, since the theatre brought such good income anyway.

But while complaints about the orchestra rained from the critics, there was much praise about one particular person associated with the orchestra, the conductor Anda Kitschman (1895–1967). Also a composer, singer, actress, pianist and director, she was the first female Polish conductor to be educated in Vienna. Kitschman’s father was the previously mentioned Adolf Kitschman, a stage actor, singer, director and author of many Polish adaptations of European operettas. Anda became a versatile musician who was equally respected for her performances of a wide array of music, both as a soloist, accompanist and singer and as a conductor. She was also well known for her cabaret songs, for which she wrote both music and texts that were witty and profound, and which she often performed herself. She translated and arranged operas and operettas and composed her own operettas.

Her strong personality and impeccable work ethic enabled her to hold her own in the field of conducting, where men dominated (and, indeed, still do). She worked alongside other conductors in the Nowości, who included Henryk Lasocki, Wacław Elszyk (as assistant) and Michał Zakrzewski. She was obviously respected for her work there and admired for her good sense of rhythm and ability to bring out the subtlest nuances in the music. Even the demanding Aleksandr Poliński wrote about her talent as a conductor while, together with his colleagues, often criticizing the conducting of her male colleagues.³⁶

To Jest Ostatni Walc … Nowości’s Final Years

When World War I started on 1 August 1914, it was a pre-season time for the theatres, and most of the actors were abroad on tour, including the theatre’s brightest stars Messal, Kawecka, Niewiarowska, Szczawiński, Bielska and Ćwiklińska. Messal, Kawecka, and Niewiarowska all spent the war years in Russia, performing to the adoring audiences there. In Warsaw, theatre repertoires were altered as a result of the new political situation, and the plays became more serious, with more anti-German sentiment. One of the productions reflecting this new mood was the Polenblut, which had to be adapted to suit the demands of patriotic audiences. So, the director concealed its anti-Polish element and gave it some extra ‘nationality’.

In these war years there were only three government theatres active, including the Nowości, and three private theatres: Bagatela, Polski and Wodewil. In July 1915 the Warsaw Government Theatre Directorate ceased to exist, and the Nowości became the property of the artists. Some think that 1917 was the year that brought one of the greatest successes to the Nowości, which also became its last: Kálmán’s Księżniczka czardasza clocked up one hundred performances in one season. Widespread impoverishment, higher taxes and competition with other theatres which, perhaps, catered more to the patriotic mood of the nation, did not help the operetta at that time.³⁷

In July 1921 the cast was disbanded, and the theatre was moved to another building, the former Marywil Street Theatre on 5, Bielańska Street, at that time under the management of the Capital Theatre Society. The era of stability was over, and between 1921 and 1932 Nowości changed management and names several times, being called Metropolitan Operetta Theatre, Messal-Niewiarowska Theatre and Orpheum. The troupe included new singers: Stanisław Gruszyński, Adam Bodosz, Waleria Markowska and Olga Orleńska. The directors who led the theatre during its final years included Władysław Szczawiński and Wasław Julicz. Finally, after numerous changes in management and name the theatre was closed in 1932.

Afterword

It might easily be argued that British, American and German operetta of the early twentieth century became absorbed into the modern Broadway musical. Less persuasively, perhaps, twentieth-century ballad operas, such as Ethel Smyth’s The Boatswain’s Mate (1916) and Vaughan Williams’s Hugh the Drover (1924), might be seen as precursors of the modern musical that relies on existing songs, such as Mama Mia! Most difficult of all, however, is to decide what befell comic opera. When this term is taken to be synonymous with ‘light opera’ or ‘operetta’, a case can also be made for its having been absorbed into the modern musical. Problems arise when ‘comic opera’ is intended to suggest a kinship with the high-art status of operas such as Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro or Verdi’s Falstaff. Vaughan Williams must have had this kind of distinction between art and entertainment in mind when he labelled Sir John in Love a comic opera, but The Poisoned Kiss, which he called a ‘romantic extravaganza’, has been described as an ‘uncertain cross between operetta and musical comedy’.⁴⁵ High-status comic opera does not appear to have survived into the second half of the century with any degree of strength, despite the success of Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring in 1947, and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1951. Coincidentally, each of those years saw the premieres of two acclaimed productions in the West End that could be labelled operettas: Ellis’s Bless the Bride and Novello’s Gay’s the Word. After this, the descriptions ‘comic opera’ or ‘operetta’ for new stage works became a rarity.

‘Operetta is dead! Long live the operetta!’ This is how Hans Herbert Pudor, a Nazi director for operetta at the theatre of Breslau, cheered in an essay of 1937. He was convinced by the efficiency of the purges in the repertoire that occurred after 1933, making it clear with lofty words: ‘Dead is the operetta that dangled insubstantially on a string of a revue-plots, for the purpose only of a magnificent setting, paired with the exhibition of more or less titillating female amenities.’ In general, Pudor fought against the modern type of revue-operetta, with its glamour and eroticism, and generally rejected it as ‘non-German’. But significantly, he was not able to point to an alternative for the future of the genre: on the contrary, in his essay he criticized two central strategies that defined new operettas in the Third Reich, when he declared both as failed: new chauvinistic operettas and works that ‘crank out operetta with rural folk motifs’.¹ However, this leads to an aporia: Pudor knows what he does not tolerate on operetta stages – but he does not know what he should tolerate instead.

Today two questions remain: what was operetta in the Third Reich really made of, and was the genre really as dead as claimed? An investigation into operetta between 1933 and 1945 must adopt three different approaches: first, the Nazi ‘fight’ against a genre widely condemned for ideological reasons; second, the Nazi aim to create a new ‘German operetta’ to replace an ostracized repertoire; and third, how theatre practice really reacted to political orders.

In fact, the Nazi political censorship of operetta should not be underestimated: nearly the entire genre was condemned as non-German for both artistic and ideological reasons. Mainly it was simply the regime’s blind racism that classified the genre’s tradition as Jewish: nearly every artist was accused of being a Jew, whereas not everyone saw himself or herself as Jewish by religion or culture. This culminated in the use of the term ‘degeneracy’, which led to Nazi purges in the repertoire. Significantly, it was not possible to justify the accusation of degeneracy by examining the operettas themselves; instead, it had to be motivated by invectives against single artists. A list of banned works dated 1 September 1935 exemplifies this. It was signed by Hans Hinkel as Director of the Reich Culture Chamber – but even if it was directed against certain ‘musical works’, it remained merely an amateurish brainstorming exercise around the names of suspicious composers, who were supposed to be Jewish.² It was not possible to defame their work by reference to technical quality.

