Part II - The Reception of Operetta

Summary

It is clear that the productions in the West End and on Broadway of The Merry Widow marked a distinctive new phase in operetta reception. The massive success of The Merry Widow opened up a flourishing market for operettas from Vienna and Berlin. This was confirmed by the huge success of Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier in New York (1909) and London (1910). The Berlin operettas of Jean Gilbert were soon in demand in the West End and on Broadway. Continental European operetta entered a marketplace dominated by musical comedy. The first major blow to the operetta market, especially in the UK, was the outbreak of the First World War. After the war, many creators of operetta were eager to escape to the comfort of historical romances. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, many people were prepared to pay for operetta, and an assortment of theatres and ticket prices enabled a broad social mixture to do so. In addition to critical-aesthetic reception, theatrical productions were open to moral concerns. The chapter ends with reflections on the reasons for the decline in productions on Broadway and in the West End post-1933.

5 The Reception of Operetta in London and New York

The success of Franz Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe was not only sensational and widespread, it was unpredicted – the play on which it is based had, after all, been around for over forty years. When it was being prepared for its first performance in Vienna, the manager of the Theater an der Wien, Wilhelm Karczag, exhibited little faith in its prospects.¹ Its conquest of the stages of Europe and its appeal to the wider world was a possibility unforeseen. That is why it makes sense to name it as the foundation stone of the Silver Age of operetta. There may have been stage works of the time that had a longer continuous run in one country or another, but Die lustige Witwe had a cosmopolitan appeal that reached across borders. The most successful stage work in the UK in the first half of the twentieth century was Chu Chin Chow, but nowhere else in the world did it achieve anywhere near the same number of performances as did the West End production. In January 1908, London’s Daily Mail claimed that The Merry Widow had been performed 450 times in Vienna, 400 times in Berlin, 350 times in St Petersburg, 300 times in Copenhagen, and was currently playing every evening in Europe in nine languages. In the USA, five companies were presenting it, and ‘the rush for tickets at the New Amsterdam Theatre’ was likened to ‘the feverish crowding round the doors of a threatened bank’.² Stan Czech, in his Lehár biography, claims that by 1910 it had been performed ‘around 18,000 times in ten languages on 154 American, 142 German, and 135 British stages’.³

After try-outs in several American cities, The Merry Widow opened at the New Amsterdam on Broadway on 21 October 1907, where its reception was seen by critics as an indication that audience standards were rising, an opinion that gave comfort to American operetta composers such as Reginald De Koven and Victor Herbert.⁴ So well known did the operetta become that a burlesque version was produced in January 1908 at the Weber and Fields Music Hall, New York.⁵ It used Lehár’s music, but had a new parodic script by George V. Hobart that cast Lulu Glaser as Fonia from Farsovia (rather than Sonia from Marsovia) and Joe Weber as the messenger Disch (instead of Nisch). Henry W. Savage, the manager of the New Amsterdam, granted permission for the parody, knowing that it would increase interest in his own production, which went on to enjoy a run of 416 performances.

Anyone studying the reception of German operettas in the UK and USA is bound to recognize that the productions in the West End and on Broadway of The Merry Widow marked a distinctive new phase in operetta reception.⁶ Before The Merry Widow, the last German operetta to have a successful premiere in both London and New York was Carl Zeller’s Der Vogelhändler (produced first in Vienna in January 1891).⁷ It became The Tyrolean at the Casino, New York, in October 1891, and was given five performances in German at Drury Lane, London, four years later.⁸ Wiener Blut, an operetta of 1899 based on arrangements of the music of Johann Strauss Jr, was produced on Broadway as Vienna Life in early 1901, but had no outing in London.⁹ A much-revised version of Hugo Felix’s Berlin operetta Madame Sherry enjoyed modest success in London in 1903, but did not reach New York until 1910, when Felix’s music was replaced by that of Karl Hoschna.

The librettists of Wiener Blut were Victor Léon and Leo Stein, and in 1905 they were to gain further acclaim with their adaptation of Henri Meilhac’s L’Attaché d’ambassade as Die lustige Witwe. In December that year, set to music by Franz Lehár, it opened at the Theater an der Wien, and in May the following year was at the Berliner Theater. The year after, it was produced as The Merry Widow at Daly’s Theatre in London’s West End and, a few months later, was on Broadway. The English version by Basil Hood and Adrian Ross was used in both London and New York. George Edwardes’s West End production opened on 8 June 1907 and ran for a remarkable 778 performances.¹⁰ The actor-comedian George Graves, who played Baron Popoff in the operetta, looked back on the opening night in his autobiography of 1931, and declared: ‘Never have I known such wild enthusiasm as greeted this show.’¹¹ During and after the London run, The Merry Widow conquered the provinces, where it was performed at city theatres by the Edwardes touring companies and by what were known as ‘fit-up companies’ in Corn Exchanges, Town Halls, and other urban venues.¹²

The massive success of The Merry Widow opened up a flourishing market for operettas from Vienna and Berlin. This was confirmed by the huge success of Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier in New York (1909) and London (1910). The stage works of Paul Lincke, who is credited as the founder of Berlin operetta with his one-act Die Spree-amazone of 1896, took time to travel. His ensemble song ‘Glühwürmchen’ from Lysistrata (1902) was familiar as an orchestral piece in London, and also featured in the Broadway show The Girl Behind the Counter (Talbot, 1907),¹³ but his operetta Frau Luna (1899), popular in Germany, was not produced in London until 1911 (as Castles in the Air, at the Scala Theatre¹⁴), and was not given at all in New York. In contrast, the Berlin operettas of Jean Gilbert were in demand in both London and New York. Other operettas – those of Victor Herbert excepted – were not doing well on Broadway following the success of The Merry Widow. Among the better, though unimpressive, statistics are: a run of 65 performances for Edward German’s Tom Jones at the Astor Theatre in late 1907, and 64 for Reginald De Koven’s Robin Hood at the New Amsterdam in 1912. John Philip Sousa’s The American Maid was given just 16 performances at the Broadway Theatre in 1913. Regular but short runs of Gilbert and Sullivan took place during 1910–13 at the Casino.

William Boosey comments that when he first went into publishing in the 1880s, French operetta was the dominant type, with Offenbach, Lecocq, Audran, and Planquette to the fore.¹⁵ Operetta from the German stage ousted the French variety after 1907, although the latter returned during the First World War, with performances of Cuvillier and Messager. This needs to be qualified, however, because Cuvillier’s biggest success in the West End was The Lilac Domino (1918), which originally had a German libretto, and Messager’s Monsieur Beaucaire (London, April 1919, New York, December 1919) was composed to an English book by Frederick Lonsdale, with lyrics by Adrian Ross. Cuvillier’s French operetta, Afgar, was produced at the Pavilion, London in 1919, and the Central Theatre, New York, in 1920. A reason Paris was failing in the new operetta market was given by the American book and lyric writer Harry B. Smith, who remarked after a visit in 1909: ‘The revue was the only kind of musical piece in evidence.’¹⁶ Nevertheless, the operettas of Henri Christiné, Maurice Yvain, and Reynaldo Hahn, proved successful in Paris, despite a puzzling lack of international interest in them.¹⁷ The number of successful musical plays and operettas had, in fact, been declining in Paris after 1900. Between 1900 and 1914, 22.5 per cent of such pieces had runs of 100 performances or more in London, but only 5.7 per cent did so in Paris.¹⁸

The Audience for Operetta

The disposable income of the middle and lower middle classes had increased in the late nineteenth century and changes in stage entertainment catered for the new audiences. Symptomatic of that was the renaming of music halls as Palaces of Variety, with its suggestion of greater respectability and suitability for a family audience. Linked to new audience appetites, also, was the development of romantic musical comedy as a substitute for burlesque in the 1890s. George Edwardes attributed his success, not to exceptional managerial and leadership skills, but to his understanding of an audience’s reactions.

I regard the members on an audience as the real critics. It is no use defying them as so many managers I know have done. That’s altogether wrong! It’s certainly very galling to spend many thousands of pounds upon a piece only to be rewarded with hisses; but when there is dissatisfaction my plan is carefully to examine the cause and see if there is really anything to complain about.¹⁹

The West End and Broadway were both developing rapidly as centres of entertainment in the early twentieth century, helped by rising prosperity in the period before the First World War.

The audience attracted to operetta needs to be considered from two angles, the economic and the aesthetic – although nobody familiar with the work of Pierre Bourdieu will be persuaded that these two perspectives can be easily separated. In the West End, the aesthetic attraction of The Merry Widow lay in its melodious music, its new emphasis on glamour and romance, and in the charismatic performances of Elsie and Coyne, who became ‘idols of the day’.²⁰ The aristocracy did attend some of the theatres where operettas were staged, and evening dress was de rigeur for the stalls and dress circle, but these theatres attracted a cross-class audience, and the presence of aristocracy no doubt added to the allure of this genre. The presence of royalty at an opening night, as for The Count of Luxembourg in 1911, and the conducting of the opening night by the composer, further enhanced the glamour of the theatrical experience. Yet the presence of the King did not lend aristocratic status to operetta any more than it did to the Royal Variety Show, the first of which took place the following year. Commercial popular music was part of a ‘common musical culture’ in the first half of the twentieth century.²¹ Another attraction of the theatre was spectacle, which relied on the latest technology (a discussion of this aspect of operetta will be found in Chapter 7).

Try-outs were common before West End or Broadway productions, so that changes could be made in response to the reactions of the first audiences. Manchester was a favourite try-out city in the UK, as was Boston in the USA for the entrepreneurial Shubert brothers. J. J. Shubert was, in fact, keen to turn the Boston Opera House into an operetta venue.²² Tours to other cities took place with original cast members after the end of a West End or Broadway run, but other touring companies were sent out while a show was still running. Try-outs could be unreliable, for, as Phyllis Dare remarked, ‘very often that which appeals to London audiences falls quite flat in the provinces, and vice versa’.²³ An example is Jean Gilbert’s Lovely Lady (Die kleine Sünderin), which had a successful try-out at the Opera House, Manchester in early February 1932, but was a surprise flop at the Phoenix in London later that month. This is an example of transcultural reception on the small scale, the cultural transfer from one region to another, rather than one country to another. Basil Hood tended to adopt a nationalist tone when speaking of differences between Austrian and British audiences (see Chapter 5), but those differences are to a large extent merely another example of the same phenomenon.

Operettas successful in the modern city of Berlin were more likely to cross borders easily.²⁴ Vienna had a lingering taste for depictions of country manners. Lehár’s Rastelbinder was based on a Slovakian tale. Its folk-like style and its topic of Slovak immigrants in Vienna meant that, like Leo Fall’s Der fidele Bauer, it did not travel easily.²⁵ In October 1909, the latter enjoyed a short run as The Merry Peasant at the Strand Theatre in London, but was found ‘somewhat old fashioned according to the present lines of musical plays’.²⁶ In New York, it was performed for two weeks in German at the Garden Theatre. Although the First World War ruled out a production of Leon Jessel’s Schwarzwaldmädel, it, too, was unlikely to travel well. Like Der fidele Bauer, it was too firmly in the Volksoperette mould. The composer Edmund Eysler was a little too Viennese to export easily, though several productions of his operettas enjoyed modest success on Broadway, and one, The Blue Paradise (Ein Tag im Paradies), had a long run at the Casino in 1915.²⁷ His only operetta to be given productions in both London (1913) and New York (1914) was The Laughing Husband. It was, in fact, the only performance of an Eysler operetta in London. It may be that the lukewarm success of Oscar Straus’s A Waltz Dream in London and New York was a consequence of its being too Viennese.²⁸ It was at Hicks’s Theatre in 1908 (produced by Edwardes) but was thought to be miscast: ‘the whole cast did not seem to quite catch the right spirit’.²⁹ Its sad ending suited a Vienna that nursed nostalgic feelings for alt Wien, and it had been a huge success at the Carltheater in 1907, but it did not work in optimistic Edwardian London. Straus thought he was the first to introduce an operetta with a sad ending, but it was not novel in London, because Gilbert and Sullivan had already done so in Yeomen of the Guard (1888).

Sometimes, operettas did better in London and New York than in Vienna. Despite its mediocre reception at the Theater an der Wien in 1908, where it ran for just 62 performances, when Straus’s Der tapfere Soldat opened as The Chocolate Soldier at the Lyric, New York, in 1909, it ran for nine months. The Broadway version was soon taken to London and featured in the lead roles Constance Drever, who could both sing and act, and ex-Gilbert and Sullivan stalwart C. H. Workman. Drever’s singing of ‘My Hero’ was one of the highlights.³⁰ American Tin Pan Alley publisher Witmark and British publisher Feldman joined together to make money marketing this hit song. The West End triumph of The Chocolate Soldier encouraged Edwardes to revive A Waltz Dream at Daly’s in 1911, but its reception again proved disappointing.

Fall’s Die Dollarprinzessin achieved 428 consecutive London performances, compared to only 80 in Vienna, although it had enjoyed an initially enthusiastic reception there when it premiered at the Theater an der Wien in November 1908. No doubt that was because it featured the Austrian stars of Die lustige Witwe, Mizzi Günther and Louis Treumann. Karczag, who, in addition to being theatre’s director was also the Fall’s publisher, blamed Treumann for ruining the operetta’s success when he abandoned his role after two months.³¹ It was produced to much greater success in Berlin in June 1908, and the Berliner Tageblatt commented on the marvels of its presentation.³² It had to wait until September 1909 to be staged at Daly’s because of the success of The Merry Widow. The Broadway production by Charles Frohman was given almost simultaneously with that on the West End, but in a new English-language version by George Grossmith. Frohman then wanted to commission an all-American operetta from Fall, but Fall’s agent Ernest Mayer informed him that the composer would not know how to write an operetta specifically for America, when the whole world was open to him.³³ Fall’s response was symptomatic of the cosmopolitan outlook of those involved in operetta.

Sometimes an operetta differed in its Broadway and West End receptions. The Girl in the Train, Harry B. Smith’s version of Fall’s Die geschiedene Frau, was first given at the Globe Theatre, New York, in October 1910, and lasted for just 40 performances. Adrian Ross’s version of the same operetta (using the same title) opened at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, in June 1910, and ran for 339 performances. It would have continued, but Huntley Wright (playing the Judge) went to Switzerland for a holiday, and his understudy broke his arm.³⁴ Ralph Benatzky’s My Sister and I had only eight performances at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, in 1931, but as Meet My Sister in New York it notched up 167. Jean Gilbert’s Die keusche Susanne was produced in London as The Girl in the Taxi (Lyric, 1912) and in New York as Modest Suzanne (Liberty, 1912). On Broadway, it managed just 24 performances,³⁵ but in London it ran for 384. With two successful West End revivals, it received a total of 597 performances during 1913–15, making it one of the most popular operettas in London. Why it fared so much better in London than New York is a question very difficult to answer, because a range of performance and staging factors need to be considered, as well as the content and its treatment.

