8 - Operetta and Cosmopolitanism

Summary

Cosmopolitanism involves a taste for cultural products of other countries and requires a disposition of openness towards new cultural experience. Like jazz, operetta appealed to people from different cultural backgrounds. This chapter examines operetta from the perspective of both the social and the aesthetic. It explores the social conditions that allowed operetta and its cultural networks to flourish, but also seeks to explain what is cosmopolitan about the stage works themselves, in their musical style and dramatic content. A cosmopolitan genre is one that is open to international musical influences, as European operetta demonstrated when responding to jazz and dance band music. A diasporic cosmopolitanism forms another dimension of the art world of operetta. A diaspora may make great efforts to retain cultural traditions but can also assimilate other cultural knowledge and practices. Operetta involved a large number of Jews working in all aspects of its production. By engaging with culture across borders of all kinds, cosmopolitanism challenges ideas of Self and Other. To be cosmopolitan is to recognize a common humanity in the world’s diverse cultural artefacts.

The pleasure of operetta was linked to a cosmopolitan appetite that developed with modernity. Indeed, the growth of cosmopolitan consumption can be related to capitalist enterprise in the nineteenth century. As early as 1848, Karl Marx was announcing, ‘the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … The individual creations of individual nations become common property’.¹ In the rise of operetta as a cosmopolitan genre there was a mixture of social factors in which the political economics of consumption played a significant role. The expansion of a middle class with disposable income that could be spent on leisure pursuits was crucial to the success of operetta. What is more, the increased facility of communication and travel in the early twentieth century began to erode partisan feelings of locality, even before globalization, migration, and nomadic citizenship worked to change the way people conceptualized their relationship to others.

The consequence of a loss of partisan attachment to the local is not that culture becomes consumed in the same way in different countries, and this is evident in the various revisions made during cultural transfer and exchange. The local plays as much a part in cosmopolitanism as in globalization. Cosmopolitanism involves a taste for cultural products of other countries and requires a disposition of openness towards new cultural experience,² but it also calls for the sense of recognition of the Self in the Other. I am not convinced that the uncritical consumption of food, drink, or music should be so readily dismissed by Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande as ‘banal cosmopolitanism’.³ I am more drawn to Ryan Minor’s phrase ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ and his suggestion that cosmopolitanism can sometimes be interesting precisely for being an unmarked category.⁴ The English diner who loves Indian curry because it is delicious, and not because it is exotic, is, in effect, consuming the foreign as a local pleasure, and this represents something more remarkable than a banal act. The next step is to adapt the imported culture to local preferences. Remaining in the world of curry, an example is the addition of masala sauce to the Indian dish chicken tikka in order to satisfy a Western taste conditioned by eating meat with gravy. It is a similar process that I argue can be found in the adaptation of German operetta for Broadway and the West End, and also in the readiness with which German operetta assimilated American features in the 1920s.

The production and reception of operetta relate to many of the themes that have emerged in recent years concerning the meaning and character of cultural cosmopolitanism, such as the development of non-national affiliations. Cosmopolitan theorizing is a means of addressing the new challenges that sociology faces in the twenty-first century, when, as John Brewer puts it, ‘the very notion of society and “the social” is under challenge from globalization and fluid mobilities and networks of exchange that render the idea of social structure irrelevant’.⁵ In fact, fluid mobilities and networks of exchange can be found emerging in the previous century, through the cultural transfer of operetta. In the twenty-first century, it is jazz, pop music, and film that tend to feature in accounts of cosmopolitan taste, but operetta was a forerunner.

Operettas replaced the dialect dramas in Vienna’s commercial theatres as the desire to export operetta internationally increased.⁶ Like jazz, operetta appealed to people from different cultural backgrounds, offering them opportunities for participation as both listeners and creative artists. Max Schönherr, a conductor who was engaged at the Theater an der Wien and the Wiener Stadttheater in the 1920s, recalled that, while new productions of operettas were ‘not always met with critical acclaim’, they were nevertheless adored by people from a diverse array of ethnic and social backgrounds.⁷ Theatres on Broadway and in the West End recognized themselves as cosmopolitan spaces, and sometimes advertised themselves as such (Figure 8.1). Those working in the theatre profession were well aware of the cosmopolitan circles in which they moved, and that was true both on and off stage (Figure 8.2). This concluding chapter examines operetta from the perspective of both the social and the aesthetic. It explores the social conditions that allowed operetta and its cultural networks to flourish, but also has words to say about the stage works themselves, seeking to explain what is cosmopolitan is their musical style and dramatic content.

Figure 8.1 Cosmopolitan pleasures advertised at the Empire Theatre, home to the London premiere of Künneke’s Love’s Awakening in 1922 and Lehár’s The Three Graces in 1924.

Figure 8.2 Advertisement for the Cosmopolitan Club in Rupert Street, The Stage Year Book (1914), xlix.