Another prime aspect of the Nazi fight was against the dazzling aesthetics of the modern revue-operettas of the twenties: modern show concepts were condemned as an artistic reminiscence of the detested Weimar Republic – and its commercial style was declared as characteristic of Jewish business behaviour. Certainly, this verdict stands against the very nature of operetta itself: the aesthetics of popular musical theatre are cosmopolitan, dealing with the questions of its time by reflecting the mentality of the audience. The quest for financial success has always been part of the background of every new piece, and so the Nazi counterattack had to question the genre itself.

A law dated 22 September 1933 established the so-called Reich Chamber of Culture, with its several chambers designed to embrace the entirety of cultural life in Germany. Every artist had to be legalized by being registered in his specific chamber. Thus, the system became a perfidious instrument for dejudaization, because not being registered in a chamber resulted in an occupational ban. A little later, the ‘Theatre Law’ from 15 May 1934 empowered Joseph Goebbels as the Reich Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda to fully control the schedules of plays: now the minister was able to order or to hinder play performances by law. It was realized in practice by the Reich Drama Adviser Rainer Schlösser (1899–1945) who, with his staff of the Reich Dramaturgical Bureau (which was integrated into the Propaganda Ministry), promulgated a system of censorship in the theatre business. Nevertheless, their claim that they would renew the operetta schedule immediately was not easy to realize: traditional operettas remained indispensable for the commercial situation of the theatres – and their repertoire could not be easily changed. This led to the paradoxical situation in which, after 1933, so-called non-German operettas remained on stage until 1935. From that year on, the Reich Dramaturgical Bureau intensified the restrictions on Jewish operettas – but, even then, Schlösser and his staff took care not to provoke a crisis concerning the economic basis of the genre.

This led to a system of pragmatism and double moral standards: because there were not very many Aryan composers left, it became necessary to idealize the genre’s tradition, mainly the Viennese operetta of Johann Strauss Jr, Carl Millöcker, Franz von Suppé and Carl Zeller. They were declared to be the incarnation of typical German artists – until it was discovered in 1938, that Johann Strauss, whose name was used to replace Jacques Offenbach as the founder of operetta in Nazi theatre history, had to be declared an ‘eighth-Jew’. It was Goebbels himself who decided to ‘forbid to make that public. Because firstly this is not proven and, secondly, I am not in the mood to excavate the entire German cultural heritage.’³ So, this fatal detail was erased in the Viennese archives as well as in the related parish register.

It was much easier to erase non-German librettists: the Reich Music Editing Office (Reichsstelle für Musikbearbeitungen), established on 1 May 1940 under the lead of Heinz Drewes (1903–80) and Hans Joachim Moser (1889–1967), took charge of changing plots and details in librettos, as demanded by daily politics. Many operettas were meant to be saved for the market after having their non-German style excised. However, in many cases it sufficed simply to keep quiet about the Jewish texts of popular works – such as those of Franz Lehár, a composer widely known for being the Führer’s favourite. Hiding the names of undesirable collaborators became an easy trick.

Such was the case with Fritz Löhner-Beda, who was vilified for being a Zionist but, on the other hand, created wonderful, indispensable verses such as those for Das Land des Lächelns (The Land of Smiles) of 1929. This operetta was given in the Vienna State Opera on 30 April 1940, on the occasion of Lehár’s seventieth birthday, with Hitler in the audience. Löhner-Beda and his colleague Ludwig Herzer were not mentioned on the playbill; in fact, Herzer was already in exile, while Löhner was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, still hoping that Lehár could save him. He was murdered in Auschwitz, probably on 4 December 1942.

Many important artists had to suffer: Léon Jessel for example, the composer of the smash hit operetta Schwarzwaldmädel (The Black Forest Girl) of 1917, was declared Jewish, although he saw himself as a German nationalist – and even sympathized with the Nazi regime. He died after being tortured by the Gestapo on 4 January 1942. Some artists succeeded in finding exile just in time: Paul Abraham, Emmerich Kálmán, Leo Ascher, Robert Gilbert, Bruno Granichstaedten, Robert Katscher and Oscar Straus, for example. Ralph Benatzky and Robert Stolz left Germany by choice. Other important operetta experts tried to hold out: Edmund Eysler, for example, survived in a hiding place in Vienna; the librettists Béla Jenbach, Victor Léon and Julius Wilhelm attempted the same but died before 1945.

In the meantime, ‘German’ artists used the opportunity to fill the gap: many of them did that for both economical and ideological reasons. The problem was that they had no clue how to define an original German operetta in a way that would not be bound to the old standards, which were widely banned for being Jewish. Nazi cultural politics knew exactly what to stand against but did not how to define alternatives. There was not a single hint on how to freshen up the genre in an official Nazi way. Going back to the polemics of Hans Herbert Pudor at the very beginning of this chapter, two central ways can be seen of how to conceive a new German operetta after 1933. On the one hand, there was an urge to use heroic and patriotic subjects and, on the other, an inclination to deal with homebound, often rural subjects, which came close to the Nazi ‘blood-and-soil’ ideology. It has to be pointed out that those concepts were usually motivated by an attitude of ‘self-ideologization’: composers and librettists worked strategically to succeed – or even to survive – under the new political conditions after 1933.

The first way was taken exemplarily by the Austrian composer Heinrich Strecker (1893–1981), who succeeded with his new operetta Ännchen von Tharau (1933), which reached over 4,000 performances by 1973. After the war, Strecker declared himself a non-political artist – but that is imprecise, in view of his activities from 1934 on as a cultural leader of the initially forbidden Austrian National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), which even led to his imprisonment in May 1936. Ännchen von Tharau, created with the librettist Hans Spirk (1897–1966), must be rated as a highly ideological attempt to, in his own words, ‘awaken the old, German musical comedy’.⁴ This leads to an operetta paradigm inspired by the genre’s nineteenth-century tradition but now enriched with typical ‘German’ slogans as the publisher claimed: ‘German emotional life, militant attitude and fidelity between friends pervade the piece in ever-new variations.’⁵

The plot is a very romantic, free interpretation of how the old folk song Ännchen of Tharau by the German poet Simon Dach might have been invented. In the operetta, Dach and his best friend Johannes Portatius are in love with the same young woman. In the end, Dach will subdue his feelings because he appreciates ‘fidelity between friends is higher than love’.⁶ Johannes Portatius in turn tries to forget Ännchen by joining the army – like Sandor Barinkay in Strauss’s Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron). In the time that follows, Portatius succeeds in becoming a distinguished commander – and finally wins Ännchen’s heart, of course – while Simon Dach attains a professorship that suddenly cures him of his lovesickness. Before that, however, the operetta takes place in a military camp. There, patriotic and heroic scenes are drawn, reminiscent of Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy or Heinrich von Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg). Of course, this is contrasted with the comical situations necessary in operetta: it is the comical character Schnerzlein, an incompetent Saxon soldier, who provokes absurd situations. All the more, Johannes and his very own ‘devil squadron’ appear as a soldier’s ideal, which also came close to Nazi requirements. But this does not make Strecker’s operetta an innovative piece at all: this kind of military romanticism was part of the genre’s tradition since the aforementioned Gypsy Baron and reveals nothing but the fact that operetta is always adapted to its time: it does not create politics but reacts to them by dealing with varying established dramaturgical standards. Yet, that was not how to define a brand-new Nazi ‘German operetta’; so, instead, Strecker merely picked up some very old standards and used them to please the regime.