Challenges to the Operetta Market

Operettas faced competition from other stage entertainment: at first, from musical comedies, and then, in the second decade of the century, from revues. These shows developed out of music hall and vaudeville, and consisted of turns and sketches related to a general theme. Hullo, Ragtime! (Hirsch), which opened at the Hippodrome on 23 December 1912, was the first of London’s ragtime-flavoured revues, and ran for 451 performances. Operettas from Berlin were already making significant inroads at this time, and not just those of Gilbert. Walter Kollo, who composed for the Berliner Theater during 1908–18, enjoyed an English production of his Filmzauber (co-composed with Sirmay, 1912) at the Gaiety, London, in 1913, given as The Girl on the Film. It lasted eight months in the West End, but only eight weeks on Broadway. The hugely successful Maytime at the Shubert, New York, in 1917 was based on Kollo’s Wie einst im Mai (1913), but it was changed almost out of recognition and given new music by Sigmund Romberg.³⁶

The first major blow to the operetta market, especially in the UK, was the outbreak of the First World War. Courtneidge had nothing ready for production in spring 1914, and Edwardes transferred to him his rights in Gilbert’s Die Kino-Königin. Courtneidge went to see it on Broadway, where it was being given as The Queen of the Movies, with book and lyrics by Glen MacDonough. He did not care for the adaptation, so he made his own, The Cinema Star, with assistance from Jack Hulbert.³⁷ The leading roles were played by his daughter Cicely and Jack Hulbert, who were later to marry. He soon found himself in a quandary over this production because of the disastrous turn of events brought on by war.

The play promised to be one of the most successful I had produced, and I looked forward with confidence to the future when the outbreak of War ruined all my hopes. The German origin of The Cinema Star was fatal. … After struggling vainly for a time I had to close the theatre.³⁸

Edwardes made a similar mistake: his purchase of the rights to produce Gilbert’s Puppchen also came to nothing because of the war. An even worse error was his neglect of his own safety abroad, resulting in his internment for some time at Nauheim, Germany, in 1914.

In the war years, a cosmopolitan appetite for operetta could be interpreted as unpatriotic. Although The Cinema Star was playing to full houses, it was withdrawn on 19 September 1914. That did not prevent it turning up with the original company at the Grand Theatre in Leeds the following year.³⁹ It was, in fact, Cicely Courtneidge who had suggested to her father that a tour would help recoup the losses caused by its premature closure in the capital. In her autobiography, she explains: ‘The fact that The Cinema Star was originally a German show was little known away from London and we played to very good business.’⁴⁰ A revival of Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier opened on 5 September 1914 at the Lyric Theatre, and ran for 56 performances, but the programme was careful to announce that service men in uniform could purchase half-price tickets, and profits were to go to the Belgian Relief Fund. Gilbert’s Mam’selle Tralala (Fräulein Trallala) had closed at the Lyric in July, but its music was revised by Melville Gideon, who then took all the credit when it reopened the following year as Oh, Be Careful! at the Garrick.⁴¹ However, it lasted for only 33 performances, despite Yvonne Arnaud repeating her role as Noisette.

As the war continued, people felt uncomfortable about attending the theatre, and there were pressures on actors, too. Managers were asked to adopt a policy of only employing actors unfit for military service.⁴² Nevertheless, two home-grown musical comedies of operetta-like character became enormous wartime hits: Frederic Norton’s Chu Chin Chow (His Majesty’s, 1916) and Harold Fraser-Simson’s The Maid of the Mountains (Daly’s, 1917). The latter was given 1352 performances, while Chu Chin Chow ran for an astounding 2238 performances (a record unbroken in the UK before Les Misérables). Remarkably, Emmerich Kálmán’s Soldier Boy! was first produced in London during wartime, in June 1918, but without his name on the programme. It was Rida Johnson Young’s 1916 Broadway adaptation (Her Soldier Boy) of Gold gab ich für Eisen, with revisions by Edgar Wallace. Acting as a distraction from the work’s origins, a song associated with the British troops, George and Felix Powell’s ‘Pack up Tour Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’, was interpolated in both the New York and London productions.⁴³ The downside to Kálmán’s unique wartime achievement was that he received no royalties. However, barely two years after the war ended, he was to enjoy success with The Little Dutch Girl, which opened at the Lyric Theatre in December 1920.

Concern about productions of operetta from the German stage began to be voiced in New York after the USA entered the war in April 1917. At that time, two Kálmán operettas were running on Broadway, and, in June, Straus’s My Lady’s Glove (Die schöne Unbekannte) received its American premiere. In September 1917, The Riviera Girl, an adaptation of Kálmán’s Die Csárdásfürstin was to be seen on Broadway, and, in November, Lehár’s The Star Gazer (Der Sterngucker). The failure of the latter, which managed to scrape only eight performances, may be attributable to the changing public mood now that American troops were engaged in fighting. By May 1918, Rudolf Christians, the manager of Irving Place Theatre had been forced to cancel German-language performances because of public pressure, and a season of operetta in German to be produced by him at the Lexington Theatre, 1919–20, was also cancelled after heated debate.⁴⁴ Yorkville Theatre, a German-language theatre with a seating capacity of 1250, became an American playhouse in September 1918.⁴⁵ In August that year, it was announced that all royalties earned by ‘enemy holders of American rights to Broadway hits’ would be invested promptly in Liberty bonds.⁴⁶ When the war ended, the Shuberts planned to produce an American version of Eduard Künneke’s Das Dorf ohne Glocke, which had a nostalgic nineteenth-century setting and had been well received in Berlin in 1919, but their plans fell through.⁴⁷ As the reality of American deaths in the war sunk in, the appetite for German operetta evaporated.

Operettas dating from the war years were often neglected. Fall’s Die Rose von Stambul was a resounding success in Vienna in late 1916, and in Berlin the next year, but was not going to be welcomed as warmly in countries for which Germany, Austria, and Turkey (the location of the operetta) were the wartime enemy. There was no London production, and the Broadway production was not until 1922, when this work was growing in popularity in continental Europe. There were, of course, those who wanted a return to cosmopolitan entertainment in the West End once the war was over. Producer Albert de Courville asked in a letter to The Times on 8 April 1920, ‘Are we at liberty to reawaken public interest in a class of show highly delectable before the war?’⁴⁸

Operetta in the 1920s

After the war, many creators of operetta were eager to escape to the comfort of historical romances. Among the most popular operettas on historical themes were Madame Pompadour (1922), Die Perlen der Cleopatra (1923), Lady Hamilton (1926), Casanova (1928), Friederike (1928), Das Veilchen von Monmartre (1930) (with Delacroix and Hervé among the characters), Walzer aus Wien (1930), and Die Dubarry (1931). ‘Operetta makes history marketable’, scoffed Adorno: ‘it presents the demons of the past as casually as rag dolls, and despite our fears we play with them: they have no further power over us’.⁴⁹ Not all new operetta productions succumbed to nostalgia, however, and Berlin remained fond of the modern well into the final days of the Weimar Republic, as exemplified by Abraham’s Ball im Savoy, Dostal’s Clivia, and Straus’s Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will! The incorporation of African-American elements was also an embrace of the modern that brought an anachronism to historical costume drama. Kevin Clarke remarks on the simultaneous, if contrasting, development of jazz operetta and nostalgic operetta after the First World War.⁵⁰

Berlin became the centre for operetta production in the early 1920s, and British and American interest began to grow again. The market for musical comedy had waned, and the new American musicals of Gershwin and company were still to come. Most of the well-known operetta composers had turned to Berlin in the 1920s. Kálmán was the most resistant, remaining loyal to Vienna – his great success there being Gräfin Mariza (1924). Sometimes the British eagerness for German operetta outstripped the interest in Berlin: Jean Gilbert’s Die Frau im Hermelin (Theater des Westens, 1919), which became The Lady of the Rose (Daly’s, 1921), was greeted with ‘scenes of great enthusiasm’ by the London audience, and ran for longer than it did in Berlin.⁵¹ It was a little less successful on Broadway, where it ran for 238 performances in all (beginning at the Ambassador in 1922 and transferring to the Century), but it was rare for any operetta to achieve 300 or more performances in New York (even The Chocolate Soldier made it to only 296). Gilbert visited New York in 1928, where he composed The Red Robe for the Shubert Theatre. Americans living in Berlin made it known back home if they saw a show that delighted them. The New York Times reported: ‘Enthusiastic Americans residents in Berlin early in 1921 frantically called the attention of American theatrical managers to “Der Vetter aus Dingsda,” a musical show playing at the Theater am Nollendorf Platz.’⁵² This operetta by Eduard Künneke was bought by the Shubert brothers for production on Broadway as Caroline, and by Edward Laurillard for production in the West End as The Cousin from Nowhere.

Kálmán’s reception in London and New York could be unpredictable. Ein Herbstmanöver had a run of just 44 performances on Broadway as The Gay Hussars (1909) and 74 performances in the West End as Autumn Manoeuvres (1912). Die Csárdásfürstin, which had premiered at the Johann-Strauss-Theater in 1915 and went on to enjoy success at the Metropol, Berlin, also had a disappointing reception. It opened on Broadway in 1917 as The Riviera Girl, adapted by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, with the setting changed to Monte Carlo, and incorporating additional numbers by Jerome Kern. The West End version, The Gipsy Princess, produced at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1921, with a book by Arthur Miller and lyrics by Arthur Stanley,⁵³ was more successful than the Broadway version, and enjoyed a run of 212 performances. However, audiences failed to react with the enthusiasm of those in Austria and Germany, who regarded it as one of Kálmán’s finest achievements. Perhaps the recently ended war affected its British reception. The London Times referred to it, unusually, by the German term Operette, and, although conceding that much of the music was delightful, the review ended obliquely ‘one can only admire the courage of its producers in launching it at such a difficult moment’.⁵⁴ That may have referred to economic conditions, or to residual ill feeling towards Germany. In the next two years the appetite for German operetta began to grow again, but The Gipsy Princess had to wait for its London revival in 1981 to find itself fully appreciated.

Operetta and jazz-related dance music were vying for popularity in the 1920s, and the Shubert brothers were the major champions of the former. Blossom Time (Sigmund Romberg’s version of Heinrich Berté’s Das Dreimäderlhaus) was a huge hit for them in 1921, achieving a hundred more performances than had The Merry Widow for their business rival Abraham Erlanger. The Shuberts often visited Europe, and, while they always kept an eye open for novelty acts for their theatres, their main interest was in finding operettas that could be turned into Broadway successes.⁵⁵

Operetta and the Costs of Attendance

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, many people were prepared to pay for operetta, and an assortment of theatres and ticket prices enabled a broad social mixture to do so.⁵⁶ The London Hippodrome, which advertised itself as ‘the leading variety theatre’ put on a series of one-act operettas during 1909–12. Lehár’s Mitislaw, or The Love Match (Mitislaw der Moderne) was performed twice daily as part of a variety bill during November and December 1909, before being replaced by a Christmas spectacular The Arctic, complete with 70 polar bears.⁵⁷ More upmarket theatres, such as His Majesty’s, usually had tickets available for one shilling, the same price as a ‘posh’ seat in the stalls at a West End music hall but contrasting strongly with the cheapest seats at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, which were two shillings and sixpence.

It needs to be borne in mind that in most theatres there were always fewer seats in the costliest parts of the auditorium. Even on an opening night at Daly’s there was a socially mixed audience, from the high society in the stalls to those in the pit and gallery who had queued all night because reserved seating was unavailable there.⁵⁸ MacQueen-Pope described the class mix of a Daly’s first-night audience:

The stalls were a living edition of Debrett. White waistcoats gleamed, women’s jewels shone and glittered – both sexes were perfectly ‘turned out’. The pit and the gallery had not forgotten how to applaud. The upper circle – that strange class-conscious part of the house – was packed with Suburbia. The dress circle held rich people and those who could not get into the stalls.⁵⁹

Those attending premieres were, in other ways, not typical. George Graves described them as ‘highly-specialized’, comprising guests of the management, people who attended out of social custom, critics of the press taking notes, and some ‘on the prowl’ who were ready to knock the show.⁶⁰ Commenting further on audiences, Graves declares that ‘pleasure-seeking suburbanites … roll up on Saturdays’, and are less critical than a mid-week audience.⁶¹ At a Saturday matinée, however, spectators are ‘less noisy in their laughter and more sparing of applause’, which he attributes to the larger number of women present.⁶² Nevertheless, despite this perceived reserve, he acknowledges the contribution made by women to the success of a show: ‘every actor knows, if you have the women with you the show is all right’.⁶³

The price of private boxes (£2 12s. to £5 5s.), stalls (10s. 6d.) and circle (7s. 6d.) marked them out for the social elite, and the upper circle (4s. to 5s.) was for moneyed people whom MacQueen-Pope describes as ‘rather more flashy and less tasteful’.⁶⁴ His remarks indicate that money does not buy all the privileges of class – especially not ‘good taste’. The gallery and the pit – the latter located at the back of the stalls and under the balconies – were for the ‘general public’.⁶⁵ The pit was more expensive than the gallery: at Daly’s the prices were 2s. 6d. and 1s., respectively. On the box plan of Daly’s shown in Figure 5.1, the ‘balcony’ represents MacQueen-Pope’s ‘dress circle’, and the ‘first circle’ is his ‘upper circle’. Only half of the seating is shown: the gallery is not depicted, and the position of the pit is marked only by a straight line, that is because seats could not be reserved in either of those areas.

Figure 5.1 Box plan of Daly’s Theatre from the Play Pictorial, vol. 17, no. 103 (Mar. 1911). The pit (unreserved seating) is not shown but was behind the stalls.

A mixture of lower-middle and middle class made up the audience norm. A large portion of the audience were reasonably well off, as at other upmarket London theatres. His Majesty’s had similar prices to Daly’s. Before and during the First World War, most West End theatres offered a range of prices between 6d. to 10s. 6d. (children being generally admitted at half price). The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was a notable exception, with prices ranging from 2s. 6d. to 1 guinea. In the 1920s, some theatres attempted to raise prices, but this was met with many complaints. In April 1922, it was reported that the price of stalls at the Empire was to return to half-a-guinea [10s. 6d.], because the manager, Edward Laurillard, claimed he had received many letters ‘from music-lovers declaring that they could not afford to pay 12s. 6d.’⁶⁶

Operetta vs Musical Comedy

Continental European operetta entered a marketplace dominated by musical comedy. The latter was a genre that arose in the 1890s as people grew tired of absurd or satirical comic opera plots and looked for a mixture of humour and romance, and variety in musical style, from the operatic to music hall. Edwardes was a trendsetter with his shows at the Gaiety, such as The Shop Girl (Ivan Caryll) in 1894. British musical theatre retained much of that distinctiveness in later shows, such as Lionel Monckton and Howard Talbot’s The Arcadians (1909). Broadway was dominated in the early years of the twentieth century by British fare and by the operettas of Victor Herbert, although Jerome Kern, Rudolf Friml, and Sigmund Romberg soon appeared on the scene.