Operetta’s character as a cosmopolitan genre became ever more pronounced in the first decades of the twentieth century, and this raises important questions about cultural transfer and exchange. My use of the term ‘cosmopolitan genre’ is intended to indicate that it established itself as an artistic form that was particularly accessible to people of differing cultural backgrounds. To be cosmopolitan does not rule out a local dimension: a cosmopolitan genre has an identity that relates to place but is not constrained by place. The Viennese waltz retains an element of Vienna, just as reggae includes an element of Trenchtown, Jamaica, but, at the same time, these genres belong to the world. Long before jazz and syncopated dance music became cosmopolitan pleasures, the waltz and polka had found their way around the globe, and the cosmopolitan consumer found nothing odd about a Cockney song or an African-American song in waltz time. To give a couple of examples among many, there were Cockney waltz songs such as ‘Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green’ and African-American waltz songs such as ‘Goodnight, Irene’. An example of a Cockney polka is ‘Immenseikoff’, and an ‘African polka’ can be found in Dobson’s Universal Banjo Instructor of 1882.⁸

Not all musical forms exhibit the mixture of local and cosmopolitan found in the waltz and the polka. The Ländler, for example, carries a firm identity as an Austrian genre, just as the Scottish identity of the Strathspey remains fixed. Both of them can, of course, give pleasure to the cosmopolitan consumer, but they are not cosmopolitan genres. When uprooted and planted elsewhere they remain strongly marked by place, just as a dirndl bears a stronger reference to place than a Viennese ball gown. A local cultural artefact must be accessible to change if it is to become part of a cosmopolitan culture. A cosmopolitan genre is one that is open to international musical influences, as European operetta demonstrated when responding to jazz and dance band music.

It is not coincidental that social dancing and stage entertainment developed a cosmopolitan character in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where to be patriotic was to be supranational – to feel commitments extending beyond the national. Austria-Hungary, created in 1867 with a dual monarchy, was an empire of many nations and religions. Vienna became the cultural centre of the Habsburg Empire, and that meant a transcultural and intercultural city, where there was cross fertilization of cultures as well as interaction between cultures. It is undeniable that nationalist sentiment gained ground in the later nineteenth century, but there remained plenty of politicians with an international outlook in the first two decades of the succeeding century.⁹ What is more, those involved in creating operetta for the German stage were from a broad range of countries, which would now give them the national identities of Croatian (Suppé, Albini), Czech (Benatzky, Fall, Nedbal), Slovak (Lehár), Polish (Millöcker, Hirsch, Kollo), and Serbian (Abraham), in addition to Austrian, German, or Hungarian. The international outlook they espoused was shared by composers born in Vienna itself, such as Oscar Straus, who declared ‘I have never been homesick anywhere, and if there is such a thing as a world citizen, then I am one’.¹⁰

Transcultural Networks

German operetta of the early twentieth century became part of a transcultural entertainment industry that built upon the international success in the 1890s and 1900s of musical comedies transferring from London’s West End to continental Europe and North America, as well as to countries with various ties to the British Empire, such as Australia, Canada, Singapore, and South Africa.¹¹ Entrepreneurs in the East also bought rights from Broadway producers: Maurice E. Bandmann, whose head office was at the Empire Theatre, Calcutta, commanded the ‘Exclusive Eastern Rights’ for professional and amateur performance in India, Egypt, Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Japan, and these rights covered Klaw and Erlanger’s stage entertainments as well as those of George Edwardes.¹² Operetta’s status as a cosmopolitan art world is evident in the transnational networks it created, and in the border-crossing lifestyles and mixed nationalities to be found among its orchestral musicians,¹³ star performers, composers, book and lyric writers, translators and adapters, stage directors, music directors, music publishers, scenic and costume designers, technicians, carpenters, theatre managers, entrepreneurs, producers, agents, photographers, and, of course, record companies.¹⁴ As an illustration of this transnational art world, we might glance at the list of those involved in the West End production of Fall’s The Girl in the Train in 1910. Its producer was born of Irish parents, its composer was Austrian Jewish, its librettist Polish Jewish, its translator and adapter English, its costume designers Italian and English, and its hat designers French.

A diasporic cosmopolitanism forms another dimension of the art world of operetta. A diaspora may make great efforts to retain cultural traditions but can also assimilate other cultural knowledge and practices. Operetta involved a large number of Jews working in all aspects of its production. A Jewish artist may form multiple attachments: to a country of birth, to other countries where friends and relations perhaps once lived, and to friends and relations who are not Jewish. To imagine that German Jews did not think themselves German, or that they were all strictly committed to Orthodox Judaism, was to fall prey to Third Reich propaganda. The term ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’ has been used to describe those who have a strong attachment to a community but readily interact with others and demonstrate cultural openness.¹⁵ The 1930s were marked by social upheaval and migration, in which displaced persons (many though not all of them Jewish) began to affect the course of European culture. Two of the preeminent stars of operetta, Fritzi Massary (Jewish, but Protestant by religion) and Richard Tauber (Jewish, but Roman Catholic by religion) both found it necessary to flee Germany.¹⁶

Adding to the frictions between those who felt multiple attachments and those immersed in blood and soil ideology was the increasing international presence of Americans. With what ethnicity were the many Americans born of immigrant families to identify? From the middle of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth, New York held the largest German-speaking population of any city other than Berlin and Vienna.¹⁷ Then there was the question of whether or not America possessed a national music. The music that characterized America for audiences in Europe was marked by African-American stylistic features, and this had been so since the popularity of blackface minstrelsy in the nineteenth century. The threat of such music for European national musical styles surfaces in Kálmán’s Die Herzogin von Chicago (1928) in the cultural clash between the csárdás and the Charleston. Moreover, in the early twentieth century, Yiddish culture was thriving in New York and was, for many Jews, a form of high culture (its decline can be dated to the outbreak of the Second World War).¹⁸ Finally, there was the political challenge of American republicanism. The threat that wealthy American industrialists posed to an impoverished European aristocracy is satirized in Fall’s Die Dollarprinzessin (1907).