In fact, the open ideologization of operetta subjects by dealing with everyday politics was taken up by artists who wanted to succeed in the regime even by adopting its ideological beliefs. Librettist Hermann Hermecke (1892–1961), who claimed to have developed a new kind of Nazi operetta, exemplifies the strategy of combining artistic and political ambitions with strong commercial interests. Today, Hermecke is primarily known for his collaboration with the composer Nico Dostal. Together they developed pieces like Monika (1937) or Die ungarische Hochzeit (The Hungarian Wedding) of 1939. Those special pieces remained in the genre’s tradition without dealing with daily politics; in fact, they celebrated escapism on stage and, of course, were used to fill the gap that opened up because of the Nazi purges: Monika could easily replace Jessel’s Black Forest Girl just as The Hungarian Wedding replaced Kálmán’s Gräfin Mariza (Countess Mariza). What is more, Hermecke was proud of his collaboration with the composer Arno Vetterling (1903–63) because both were proud members of the Nazi party. Together they wanted to show that ‘operetta that apparently only serves for entertainment, could be culturally effective in its best sense’: ‘If operetta were to be banned totally from the repertoire, people would lose an efficient instrument for an extensive cultural influence on the entire nation – apart from the economic consequences.’⁷ Hermann Hermecke’s and Arno Vetterling’s operetta Die Dorothee, developed in 1936 and published by the publishing house of the NSDAP, Eher Nachf., serves as a striking example of how to serve the regime by conceiving a new piece dealing with everyday politics.

The plot is set in Transylvania and was meant to show the battle between brave German immigrants living there under hard conditions, longing for their state, and the Romanian villains who act against them. There is Dorothee Werner, who owns a little farm in Transylvania, but becomes indebted to a cruel Romanian farmer called Radu Milescu, who appears as a drastic ‘non-German’ incarnation of chauvinism and sexism. His counterpart is a young, elegant and – of course – German hussar, called Klaus Engelberg, who arrives to teach Dorothee about thrift and patriotism. But the young lady does not accept Klaus’s lessons in ‘speaking German to her’!⁸ Dressed as a simple maidservant, she tries to demonstrate her autonomous rural ability to work – and provokes a romantic disaster when Klaus falls in love with her. A dispute occurs during the finale of Act 2. For a short time, the intrigues of the Romanians seem to work, until even the church elder of the village warns Dorothy: ‘Your farm is German! It has to remain German!’⁹ But, naturally, the operetta comes to a happy German ending: Klaus and Dorothee succeed against the Romanians – not least because of the intrigues of the comical character, a patriotic Saxon called Bemmrich, who served under Lt Engelberg and finally helps to trick the Romanians.

The staging of this operetta demonstrates the art, adornment and traditions of Germans in Transylvania. That is why Act 2 is set during a rural celebration, featuring Transylvanian wine as well as old folk songs and, finally, an original Transylvanian cudgel-dance, performed by the farmers. Unsurprisingly, Hermecke claimed the originality of those elements: costumes and dances were fixed in a detailed production book, because as ‘old cultural assets they have to be rehearsed without a slight deviation’.¹⁰

Dorothee was premiered on 18 April 1936 in Fürth, and during the season 1936–7 it really succeeded on stage, becoming the fourth most important operetta of the year, with around 603 performances.¹¹ Yet it has to be said that this success ran short and was restricted to the provinces.

Hermecke, himself, wished to see his work realized in the metropolis, but he failed: even if the publisher thanked him ‘for supporting our arduous fight for appropriate works in German operetta literature’,¹² the Reich Dramaturgy Department came to the conclusion, ‘for fundamental reasons, it sadly is not possible to give you an explicit certificate for the operetta Dorothee that could be used for advertising purposes’.¹³

Internally, operettas had not been rated as the perfect vehicle to promote daily politics. So the musical consultant of the leadership of the Volksbund for Germans Abroad voted against Dorothee because ‘given the present seriousness of the actual situation of the Germans abroad, it does not seem to be advisable to campaign for an operetta’.¹⁴ In the end, the work was suspected of plagiarism. It was Rainer Schlösser who came to the conclusion that ‘Hermecke’s Dorothee has indeed a very extraordinary similarity in its plot to Dichter und Bauer (Poet and Farmer) by Gustaf Quedenfeldt and Eugen Rex. This is admitted by all those involved.’¹⁵ Thus, the self-declared ideological innovation of Hermecke and Vetterling that was meant to be a very German operetta was nothing but a counterfeit.

In general, the German audience did not favour heroic, chauvinistic or even rural subjects after 1933. Those pieces may have succeeded in the so-called provinces, but Nazi politics did not have the power to change common tastes in popular musical theatre. In fact, audiences were used to the dazzling standards of the Roaring Twenties, and the audience of the capitals – Berlin and Munich – did not suddenly abandon their taste for erotic dance displays in favour of a liking for Hermecke’s original cudgel-dances. Operetta, serving as an indicator of public taste of the time, may exemplify that there was a gap between official ideology, given by the potentates, and the wishes of a still powerful audience that was able to preserve – or even endanger – theatres through its spending power. That’s what politics had to react to: Joseph Goebbels did not have the power to force stage successes. In fact, the audiences had to be seduced by the regime.

Besides, potentates themselves had been quite bourgeois admirers of operettas – and they also preferred the non-German erotic revue style for cheering up their private life. It should be pointed out that the leading operetta playhouses of the Reich did not promote new operettas that tried to support the regime with open politics. Another strategy was chosen: the audience of the metropolis was confronted with a mock liberality; the regime appeared to openly tolerate modern shows with outlandish glamour. In Berlin, it was Heinz Hentschke (1895–1970), who ran the famous Metropol-Theater as the most prestigious venue for new operettas between 1934 and 1944.¹⁶ And in Munich it was Fritz Fischer (1898–1985), who established the aesthetics for the Gärtnerplatz Theatre, which opposed every theoretical claim for German operetta. Fischer almost succeeded in both satisfying the audience and enchanting Adolf Hitler, who greatly admired these shows, even though (or because?) they were made up of elements that had originally been banned for being Jewish across the entire Reich.