A New York Times critic remarked in 1910:

For years our ears have been so accustomed to the din of the mixed form [musical comedy] that the appeal of operetta failed to rouse us from our deafness. Importations from Vienna were made occasionally, but without much success. The red-wigged comedian, the overdressed showgirl, and the tinkling tunes were having their day, and nothing, it seemed, could stop them.⁶⁷

The desire for a male comedian in musical comedy related partly to the comedy roles in Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas, and partly to music hall and vaudeville, in which comedians were star ‘turns’. American musical comedy did not export well to London. Charles H. Hoyt’s A Trip to Chinatown, which ran for 657 performances at Madison Square, managed only 125 in London in 1894. However, in 1898, Gustave Kerker’s operetta The Belle of New York (book and lyrics by Hugh Morton) settled in at the Shaftesbury Theatre for a run of 693 performances. Its success proved Edwardes wrong in his assertion that ‘an American could not write a musical play that would succeed in England’.⁶⁸ It should be acknowledged that, although the librettist was American, the composer was German but had moved with his family to the USA at the age of ten, and all his theatrical experience was gained there.

Operettas were distinguished from variety theatre and musical comedy by being marketed as a more artistically serious form of musical play, even when the subject matter was comic. Operetta was not seen as an artistic compromise but, rather, as a genre that eschewed high art snobbery as much as it avoided low art vulgarism. The magazine Play Pictorial paid tribute to Kálmán’s The Little Dutch Girl by remarking that it was ‘abounding in lilting tunes and absolutely devoid of vulgarity’.⁶⁹ Theatre World praised Straus’s Cleopatra (1925) for containing ‘really witty lyrics’ and music that was ‘tuneful without being trite’.⁷⁰ Yet Oscar Asche’s exotic production did not draw in the 1920s audience as Chu Chin Chow had done in the previous decade.⁷¹ In general, critics regarded operettas from continental Europe as superior to British and American musical comedy, and the battle of genres played itself out in many critical reviews. That said, the situation is complicated by the fact that, as Marion Linhardt has emphasized, genre identification was often a matter of promotion.⁷² For instance, Gilbert’s Katja, the Dancer is designated ‘a musical play’ in the English vocal score – a term first used by Edwardes for Sidney Jones’s The Geisha (1896) to imply something akin to operetta. However, it was premiered in 1925 at the Gaiety as a ‘musical comedy’, no doubt because the audience there expected productions to have a more ‘piquant flavour’ than is suggested by the description ‘musical play’.⁷³ At first, it would seem that no such genre blurring would occur between operettas and revues, which were especially popular on Broadway, where some of them ran as a series with fresh material each year, for example, the Ziegfeld Follies (1907–31) and the Passing Shows produced by the Shuberts (1912–24). However, a mixed genre of Revue-Operette was to develop in Berlin in the late 1920s.

The Merry Widow was greeted by the New York Times as ‘the greatest kind of a relief from the American musical comedy’, and by The Times in London as a ‘genuine light opera … not overlaid (yet) by buffoonery’.⁷⁴ The insinuation was that it might soon acquire buffoonery to make it more appealing to the musical comedy audience. The urge to liven up an operetta with a comic routine was found in both cities. The Broadway production of Straus’s A Waltz Dream had an interpolated number in the second act that reminded one reviewer of ‘cheap American musical comedy’.⁷⁵ Occasional crude humour was not the only problem with musical comedy. What had helped it appeal initially was the absence of a complex or ludicrous plot, but this lack of attention to plot came to be seen as a lack of attention to dramatic structure. A London critic offers A Waltz Dream as an instructive model, ‘which the clever, but idle or, perhaps, hampered makers of English musical pieces might well take to heart’, because the music ‘is not dropped in here and there to relieve the tedium of a senseless plot’.⁷⁶

The conviction that musical comedy is beset by artificiality surfaces in a number of reviews. The Broadway production in 1922 of Gilbert’s The Lady in Ermine was welcomed as ‘genuinely musical and dramatic’, but irritated the reviewer in those spots ‘where it has been obviously touched up for what is conceived to be a popular taste for musical comedies which are neither musical nor comic’.⁷⁷ The notion that musical comedy fell below the artistic standards of operetta and did not require skilful performers is illustrated in a review of Künneke’s Love’s Awakening (Wenn Liebe erwacht) given in London in 1922: ‘The difference between Love’s Awakening and a musical comedy may be gauged from the fact that, whereas in the latter the songs seem to occur in an incongruous way, at the Empire last night it was the intermittent conversation that seemed incongruous.’ The critic sums up: ‘here was a real light opera with real music and performed with real ability by real singers’.⁷⁸ Love’s Awakening was an attempt to raise artistic standards at the Empire Theatre of Varieties by Edward Laurillard, its manager. His published announcement that, on the first night, he would present the piano score and book of lyrics to every member of the audience gives an idea of the cultural capital of those he expected to attend the production.⁷⁹ It was, indeed, considered an artistic success, but ran for only thirty-six performances.

When the next Künneke production, The Cousin from Nowhere (Der Vetter aus Dingsda), took place in London the following year, the Times critic noted that, although it was described as a ‘new musical comedy’, it had two peculiarities:

One is that it does not possess the conventional ‘chorus’ of men and women who fill the stage at frequent and unexpected moments in the usual production of this type. Secondly, although both the original ‘book’ and the music are by Continental writers and a Continental composer, in its present form it closely resembles English light opera.⁸⁰

Conferring the label ‘light opera’ on a stage work always implied its superiority over musical comedy. Findon, of the Play Pictorial, was very taken with it and felt that no music ‘of more bewitching tunefulness’ had been composed since the days of Sullivan.⁸¹ He praised its stars, Walter Williams (the stranger), Helen Gilliland (Julia), and Cicely Debenham (Wilhelmine), and he remarked on its enthusiastic audience reception. Although it contained no choruses, it included complicated ensemble work, as in the Act 2 finale. After a run of more than a hundred performances in London, Laurillard announced his intention to send out two touring companies.⁸² A sign of the changing times, however, is that Walter Williams did not join the tour but, instead, accepted a part in the jazzy revue Brighter London (Finck) featuring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra at the Hippodrome.

A reviewer of the Broadway adaptation of Künneke’s operetta as Caroline (1923) informs readers that American theatrical managers, having been alerted to the enthusiastic reception given to Der Vetter aus Dingsda in Berlin, had gone to see what the fuss was about:

the managers came, one by one, and delivered their verdict: ‘A great show, but impossible for America. The singing cast it calls for would ruin any production financially.’ But finally there came a bolder one, and it was as a result of his visit that the Shuberts last night presented ‘Caroline’ at the Ambassador.⁸³

At the end of the decade, however, there was evidence of a growing concern that operetta composers, who had become swept up in a fashion for historical themes, were becoming too earnest. In 1930, a London reviewer of Lehár’s Frederica (Friederike) is unconvinced by this operetta based on the early life of Goethe. He argues that the composer’s artistic ambitiousness ‘has led to nothing more than pretentiousness’, and adds, significantly, ‘it is only in one or two lighter numbers written for the soubrette that the music sounds happy and at ease’.⁸⁴ The accusation of pretentiousness is always promptly made when popular genres dare to exhibit artistic aspirations. It is a criticism more usually directed at musical entertainment than plays; for example, a play of 1923 by Clemence Dane about incidents in the early life of Shakespeare gave rise to no similar concerns.⁸⁵ Taunts about excessive artistic pretensions are found in the previous century in Hanslick’s criticism of Strauss Jr’s concert waltzes and, in the later twentieth century, they surfaced in the critical reception of ‘progressive rock’. In Germany, some critics were offended at the idea of Goethe appearing in an operetta. Others objected to the Jewish writer Fritz Löhner-Beda adapting Goethe’s poetry.⁸⁶ After 1933, his efforts would be viewed as not simply adapting Goethe, but as falsifying or Judaizing Goethe – a literary equivalent to the Schubert adaptations by Jewish composer Heinrich Berté (real name, Bettelheim) in Das Dreimäderlhaus, described in a Nazi publication of 1940 as an ‘unscrupulous plunder and falsification of the works and form of one of the greatest German masters’.⁸⁷

Not every composer was travelling along the same aspirational artistic path as Lehár. Erik Charell established what he called ‘revue operetta’ with a trilogy of stage works he directed in Berlin: Casanova, 1928, Die drei Musketiere, 1929, and Im weißen Rössl, 1930. Retitled White Horse Inn, the latter enjoyed great success in London and New York and has been discussed in previous chapters. Countering the gripes of critics who thought revue operetta was all about adding a Schlager (a hit song) here and there to a musical play, Charell declared that the isolated number was not the decisive factor in revue; instead, ‘the constantly glittering movement of the whole’ was needed to keep an audience excited.⁸⁸ However, in 1932, when Benatzky’s Casanova (with music from Johann Strauss, Jr) was produced at the Coliseum, a critic reproached it for being ‘as thin a story as has ever dragged a musical comedy across Europe’.⁸⁹ This is not to suggest that it was rare for the plots of operettas to be criticized. Within half-a-dozen years of the triumph of The Merry Widow, British and American critics were beginning to complain about the many plots involving ‘petty Courts and showy uniforms’, or ‘tottering principalities, the elimination of which would probably prove fatal to the librettist’s inspiration’.⁹⁰

Moral Questions Raised by Operetta

In addition to critical-aesthetic reception, theatrical productions were open to moral concerns. Motivated, perhaps, by the renown bestowed on Maxim’s restaurant by The Merry Widow, an attempt was made to mount a London production of Georges Feydeau’s comic play La Dame de chez Maxim of 1899. In 1912, it was one of seven plays banned that year by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (another was Strindberg’s Miss Julie, dismissed as ‘a clever but revolting play’).⁹¹ The Lord Chamberlain’s Office, to which all plays (musical and spoken) had to be submitted, had the power to reject them or demand alterations before granting a licence for performance. La Dame de chez Maxim, which had a storyline about a respectable man who becomes involved with a coquette, was described as ‘A French farce of a decidedly “polisson” type throughout. A great success in Paris, but unsuited for a London audience.’⁹² The play was much admired later; indeed, George Grossmith Jr refers to The Girl from Maxim’s as ‘an oft-played comedy’ in his autobiography of 1933, and Alexander Korda directed a British film of it that same year.⁹³ The fact that a licence had been granted for The Merry Widow does not mean that it was not found morally objectionable by some. The author Arnold Bennett expresses his distaste in his journal entry for 23 February 1910:

All about drinking, and whoring and money. All popular operetta airs. Simply nothing else in the play at all, save references to patriotism. Names of tarts on the lips of characters all the time. Dances lascivious …⁹⁴

In March 1912, there was a debate on censorship in the House of Lords,⁹⁵ but that same month a petition was submitted ‘from West End Theatre Managers to the King’, asking for no change in the licensing of theatre plays.⁹⁶ Among the signatories were George Edwardes (Daly’s, Gaiety, and Adelphi Theatres), P. Michael Faraday (Lyric Theatre), Arthur Collins (Drury Lane), Robert Courtneidge (Shaftesbury Theatre), and R. D’Oyly Carte (Savoy Theatre).

The Lord Chamberlain’s Office felt a need to clarify its position regarding ‘doubtful plays’, and explained that they fell into two types:

1. 1) ‘general tone or plot is objectionable’, examples being gross immorality, obscenity, or ‘risk of international complication’;

2. 2) ‘the language is indecent, blasphemous, or contains offensive personal allusions’.⁹⁷

Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession was cited as an example of the first type; it had been rejected for its plot: ‘Mrs Warren kept a Brothel’. Many were left dissatisfied by such reasons for suppression, and, in July 1912, another petition was presented, but this time in opposition to the Lord Chamberlain. The next year, Robert Harcourt, in a parliamentary debate on 16 April, introduced a bill proposing the abolition of the censorship of plays. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office continued to function, however, until 1968, and the first stage production that followed its demise was the hippie rock musical Hair (book and lyrics by James Rado and Jerome Ragni, music by Galt MacDermot).

A sample of comments from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (LCO) will illustrate some of the deliberations made before granting a licence in return for a fee of forty-two shillings. Fall’s The Girl in the Train deals humorously with a court case for divorce, a serious and sensitive matter at this time, but it elicited no negative comments from the LCO, and that may be because the play on which it was based, Victorien Sardou’s Divorçons!, had already received a licence for performance in a translation by Margaret Mayo in June 1907. Some changes had been made: the play was set in New York, the operetta version was set in Amsterdam; but, more to the point, the content of the German libretto by Victor Léon had been toned down by Adrian Ross (the Vienna version is discussed in Chapter 7). It was given a licence on 13 June 1910; unusually, this came a week after its first performance at the Vaudeville Theatre.

Gilbert’s The Girl in the Taxi has a leading character, Suzanne Pomarel, who has won a prize for conjugal virtue, a quality she distinctly lacks. Some of its eroticism may seem tepid today:

Suzanne: ‘Oh, dear, my shoe has come untied’.

Hubert: ‘By Jove, what ripping ankles’.

The subject matter was found a little indecent by the LCO, but prompted a jaded response: ‘its chief scenes [are] laid in a gay Parisian restaurant, whither there come, as usual, for supper various improper husbands unaccompanied by their proper wives’. Paris always conjured up a morally unwholesome environment for the respectable British middle class. A licence was granted, however, on 23 August 1912, a week before the first performance at the Lyric Theatre.⁹⁸

The same weary, reproachful tone is detected in the LCO’s comments on The Girl on the Film (music by Albert Sirmay and Walter Kollo), licensed on 4 April 1913, the day before its first performance at the Gaiety Theatre: ‘The underplot affords opportunity for the flirtations of the young ladies, who, whether as typists or followers of Terpsichore, are always looked for, and at, in Gaiety entertainments.’⁹⁹ Another operetta on the subject of film making, Gilbert’s The Cinema Star, is summed up as follows: ‘Its plot is chiefly concerned with the adventures of one Clutterbuck, a millionaire who has been prompted by his wife to agitate for the suppression of the cinematograph shows, and how he was trapped into being “filmed” in a compromising position.’¹⁰⁰ That is putting it mildly, given that he was tricked into appearing in a film called Count Porn’s Last Adventure, in a scene that creates the impression of an attempted rape. The official, however, ignores this and decides, instead, that some of the lyrics require specific comment. He reports that ‘the searcher for evil’ might interpret the lines ‘in the shade of the street, every girl that we meet is a maid who was just made for love’ as a reference to ‘street-walkers’, although he believes that would be foolishly mistaken.¹⁰¹ A licence was granted on 3 June 1914, the day before its premiere at the Shaftesbury. The libretto offers some insight into contemporary moral anxieties about cinema-going. In Act 3, a police constable invites a woman into the cinema, and she exclaims in response:

Wot me – with you! In a place where they turn the lights out? You stop your nonsense! You’re exceeding the speed limit, you are.