Before the First World War, operettas for the German stage were being created with an ambition to achieve success not only on the wider European stage but also around the globe. That ambition returned as soon as war ended, and, to achieve it, an English version was important. The principal reason international success was sought was for the immense profits that ensued, but a wider social and cultural impact was evident in the transnational affiliations formed between composers, performers, and producers. These affiliations are what make the national narratives of traditional music historiography ill-suited to twentieth-century operetta. Berlin was often an intermediary between Vienna and London: Len Platt and Tobias Becker remark that ‘success in what many saw as the definitive modern metropolis was often a prerequisite for transfer to London and/or Paris’.¹⁹ The networks that facilitated these transfers indicate for Platt and Becker the existence of ‘a cosmopolitan culture crossing traditional national boundaries’.²⁰ George Edwardes was, in the words of one of his contemporaries, ‘as well known on the Continent as in London’, travelling there frequently ‘in search of new musical plays’.²¹

Operetta, as a transnational genre, required widespread copyright protection for business to flourish. The Berne Convention, discussed in Chapter 3, had an important role to play in stimulating the European entertainment business and building the confidence of transnational financial institutions.²² Those involved in the business of music aimed at a global market. This had been true of nineteenth-century music publishers and it was equally true of the burgeoning record companies of the twentieth century. A mixture of the transnational and the local is evident in marketing strategy. Martin Stokes remarks that in the twentieth-century record companies ‘became the dominant institutional site of global musical exchange’,²³ but well before this the larger urban theatres played a major role in cultural transfer and exchange.

Modern Urban Culture

Prominent among the social conditions underpinning the development of operetta as a cosmopolitan genre was the flourishing market for cultural goods in the modern metropolis. The cosmopolitan and the metropolitan share similarities: the German adjective weltstädtisch can, for instance, be translated as either metropolitan or cosmopolitan. Operetta carried an image of glamour, sophistication, and modernity that appealed to urban sensibilities. The sense of spatial difference between city dwellers in one country and those of another had been diminishing rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the social experience of cities, especially of metropolises, grew more similar from nation to nation, urban recreational activities could be disseminated from one city to another with ease. Theatres contributed to the construction of what it was to be urban, fashionable, and cosmopolitan; they did not cater passively to urban style. A cosmopolitan culture must, of necessity, possess transnational qualities, an ability to adapt flexibly to modification as it crosses borders. I have argued that, in the nineteenth century, the metropolis became the site of cultural transfer and exchange on a scale previously unknown.²⁴ A musical consequence of this transfer of cultural goods was that a new concept arose of popular music as a cultural commodity serving a global market, rather than music that sprang from a nation’s soil, was intended for local ears, and circulated in the blood of a particular ethnic group.

During the process of modernity, sociocultural features developed that were recognizable to residents of most large cities. Because of this, urban dwellers in different countries found that they experienced a material environment that had much in common with that in another city. In the early twentieth century, there were new forms of social relations that gave rise to two coexisting forms of cosmopolitanism. One was shaped by the presence of immigrants whose cultures and languages were unfamiliar to existing residents. Arthur Ransome described the streets of London’s Soho in 1907 as ‘always crowded with foreigners’, many of whom were artists, poets, writers, actors, and musicians.²⁵ The cosmopolitan character of operetta appealed to many Jewish creative artists who had sought opportunities in the city, and their contribution to this genre is substantial. The other form of cosmopolitanism was characterized by what Richard Sennett calls the ‘dynamic of difference’, which was embodied in the bureaucratic mechanisms of capitalism, especially the division of labour.²⁶ Georg Simmel argued that the metropolis gave rise to distinct forms of mental life, and it is to be noted that his focus was on cities in the plural (Grossstädte) and not on the role a metropolis might play as a national capital city.²⁷ His analysis of the social and cultural life of cities offers an alternative to arguments focusing on the development of a national culture.

The Stage Yearbook of 1914 commented of Gilbert’s Die keusche Susanne, ‘this class of piece seems to suit the taste of the “big”, city public’.²⁸ It is an observation that recognizes commonalities in metropolitan cultures. It might be noted, too, that there is nothing nationalistic about the sinful city of Mahagonny in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.²⁹ Mahagonny demands nothing more of its citizens than the possession of sufficient money to buy the pleasures it sells. The clash of national and metropolitan desires is present in Die lustige Witwe, the stage work that launched the Silver Age of operetta. Its music underpins the dualism between small rural nation and modern metropolis, as Micaela Baranello has set out clearly in a table in an article on the operetta.³⁰ The hero, Danilo, has abandoned his homeland for the pleasures of Paris. Moreover, it is romantic love, not patriotism, that provides his motivation for marrying the wealthy widow and, thereby, saving his country’s national bank from economic collapse.