‘He let artists dance nude for the Gauleiter’: such was the headline of an epitaph published in 1985 for Fritz Fischer, who had been director of Munich’s Gärtnerplatz Theatre between 1938 and 1944. In fact, Fischer’s artistic style seemed to be diametrically opposed to the ordered aesthetic in Nazi Germany: ‘Outrageously for this time, he let nude stars climb out of giant champagne glasses’¹⁷ – as in his staging of Strauss’s Die Fledermaus on New Year’s Eve 1939. Fischer’s work took a tendency in Nazi theatre practice to an extreme: he created a dazzling counter-world to the cruelty of everyday life between 1933 and 1945. This illustrates the contradictions between official cultural politics, as dictated by the rulers, and the ordinary standards of theatre practice with its well-tried formulas for success, which took inspiration from American revue standards and maintained the established routines of the ‘Roaring Twenties’. It can also be shown that this kind of double moral standard was important for the Nazi claim that they influenced the mood of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, and that was much more important for Goebbels and his staff than openly dealing with everyday politics on operetta stages.

Fritz Fischer, born on 16 July 1898 in Backnang, studied acting, ballet and singing before he had his first successes between 1923 and 1928 as manager of the German Theatre in Milwaukee. There he was introduced to American revues – at least by studying the legendary shows of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. He used to claim that Ziegfeld once stuck a red carnation in his, Fischer’s, buttonhole, thus declaring him his successor.¹⁸ He returned to Germany in 1928 and earned his first successes with his decidedly transatlantic art of staging. After 1933 it was the Munich Gauleiter Arthur Wagner who was attracted by Fischer’s so-called ‘Speed-speed-revue’ 1002 Nights that had been developed for the famous Scala in Berlin and also had an acclaimed guest performance in Munich. After seeing the show in 1937, Wagner tried to hire Fischer for the Gärtnerplatz Theatre, which had just been punished for its alleged lack of quality. In 1937, the private theatre had been nationalized on Hitler’s demand and reopened with a brand-new production of Die Fledermaus, known to be the Führer’s favourite piece.

Nevertheless, the new staging of Carl Ehrhart-Hardt embarrassed Hitler, who left the opening night during the interval. Now Wagner needed a quick success and tried a new beginning with Fischer, who became director of the Gärtnerplatz Theatre from 1 May 1938. It was a risk whether or not Hitler, whose conservative taste for operettas was well known, would accept Fischer’s new style, but the new production of The Merry Widow in 1938 pleased both Hitler and Goebbels: The propaganda minister wrote in his diary that the ‘set is awesome and tasteful … The performance itself has an adorable peppiness. We are all very enthused.’¹⁹ Fischer frequently loved to tell people that Hitler soon declared the new revue standard as ‘the only way to do operetta today’.²⁰ But this way stood against every claim for a traditional ‘German operetta’, such as Hermecke had attempted with his Dorothee.

Fischer chose a completely different way: usually, for no significant reason, he split the original operettas into thirty-three scenes, something that was to become his trademark. Those scenes were altered significantly, and the structure of the original plots was not strictly followed. A single musical number could be defined as a single scene or even an interpolated sketch lasting only a few seconds. So, Fischer’s stagings became almost post-dramatic revues, full of attachments and even circus elements. In 1939, for instance, Die Fledermaus was ‘arranged in 33 bouquets’ (Sträusse!): the first scene was set in heaven, where Fischer’s superstar Johannes Heesters, dressed as an immortal Johann Strauss, conducted a heavenly orchestra, playing the famous overture. Fischer did not hesitate to give that orchestra a very jazzy sound – a touch, that was usually heavily criticized for being ‘non-German’ in Nazi cultural politics. In the end, the show culminated in a ‘musical prison’ that became more or less a bunch of revue scenes, featuring artists like the famous Munich comedian Karl Valentin, who created the role of Frosch by improvising entertaining numbers. This was all completely against every pronouncement about German operetta – but the audience loved it! The show became a smash hit in the entire town; all performances were sold out, and spectators queued for hours to get in.

It is clear that Fischer served as an important underling for a regime that ordered distraction during the war. On the other hand, his success was condemned by line-toeing Nazis: it was a Munich music professor and idealistic member of the NSDAP called Gottfried Rüdinger (1886–1946) who wrote an exemplary pamphlet to the Reich Music Chamber, condemning what he saw in 1940: ‘The whole thing looks like a Jewish warehouse which offers a few tempting items alongside worthless and gaudy goods.’ What confused Rüdinger the most were the erotic aesthetics of Fischer’s staging: ‘I could speak and write seriously about the tradition of “beauty dances” in recent years, but it will suffice to hint at the battle that the party and its press fought, before and after the Nazis came to power, against this unwholesome practice that damages the German nation’s natural sense of morality.’²¹ Indeed, Fischer supported nudity and even burlesque elements on stage: he became popular for displaying nude women and men in his artistic as well as his infamous private life. Sex served as a spectacular effect that was much more attractive to the German audiences than propagandist plays about military successes or the rural life of orthodox German patriots. So, Fischer helped the regime to narcotize the Volksgemeinschaft, and, after the war, it was easy for him to continue his career because his style did not look like Nazi propaganda. He produced his thirty-three-pieced shows in German theatres long into the seventies.

Popular theatre has to be regarded as a mediation of the mentality of the people who pay for it. That is why operetta may give a glimpse into everyday culture, even under a dictatorship. Fischer’s success, therefore, is not as paradoxical as it may seem: it typifies the contrast between official ideology and ordinary life praxis in the Third Reich. Nevertheless, modern revue-operettas served as a corrupting gift – working to enchant and manipulate the mood of a Volksgemeinschaft that had to be managed every day. Propaganda minister Goebbels knew that; he literally had to ‘buy’ the acceptance of the Volksgemeinschaft by offering apparent continuity of the glitter of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ on operetta stages.

During the war, this brilliance served as distraction and relaxation. That is why established formulas, originally condemned as ‘non-German’, survived on stage after 1933; they were necessary because neither a single ideologist nor Nazi artist had any clue about how to develop a new kind of Nazi operetta. It may be impossible for a functional genre to become a victim of time – because it just embodies its time. The operettas of National Socialism, however, may illustrate two things: first, the difference between theoretical politics and the daily culture in Nazi Germany; and, second, the striking impotence of the regime’s cultural politics – and political artists – to develop something new.