A certain degree of suspicion is aroused by The Joy-Ride Lady, an adaptation by Arthur Anderson and Hartley Carrick of another of Gilbert’s operettas, Das Autoliebchen. The term ‘joy-rider’ was new in 1914,¹⁰² and the Parisian setting would immediately raise moral suspicion. Moral concern would be reinforced by lyrics such as the following, from the chorus in the Act 1 Finale:

Joy-ride lady, Joy-ride lady

    I’m on fire for you!

I’ve a feeling

O’er me stealing,

    Thrills me through and through.

Once again with my arms around you,

    Press your lips to mine!

All too late but, at last, I’ve found you

    Lady love divine.

The LCO believed, however, that there was more of an intention to suggest naughtiness than to make it explicit:

I think the intention of the Play is to attract people by the report that it is improper, and I have no doubt that the original was extremely so. As it stands, however, it is not, so far as the situations and dialogue go, worse than many plays of the kind.¹⁰³

It was granted a licence on 19 February 1914, a few days ahead of its production at the New Theatre.

A production suspected of being morally improper was not necessarily good for business. ‘Immorality is not a popular card to play in middle-class England’, wrote Findon, commenting on propriety and the stage in 1921.¹⁰⁴ Even a title could arouse suspicion. He relates that one regular playgoer informed him that she could on no account go to see a play called Hanky Panky John, despite assurances that it was devoid of offence.¹⁰⁵ That was a good enough reason to change an operetta title like Die geschiedene Frau into The Girl in the Train.

The acceptable duration of an embrace or kiss on stage was not specified. The scene in which Robert Evett (as Lieutenant Niki) kissed Gertie Millar (as Franzi) in the first London production of A Waltz Dream (1908) became known as, and was even advertised as, ‘the longest kiss on record’.¹⁰⁶ When Edwardes revived this operetta in 1911, he decided against repeating the extended kiss, perhaps because it might seem a publicity stunt rather than because of moral objections. Yet, even in the more liberal 1920s, Jimmy White, who had taken over as manager of Daly’s, worried about the close embrace in the last act of Straus’s Cleopatra between the heroine and Mark Antony. His anxiety abated after the producer Oscar Asche assured him that the couple’s marriage had been ratified by the Egyptian priesthood.¹⁰⁷

After the First World War, the London Public Morality Council, a quasi-official municipal body, became fretful about sex and the stage. The Council published a booklet titled Sex Plays and Books, reproducing excerpts from publications from 13 to 20 February 1925, and quoting a writer in the Daily News who stated: ‘In America, I am told, a certain play is openly advertised a “sexy”.’¹⁰⁸ The operations of the Censor of Plays became an issue again in March 1926, when the Daily Telegraph reported that means were being found to evade the law, including the production of unlicensed plays in theatres on Sunday evenings.¹⁰⁹ Another debate on the Censorship of Plays took place in the House of Lords on 10 June 1926.¹¹⁰

In New York, where no censorship office existed, some reviews contain expressions of distaste similar to those found in London. A reviewer of the Broadway production of The Lilac Domino deplored its vulgar humour: ‘Jokes about sausages, hot dogs, and other comedy of the burlesque stage are plentiful, if not pleasing.’¹¹¹ A ‘threat of flaunting licentiousness’ was found to be arising in the 1924–25 season, which led to calls for a stage censor.¹¹² There being none, the District Attorney stepped in, but, in the end, took no legal action. The next season, however, a court case was brought against William Francis Dugan’s play The Virgin Man, and Mae West was fined and spent ten days in the workhouse as a consequence of her production Sex. In the wake of this intervention by the District Attorney, the following season, 1927–28, witnessed the arrival of what was called the ‘Wales padlock law’, which meant that a theatre presenting a questionable play could be closed for a year, and its producers and performers brought to trial.¹¹³

Politics and issues of gender and sexuality are discussed further in Chapter 7, but suffice it to say, here, that operetta was rarely thought a political threat. Even a piece as strongly oriented politically as Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) was given a New York production (as The 3-Penny Opera) at the Empire Theatre in April 1933, in a version by Clifford Cochran and Jerrold Krimsky. The New York run was only 12 performances, but Marc Blitztein’s version for the off-Broadway Theatre de Lys enjoyed a record-breaking run of 2500 performances. It was that version which came to the Royal Court Theatre in February 1956, with Sam Wannamaker as stage director and Berthold Goldschmidt as musical director. Brecht and Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930) was not performed in the West End until 1963, nor given an off-Broadway production until 1970, but its German reception had not proved encouraging to theatre managers elsewhere. There was a riot at the Leipzig premiere, and, at the Frankfurt performance, an audience fight that resulted in someone being shot dead. In this stage work, Brecht painted a relentless political satire of capitalism: Mahagonny is a fictional city, supposedly in Alabama, where everything is tolerated except lack of money.

The Waning Enthusiasm for Operetta Post-1933

The decline in productions on Broadway and in the West End of operetta from the German stage can be linked to several factors. One was the persecution of Jewish creative artists and the Nazi state control of operetta, which is discussed in the postlude to this book. Another was the growing enthusiasm for the new Broadway musicals and for sound film and screen musicals. There were also other leisure-time pursuits to distract the erstwhile operetta lover: social dancing and dance bands, for instance, and radio and records. Radio ownership was increasing in the mid-1920s, but records were still expensive. However, prices fell in the 1930s and records joined sound films as channels for the dissemination and promotion of American music. As syncopated American popular styles established a position of dominance in that decade, much of the music of operetta was beginning to sound like a bygone era.

The new jazzy Broadway musical had begun to have an impact in the West End during 1925–28, with shows by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Vincent Youmans. The novel character of the latter’s No, No, Nanette! was recognized by The Theatre World in July 1925:

‘No, No, Nanette’ may be said to have been the first of the new type of musical comedy, which is rapidly ousting the more old-fashioned ‘waltz and kiss’ style of musical play. … High spirits are the secrets of the success of these modern shows … Quick-fire dancing and quick-fire comedy are the order of the day.¹¹⁴

No, No, Nanette! opened in March 1925 at the Palace Theatre and ran for 665 performances. In contrast, Lehár’s Frasquita opened in April and closed after 36 performances. In June, as if responding to competition, the next Lehár production in the West End was Clo-Clo, which was described by a disgruntled critic in Theatre World as ‘a jazz maniacal comedy’.¹¹⁵ It did continue for a respectable run of 95 performances, but Oscar Straus’s ‘old-fashioned’ Cleopatra, also produced in June, was still running when Clo-Clo closed. It was not, therefore, only the American jazzy style of show that appealed to West End audiences, and, in fact, the three biggest successes imported from the USA to the London stage in the second half of the1920s were of a more traditional operetta character: Rudolf Friml’s Rose-Marie and The Vagabond King, and Sigmund Romberg’s The Desert Song. Operetta from the German stage also remained a strong force: Gilbert’s Katja, the Dancer was hailed in 1925 as ‘one of the biggest successes the Gaiety has ever known’ – the reviewer adding, somewhat backhandedly, ‘even the waltz songs are not as irritatingly cloying as usual’.¹¹⁶ It transferred to Daly’s in September 1925 and enjoyed, in all, a run of 514 performances, which puts it in third place (behind Rose-Marie, with 851 performances, and No, No, Nanette!) among the most successful shows opening that year. Even in 1933, the Daily Telegraph welcomed Straus’s Mother of Pearl at the Gaiety as ‘a great relief from the blatant jazz compositions from which we have so long suffered’.¹¹⁷

At the same time as Broadway was exporting energetic fun mixed with romance, some operettas were taking a melancholy turn. In late 1929, the New York Times claimed that Berlin impresarios the Rotter brothers knew the value of offering a piece that gave the audience the opportunity ‘for a good cry’.¹¹⁸ The work the newspaper had in mind was Lehár’s Friederike, which was to arrive eventually at the Imperial Theatre in 1937. The sad ending and theme of resignation had already been present in Ein Walzertraum and Das Dreimäderlhaus.

Broadway musicals increased their presence on the London stage in the 1930s. Singer-comedian George Graves was more anxious about the ‘American invasion’ of the West End than he was about continental European fare, because American stage works were not adapted in the same way, and thus they threatened ‘to eclipse our language and social standards’.¹¹⁹ By 1931, the year Graves published his autobiography, he sensed the danger from Broadway has passed, and prophesized that ‘a renewal of the popularity of British shows’ would follow the ‘long spell of foreign domination of our theatre’.¹²⁰ He failed to see that the Broadway shows had prepared the ground for the later dominance of American musicals in London. When Lehár’s Paganini was produced by C. B. Cochran at the Lyceum in 1937, it had Richard Tauber and Evelyn Laye in the lead roles, and contained some Lehár’s most lyrical music; yet, even so, the reception was disappointing. It was beginning to seem as if continental European operetta’s glory days were over.

A weariness with operetta after the Second World War is evident in the Times review of the revival of Stolz’s Wild Violets (Wenn die kleinen Veilchen blühen) at the Stoll Theatre, London, in February 1950. The reviewer thinks it ‘may be of interest to the younger generation as a period piece’, but Annie Get Your Gun (Berlin) and Oklahoma! (Rodgers and Hammerstein) had arrived in the West End three years before and had ‘led audiences to expect a whole string of catchy tunes’.¹²¹ Wild Violets actually continued for a respectable run of 121 performances, but it had achieved 290 at Drury Lane during 1932–33. It is ironic that the up-to-date George Gershwin told Oscar Straus, with whom he had become friends during the latter’s American visits, that The Chocolate Soldier was his favourite musical.¹²² Gershwin did not dismiss Straus as old fashioned, even if his own stage works now epitomized contemporary musical theatre. Nevertheless, Straus was present at the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! in 1943 and remarked afterwards: ‘Something new and elemental has arrived. It is a revolution which makes old fogeys like me seem academic, perhaps even classical.’¹²³ Straus’s Three Waltzes (Die drei Wälzer) was the last silver-age operetta to have a Broadway premiere in the 1930s. It opened at the Majestic Theatre, 25 Dec. 1937 and ran for 122 performances. After that, there was no premiere of an operetta from the German stage until 1946, when the long-planned production of Lehár’s Das Land des Lächelns finally opened at the Shubert Theatre with the title Yours Is My Heart. It lasted a mere 36 performances, despite the presence of Richard Tauber.

6 Operetta and Intermediality

Operetta not only transferred across borders but also from one media platform to another, a characteristic of industrialized production termed ‘intermediality’. A stage show was a multilayered communication medium that connected to other media, such as sheet music, records, film, and radio, linking ‘a variety of media in a symbolic mesh’, as Carolin Stahrenberg and Nils Grosch explain succinctly.¹ As early as 1912, a Broadway theatre reviewer remarked: ‘Nowadays when one goes to hear a Viennese operetta one is certain to recognize the tunes.’ The next year, another American reporter observed: ‘Viennese operetta waltzes are produced in New York restaurants long before they reach the New York theatres.’² Operetta also transferred from the theatre to the palais de danse after the First World War. Composers knew that if they included waltzes, tangos, and fox trots, these could be marketed in an alternative way via dance bands. An operetta song demonstrated its autonomy ‘by its ability to walk out of the theatre on its own’, as David Baker neatly puts it, ‘becoming a hit in cafés, band concerts, dance halls or variety shows’, and, of course, on records.³ There was nothing so new about this, Johann Strauss’s operettas were intermedial in a similar sense, since he served up ballroom versions of many of their numbers. Intermediality can create new styles of entertainment, as demonstrated by Zirkus aimé (1932), a mixture of revue operetta and circus, with music by Ralph Benatzky and book and lyrics by Curt Goetz. When it was given in the West End as The Flying Trapeze (1935), its novel combination of theatre and circus was commented on in The Play Pictorial.⁴

Arrangements of Operetta Music

The term ‘remediation’ refers to a change from one medium to another, and there were various ways in which the music of operetta might be remediated. For example, it could be turned into sheet music for private pleasure playing the home piano, or, re-emerge as a military band medley for the enjoyment of the public spending a leisurely afternoon in the park. The market for sheet music was enormous. Bernard Grun recollects that, in the first half of the twentieth century, people bought ‘thousands of piano scores, songs, and “selections,” which were then played at home on the piano’.⁵ Diverse arrangements were published: for voice and piano, piano solo or duet, solo instrument with or without piano accompaniment, large or small orchestra, and military or brass bands. The Royal Artillery band recorded a selection from The Merry Widow, as did the Grenadier Guards band.⁶ Military bands also spread this music in other countries. King Edward’s Horse, a British Dominions cavalry regiment, recorded a selection from The Chocolate Soldier in 1913 for Edison Bell.⁷ Many arrangements were for dancing. MacQueen-Pope comments on the ubiquity of the ‘Merry Widow Waltz’, which in the days before the palais de danse was ‘ground out on piano organs …, played in restaurants by orchestras, at the seaside, in parks, at exhibitions, on parade by brass and military bands, tinkled on pianos in innumerable homes, churned on records on the new popular gramophones, [and] danced by couples … at parties everywhere’.⁸

A publisher might employ more than one arranger, even for piano selections. In 1909, Ascherberg, Hopwood & Crew published Carl Kiefert’s waltz based on melodies from The Dollar Princess, as well as Charles Godfrey’s piano selection from that operetta. The piano part of a vocal score needed an arranger, and Chappell often employed H. M. [Henry Marcellus] Higgs. There were many other arrangers, such as Henri Saxon, Guy Jones, and Gustav Blasser, working for various publishers. A musical director might also arrange selections, as Arthur Wood did for Gilbert’s Yvonne. In the early century, a vocal score would have cost around 6s in the UK and $2 in the USA (slightly more expensive). A single song was around 2s in the UK and 60¢ in the USA. At this time a dollar was worth just under five shillings (and there were 20 shillings to the pound). The typical price of individual songs remained the same after the war, although the cost of a vocal score increased a little. As a consequence of the sharply rising prices in 1922, however, sheet music was becoming cheaper in real terms.