In tandem with these new material conditions, a new cultural environment arose, encouraging the development of a cosmopolitan disposition open to a variety of cultural experience, rather than an appetite for cultural uniformity (or, for that matter, conformity). One manifestation of this disposition was what might be called ‘cosmopolitan eating’. Italian restaurants had already opened in nineteenth-century London, and Richard D’Oyly Carte engaged the celebrated French chef Auguste Escoffier at the Savoy Hotel, where he created pêche Melba for the diva Nellie Melba in 1893. Menus from around the globe became increasingly available in early twentieth-century London. The West End’s first Chinese restaurant opened in 1908, after Chung Koon, who had worked as chef on the Red Funnel Line, married an English woman.³¹ It was named Maxim’s, perhaps after the Parisian restaurant made famous in The Merry Widow. London’s first Indian restaurant, the Salut e Hind, opened in Holborn in 1911. The cosmopolitan appetite for food extended to other areas of consumption. In this respect, modern department stores proved influential: Selfridges, which opened on Oxford Street in 1909, had reception rooms for French, German, and overseas customers, and was proud of the cosmopolitan range of goods it made available. It also sometimes acted as supplier to operetta productions.³² It is not coincidental that Theodor Adorno, with his typical mixture of insight and waspishness, explained that the massive appeal of Die lustige Witwe throughout Europe could be compared to the success of the first department stores.³³

Cultural Transfer

The production and reception of operetta defies any adequate explication in nationalist terms, and is better conceived of as a historically important example of the shaping of a cosmopolitan disposition, both social and aesthetic. Its study, therefore, provides an alternative to the methodological nationalism that has dominated so much musical historiography. Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider have criticized such methodology for subsuming society under the nation-state and have called, instead, for a methodological cosmopolitanism that investigates border crossings and other transnational phenomena.³⁴ In the early twentieth century, nothing was crossing borders with the same speed as the music of operetta. Stefan Frey cites the experience of a captain of the Belgian army in 1909, who, entering a traditional-looking restaurant in Beijing was surprised to hear the resident musicians strike up the ‘Merry Widow Waltz’.³⁵ The next year, another captain witnessed a performance of Die lustige Witwe in a hotel by the Zambesi to which an extra train brought farming families from Northern Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe).³⁶ In that year alone, this operetta clocked up 18,000 performances in ten different languages.³⁷

Scrutinizing international organizations, entrepreneurs, agents, cultural institutions, and communications media, requires the development of a methodology that avoids rigid top-down thinking. Martin Stokes advises that focusing on musical cosmopolitanism, rather than musical globalization, ‘invites us to think about how people in specific places and at specific times have embraced the music of others’.³⁸ He notes that it has the advantage of restoring ‘human agencies and creativities to the scene of analysis’, because music becomes part of a process ‘in the making of “worlds”, rather than a passive reaction to global “systems”’.³⁹ It turns our attention to the many knowing and deliberate acts of cultural transfer and exchange.

As noted in Chapter 2, the music of operetta was rarely altered to suit any new location or modified in any significant way, although it was often supplemented with additional numbers. It was not just the presence of syncopated songs and tangos that indicated a transcultural musical dimension to German operetta; the various musical style-types function as codes that signify emotions or moods in different ways – ways that relate to the sociocultural context in which those styles developed. The Viennese waltz was a well-established style for signifying love and romance, but a romantic or erotic mood could also be achieved via the newer style of African-American syncopation, or the Argentine tango. Then, there is the incorporation of ‘jazz’ styles that may connote place but do not necessarily connote a nation. By the end of the 1920s, African-American styles were regarded in Berlin as belonging to ‘an international musical vocabulary’.⁴⁰ This is the reason jazzy elements are not found out of place among the Alpine scenery of Im weißen Rössl. The presence of this variety of signifying practices is why operetta can be called cosmopolitan in a musical sense, in addition to the cosmopolitan attributes it displays in subject matter and reception.

Ethnic identity is rarely presented as exclusive. It may have been the strong rustic character to much of The Merry Peasant, the West End version of Fall’s Der fidele Bauer, that caused a critic to describe it as ‘somewhat old fashioned’.⁴¹ It opens with a song containing yodels and is marked with traditional Austrian music features elsewhere. However, when Austria becomes spectacle – as in Benatzky’s White Horse Inn (Im weißen Rössl) – it is fine to open with yodels (just as it was acceptable for Rodgers and Hammerstein to include a yodelling song in The Sound of Music). Nevertheless, there is no glib contrast to be made between the experience of the reality of the Salzkammergut and the stage representation. Certainly, people went to Wolfgangsee in droves after watching White Horse Inn, but most placed themselves in the care of businesses who were selling tourism as a form of leisure-time consumption (see Chapter 7, Figure 7.4). Thus, the sublime became intermingled with the banal, for, as Guy Debord remarked, ‘[t]he economic organization of visits to different places is already in itself a guarantee of their equivalence’.⁴²