An old and well-known anti-Semitic accusation levelled at ‘Jewish’ artists is that they are unable to develop original art by themselves but, instead, are parasites who steal the inspiration of others. It is symptomatic of National Socialism that this old allegation had to be inverted to define operetta between 1933 and 1945: it was the Nazis who behaved as cultural parasites when they banned the so-called ‘Jewish’ operetta tradition, because they filled the gap with replacements full of stolen ideas.

The Nazi essayist Hans Herbert Pudor, whose words opened this essay, serves as an example of the absurdity of operetta in the Third Reich: Pudor claimed that the genre should present original, ‘modern words, thoughts and rhythms’ after 1933.²² Yet he had no clear vision about how to do this. Pudor dared to proclaim the ‘death of the genre’, but he did not know anything about its possible resurrection. It demonstrates the rift that National Socialism created in the development of the genre: the Nazis actually did not have the power to kill the genre, but they let it die.

At the beginning of the chapter, I should distinguish between two meanings in which the label ‘operetta films’ is used: one refers to film adaptations of stage works and the other to operettas specially created for the medium of film. To avoid confusion, whenever I refer to a screen operetta, it will be the latter I have in mind. Most of this chapter will, however, be concerned with film versions of stage operettas. For reasons of space, I am concentrating on American, British and German films. It would be unpardonable not to mention Trois valses (1938), the film of the French version of Oscar Straus’s Die drei Wälzer, starring Yvonne Printemps and Pierre Fresnay. Yet, even in this case, I must add that its director, Ludwig Berger, had many years of experience in the German film industry and had previously enjoyed much acclaim for his silent film of an earlier Straus operetta, Ein Walzertraum, in 1925.

Berlin and Hollywood were not dissimilar in their approach to musical films. There had been links between the industries of both countries even before the Nazis drove many German-Jewish film directors to seek employment in the USA. As in the UK and USA, German films were, at first, short music-hall or vaudeville attractions. In the early days of motion pictures, it was common to regard the medium of film as second best to the stage. However, in the 1920s, the case for the independent artistic status of film was already being made. Cultural historian Egon Friedell argued that film had areas of activity and effects that were subject to its own generic laws (eigentümliche Gattungsgesetze); moreover, he believed it was the art form that represented contemporary times most clearly and completely.¹ This chapter offers an overview of operetta films, and reveals how star singers, such as Richard Tauber, responded to the dictates of film, which sometimes ran counter to stage performance practice.

Even before the advent of sound, there were film adaptations of operetta. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s (MGM) first film of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, which appeared in 1925, was silent. It was directed by Erich von Stroheim, who departed considerably from the operetta and devised what would now be called a ‘backstory’ of the widow as an American ex-vaudeville performer who arrives in the small kingdom of Monteblanco and goes to Paris later. Lehár’s music was arranged by William Axt and David Mendoza. The film has some erotic content, showing scantily clothed dancers at Maxim’s restaurant and featuring a love scene on a bed in a chambre séparée with half-naked blindfolded musicians playing in an alcove. John Gilbert is Danilo, and Mae Murray the widow. There was, of course, music to be heard while the silent film was being shown; larger cinemas had orchestras, and scores were specially put together to accompany films. It was exciting, no doubt, to watch such films to the accompaniment of musical excerpts but not so thrilling as in the 1930s, when audiences flocked to cinemas to both see and hear screen stars. Films of that decade also offer valuable historical insight now into vocal practice and performance technique. In addition, they contribute important knowledge to our understanding of adaptation. The absence of singing in silent film versions of operetta did affect the way operetta was later adapted for the screen. There was always a tendency to have more dialogue than music, and there was often a desire to locate musical numbers in a context where they might plausibly have occurred. The music, when it was heard, however, often differed to some degree from that in the stage work because it was usually rearranged by a composer specifically employed for the making of the film.

The Jazz Singer (1927), starring Al Jolson, is frequently cited as the first ‘talkie’ or sound film,² but it remained silent in large parts, and the accolade of the first musical film with continuous sound goes to MGM’s Broadway Melody of 1929, directed by Wesley Ruggles. The first German film with sound throughout was Der blaue Engel (1930), directed by Josef von Sternberg, and starring Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich. The first screen operetta was Zwei Herzen im Dreivierteltakt (1930) directed by Géza von Bolváry. The screenplay was by Walter Reisch and Franz Schulz, and the music by Robert Stolz. Apart from setting a trend for title songs, it relied too much on older models to be influential, even though they were given a modern polish. Perhaps that is why, although it began life on screen, it was soon adapted for the stage, as Der verlorene Walzer (1933).

In September 1930, the major German film company Universum-Film, better known as Ufa, released another film that had sound throughout, a screen operetta directed by Wilhelm Thiele called Die Drei von der Tankstelle.³ Although the title, ‘The Three from the Filling Station’, might seem unexciting, it proved to be Ufa’s most commercially successful film of the 1930s. The days of the Weimar Republic are often associated with an outpouring of unruly behaviour and hedonism preceding the establishment of the authoritarian Third Reich in 1933. However, this film offers more than dance, song and frivolity. The humour is infectious, and the three best friends who are rivals for the hand of the wilful young woman (played by Lilian Harvey) finally resolve their differences amicably. It is the end of the film that is most surprising because it reveals that Bertolt Brecht was not alone in his ideas about breaking frame in dramatic representations nor in his desire to remind audiences of the mechanics of construction of representational forms. After the apparent happy conclusion, the stars of the film step through theatre curtains and react with sudden surprise, as if seeing the ‘real’ audience in the cinema staring at them. They wonder why no one has gone home because the show is over. Then they realize that the audience wants a proper operetta finale and will only then be satisfied that the film has ended. In the later twentieth century, this kind of self-referentiality and exposure of the means by which a narrative code, dramatic meaning and illusion are constructed would be termed ‘postmodernism’.