Before the war, figure dances were still in vogue, so Chappell published a set of ‘Merry Widow Lancers’. Iff’s Orchestra recorded the Merry Widow Lancers on three discs (containing the five figures of the dance).⁹ Some of the music, notably that of the ‘Merry Widow Waltz’ and ‘Vilja’, is uncomfortably forced into the required tempo for the figures in a way that was rarely necessary in quadrilles based on music from the Johann Strauss operettas. After the war, dance bands grew in number and were of the newer variety dominated by wind instruments rather than strings. The repertoire of these bands included waltzes, fox trots, and tangos from operetta. The link between theatre and dance was evident when Irene and Vernon Castle took roles in Irving Berlin’s Watch Your Step at Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theatre in 1914, the year they started their dance school and published Modern Dancing.

The remediation of an operetta number as a dance piece involved related material but offered a different experience. A few examples from both sides of the Atlantic suffice to illustrate how the dance bands of the 1920s included operetta in their repertoire. The duet ‘Josef, ach Josef’ from Leo Fall’s Madame Pompadour was a hit record for two stars of the Berlin stage, Fritzi Massary and Max Pallenberg, in 1928.¹⁰ Yet the Savoy Orpheans at the Savoy Hotel, London, had already recorded it as a fox trot, ‘Joseph’, several years earlier.¹¹ In New York, George Olsen and His Music recorded the fox trot ‘Leander’ from Jean Gilbert’s operetta Katja, die Tänzerin in 1926.¹² Needless to say it was a similar story with dance bands in Berlin, of which there were a plethora by 1927.¹³ Operetta continued to relate to dance band music in the 1930s: Chappell published dance-band arrangements of the waltzes ‘Pardon, Madame!’ and ‘Good Night!’ from Abraham’s Viktoria and her Hussar in 1931.¹⁴ Henry Hall, who had recently become conductor of the BBC Dance Orchestra, was asked by Chappell to select and arrange a piano selection from the same composer’s Ball at the Savoy in 1933.

Player Pianos and Records

There had been various early models of player piano, but it was the pianola developed by the Aeolian Company in 1897 that really took off.¹⁵ In 1908, an industry conference in Buffalo agreed to a common format for piano rolls, which would be capable of playing all 88 notes of the standard piano keyboard. Before this, in 1904, Edwin Welte had invented a device that would play back a performance exactly as the original pianist had played it. People were desirous of hearing a celebrated pianist’s performance in their own homes, and player-piano rolls now hold value as a source of historic performing practice – at least in terms of tempo, phrasing, and rhythm. It was still necessary to rely on mechanical devices to give prominence to a melodic line. The player piano was at the height of its popularity in the 1920s. Player pianos and piano rolls, which had been produced all around the globe, faced a period of decline in the1930s, as attention turned to radio and records. Figure 6.1 shows one of two rolls of selections from Lilac Time, arranged by G. H. Clutsam, issued by the Artistyle Music Roll Company.¹⁶

Figure 6.1 Lilac Time piano roll.

Before the British Government passed its new Copyright Act in 1911, a Royal Commission had to grapple with the vexed question of a composer’s rights with regard to mechanical music. The gramophone companies claimed that copyright fees would cost many jobs among the manufacturing workforce. According to William Boosey, Winston Churchill decided that pianola rolls infringed copyright because it was possible for a human being to read and reconstruct the music being played, but that was not the case with gramophone records. The Act resulted in many composers having to part with their work to record companies for a compulsory fixed percentage. Section 19 of the Act put it at 5 per cent of the price of the record, or 2.5 per cent if the composer’s music did not feature on the second side of the record. It meant that composers were earning less than 2d from each record sold (records at this time cost between 1s and 3s). Moreover, this 2d had to be shared with any lyricist or agent they used. Once the copyright percentage was agreed with one record company, another company had the right to insist upon the same terms. The performers of music, on the other hand, were able to negotiate any terms they pleased, and consequently made far more money out of records than did composers and lyricists.

The changing music market in the early twentieth century prompted a shift from concentrating on sales of sheet music to the exploitation of rights.¹⁷ The UK’s Copyright Act of 1911 responded to the 1908 revision of the Berne Convention by asserting that copyright in music applied to its mechanical reproduction. The Mechanical Copyright Licences Company, established in 1910, collected and distributed royalties, and became the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society in 1924. Publishers realized that performing rights, about which they had been so neglectful previously, were now a major source of income, especially with the advent of recording, player pianos, films, and radio broadcasts.

The phonographic cylinder could no longer compete with competition from discs as the first decade of the twentieth century drew to a close. Columbia Records dropped the format in 1912, though Edison kept going with dwindling numbers. The industry was always keen, for competitive reasons, to stress its technological progress. An advertisement in 1912 for the Orpheus gramophone claimed that it had an ‘everlasting sapphire point’ making replacement needles unnecessary.¹⁸ Another advertisement, for the new Columbia Grafonola of 1924, boasts of technological progress in Columbia’s gramophones and records.¹⁹ Yet the German record label Electrola, part of the same business as Britain’s Gramophone Company, had already claimed perfection for its records of The Merry Widow in 1907, citing an endorsement from the composer: ‘The new Gramophone Records reproduce the fine musical points of my own music in the most perfect manner.’²⁰ In 1910, the Gramophone Company gave Robert Falcon Scott two HMV ‘Monarch’ gramophones and a box of several hundred records to take with him on his ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic. Among the discs were the ‘Dollar Princess Two-Step’ and ‘Dollar Princess Operatic Party’, issued while the operetta was still running at Daly’s.²¹

Records were of performers who had achieved stardom on stage, and the same was true of films and photographs. Even published song-sheets commonly named the singer who had made the song popular. Thus, to pick up on Mary Simonson’s useful phrase, performers created ‘intermedial reference points’.²² In 1911, for example, soloists from the London production of The Count of Luxembourg could be heard on discs released by HMV, and soloists from the New York production of Gypsy Love could be heard on Edison cylinders. Recordings were of single items or selections rather than of whole productions. Original cast members were preferred, but engaging every single one was not always possible. Records of some members of the Daly’s Merry Widow cast (sadly, not Lily Elsie²³) were released by Odeon, a company founded in Berlin in 1903, for which Eduard Künneke worked as musical director during 1908–10. Harry Welchman played Colonel Belovar in the Daly’s production of The Lady of the Rose, but it is Thorpe Bates who sings the role on the Columbia recordings with Daly’s Theatre Orchestra. Yet Phyllis Dare, Ivy Tremand, and Huntley Wright all sing their own numbers on these records (see Appendix 4). Singers engaged for recordings discovered that gramophone royalties could supplement their salaries substantially, especially if they were star performers. José Collins’s earnings at the Gaiety in 1923, including her gramophone royalties, sometimes amounted to £800 in a single week.²⁴

There were three record manufacturers in Britain in 1912, but by 1916 the number had risen to 60.²⁵ Recording companies marketed operetta not only as dance music but also as hit songs. The 1920s were a boom time for record sales, and songs from successful operettas were recorded regularly because, at this time, the industry was reluctant to promote anything new and untried.²⁶ In Austria and Germany, Odeon and Parlophone advertised records of Schlager (hit songs).²⁷ HMV Records of ‘Sämtliche Schlager’ (‘All the Hits’) from Der Graf von Luxemburg were advertised as on sale at Weiss’s shop at 189 Friedrichstrasse, Berlin, almost immediately after its premiere in 1909.²⁸ When Paul Abraham appeared on the scene, he was well aware of the market for Schlager. Many songs from Viktoria und ihr Husar became hit records (‘Meine Mama’, ‘Mausi’, and ‘Goodnight’ were special favourites). In Die Blume von Hawaii (1931), there were again hit songs to be marketed: one of them, half written in English, was ‘My Golden Baby’.²⁹

The separate existence of Schlager encouraged intermediality. People who had never been to a theatre were whistling Lehár’s ‘Nechledl-Marsch’ (from Wiener Frauen) on the streets, claims Anton Mayer.³⁰ Out of the context of operetta performance, it hardly mattered what key a song was sung in, or whether the singer was male or female. Chappell marketed the sheet music for ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’ in four different keys to cater for male or female soloists of various voice ranges, and also published a vocal duet version for soprano and tenor (Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2 ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’, the hit song of The Land of Smiles.

Tauber’s voice ensured wide dissemination of Lehár’s music on radio and records.³¹ Certain songs became particularly identified with him, examples being ‘Hab ein blaues Himmelbett’ (Frasquita), ‘Gern hab’ich den Frau’n geküsst’ (Paganini), and ‘O Mädchen, mein Mädchen’ (Friederike).³² With ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz’ (Das Land des Lächelns), the Tauber-Lied became a ‘declaration of love’ song and lost the narrative quality it had in Frasquita and Paganini. Frey comments that this type of song was even more effective on radio or gramophone than the stage, and records of ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz’ sold over a million copies in German, English, French, and Italian versions.³³ The song was as popular on radio as it was in sheet music and on disc. In 1944, Forbes-Winslow remarked that ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’ had been ‘broadcast repeatedly from more than fifty stations in parts of the world’.³⁴

Some singers now made their reputations singing vocal refrains on dance-band records, one such being Pat O’Malley, who sang songs from White Horse Inn on recordings made by Jack Hylton and His Orchestra in Berlin and Milan,³⁵ before becoming a film and TV actor in the USA. Others who released songs from this operetta were Sam Browne and Cavan O’Connor.

Radio

When dance bands and singers performed on radio, it always created a thorny problem for the BBC. The corporation was anxious to avoid accusations that it was acting like an advertiser in a theatre programme. When Eric Maschwitz, head of the BBC’s variety department, first invited Cavan O’Connor to appear on radio in 1935, he was asked to sing anonymously as ‘The Vagabond Lover’. His signature song, ‘I’m only a Strolling Vagabond’, was that of the unknown stranger in Künneke’s The Cousin from Nowhere.

In New York, RCA Radio had no hesitation in promoting the Broadway production of White Horse Inn, and broadcast excerpts in the same month as the premiere, excitedly announcing the presence of leading cast members, such as Kitty Carlisle and William Gaxton.³⁶ An unnamed chorus member was Alfred Drake, the understudy for Gaxton (as Leopold), who later achieved fame as Curly in Oklahoma! at St James’s Theatre in 1943.³⁷ In the next decade, Drake enjoyed star billing in a BBC broadcast of excepts from White Horse Inn (15 November 1959).

The precursor of radio was the electrophone. The use of telephone technology to relay music from the Paris Opéra had been demonstrated at the Exposition Internationale d’Électricité in 1881, and companies offering similar services soon sprang up elsewhere.³⁸ In 1890, Lillian Russell sang ‘Voici le sabre’ from Offenbach’s La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein into a funnel on the New York stage, while President Grover Cleveland listened to her performance in Washington.³⁹ In London, an audio system developed by the Electrophone Company in 1895 used telephone lines to relay musical shows and opera. On 1 February 1896, the cover of the weekly review Invention depicted a man relaxing in an armchair, smoking a pipe, and listening to an electrophone transmission over headphones.

Singer Ellaline Terriss mentions the electrophone in her autobiography, describing how, by means of microphones, a show was relayed over the telephone. It enabled her to hear The Shop Girl (1895) when she was temporarily absent from the show through illness. She explains:

you listened by holding earphones to your ears on a kind of two-pronged metal rod – or you could just hold them in your hands. There was also an attachment like a stethoscope with little tubes which fitted into your ears. Over it you heard the show, and although it was by no means as clear and good as modern radio, still it served its purpose and we thought it was wonderful.⁴⁰

The Electrophone Company had a salon at its headquarters in Pelican House, Gerrard Street, where listeners sat, often wearing evening dress in the early days, and listened over headphones. The system was also available in some hospitals, but the usual practice was to subscribe to the service and ask an operator to connect your telephone to the site of your choice. In 1906, all the main London operetta theatres were available. Terriss considered it a forerunner of radio, and, indeed, it was radio that drove the electrophone into oblivion in the summer of 1925. Just one year before, the Electrophone Company was offering subscribers the chance to listen to Fall’s Madame Pompadour at Daly’s and Lehár’s The Three Graces at the Empire.⁴¹ A subscription of £5 a year allowed two listeners access to any of the shows broadcast, and there was no extra charge for the telephone call.

The arrival of radio effected a change in music dissemination. William Boosey declared that the radio broadcasting of music was what decided Chappell to abandon concert giving.⁴² It was also radio that made the collection of performing rights imperative. The first show to be broadcast from a theatre in the UK was Straus’s operetta The Last Waltz, which opened at the Gaiety in December 1922. BBC radio services had begun that year, and the former Gaiety Restaurant, next door to the theatre, was now Marconi House, headquarters of BBC broadcasting.⁴³ It had a studio on the top floor, and leading stars such as José Collins and W. H. Berry were soon engaged.⁴⁴ Austria’s first radio station Radio Verkehrs AG was established in 1924, and, two year later, Frasquita was the first operetta to be broadcast in its entirety (live from the Thalia-Theater). At this time, the station was attracting an audience of over 100,000, and issuing a weekly magazine, Radio Wien.⁴⁵

Radio had, at first, transmitted live from theatres, but the BBC was soon using alternative premises, such as St George’s Hall. Studio broadcasting then became the norm, and with this development came the recognition that the broadcasts needed to ‘develop a technique of acting and production peculiar to themselves’.⁴⁶ An obvious difference was the interaction of actors with microphones, which necessitated decisions about where the latter were to be placed. If radio productions are ignored in studies of operetta reception, a sense of the public’s familiarity with some stage works is undermined. The BBC, for example, broadcast over half-a-dozen studio performances of Künneke’s The Cousin from Nowhere between 1927 and 1938. The neglect of radio broadcasts has given the impression that Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper was ignored in the UK until Marc Blitzstein’s Broadway version was given at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956. In fact, its first performance took the form of a live BBC studio broadcast on 8 February 1935 (as The Tuppenny-ha’penny Opera, adapted by C. Denis Freeman), and the musical suite that Weill made of this work had already been transmitted on 10 March 1933.

Radio offered opportunities for new compositions. Franz Marszalek, the musical director of the Schauspielhaus in Breslau (Wrocław), where Künneke’s Lady Hamilton had its premiere in 1926, later took up work at that city’s radio station. Künneke already had a connection with Breslau, because his wife, the singer Katarina Garden, had been born there. Marzalek commissioned him to compose a Dance Suite for radio, and it was broadcast on 8 September 1929. Künneke also composed his ‘Opta-Walzer’ for choir and orchestra (including a theremin) as an advertisement for Opta Radio. On 1 January 1932, the BBC broadcast the first radio operetta, Good Night, Vienna! (music by George Posford, libretto by Eric Maschwitz, using the pseudonym Holt Marvell).⁴⁷ It became a screen operetta later that year. A stage version did not appear until 1936. A later operetta heard first on radio was Kálmán’s posthumous Arizona Lady, broadcast by Bayerische Rundfunk, 1 January 1954.