The operetta stage was certainly geographically diverse. MacQueen-Pope asks, apropos of Lehár: ‘Is there any composer of musical plays who has drawn his subjects from so many lands and cities? Vienna, Paris, Alsace, Hungary, Russia, the Balkans, the Alps, Italy, Spain, Tangiers, the Far East … ’⁴³ What is more, it is not unusual for a country to change during the course of an operetta (Belgium to France in Eva, Spain to France in Frasquita, Austria to China in Das Land des Lächelns). Lehár is not alone in this regard; Paul Abraham’s Viktoria und ihr Husar, for example, moves between Siberia, Tokyo, St Petersburg, and Hungary. This complicates the simple binarism of Self and Other (or Us and Them) that is found in Orientalist works. In twentieth-century operettas there is a multiplicity of Others rather than a simple East/West binarism. The Other may be the Dutch girl or the American tycoon, and the environment of the Other might be the French Riviera or the Austrian Salzkammergut. The lack of anti-Semitism in operetta may be owing to the number of Jews involved in its creation, from composers and librettists to performers and impresarios (for example the Shubert brothers in the USA). Actor and theatre manager Seymour Hicks comments in his autobiography on the importance of Jews to the West End: ‘I have organized or assisted at many, many matinees for Jewish charities, as I always feel that in doing so I am making some slight return to a vast number of ladies and gentlemen who are one of the chief supporters of the theatre in this country.’⁴⁴

Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

The most common historiographical discourse about nineteenth-century Europe is one of increasing nationalism and nationalist movements, but there is an alternative, if neglected, story to be told: that of increasing cosmopolitanism, especially in the appetite for cultural goods. The Viennese waltz, for example, swept around the world in the 1830s. Despite growing nationalist sentiment in Germany in that century, cosmopolitan attitudes (as connoted by the adjectives weltläufig or weltoffen) could still be viewed as positive qualities. Nevertheless, cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century was often likely to be regarded as sophisticated worldliness rather than open-mindedness to other cultures. This may, or may not, be the kind of cosmopolitanism of which the aristocratic Lady Babby’s boasts in Gipsy Love. Her song ‘Cosmopolitan’ was an interpolated number composed by Franz Lehár to lyrics by Adrian Ross for the London production of 1912.⁴⁵ The refrain runs as follows:

All the men are glad to look at Lady Babby,

And they look again!

The French say, ‘Oh, la, la!’

Italians cry ‘Brava!’

The Germans bow and softly murmur ‘Wunderschön!’

From Cairo donkey boy to London Taxi cabby,

Ev’ry mortal man

Would like to have me stay;

Some day I may – I am so cosmopolitan!

The noun Weltläufigkeit might indicate a sophisticated, urbane type of cosmopolitanism, but Weltbürgetum was a term bearing positive, even idealistic, connotations. During the German Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism had been the subject of important and influential texts, for example, Christoph Martin Wieland’s Das Geheimnis des Kosmopolitenordens (1788) and Immanuel Kant’s essay Zum ewigen Frieden (1795), in which he advanced a political argument for a universal civil society comprised of states in a pacific federation under the rule of international law.⁴⁶ In the field of culture, Germany had the example of a preeminent cosmopolitan literary figure in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Cosmopolitanism offered an alternative to national politics, although it was unable to counter the rise of aggressive nationalism. Austin Harrington argues, however, that ‘cosmopolitan pluralistic ideas lived on beyond the caesura of 1914–18’ in the writings of Karl Jaspers and Karl Mannheim.⁴⁷

Negative views of cosmopolitanism tended to be held by those who condemned it for eroding national traditions. Yet increasing numbers of composers born late in the nineteenth century found that their family lineage or place of birth gave them no direct or clear-cut national identifications, and, in consequence, they had enjoyed a youthful experience of different cultural choices. It equipped them with an ability to move flexibly among cultural options – Hungarian, Slovakian, or Austrian in Lehár’s case, for instance.⁴⁸ Bernard Grun, who knew Lehár personally, also attributed the composer’s cosmopolitanism and fluency in languages to the ‘frequent migrations’ necessitated by his father’s changes of infantry garrisons.⁴⁹ Kálmán is often thought of as thoroughly Hungarian, but his family spoke both Hungarian and German; he adopted the Hungarian name ‘Kálmán’ (actually a given name rather than family name) as a replacement for his family name Koppstein. He was not the only one doing this in response to growing nationalism in Hungary: Albert Szirmai, for instance, was born Albert Schönberg. Many individuals involved with operetta were, like Kálmán and Szirmai, Jewish artists, and they sometimes found themselves described negatively as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’.⁵⁰ The charge of rootlessness is, of course, linked to nationalist discourse, and this is what I wish to cast aside in order to narrate a different type of history, one that places cosmopolitanism in a positive light. Nicolas Bourriaud offers an alternative to the negative image of the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ with his thoughts on the radicant: ‘an organism that grows its roots and adds new ones as it advances’ (an example being ivy).⁵¹