Not everyone was ready to applaud operetta films, however. Siegfried Kracauer argued that analysing German films of 1918–33 reveals ‘deep psychological dispositions’ that ‘influenced the course of events during that time’.⁴ He accused most operetta films of the early 1930s of romanticizing the past and representing an enchanted Vienna with gentle archdukes, tender flirtations, baroque decors, Biedermeier rooms and customers drinking and singing in suburban garden restaurants. Psychologically, he claimed, it had the effect of suggesting such people presented no threat.⁵ He recognized that Die Drei von der Tankstelle did not fit this mould, but it was still to be mistrusted because of its escapism: it was a ‘playful daydream’ that shifted ‘the operetta paradise from its traditional locales to the open road’.⁶ Instead of perceiving the innovative way in which music and sound is used in this film, he complained that the score was eccentric and full of whims, that it interfered with ‘the half-rational plot’, and he gave the example of a waltz that invites the workers who are clearing out the friends’ unpaid furniture ‘to transform themselves into dancers’. Even the clever use of the sound of the heroine’s car horn – an imaginative example of turning noise into a leitmotiv – does nothing but attract his scorn.⁷

Ufa was created in 1917, and although it was to absorb other companies, it did not enjoy any kind of monopoly. Nonetheless, it was the only serious European challenge to Hollywood, and Ufa’s international success lay firmly in operettas and comedies. Versions were often shot in three languages: German, English, and French, Die Drei von der Tankstelle being an example. The music to that film was by Werner R. Heymann, who was also the composer for Ufa’s Der Kongreß tanzt, released in 1931. Once more, the star was Lilian Harvey, who had been born in London to a German father and English mother. On the strength of the acclaim he had received for his revue operettas at the Großes Schauspielhaus, Berlin, Erik Charell was engaged as director, and he immediately established himself as one of the most skilful directors of operetta on film, making use of Carl Hoffman’s unusually flexible camera movement to demonstrate how camera mobility and sound film could work together. The lengthy scene in which Lillian Harvey travels through the wood by carriage and is greeted by singing onlookers caused a sensation and was much imitated.⁸ This film also had the services of the influential set designer Walter Röhrig, who had created the expressionist sets for Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920). Being of Jewish descent, Charell’s career in Germany came to an end in 1933; it was, however, resumed after World War II.

Three original screen operettas were released in 1931: Die Privatsekretärin, with music by Paul Abraham; Ronny, with music by Emmerich Kálmán; and Die große Attraktion, with music by Franz Lehár. Lehár was to compose another two screen operettas during the Weimar years (as well as seeing film adaptations made of three of his stage operettas: Das Land des Lächelns, Friederike and Der Zarewitsch). Abraham had first made a name for himself with music for film in 1929. In the later film of his operetta Die Blume von Hawaii (1933), spectators were given sight of what was an unattainable destination in the Depression years. For people who could not afford to travel anywhere, it must have been exciting to see palm trees, the sea hitting the rocks and so forth brought to life on screen. A halfway house between stage operetta and screen operetta was Die 3-Groschen Oper (1931), directed by G. W. Pabst, with Theo Mackeben as musical director. It omitted a lot of Kurt Weill’s music, but it was common for German films of the 1930s to include four or five numbers only. Lotte Lenya played Jenny, Carola Nehr was Polly and Macheath was a non-singing role played by Rudolf Förster. In Pabst’s film, there is non-mimetic delivery of songs by characters, most strikingly ‘Seeräuber Jenny’ sung by Lenya. Her blank expression operates as a mask, and its effect is to force a critical position on to the viewer, something Brecht constantly strove for in his epic theatre. At the same time, the film credits make clear that the screenplay is a free adaptation of Brecht, and not his stage play. In the film, for instance, there is a burglary at the large London department store Selfridges, absent from the original play.

Film was a hugely popular medium in Weimar Germany, and cinema numbers grew in this period from 2,000 to 5,000.⁹ It was a similar story in Britain: by February 1930, there were 1,000 cinemas wired for sound, and at the end of 1934 over a thousand cinemas had a capacity of between 1,000 and 2,000 seats, although cinema numbers themselves exceeded 2,000 only in the mid-1930s.¹⁰ German films lost a lot of talented people as a consequence of Nazi ‘racial purity’ laws (Rassenreinheit Gesetze). Richard Traubner cites the publication of lists in the 1930s that were designed to reveal how strong the Jewish influence was on German cinema: one list claimed 45 per cent of film composers and 48 per cent of film directors had a Jewish background.¹¹

From 1933 on, Jewish artists began to be omitted from film credits. The Ufa film of Die Csárdásfürstin, directed by Georg Jacoby, was a huge box-office success in 1934 but made no reference to its Jewish composer Emmerich Kálmán or its Jewish librettists Leo Stein and Béla Jenbach. Hans-Otto Borgmann is credited for the musical adaptation, and Jacoby, along with Hans Zerlett and B. E. Lüthge, for the script (Figure 18.1). However, the star was Marta Eggerth, whose mother was Jewish. It was soon found necessary to replace Jewish singers. Fritzi Massary was associated with recent leading stage roles in Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will and Der letzte Walzer but did not appear in the films of those operettas. The next step was to remove ‘Jewish music’ and rewrite ‘Jewish lyrics’, as happened in Carl Lamac’s film of Im weißen Rössl (1935).¹² Finally, persecution of Jews increased to the extent that even a famous singer such as Eggerth had to flee Austria for New York in 1938 (the year of the Anschluss).

Figure 18.1 Film cast of Die Csárdásfürstin. Illustrierte Film-kurier, Vol. 16, 1934

In Georg Jacoby’s remake of Die Csárdásfürstin (1951), his wife Marika Rökk played Sylva Varescu, and Johannes Heesters was Edwin von Weylerheim. Both singers were admired by Hitler and suspected of being Nazi sympathizers. However, when secret intelligence documents were declassified in February 2017, there was a surprising revelation about Rökk: they revealed that she had been, in fact, a Soviet agent.¹³

During the early 1930s, it is interesting to see the impact on performers when they move from a theatre stage to a film studio and are faced with a camera instead of a live audience. There are some significant differences between theatre and film: in the theatre, the whole space of the action is seen, but the spectator’s position and angle of vision is fixed. Béla Balázs observes that, in film, four new devices take over: a scene can be broken into several shots, the spectator can be given a close-up, the angle of vision can be changed and montage can be used.¹⁴ In film, the camera does the focussing. Moreover, there is a need to consider the editing of shots, for example, the speed of change from one to another. There was a range of conventional shot positions in the 1930s, the most common being the long shot, the mid-shot (often used for two actors in the same scene) and the close-up (head and shoulders). The relationship of the performer to the camera was important. If the performer sang to camera, it emphasized the performance act, breaking with naturalistic illusion. There were many differences between working to camera and working with a live audience. In a theatre, a performer could turn unexpectedly to a section of the audience in any part of the auditorium. Film-makers liked to edit shots; they did not like a performer suddenly deciding which camera to speak to.