Film

In the early days of film, stage actors had generally been scornful about the new medium, but with the advent of sound film it became common for actors to combine a cinema and theatre career, especially since earnings tended to be higher in film.⁴⁸ Some acclaimed operetta singers, such as Carl Brisson and Evelyn Laye, became film stars. The singing of Gitta Alpár, a coloratura soprano first with Budapest State Opera, and later with Berlin State Opera, can be heard in the film I Give My Heart (Wardour Films, 1935), based on The Dubarry. Because of her Jewish heritage, Alpár had fled from the Nazis in 1933, first to Austria, then to the UK (later, to the USA). Stars crossing from film to stage could prove less trustworthy, especially in the days of silent film. When Charles Dillingham acquired the American rights of Madame Pompadour, there were rumours that Metropolitan Opera diva Geraldine Farrar, or even Fritzi Massary, might take the title role, but the part was, at length, given to silent screen star Hope Hampton.⁴⁹ Sadly, at the Philadelphia try-out she showed a lack of singing and stage acting experience, and so, for the Broadway premiere (the opening production at the new Martin Beck Theatre), she was replaced by the reliable Wilda Bennett. However, in contrast, Max Hansen, who played Leopold in Richard Oswald’s 1926 silent film of the comic play Im weißen Rössl (written by Oscar Blumenthal and Gustav Kadelburg in 1897), succeeded in playing the same role on stage in the later operetta.

There were links between film and stage from the beginning. The performance of Paul Lincke’s Castles in the Air at the Scala Theatre, London, in April 1911, was preceded by ‘Charles Urban’s Kinemacolor’.⁵⁰ Sirmay and Kollo’s The Girl on the Film (1913) was the first operetta to include a scene of film projection (in Act 3). A year later, in the New York production of The Lilac Domino in 1914, a film was shown of the carnival in Nice. A number entitled ‘Film Music’ forms part of the musical score, but it is composed with a broad brush – a march and trio – rather than incidental music to be synchronized with screen images. That same year, the ‘Song of the Picture-Palace Queen’ in Act 1 of Gilbert’s The Cinema Star illustrated how music was used more typically to represent action and mood in motion pictures.

Klaw and Erlanger formed a film company in 1913 and were soon joined by a major studio, the Biograph Company. They must have believed profits were assured because of the number of theatres they had at their disposal, but the prices they charged were too high and it folded in three years.⁵¹ When the Shuberts took over the Longacre Theatre in 1918, it was in partnership with others, including L. Lawrence Weber who, as secretary of the Producer Managers Association was associated with several motion picture companies. Several of these companies listed their address as the Longacre Theatre, revealing how film and theatre businesses were working in cooperation.⁵² In the mid-1920s, The Play Pictorial recognized such connections by including brief coverage of new films. The film rights to Der letzte Walzer, which Blumenthal and Rachman had sold to United Plays, Broadway, were purchased by the Shuberts in October 1920, but they failed to make the film within three years, as stipulated in the contract. As a consequence, in 1927, Grünwald, Brammer, and Straus resold the motion picture rights to the Davidson Film Aktiengesellschaft, Berlin, for 20,000 marks in lieu of royalties.⁵³

Operettas provided the subject matter of a number of classic films of the silent era. A much-admired director, Ludwig Berger, was responsible for Ein Walzertraum (1925), starring Willy Fritsch and Mady Christians. Unfortunately, a large number of silent films have either been lost or no longer exist. Early silent films were on a single reel, and thus short in duration; multi-reel films were a feature of the second decade of the twentieth century. In the 1920s, there were critics ready to argue for the artistic status of film. Cultural historian Egon Friedell maintained that, like other art forms, film had areas of activity and effects that were subject to its own generic laws; moreover, he believed it was the art that represented contemporary times most clearly and completely.⁵⁴

Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow (MGM, 1925), starring John Gilbert as Danilo and Mae Murray as the widow, departs considerably from the operetta. It includes what would now be called a ‘backstory’ of the widow’s early life as an American ex-vaudeville performer in the small kingdom of Monteblanco. The Parisian scenes come later. Lehár’s music was rearranged by William Axt and David Mendoza. The film has erotic content featuring scantily clothed dancers at Maxim’s restaurant and a love scene on a bed in a chambre séparée, with half-naked blindfolded musicians playing in an alcove.

After seeing Die Zirkusprinzessin in Berlin in 1926, Arthur Hammerstein contracted Kálmán for the opening show at the theatre he had built in honour of his father Oscar in New York.⁵⁵ It was to be Golden Dawn, in which Archie Leach took the minor role of Anzac. Leach had not yet become the film star known as Cary Grant, and did not appear in the Warner Brothers and Vitaphone film version directed by Ray Enright in 1930. The music was credited to both Emmerich Kálmán and Hubert Stothart, and the Vitaphone Orchestra was conducted by Louis Silvers. The fox trot song ‘Though I’m Interested’ and the sado-masochistic song in which a woman declares she wants a man like a tiger (a typical ‘I want’ burlesque number) must surely be Stothart, because Kálmán’s grasp on syncopation was slight at this time. The screenplay and dialogue was by Walter Anthony, and the location and time was East Africa during the First World War, when it was under German rule. The cast was a mixture of British and American. Dawn (played by Vivienne Segal) is white but has been assured that once in many years African girls are born white and beloved of the god Mulungu. The ‘wild African dances’ at Dawn’s purification ceremony in advance of her being sacrificed are not characterized by African signifiers – it is all very European. The bloodthirsty Shep Keyes, played by Noah Beery in blackface make-up, is undaunted by the dire warning, ‘the British government will not tolerate the sacrifice of a white woman’. She is, of course, rescued.

A year later, contrasting with the overheated acting of Golden Dawn, G. W. [Georg Wilhelm] Pabst’s film Die 3-Groschen Oper (1931) featured non-mimetic delivery of songs, most strikingly so in Lottie Lenja’s singing of ‘Seeräuber Jenny’. Her blank expression operates as a mask, but the effect is to force a critical position onto the viewer, something for which Brecht constantly strove in his epic theatre. Elsewhere, the film exhibited intertextuality in casting Fritz Rasp, who was celebrated for playing cold villains, as Peachum, and having Reinhold Schünzel play his usual shiftless character-type as Tiger Brown. The film credits make clear that the screenplay is frei nach Brecht (freely after Brecht) and not his stage play. In the film, for instance, there is a burglary at the London department store Selfridges. The musical director was the competent Theo Mackeben, but neither Kurt Weill nor Brecht were pleased with this version of Die Dreigroschenoper and took Pabst to court.⁵⁶

Tonfilmoperette was a major part of the entertainment culture of the Weimar Republic.⁵⁷ Cinema numbers grew in this period from 2000 to 5000.⁵⁸ Films were able, via the simple expedient of locating a scene in a dance hall or bar, to feature cameo appearances by well-known dance bands.⁵⁹ Moreover, films had an influence the stage. In 1919, Ernst Lubitsch directed the film Madame Dubarry, starring Pola Negri as Jeanne and Emil Jannings as Louis XV; thus, the Mackeben-Millöcker Dubarry did not appear from out of the blue.

During the 1930s, some theatres in Vienna were closing or screening films (see Chapter 3). Even the Theater an der Wien was operating mainly as a cinema in 1936. In Germany, Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft, better known as Ufa, which had been founded in 1917, was absorbing other companies, but did not enjoy any kind of monopoly. Ufa presented the only serious European challenge to Hollywood, and its international success lay in operettas and comedies. Versions of these were often shot in three languages: German, English, and French. For example, one of the best-known films of the Weimar period, Ufa’s Der Kongreß tanzt (1932), directed by Erik Charell, was produced simultaneously as Congress Dances and Le Congrès s’amuse.

Ufa released a screen operetta Die Drei von der Tankstelle, directed by Wilhelm Thiele, in 1930. Although the title, ‘The Three from the Filling Station’ might seem unexciting (a French version was retitled Le Chemin du paradis, but no English version was made), it proved to be Ufa’s most commercial successful film of the 1930s. Rainer Rother has explained that musical films of this period derived their popular appeal by creating laughter in the face of economic depression, and this they achieved through irony.⁶⁰ There are common preconceptions of the days of the Weimar Republic as an outpouring of hedonism before the Nazi horrors to come,⁶¹ but this film offers much more than dance, song, and frivolity. Its humour is infectious and the three best friends who are rivals for the hand of a wilful young woman resolve their differences amicably in the end. And it is the end of the film that is most surprising, because it shows that Brecht was not isolated in his ideas about breaking frame in dramatic representation and reminding audiences of the mechanics of the construction of representational forms. The stars of the film, Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch, are shown stepping through theatre curtains and suddenly noticing that the cinema audience is staring at them. They wonder why nobody has left; the show is over. They rapidly realize that the audience wants a proper operetta finale, and only then will be satisfied that it is the end. An ironic ‘proper’ finale follows, complete with full cast, a line of high-kicking dancers (revealing the influence of the Tiller Girls in Berlin) and assorted extras. In the later 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’. But here it is, before the post has arrived.

The spectacular scenery that could be shown on film enthralled those who were stuck in the city in the depression years and yearned to travel (see Chapter 7). A film like Die Blume von Hawaii of 1933, directed by Richard Oswald, appealed to the tourist impulse. For most people Hawaii was an unattainable destination, and yet here it could be seen on screen: the palm trees, the sea hitting the rocks, and so forth. However, out-door production offered more than travel brochure information or beauty of landscape, it added to the apparent naturalism of film compared to the pseudorealistic decorative effect of stage scenery.⁶² People expected a broader view of location, although this did not prevent a film from constructing an imaginary location, so that the inside and outside of a house might in reality be two different houses presented as one. German silent films were often out-door films, but studio filming increased from the mid-1920s.

Robert Stolz’s Zwei Herzen in Dreivierteltakt was the first German screen operetta, and was premiered at the large Ufa-Palast cinema in Berlin on 13 March 1930.⁶³ Based on it, was the British film Two Hearts in Waltztime (1934), directed by Carmine Gallone and Joe May, starring Carl Brisson, Frances Day, Valerie Hobson, and Oscar Asche. Stolz’s screen operetta had been a great success in the USA, where it had been advertised as the ‘First German Screen Operetta: All-Talking, Singing, Dancing!’⁶⁴ His score to another screen operetta, Das Lied ist aus, which appeared later that same year, contained the song ‘Adieu, mein kleiner Gardeoffizier’ (lyrics by Walter Reich), which was interpolated into the West End production of White Horse Inn as ‘Good-Bye’.

Three original screen operettas were released in 1931: Die Privatsekretärin, with music by Paul Abraham, Ronny, music by Emmerich Kálmán, and Die große Attraktion, music by Franz Lehár. Composing for film could prove profitable. Kálmán was paid 30,000 marks for the seven numbers he composed for Ronny.⁶⁵ Lehár composed another two screen operettas during the Weimar years and had film adaptations made of three of his stage operettas: Das Land des Lächelns, Friederike, and Der Zarewitsch. A loose adaptation of Lehár’s Zigeunerliebe was released by MGM in May 1930 as 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. An example of a continental European operetta that made it to Hollywood, but not to the Broadway stage, is The King Steps Out (1936), directed by Josef von Sternberg, and starring Grace Moore and Franchot Tone. It was based on Fritz Kreisler’s Sissy (libretto by Ernst and Hubert Marischka), first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1932.

Erik Charell was director of the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin when Erich Pommer of Ufa asked him to direct Der Kongreß tanzt (1931). Michael Wedel has suggested that Charell’s experience of the medium of film inspired an innovative creation of ‘a virtuoso synthesis of choreography, musical montage and a smooth narrative flow, which enchanted audiences in Germany and abroad’.⁶⁶ Pommer founded the film company Decla and, after it became part of Ufa in 1923, he joined Ufa’s directorial board. When Ufa reorganized under a new general manager, Ludwig Klitzsch, in 1927, financing and production became separate units. The production-unit system was also being established at a similar time in Hollywood. The separation of production and finance gave Pommer more freedom to accept Charell’s expensive demands for Der Kongreß tanzt. Carl Hoffman, a renowned cameraman, and also a director, set an example of how camera mobility and sound could work together in this film.⁶⁷ It also had the services of the influential designer Walter Röhrig, who had created the expressionist sets for Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1919).

Siegfried Kraucauer argues that German films of 1918–33 reveal ‘deep psychological dispositions’ that ‘influenced the course of events during that time’.⁶⁸ In particular, he criticizes the ‘patronizing benevolence’ of their depiction of a retrospective and Utopian Vienna with ‘gentle archdukes, tender flirtations, baroque decors, Biedermeier rooms, [and] people singing and drinking in a suburban garden restaurant’, all of which ‘implied that such effeminate enemies would be a pushover’.⁶⁹ He holds that, with the coming of sound, ‘operetta profited more than any other escapist genre’.⁷⁰ He recognized that Die Drei von der Tankstelle did not romanticize the past, but he still mistrusted its escapism:

this film was a playful daydream woven of the materials of everyday life. Three careless young friends suddenly gone bankrupt buy a filling station with the proceeds of their car; there they devote themselves to flirting with a pretty girl who time and again turns up in her roadster – a dalliance which after some emotional confusion logically ends with one of the three rivals winning out. The refreshing idea of shifting the operetta paradise from its traditional locales to the open road was supported by the eccentric use made of music. Full of whims, the score constantly interfered with the half-rational plot, stirring characters and even objects to behave in a frolicsome manner. An unmotivated waltz invited workers clearing out the friends’ unpaid-for furniture to transform themselves into dancers, and whenever the amorous roadster approached, its horn would emit a few bars which threaded the film with the stubbornness of a genuine leitmotiv.⁷¹

Instead of perceiving innovative ways in which music and sound are used, he finds the score eccentric and full of whims. The imaginative treatment of the heroine’s car horn – turning noise into a leitmotiv – attracts no more than a scornful comment.