Cosmopolitans do not necessarily abandon their local identity. In any case, social identity, unlike personal subjectivity, is largely in the hands of those who do the identifying (which is why identity and subjectivity may sometimes be at odds with one another). Moreover, it is unlikely that cosmopolitan consumers would take a keen interest in the culture of others if they possessed little interest in their local culture. There may have been no general desire for the local to dominate radio broadcasting even in its early days, but that did not suppress the wish to hear something of local affairs. At the same time, it is evident that radio was an example of those modern technological innovations that eroded a sense of local belonging. Martin Heidegger found that the radio he acquired in 1919 transformed his village life into something cosmopolitan.⁵² Cosmopolitanism combines a sense of the global alongside the local and this produces a complex mixture of ideas. Cosmopolitanism can even link to nationalist aspirations – for example winning prestige for one’s country internationally – but it also presents a serious problem for nationalists by appearing to dilute the home culture. A simple link between the national and the cosmopolitan can be found in the ‘traditional English cup of tea’, with its leaves from the Asian Subcontinent, its sugar from the Caribbean, and its milk from home.

There are two other negative perceptions of cosmopolitanism, both of which link it to imperialism. From one point of view, it embodies a Western self-interest that masquerades as a universal human interest and ‘opens the way for imperialist interventions into vulnerable nations’.⁵³ However, the cosmopolitan disposition is open to different cultures; it is the nationalist disposition that is predominantly interested in one culture. The second perspective sees precious culture from the colonial periphery being sucked into and distorted by the metropolitan centre. Operetta, however, did not transfer from the periphery but, instead, from one urban centre to another. What is at stake, here, is competing urban cultural power rather than a dominant metropole and a periphery. In 1912, Ernst Klein wrote in the Berlin Lokal-Anseiger (gazette) that the cosmopolitanism of Viennese operetta was motivated by business interests,⁵⁴ which sought the large royalties that were to be earned in the UK, the USA, and France.

Cosmopolitan Production and Cosmopolitan Reception

We are now left to ask how much cosmopolitanism there was in the creation of the operettas and how much lay in the consumption. Operetta composers could be open to cosmopolitanism to varied degrees, and audiences could also vary in their cosmopolitan disposition. It would be naïve to deny that an operetta such as Fall’s Die Rose von Stambul indulges to some extent in cultural Othering, but it differs in significant respects from exoticism and Orientalism in its representation of the cultural Other (its hero and heroine are drawn to Western values, and the last act is set in a cosmopolitan hotel in Switzerland). This is where reception needs to be examined in combination with the subject positioning of operetta. Those involved in its production made a variety of assumptions about the audience to whom they were catering. To satisfy the kind of aesthetic cosmopolitanism already evident in the audience’s appetite for English adaptations of German operetta, cultural traditions needed to be explained and shared and not become barriers that separate. Thus, we find something closer to what Bourriaud calls a ‘translation of singularities’,⁵⁵ rather than cultural misrepresentation.

In contrast, a characteristic trait of Orientalism is its focus on representation over imitation, by which I mean that the Other may be represented by material that bears little or no relationship to the culture of that Other.⁵⁶ Exotic and Orientalist representational techniques serve the function of emphasizing difference or strangeness: they work to produce recognition of the Self as different from the Other, and not to stimulate recognition of the Self in the Other – that is, sameness.⁵⁷ If we reach back to The Mikado, we find perhaps the most pronounced example of an ‘Eastern’ operetta in which the English audience recognized itself – even if the eponymous character enters to a Japanese tune. However, The Mikado works in an allegorical way, whereas Die Bajadere has a scene in which the Indian prince calls directly for recognition of sameness:

People in Benares also kiss as hotly and sweetly as here,

People in Benares also love as deeply and strongly as here.⁵⁸

Indeed, confusion about ethnic difference is fundamental to Julius Brammer and Alfred Grünwald’s plot to Kálmán’s operetta. The prince falls in love with a young woman he assumes to be a Hindu dancer, but when he discovers her to be a French woman playing a role it makes no difference to him. The sentiments of the Indian Prince find an echo some years later in Gustl and Mi’s duet in Das Land des Lächelns, which begins with the assertion that when the world was created all human beings were the same and love remains the same for all – the implication being that it is culture, not nature, that divides people.

In the reception of the music of operetta, the Other may simply be absorbed as the Self. This is evident in the confusion over interpolated numbers in operettas. Critics often failed to notice a local interpolation that was not part of the imported score. as an American critic pointed out in a review of the music of Fall’s Lieber Augustin (see Chapter 2).⁵⁹ It raises the question of how far we can regard the countries of Europe as standing in a Self vs Other relationship to one another. Rabindranath Tagore, in his study of nationalism published in 1917, quipped that Europe was actually ‘one country made into many’.⁶⁰ There is usually a need for semiotic competence in understanding the meanings of other cultures, but operetta falls within a broad Western musical and theatrical culture, some of the elements of which had become familiar globally in the previous century. Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry describe cultural cosmopolitanism as a disposition that delights in ‘contrasts between societies’.⁶¹ However, there is often a feeling of ‘this is the same’ in operetta, especially if it is an operetta concerned with the experience of modernity. It is felt most strikingly when modern technology features in the scenes on stage (for example, the typewriter and car in Die Dollarprinzessin). In Thomas Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg (1924), set in the period before the First World War, it is technology that the humanist Ludovico Settembrini praises for creating increased understanding between people of different countries and destroying prejudice.⁶²