In many cases, screen adaptations of operetta were far from being filmed versions of the original stage production: the music of more than one operetta might be included, and the dialogue and narrative might change. About thirty British films made in the 1930s leaned heavily on operetta from the German-language stage, and the fondness for this genre may have been partly motivated by the thought that there was a possibility of good returns from the European box office. British International Pictures’ (BIP) Blossom Time of 1934 was a notable success, and even Alfred Hitchcock tried his hand that year with Waltzes from Vienna, an adaptation of Walzer aus Wien (which had music of the Strauss family arranged by Erich Korngold and Julius Bittner).

Blossom Time cost BIP much more than its other films, owing largely to the expensive sets and crowd scenes.¹⁵ It was an adaptation of Schubert melodies by G. H. Clutsam and was a screen operetta that differed from his earlier Schubert operetta Lilac Time, which was based on Berté’s Das Dreimäderlhaus. To add to the confusion, it differed also from Romberg’s Broadway adaptation of the latter as Blossom Time, which is why the film was given the title April Blossoms in the USA. The director, Paul Stein, was Viennese but had worked for five years in Hollywood.¹⁶ The cast included the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber, hero of many a Franz Lehár operetta, and the most famous star to work for BIP at that time. Blossom Time was a triumph commercially as well as being well received by the critics and encouraged BIP to follow up with My Song Goes Round the World, another film starring a famous tenor, this time Josef Schmidt. The coloratura soprano Gitta Alpár, who had started her career with Budapest State Opera and then joined Berlin State Opera, can be heard in I Give My Heart (Wardour Films, 1935), which was based on The Dubarry (Theo Mackeben’s adaptation of Carl Millöcker’s Gräfin Dubarry). She fled the Nazis in 1933, first to Austria, then to the UK and USA because of her Jewish heritage.

Famous singers of the stage were not always quick to adapt to the medium of film. An examination of the scene in Blossom Time in which Tauber accompanies himself on piano singing ‘Once There Lived a Lady Fair’, reveals that his mimic and gestural signs are in accord with operatic performance practice, and contrast with the naturalistic code adopted by the members of the drawing-room audience in the film. His gestures are theatrical, whereas theirs are economical. Variety remarked backhandedly of his acting in this film that it was ‘surprisingly good – for a world-famous tenor’.¹⁷ Jane Baxter, cast in the role of Vicki Wimpassinger, the object of Schubert’s affection, was a glamorous film star of the 1930s and was careful to adopt the restrained mimetic code of cinema (having already appeared in several films). Tauber is first and foremost a celebrated singer. Shots are intercut showing details of dramatic significance, such as the emotional impact his performance is having on his audience. We gauge their reactions from the use of montage, which presents us with a sequence of different shots from which we interpret what is going on and build a picture of the whole (an idea of the space of the room, for instance). In one sense Tauber’s audience ‘stands in’ for us, the viewers of the film, since we have no presence in a film equivalent to that which we enjoy in a theatre.

British and American operetta films, when compared to German films of the same era, add to our insight into performance style and technique, dramaturgical practice, musical priorities and cultural values. British and Dominions Film Corporation released a film in 1933 of Noël Coward’s Bitter Sweet, starring Anna Neagle and Fernand Gravey. Another film of this operetta was released by MGM in colour in 1940, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Coward described the second film as ‘dreadful’ and claimed it prevented him from ever being able to revive Bitter Sweet (adding, with his customary humour, that it was a pity, because he had been ‘saving it up as an investment’).¹⁸ Mister Cinders (1934), with music by Vivian Ellis (from his stage musical), was produced by BIP shortly after Blossom Time, but it is noticeable how much more smoothly the musical numbers are integrated into the film, and, under Frederic Zelnik’s direction, how at ease the singers now appear in front of the camera. A film version of Ivor Novello’s spectacular Drury Lane operetta Glamorous Night (1937) was directed by Brian Desmond Hurst at Elstree Studios and featured two Americans in the leading roles, singing star Mary Ellis and matinee idol Otto Kruger. Its popularity encouraged Associate British Pictures to plan films of Novello’s next operettas, but a financial crisis hit British films in 1938, and war broke out the next year.¹⁹ It was not until 1950 that the company released a film of The Dancing Years, directed by Harold French and produced in colour. Dennis Price played Rudi, Gisele Preville was Maria, and Patricia Dainton was Grete. The success of the film rivalled that of the acclaimed theatre production.

In the USA, German director Ernst Lubitsch, whose family was Ashkenazi Jewish, was making his mark in musical films, the first being The Love Parade (Paramount, 1929), with Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier. They also starred in his film One Hour with You (1932, music by Oscar Straus). In The Merry Widow (MGM, 1934), Chevalier played Danilo, and MacDonald was Sonia (Hanna). The screen play was by Ernest Vajda and Samson Raphaelson. The name of the Ruritanian country was changed to Marshovia, and fresh lyrics were provided by Lorenz Hart (uncredited), with some additional lyrics by Gus Kahn. The musical adaptation was by Herbert Stothart, aided by orchestrators Paul Marquardt, Charles Maxwell and Leonid Raab. Herbert Stothart was a composer, arranger and musical director for MGM in the 1930s. He had plenty of Broadway experience and had worked with Vincent Youmans and Rudolf Friml before his involvement in an early sound film adaptation, released in June 1930, of Golden Dawn, a Broadway operetta composed by Kálmán to an English text. A month earlier that year, another early MGM sound film had been released, based on a loose adaptation of a Lehár operetta (Zigeunerliebe); it was The Rogue Song, directed by Lionel Barrymore and Hal Roach (uncredited). It starred Catherine Dale Owen, Lawrence Tibbett and, perhaps unexpectedly, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

As the Depression began to lift in the USA in 1934, Hollywood producers took renewed interested in Broadway and sponsored many plays there. At the end of the 1935–6 season, however, Hollywood producers (such as MGM, who had backed productions by Max Gordon and Sam H. Harris) took umbrage at the provisions in a new contract made between play producers and the new Dramatists’ Guild-League of New York Theatre. It divided the money paid for rights to a play into 60 per cent for the author and 40 per cent for the producer, and even if a film producer had financed the play, the film rights were still to be offered in the open market.²⁰ There was an inevitable reduction in interest from Hollywood. Perhaps, at this point, it would be helpful to draw upon Vivian Ellis’s neat distinction between a film producer (such as Samuel Goldwyn in Hollywood or Erich Pommer in Berlin) and a film director: the producer assembles the picture, and the director shoots the picture.²¹

Lubitsch’s Merry Widow had won many admirers but was not a huge box-office success, and that prompted MGM to seek a change of partner for MacDonald. Nelson Eddy was soon found.²² MacDonald and Eddy were first brought together in Naughty Marietta (1935; based on Victor Herbert’s operetta), which was followed by Rose-Marie (Friml, 1936). Their third film together, and their biggest success, was Maytime (Romberg, 1937), directed by Robert Z. Leonard. Their film partnership continued until 1942.