The screen operetta he chooses as the pinnacle of ‘lucrative speculation in romantic nostalgia’ is Der Kongreß tanzt:

[It] set the flirtations of a sweet Viennese girl against the stately background of the Viennese Congress of 1814. Spectacular mass displays alternated with intimate tête-à-têtes involving the Tsar in person, and Metternich’s diplomatic intrigues added a pleasing touch of high politics. Elaborate rather than light-winged, this superoperetta with its agreeable melodies and intelligent structural twists amounted to a compendium of all imaginable operetta motifs. Some of them set a fashion. Particularly frequent were imitations of that sequence of Congress Dances in which Lilian Harvey on her drive through the countryside passes various kinds of people who all take up the song she sings from her carriage.⁷²

Once again, he is unimpressed by cinematic innovation: he has no words of admiration for the long tracking shot of Harvey’s carriage journey, an astounding feat of camera work at this time. He sees it merely as a fashionable gimmick to be imitated. Nothing in Kracauer’s commentary suggests that he would have had any sympathy with Richard Dyer’s argument that social tensions in the depression years generated social needs to which film musicals responded, albeit by offering no more than the pleasure of an escapist Utopian vision.⁷³ People did not necessarily mistake a vision of a Utopian Vienna for social reality. Zoë Lang has also pointed out that, alongside an idealization of Austria’s imperial past, a typical feature of such films – Der Kongreß tanzt among them – is the woman who gives up her dreams for more realistic options.⁷⁴

German operetta films begin to suffer from Nazi interference after 1933, which, at first, meant eliminating credits naming Jewish artists, as happened with Die Csárdásfürstin of 1934, directed by Georg Jacoby, and Im weißen Rössl of 1935, directed by Carl Lamac.⁷⁵ It was not long before Harvey and Fritsch were eclipsed by Marika Rökk and Johannes Heesters as the Nazi ‘dream couple’ (beginning with Der Bettelstudent of 1936, directed by Jacoby). Rökk, who married Jacoby, was banned for performing for a few years after the Second World War because of suspected Nazi collusion.⁷⁶ Ironically, it was revealed in 2017 that she had actually been a Soviet agent.⁷⁷

When a stage operetta became a film, the tendency was to reduce musical content and increase dialogue, perhaps because musical numbers often seem static and undramatic on film. A lukewarm reviewer of Ufa’s Der Vetter aus Dingsda (directed by George Zoch), screened at the 79th Street Theatre in Yorkville, commented on the ‘occasional bit of singing to remind one of the film’s origin’.⁷⁸ In many cases, screen adaptations of operetta were far from being filmed versions of the stage production: the music of more than one operetta might be included, and dialogue and narrative might change. In addition, the music was mediated differently. As Mary Simonson remarks: ‘The emergent cinema did not simply remediate the materials, performance strategies, and aesthetics of the stage.’⁷⁹ According to Linda Hutcheon, when ‘a manifestly artificial form like an opera or a musical’ is adapted to the screen, there are two possible ways to proceed, either the artifice can be acknowledged or it can be ‘naturalized’.⁸⁰ She notes that a particularly awkward problem is the convention that a character’s interiority is conveyed through music, which sits uneasily with the conventions of realist drama.⁸¹

Guido Heldt observes that, in film musicals, rather than music serving the plot by adding emotional intensity to a particular scene, the plot more often serves the music by providing ‘the scaffolding for the numbers it has to frame and motivate’.⁸² Interpreting songs as internal thoughts may be possible, but this becomes progressively more difficult in the case of duets, trios and larger ensembles. The ability of a group of people to articulate their thoughts simultaneously in musical harmony is never going to be convincingly realistic – as Mad Margaret says of her fellow villagers in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore: ‘They sing choruses in public. That’s mad enough, I think!’ In film musicals, numbers are often introduced by an ‘audio dissolve’ from normal conversation to instrumental accompaniment to singing, whereas on stage they are usually distinct structural entities.⁸³ The change from stage play to screenplay is affected by the scenario, shooting script, and use of montage, and that leads to blurred distinctions about authorship between the screen writer and the film director from the 1920s on.

During the early 1930s, it is instructive 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. Film may seem to be an all-embracing medium, but it has its own conventions, even if they are subject to change with the passing of time. There are 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. In film, Béla Balázs observes that 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.⁸⁴ Moreover, there is a need to consider the editing of shots, for example, the speed of change from one to another. There were 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 is important. If the performer sings to camera, it emphasizes the performance act, breaking with naturalistic illusion. There are many differences between working to camera and working with a live audience. In a theatre, a performer can turn unexpectedly to a section of the audience in any part of the auditorium. Filmmakers like to edit shots; they do not want performers choosing which camera to turn to.

The British film Blossom Time of 1934 was a new adaptation of Schubert melodies by G. H. Clutsam and differed from his earlier West End success Lilac Time, based on Berté’s Das Dreimäderlhaus. To add to the confusion, it also differed from Romberg’s Broadway version of the latter as Blossom Time, which is why the film’s American title became April Blossoms. The credits state that the screenplay, dialogue, and lyrics are by Franz Schulz, John Drinkwater, Roger Burford, and G. H. Clutsam, and the music is ‘specially adapted and composed’ by the latter. This screen operetta was later turned into a stage operetta, Blossom Time (book by Rodney Ackland), produced at the Lyric Theatre in 1941. Blossom Time cost British International Pictures (BIP) much more than its other films, owing to the expensive sets and crowd scenes.⁸⁵ The director Paul Stein was Viennese but had worked for five years in Hollywood.⁸⁶ The cast included Richard Tauber, the most famous star to work for BIP at that time. Tauber was one of first operetta singers to become a sound film star; indeed, he performed in over a dozen films (six of them British) and founded his own film production company in 1930, releasing Das Land des Lächelns in November of that year. Being of Jewish ancestry, he found it necessary to move to London permanently in 1938.

An examination of the scene in the film in which Tauber accompanies himself on piano singing ‘Once There Lived a Lady Fair’ (the music of which is by Clutsam rather than Schubert), reveals that his mimetic and gestural signs are in accord with operatic performance practice – as is his wide dynamic range – 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 restrained. Variety remarked backhandedly of his acting in this film that it was ‘surprisingly good – for a world-famous tenor’.⁸⁷ Jane Baxter, cast in the role of Vicki Wimpassinger, the object of Schubert’s affection, was a glamorous film star of the 1930s and adopts the restrained kinesic code of cinema. Tauber is first and foremost a celebrated singer. Film is a medium in which sound tends to be balanced technologically, but this suits his gentle falsetto conclusion to the song. Shots are intercut showing details of the emotional impact his performance is having on the audience. The device of montage presents 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 the viewers of the film, since they have no presence in a film equivalent to that which they enjoy in a theatre. Naturally, records were produced of film hits, and Tauber’s recording of ‘Once There Lived a Lady Fair’ (CE 6480–2) was released in July 1934, the same month as the film’s release.

The film was a triumph commercially, as well as being well received by critics, and that encouraged Stein to follow it up with My Song Goes Round the World, a film starring another famous tenor, Josef Schmidt. British and American companies became keen to make film versions of German operetta. The success of Blossom Time persuaded Alfred Hitchcock to try his hand later in 1934 with Waltzes from Vienna, which Oswald Stoll had presented at his Alhambra Theatre in 1931–32. MGM in the USA fought back in November 1934 with Ernst Lubitsch’s film version of The Merry Widow starring Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier.

The Hollywood version of Waltzes from Vienna had to wait until 1938 and was retitled The Great Waltz. It was directed by Julien Duvivier, Victor Fleming, and Josef von Sternberg, and starred Luise Rainer (as Poldi Vogelhuber), Fernand Gravey (as Johann Strauss), and Miliza Korjus (as Carla Donner). The screenplay was by Samuel Hoffenstein and Walter Reisch from an original story by Gottfried Reinhardt, rather than the book that Moss Hart had written for the Broadway production of 1934. The music was adapted and arranged by Dimitri Tiomkin, and Oscar Hammerstein II’s lyrics replaced those of Desmond Carter, which had been used in the West End and Broadway productions. Broadway choreographer Albertina Rasch was, however, re-engaged to supervise dances and ensembles. The film begins with an on-screen announcement:

In Vienna in 1844 ‘nice people’ neither danced the waltz … nor kissed their wives in public … nor listened to new ideas … In 1845 came Johann Strauss II and his immortal melodies …

It is unhistorical nonsense, of course, but an excuse follows: ‘We have dramatized the spirit rather than the facts of his life, because it is his spirit that has lived – in his music.’ There follows a scene of Strauss’s first performance with his orchestra at Dommayer’s Casino. It is poorly attended and going badly. An aristocrat enters with ‘famous opera singer’ Carla Donner in his party, and she is immediately attracted to young Strauss. They have to leave, but by now a large crowd has gathered outside. A tenor sings ‘Every Tree in the Park’, the tune of its verse based on ‘Ja, das alles auf Ehr’ from Der Zigeunerbaron (actually composed over forty years later). Around twenty minutes into the film, there is a dramatic cut from the sensual abandon of a waltz to a decorous minuet in an aristocratic hall. Carla has invited Strauss, who has brought a song, ‘Looking at You’. Carla sings it, tactfully avoiding announcing that it is a waltz. The polite audience looks shocked as the waltz rhythm kicks in, but – astonishingly – they are won over. Carla is an irrepressible vamp, although her voice is what one might imagine if Ethel Merman had been a coloratura soprano.

The film plot shares some resemblance to Waltzes from Vienna in being a love triangle between Strauss, his down-to-earth sweetheart, Poldi, and the sophisticated, high-society woman, but it also includes scenes of Strauss marching with the revolutionaries of 1848 (to his own march). Later, facing a blockage of barricades, he ends up in a carriage with Carla in the Vienna Woods and, naturally, it provides inspiration for his Tales from the Vienna Woods waltz (in reality composed twenty years later). In no time at all he is shown conducting its performance by a women’s orchestra in a garden restaurant. Carla offers the public another opportunity to hear her glass-shattering top notes, and, suddenly, the revolution is over.

There is now a domestic scene with Strauss playing the tune of the bullfinch duet from Der Zigeunerbaron on the piano and becoming irritated with Poldi for disrupting his work. They decide to leave Vienna (they are now man and wife) and inform a gathering of their friends. Strauss then sings ‘One Day When We Were Young’ to the bullfinch tune, but Carla happens to pop in, and her look indicates that she knows she is the inspiration for his song. Carla has brought an operatic commission. Poldi persuades him he must stay in order to compose for the Imperial Theatre. The piece he writes is Die Fledermaus (actually composed for the Theater an der Wien not the Burgtheater). Poldi goes to the performance and tells Carla she is not standing in her way, because she loves Strauss and recognizes his manly needs as an artistic genius. It is easy, perhaps, to feel a little nauseated, but the scene is affecting because of Louise Rainer’s acting. Strauss leaves in a carriage with Carla but she is suddenly struck with the realization that Poldi will always be between them. She tells him so and catches the Danube boat to Budapest alone (to strains of ‘One Day’). The film’s closing scene takes place forty-three years later; Strauss and Poldi have an audience with the Emperor, who takes Strauss to his balcony to show him a cheering crowd of Viennese citizens who love his music.

Oscar Straus had composed an operetta called Hochzeit in Hollywood in 1928, and the word ‘Hollywood’ in the title may have prompted the invitation he received from Warner Brothers. He arrived in Hollywood in January 1930 for a three-month engagement, but there was no project for him to work on. Straus re-established contact with Ernst Lubitsch whom he had met when the latter was an actor in Max Reinhardt’s company. Lubitsch had left Germany for Hollywood in 1926 and had just begun to make his mark in musical films, the first being The Love Parade (Paramount, 1929), with Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier. On the expiry of Straus’s Warner contract, he received a telegram from Lubitsch informing him that a film was going to be made of A Waltz Dream. Straus became involved with the adaptation, working with Lubitsch and composing some fresh music.⁸⁸ Its title was The Smiling Lieutenant and, following its release in 1931, it became the first sound-film adaptation of a stage operetta to enjoy international success. It starred Claudette Colbert as Franzi, Maurice Chevalier as Lieutenant Niki, and Miriam Hopkins as Princess Anna. The musical director was Adolph Deutsch, and Johnny Green and Conrad Salinger were involved in arranging Straus’s music. The screenplay was by Ernest Vajda and Samson Raphaelson, and the song lyrics by Clifford Grey.

Tom Gunning coined the term ‘cinema of attractions’ to describe the emphasis that early silent film placed on showing and exhibiting. Chevalier has not moved far from an ‘exhibiting’ technique in The Smiling Lieutenant. He sometimes directs his gaze towards the camera as a means of establishing contact with the spectator. Revealing an awareness of spectatorship by looking directly at the camera is a feature of early European film rejected in classical Hollywood practice because it ran counter to the creation of realistic illusion.⁸⁹ The plot of this film revolves around an incident in which Lieutenant Niki, on street duty during the arrival procession of the visiting King Adolf XV of Flausenthurm and his daughter, Princess Anna, smiles and winks at his sweetheart Franzi. Unfortunately, the princess thinks it was meant for her. In consequence, he finds himself having to marry her and move to Flausenthurm. He remains fond of Franzi, but, in the end, Franzi teaches Anna how to win him over to herself.

The scenes of Niki’s initial courting of Franzi, and of the eventual winning over of Niki by Anna, reveal how continental European operetta was transcreated for the American market. In The Smiling Lieutenant, Niki courts Franzi with a song in fox-trot rhythm (‘A dinner or supper for two’) rather than the waltz song ‘O du Lieber’ – even if the latter remains part of the underscore at times. In the stage operetta, Franzi had to teach the princess about the lively temperament that makes Viennese women so attractive, and encouraged her, also, to cater for his love of Viennese food. In Berger’s 1925 film of the operetta, Franzi goes further, and teaches the princess to play a Viennese waltz on the piano. In Lubitsch’s film, Franzi has rather different advice: she plays ragtime and sings ‘Jazz up your lingerie’. The next time we see the princess she is playing syncopated music at the piano with a cigarette dangling from her lips. Clearly, the vivacious, emancipated American woman is an equivalent of the Viennese woman and her fiery temperament. Indeed, while Niki is discovering his wife’s change of behaviour, the film’s underscore is of the trio ‘Temp’rament’ from Act 2 of the Viennese version. Two differing cultural traits are conflated here, and yet there is a similarity to be recognized in how they are used to achieve the same end, that of domesticizing Niki. The film concludes with Niki singing to camera, ‘I’ve found at home my rata-tatata-tata’. That is how operetta cosmopolitanism works: an audience recognizes itself in the imported operetta, aided by appropriate cultural parallels.