The character Mustafa Bei in Abraham’s Ball im Savoy (1932) excuses his free lifestyle and liberal attitude to sexual relationships by stressing that his home city of Istanbul is cosmopolitan. His six divorced wives, from Vienna, Prague, Rome, Madrid, Berlin, and Budapest, all appear in the operetta. Certainly, his character might appear offensive to more Turkish people now than at the time the operetta was written. It was produced after the period of reforms in Turkey, 1926–30, during which Mustafa Kemal secularized the Turkish state, closed Islamic courts, adopted a variant of the Swiss Civil Code (stressing gender equality), adapted the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, and, not least, was prepared to be seen drinking alcohol in public places. The representation of Mustafa Bei is a striking move away from Orientalist thinking. When a musical sign of cultural difference is present in Abraham’s representation of Bei (such as the augmented second) it serves only as a reminder of the local in the cosmopolitan. Stereotyping it may still be called, but no more so than the use of a snap rhythm to indicate that a character is Scottish. Stefan Schmidl has argued that such ready-made associations (csaŕdás for Hungary, polka for Bohemia, mazurka for Poland, and so forth) can be understood as musical symbols of the everyday encounters with coinciding nationalities in expanding urban environments.⁶³

The theoretical premise of transculturalism, from Fernando Ortiz’s seminal thoughts of the 1940s onwards,⁶⁴ is that identity is not restricted to definitions of the Self but recognizes the relationship one shares with others. The ability to recognize oneself in the other person is what distinguishes a transcultural outlook from a Self that is defined against an Other, as in Orientalist discourse. Moreover, in contrast to multiculturalism, which has so often resulted in the parcelling up of cultural differences into detached units that encourage no recognition of shared commonalities, transculturalism is about cultural mixing. Operetta in the twentieth century was part of an entertainment industry that prompted the cross-fertilization of cultures (for example, Hungarian, Austrian, African-American, and Argentine musical styles) with none of the embedded friction or anxiety suggested by theories of cultural hybridization. It was cosmopolitan in its embrace of culture beyond regional or national boundaries; anything that appealed to the urban theatregoer – from the csárdás to the fox trot – was incorporated without hesitation. A mixture of musical style was the norm.

The flexibility of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ is what makes it – like the term ‘liberty’ – both attractive and contentious. Attempts to find modifiers that can be placed before it are an indication that the term in isolation is found too vague for many social theorists. Its conflicted meanings – some of them are historical, while others emanate from the recent vogue for cosmopolitan ideas – have yet to be resolved. Homi Bhabha attempts to account for the day-to-day cosmopolitanism bound up in the everyday existence of displaced individuals with his concept of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’.⁶⁵ Brigid Cohen uses the term ‘migrant cosmopolitanism’ to describe the transnational and disparate cultural affiliations found in the work of Stefan Wolpe and Yoko Ono.⁶⁶ Many of the modified versions of cosmopolitanism are driven by the desire to link together the ties of a particular social membership with the universalist aspirations of cosmopolitanism. An example is Mitchell Cohen’s ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’.⁶⁷ Still, it is to be wondered if clarity is to be gained by an ever-proliferating number of cosmopolitan variants.

Cosmopolitanism is sometimes criticized for being too closely aligned with the opportunities available to affluent men. Yet the cosmopolitan appeal of fashion in operetta was directed primarily at the feminine gaze, as many advertisements appearing in the periodical the Play Pictorial testify (see Chapter 7). All the same, cultural cosmopolitanism in the early decades of the twentieth century remains vulnerable to the accusation that it represented a bourgeois or elite taste, despite the fact that operetta was never viewed as a high cultural form and many operettas were marketed simply as Broadway or West End entertainment. Platt and Becker argue that early twentieth-century musical theatre presented a challenge to ideas of ‘highbrow’ cosmopolitanism and its ‘privileged cultural products and social elites’.⁶⁸ Operetta from the German stage was produced in commercial theatres that were taking advantage of a growing urban population made increasing mobile by improvements in public transport. Some of the venues producing operetta were variety and vaudeville theatres (for example, the Hippodrome in London and the Palace Theatre in New York). Its reception in theatres of differing social status eats away at the idea that its cosmopolitan character was elitist to any pronounced degree, even if Amanda Anderson is right to point to the frequent tension that exists between egalitarianism and elitism in cosmopolitanism.⁶⁹ Certainly, there must have been a part of the audience that regarded a visit to an operetta performance as a posh night out.