The Austrian film director Arthur Maria Rabenalt commented on the various advantages possessed by screen adaptations over the stage originals: complicated intrigues could be edited in a way that made them more credible, awkward scene changes could become lither, and characters could be made more convincing by making certain dramatic situations more visible.²³ Another way of removing stage rigidity in screen adaptations was to reduce the quantity of music and be flexible about the sequence of an operetta’s musical numbers. In films, means were usually found to moderate the affront to realism when characters suddenly feel a compulsion to sing.

Three short examples can be given to illustrate some of the variety in the practice of adapting from stage to screen. In the film The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), based on Oscar Straus’s Ein Walzertraum (1907) and directed by Lubitsch, the adaptation is designed to help the American audience recognize itself in the imported operetta, which had placed much emphasis on the charms of Vienna. In the Viennese stage version, in order to help a foreign princess to win the affections of the Austrian lieutenant, Franzi (the vivacious leader of a women’s orchestra) has to teach her about what makes Viennese women so attractive: it is their lively temperament. She also encourages the princess to cater for the lieutenant’s delight in other Viennese pleasures, such as food. In the film, Franzi proffers advice of a rather different character: she plays the piano and sings a ragtime song: ‘Jazz up your lingerie’. The next time we see the princess on screen, she is playing syncopated music at the piano with a cigarette dangling from her lips. It is clear that her behaviour now resonates with the bold, emancipated American city woman of the 1920s (the original operetta belongs to 1907).

Sometimes adaptations could entail complete reworking. In the film of The Chocolate Soldier (1941), the adapter faced a difficult challenge. Bernard Shaw had given permission (with a high degree of scorn) for the original German libretto to be based on his play Arms and the Man. However, he now refused to allow his work to be used in a film unless he was paid a substantial sum. MGM refused and, instead, went ahead, retaining Straus’s music but commissioning a new screenplay from Leonard Lee and Keith Winter based on Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman.

In Maytime, there was an opposite state of affairs. The Broadway stage version of Wie einst im Mai in 1917 had jettisoned Walter Kollo’s music, and Rida Johnson Young had adapted the libretto by Rudolf Bernauer, Rudolf Schanzer and Willy Bredschneider for a fresh score by Sigmund Romberg. In the film version, much of Romberg’s score was itself discarded, and replaced by interpolated numbers. Maytime was a film triumph, however, and revealed that audiences enjoyed a tear-jerker as much as a song and dance show. Unfortunately, it appeared in 1937, the year in which Hollywood lost its interest in adapting stage entertainments because of the new contractual conditions. Perhaps that was why so little use was made of the Romberg score and why the musical director, Herbert Stothart, chose to include public-domain music that did not require payment of copyright fees.

In Germany and Austria, the 1950s and early 1960s witnessed the halcyon days of Heimat films (homeland films). These films became a celebration of forests, mountains and dirndls. They had a nostalgic appeal in their emphasis on wholesome and supposedly traditional values lived by honest folk overcoming adversity in idyllic rural locations. The Heimat film is often confused with the Bergfilm (mountain film), but the latter had a simpler plot, usually involving an accident and rescue. Remakes in colour of old films were popular in the 1950s. The taste for the Heimat film was initiated by Schwarzwaldmädel (The Black Forest Girl) of 1950, directed by Hans Deppe, which was the first German colour film to be released after World War II. Remarkably, it was the fourth time a film had been made of this operetta. The script was by Bobby Lüthge, who kept the same characters and plot but moved the period of action to the present – although that did not preclude the wearing of traditional Black Forest costumes. The scenery is of serene landscapes unspoiled by war. The conciliatory mood of the film made it enormously appealing, and it engendered a succession of Heimat films.

The influence of the 1950 Schwarzwaldmädel is felt in the 1952 film of Im weißen Rössl, despite Charell’s contribution to the screenplay. Jazzy songs are gone. The intervention of the Emperor Franz Josef is no longer an ironic twist on the crisis-resolving power of the deus ex machina but is, instead, presented seriously. It was a marker of what was to come: in the 1960 film directed by Werner Jacobs, all traces of the frivolity, mischief, camp and caricature of Charell’s original revue operetta – the features that lent it a tone of social critique – had vanished. Although its re-orchestrated score now reveals its age, it remains the most popular version of Im weißen Rössl, largely because of the presence of Peter Alexander, who sang in popular films, then operetta adaptations and, later, became a TV presenter.

Die Försterchristl (Christel the Forest Ranger) first filmed in 1926, had been remade in 1931, and was remade in black and white in 1952 and in colour in 1962. The 1952 Die Försterchristl, which starred Hannerl Matz and was directed by Arthur Rabenalt, was admired for having the romantic comedy touch associated with Lubitsch. The operetta, with music by Georg Jarno, was set just after the 1848 revolution in Austria and Hungary. Eighteen minutes into the 1962 version of Die Försterchristel [sic], there is a surprising interpolated number. It is British composer Ronald Binge’s Elizabethan Serenade, arranged for a chorus, who greet the arrival of the Kaiser and Countess Elisabeth. It had been a hit tune in Germany in the early 1950s. Oskar Sima plays Leisinger in both Försterchristl (1952) and Försterchristel (1962). These two films have many scenes in common; it is almost as if the film company Carlton simply wished to remake it in colour so as to do justice to the Austrian landscapes.

There were, all the same, non-homeland films made during this period, one of which was of Oscar Straus’s operetta Der letzte Walzer (1953), directed by Rabenalt. The screen adaptation is by Curt J. Braun, but Julius Brammer and Alfred Grünwald remain credited for the libretto. There is also interpolated music, and Robert Gilbert and Fritz Rotter are credited for the lyrics to the songs of the interludes, the music of which one assumes is by Straus. The composer is shown conducting the Bavarian Symphony Orchestra at the beginning of the film, while the credits roll, although the musical director for the film was Bruno Uher.

Operetta had a final flowering on television, and one of the pioneers of TV operetta was Kurt Wilhelm, who was fond of big production numbers. Television production was often a hybrid of stage and screen practice. Studio sets resembled stage sets, but the changing camera angles are indebted to film.²⁴ The German television company Beta, founded in 1959, became interested in operettas in the 1960s and was able to produce them with a budget beyond the affordability of Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) and Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF; Austria).