A charge of elitism could be directed more persuasively at upper-class cosmopolitanism during the early decades of the eighteenth century (for example, the Grand Tour, or aristocratic enthusiasm for Italian opera). William Weber argues that Italian opera played ‘a central role in shaping cosmopolitan identity for the nobility and upper-middle class’ in London.⁷⁰ Katherine Preston adds that this was understood by wealthy Americans, who ‘used their own patronage of Italian opera to imitate the British nobility and to demonstrate their own connection with a cosmopolitan world beyond North America’.⁷¹ Italian vocal music carried with it what Weber describes as ‘cosmopolitan authority’.⁷² Thomas Turino has pointed out the irony of the denigration of cosmopolitanism during the Third Reich, while, at the same time, the selection of music in Nazi-sponsored international tours was informed by the status German composers held in cosmopolitan circles.⁷³ In the second half of the nineteenth century, the concept of ‘classical music’ carried the same kind of authority, and was a reason why British composers felt little urge to develop a national style – although, of course, that became a concern towards the end of the century, when Britain’s imperialist policies gained increased momentum.

Prior to operetta – defined broadly to include opéras-bouffes and the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan – the musical-theatrical genre with the broadest cosmopolitan appeal was opéra comique. The international success of André Grétry’s Richard Coeur-de-lion (1784) was considerable, François-Adrien Boieldieu’s Le Calife de Bagdad (1800) more so. After the Napoleonic Wars, Boieldieu enjoyed his greatest success on the international stage with La Dame blanche (1825), and Daniel Auber, Adophe Adam, and Ferdinand Hérold experienced similar triumphs in the 1830s. Nevertheless, the cultural transfer of opéra comique lacked the global networks of exchange that developed later in the century.⁷⁴

To return to Weber’s notion of ‘cosmopolitan authority’, there is little of a case to be made for operetta’s ability to exert this kind of cultural power. Operetta’s main rival was musical comedy, which Charles Kassell Harris in 1906 claimed had helped to increase the sale of popular songs because it was ‘made up almost entirely of popular music’.⁷⁵ Although, as seen in Chapter 5, many critics drew a contrast between operettas from the German stage and what they regarded as vapid Anglo-American musical comedy, this did not mean that operetta was part of a cosmopolitan package of culturally authoritative artworks for refined and educated sensibilities.⁷⁶ It represented a wider artistic vision of cosmopolitanism in which popular entertainment plays a significant role. In this regard, its translations and adaptations were significant, because the art versus entertainment struggle of the second half of the nineteenth century ensured that no high-art operas could be subjected to such ‘degrading’ treatment.⁷⁷

Nevertheless, the years of the First World War provided a severe test to those who devoured English versions of operettas from the German stage with a cosmopolitan appetite. The difficulty was felt to a greater degree in London than in New York, partly because the American city was home to many citizens of German descent and partly because the USA was late to enter the conflict. Jean Gilbert’s The Cinema Star was playing to full houses in London just before Britain declared war on Germany (4 August 1914), but it was soon withdrawn (see Chapter 5).⁷⁸ It is an illustration of the tension in Kwame A. Appiah’s argument that patriotic attachments can exist without friction as part of a liberal cosmopolitanism.⁷⁹ Appiah developed the idea of ‘patriotic cosmopolitanism’ as part of a critique of Martha Nussbaum’s concept of a world citizenship uninhibited by particular cultural, political or religious affiliations.⁸⁰ However, patriotic cosmopolitanism appears to be content with contradictory words and actions in times of national strife. When Rudolf Christians, manager of the Irving Place Theatre, New York, found himself compelled to cancel German-language performances, he complained that President Woodrow had given many assurances the war was not against the German people, and, that being so, he demanded to know why local authorities were interfering with performances and depriving his company of a livelihood.⁸¹ He was offered no answer.

A counter-argument to the kind of cosmopolitan appreciation that I am advancing here is usually based on the idea that the cultural conditioning a person acquires from being part of a nation, a community, or a social milieu means that this individual will create or perform artworks in a way that an outsider never can do. This conviction can lead to more rigid beliefs, for example, that the ability to play a Dvořák symphony is in the blood of Czech orchestral musicians, or that an understanding of Elgar is in the blood of English musicians.⁸² However, this conviction fails to account for the number of Chinese musicians who appear to be such expert and sensitive interpreters of Western concert music. Bourriaud does not regard tradition or local cultures as inevitable adversaries of efforts to immerse oneself in another culture; they become such only when they act as constraining cultural schemata, and roots become part of a ‘rhetoric of identity’.⁸³

By engaging with culture across borders of all kinds, cosmopolitanism challenges ideas of Self and Other. To be cosmopolitan is to recognize a common humanity in the world’s diverse cultural artefacts. The cosmopolitan disposition does not disregard local culture, but it is also open to the culture of others. The local, in any case, is often just a part of something that is bigger than the local. Jazz is not perceived as a type of ‘local’ music, but there are local flavours such as those that developed in New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City, and New York. In arguing that operetta is a cosmopolitan genre, I do not mean to imply that every operetta travels as well as another. Fall’s Der fidele Bauer (1907) will probably never achieve the success it has enjoyed in Austria because its local elements, embedded in both text and music, are unusually strong. In contrast, the same composer’s Die Dollarprinzessin reaches effortlessly across borders. It is evident that operetta is a genre that lends itself readily to cosmopolitanism, but it does not necessarily ensue that every single operetta has cosmopolitan appeal.