Chevalier starred again, this time with Jeanette MacDonald, in the next Lubitsch-Straus collaboration, One Hour with You (1932). Lubitsch was proving his skill in comedy, especially of an erotic character, and was admired for his social psychological understanding of character motivation, as well as his talent for innuendo. In April 1934, he turned his attention to The Merry Widow, which premiered in October that year. It starred Chevalier as Danilo and MacDonald as Sonia, the screenplay was by Ernest Vajda and Samson Raphaelson, and new lyrics were provided by Lorenz Hart (with some additional lyrics by Gus Kahn). The musical arrangement was by Herbert Stothart, with help from orchestrators Paul Marquardt, Charles Maxwell, and Leonid Raab. Herbert Stothart had become a composer, arranger, and musical director for MGM in the 1930s, and brought with him his Broadway experience. The place name change from Marsovia to Marshovia in the film may be motivated by a desire to offer a more Eastern European pronunciation of Marsovia (as in the Hungarian ‘s’, or the Czech ‘š’). When Danilo first sees Sonia in Marshovia, she wears a widow’s veil, and so he does not recognize her later, when she pretends to be a new dancer, Fifi, at Maxim’s restaurant in Paris. He has been sent to Paris to marry the widow, but he only realizes that Fifi and the widow are one and the same when he attends the ball at the embassy. There is no backstory of their having been young lovers in the past, but they are strongly attracted to each other and decide to marry. Then, discovering that the marriage has been a plot, Sonia calls it off, and Danilo returns to Marshovia, where he is imprisoned for failing in his task. She goes there, too, to vouch for his innocence, and they are finally reconciled in his prison cell.

There are several differences between the stage operetta and the film version: in the former, it is the ‘Dollar Princess’ problem (money creates distrust for a couple in love); in the film, seduction scenes are important. Lubitsch demonstrates his characteristic fascination with seduction and power relations, the latter being different during the seduction process when sexual desire is the focus.⁹⁰ Maurice Chevalier is the same charming seducer he was in The Smiling Lieutenant. MacDonald and Chevalier had already appeared in Lubitsch’s The Love Parade, One Hour with You, and Love Me Tonight, but, surprisingly, The Merry Widow was not a box office success and that prompted MGM to find a new partner for MacDonald in the shape of Nelson Eddy.⁹¹ MacDonald and Eddy’s first film together was Naughty Marietta in 1935 (screenplay by Rida Johnson Young, music by Victor Herbert). The couple’s biggest film success was Maytime (1937).

In The Chocolate Soldier (1941), directed by Roy del Ruth, Nelson Eddy’s partner was Risë Stevens. Straus’s music was adapted by Bronislau Kaper and Herbert Stothart, and additional music and lyrics were by Gus Kahn and Bronislau Kaper. Shaw had originally agreed, via his German agent Siegfried Trebitsch, that the plot of his play Arms and the Man, but no dialogue, could be used for Der tapfere Soldat and its Broadway version The Chocolate Soldier subject to two conditions: it should be advertised as an unauthorized parody and he should receive no royalties. The latter stipulation, which may be taken as typically Shavian derision, had clearly begun to pain him once he saw the enormous profits the operetta was making. When MGM expressed the wish to film it, he had no hesitation in demanding to be paid handsomely. Reversing his original position, which was undoubtedly intended to represent him as an idealistic artist rather than a business man, he now supported his demands by asserting that Louis B. Mayer was the idealist, while he was the businessman.⁹² Unfortunately, Shaw’s waspish wit failed him a second time, and he received nothing. With some help from Straus, the music was fitted around an adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s play The Guardsman by Leonard Lee and Keith Winter Shaw. Some years later, when Pinewood Studios made a film of Pygmalion (1938), they took care that no similar problem should arise by having Shaw write the screenplay. To Shaw’s intense discomfort, however, his screenplay was awarded an Oscar in Hollywood. When Lerner and Loewe’s musical My Fair Lady (which is closer to the Pinewood film of Pygmalion than to the stage play) was produced on Broadway to enormous acclaim in 1956, Shaw had been dead for over five years and was therefore spared further personal embarrassment.

The 1941 film of The Chocolate Soldier opens with Maria (as Nadina) on stage singing ‘My Hero’; she is soon joined by her husband Karl (as Bumerli), making it a duet. Maria longs to be an opera singer – she later sings ‘Mon Coeur s’ouvre à ta voix’ (from Samson et Dalila by Saint-Saëns) at a soirée. We learn that one of her favourite operatic arias is ‘Star of Eve’ from Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Karl suspects his wife of having an eye for other men. In a restaurant scene, he enters in disguise as Vasily, a ‘famous Russian bass’, to sing Mussorgsky’s ‘Song of the Flea’ (another interpolated number). He tells Maria he has seen her in The Soldier of Chocolates and tries to seduce her. When flowers arrive for Maria the next day, Karl demands to know who sent them. Maria, who is not fooled by what is happening, lies. Vasily visits and calculatingly sings ‘Star of Eve’. Later that evening, her husband having had to go to Olmutz, he serenades her with ‘The Moon Will Rise in Vain’ (another interpolated number). Maria lets him in, sings ‘Tiralala’ (from the stage operetta), and they go out for the evening. She also reprises ‘My Hero’ as a song for Vasily, playing him along mercilessly, despite a jealousy he is unable to conceal.

That night Karl returns and asks what she has been doing. She tells him she has been reading. They travel to the theatre to perform in The Chocolate Soldier, and the scene is that of the Nadina-Bumerli duet ‘Oh you little choc’late soldier man’, but Karl changes Bumerli’s words to fit his distrustful mood. After an ensemble dance routine, Karl returns to the stage as Vasily. It is a cue for another reprise of ‘My Hero’, at first with new lyrics, and then, as Nadina/Maria sings, the original lyrics. She informs him she was never fooled and they conclude with the duet ‘Forgive, Forgive, Forgive’. The number of reprises of ‘My Hero’ in the film make up for Straus’s failure to provide a single one in the stage operetta – he had not expected it to be a hit song.

Concluding Remarks

Austrian film director Arthur Maria Rabenalt commented on the various advantages screen adaptations possessed over the stage originals: the libretto became the basis of a scenario with montage, 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.⁹³ 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. Short instrumental reprises could be used for scene transitions, and new numbers could be specially composed for the film version: for instance, ‘Toujours l’amour in the Army’ for Chevalier in Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow.

Whatever its artistic merits, the commercial success of film meant that many in the theatre world viewed it negatively as a rival of their own performance medium. Similar feelings were engendered by radio. Yet others felt differently. George Grossmith, who joined the BBC management in 1926, declared that he had ‘always thought that all branches of the entertainment world should work hand in hand’.⁹⁴ In the summer of 1929, he was in Hollywood learning about new developments in the motion picture industry at United Artists. He was approached by Ned Marin and Edmund Goulding of Fox Studios, who knew he had been responsible for the book of the Broadway production of The Dollar Princess. They asked if he would devise the scenario for a film they intended to make of it, directed by Alexander Korda. Flying films were proving popular at the time, so they wanted it updated to include planes; therefore, Freddy would not be Alice’s secretary but, instead, her private pilot. Unfortunately, while still at the planning stage, two of the planes belonging to Fox Studios crashed over Santa Monica Bay. Grossmith was then asked to work on a Foreign Legion scenario instead. The next thing to disappear was the music, and the film became Women Everywhere, set in Casablanca, which was replicated in miniature at Fox Hills.⁹⁵ In this instance the term ‘remediation’ is absurd, because the final product lacks any resemblance to the initial product, but there is a traceable intermedial relationship.

In this chapter the term ‘intermediality’ has been employed to indicate a mutually influencing relationship between one medium and another. Intermediality implies a conscious thought process about how the art that is created will work for different media. Thus, arranging selections of operetta in the nineteenth century for music boxes and other mechanical media platforms may be best seen as remediation, whereas writing a theatre piece with planned detachable numbers for other use (performance at home, dance bands, or records) is intermedial practice. Klaus Waller remarks that Abraham’s intention, from the outset, was to create catchy melodies for the stage that could also be disseminated via dance halls, coffee houses, and records, radio, and cinema.⁹⁶ Intermediality stands in opposition to the Gesamtkunst ideal, which is one of centralization rather than dispersion. In the music dramas of Wagner, for example, it was the composer’s wish that the arts should unite to serve the stage performance. In contrast, operetta of the early twentieth century is representative of an intermedial art world.

7 Operetta and Modernity

Modernity serves as an overarching term for the social, economic, and cultural changes brought about by the scientific and technological innovations of what is commonly called ‘industrial revolution’. Undoubtedly, people in the early twentieth century, especially those living in large cities, acquired a strong sense of being part of a modern age, and this term signified more than a simple chronological distinction between past and present. Jose Harris emphasizes that a perception of modernity pervaded mental life:

the consciousness of living in a new age, a new material context, and a form of society totally different from anything that had ever occurred before was by the turn of the century so widespread as to constitute a genuine and distinctive element in the mental culture of the period.¹

The term ‘modern’ had been used previously to contrast the ‘classical’ period with more recent times, but it had now come to mean contemporary life with its many social, scientific, and technological changes. Accounts of how modernity affected the arts frequently draw connections with the aesthetics of modernism. In Vienna, that would entail references to painters such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. The concept of the modern was broader than this, however, and included all new developments that had produced marked effects on social and cultural life.

Contemporary life was rarely depicted in operetta and opera of the nineteenth century, although Offenbach’s La Vie parisienne and Verdi’s La traviata were notable exceptions.² In the early twentieth century, operetta frequently engaged with everyday life, and related to features of modernity such as trains (The Girl in the Train, The Blue Train), planes (Little Boy Blue,³ Love and Laughter), factories (Eva), cinemas (The Girl on the Film, The Cinema Star), and cars (The Girl in the Taxi, The Joy-Ride Lady). Contemporary settings are also found in the Zeitoper of the Weimar Republic period, which shared some features characteristic of operetta. Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf (1927), one of the best-known examples, references jazz idioms but is closer to modernism in musical style than is operetta. With the exception of Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins, Zeitoper tended towards comedy (though mixed with satire), but the term remained vague and in Kurt Weill’s opinion moved rapidly from concept to slogan (Schlagwort).⁴

Paul Lincke’s Frau Luna of 1899 was, in its fantasy, comic characters, and high-spirited music, far closer to Offenbach’s opéra-féerie Le Voyage dans la lune (1875) than to Die lustige Witwe. However, it did engage in several ways with modernity. It envisaged a new technologically advanced era: one scene, for example, had workers making electric lights. The German officer’s desire to annex the moon for Prussia was both a satire of militarism and a foreshadowing of troubled times to come. It was the first notable operetta from Berlin, a city that embraced modernity and was soon welcoming operettas on modern life. The London version, Castles in the Air, produced at the Scala Theatre in 1911, was given a modern context by being preceded by Charles Urban’s ‘Kinemacolor’, a development in early cinema.

Die lustige Witwe staged a clash between the values of feudal Pontevedro and the capitalist metropolis Paris. Moritz Csáky remarks that, for the Viennese audience, Pontevedro (recognized as Montenegro) represented ‘a backward country’ in which quasi-absolutist, pre-modern conditions prevailed.⁵ The articulation of modern values was made more explicit in Lehár’s Mitislaw der Moderne, composed in 1907 for the Hölle cabaret in the basement of the Theater an der Wien. This one-act operetta reintroduces Danilo, as well as dancers from Maxim’s. One of its numbers, ‘Sei modern’ (‘Be Modern’), asserts that modernity is exciting and fashionable.⁶

Sei modern, mein Sohn, modern,	Be modern, my son, modern,
Denn das hat man heute gern	For it pleases people today,
Sei modern vom Glockenrock	Be modern from your flared jacket
Bis zum dünnen Silberstock	To your thin silver cane;
Sei modern auch von Moral	Be modern in morals, too,
Liebe dreizehn auf einmal	Love thirteen at once,
Sei modern, sei immer jung	Be modern, be ever young,
Denn das hat Chique, hat Schmiss, hat Schwung!	For it’s chic, lively, and energetic!

In Oscar Straus’s burlesque operetta Die lustigen Nibelungen (1904), Siegfried, in addition to having a proud name, lays claim to the possession of modern chic in his song, ‘So war’s bei den Germanen’. Dapper modernity certainly needs to be distinguished from the earnest artistic movement labelled ‘modernism’. Silver-age operetta was assuredly modern (like jazz and new styles of ballroom dancing), but it was not modernist. Modernism was associated with aesthetic ‘advances’ in style. In music, this meant greater complexity in harmony and rhythm, driven by the conviction that music was evolving like some kind of organism. Yet, for all its purported advances and embrace of artistic autonomy, modernism is less likely to be perceived today as progressive in a social sense. One has only to consider that three common targets of early modernists were women, Jews, and ordinary working people (disdained as the ‘masses’).⁷

Die lustige Witwe was perceived as a modern operetta that broke with Viennese tradition. This was recognized by Lehár’s first biographer, Ernst Decsay.⁸ Stefan Frey, however, is careful to point out that its modernity is to be understood in social rather than aesthetic terms, in its depiction of scenes from modern life.⁹ Danilo and Hanna are not a typical romantic young couple, and are not contrasted with a vulgar buffo couple, but with Camille and Valencienne, both of whom have social standing (even if Valencienne treats social respectability ironically). Maxim’s restaurant, the setting of Act 3, had been founded by Maxime Gaillard in Paris just twelve years before the operetta’s premiere, and was indisputably modern with its cosmopolitan art nouveau interior (it is still standing at 3 rue Royale). In distinguishing between modern and modernist as these terms apply to the social and to the aesthetic, my intention is not to suggest that Lehár’s music was not thought modern: indeed, a critic in 1906 found the music ‘more modern than Viennese’.¹⁰ A distinction between the social and aesthetic is necessary in order to distinguish this kind of popular modernity from the musical modernism cultivated by contemporary composers such as Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg. Peter Bailey has used the phrase ‘popular modernism’ to describe theatrical entertainment that engaged with modernity but was ‘less concerned with breaking down the structures of modernity than coming to terms with them’.¹¹ Adorno, in January 1934 writes of ‘der veralteten Moderne der lustigen Witwe’ (‘the outdated modernity of The Merry Widow’). Although he perceives the modern of the early century as outdated, his comment acknowledges that Die lustige Witwe was once a modern, if not modernist, stage work.¹² It does not mean that, from this stage work on, all operettas embraced modernity – an immediate exception was Die Försterchristl of 1907. It does not mean, either, that critics never imagined musical modernism might make its way into an operetta score. In fact, a reviewer of Lehár’s Eva on Broadway declared: ‘Eva says “Yes” in the first act to discords that Schoenberg might have been proud to have written’.¹³

Familiar objects of the modern age that members of the audience might either possess or desire feature often on stage. In the first scene of The Chocolate Soldier, set in Bulgaria, 1885–86, there is an ‘electric reading lamp’ on the bedside table. In the finale of Act 1 of The Girl in the Taxi, René enters carrying a ‘pocket electric lantern’. A more common modern functional object was the typewriter. It appears in The Dollar Princess, and the cast of The Girl on the Film includes eight ‘Typewriting Girls’. The latter, as may be guessed, also includes examples of modern work opportunities in the shape of six cinema actresses. In addition, the cast includes eight ‘rather more stylishly dressed actresses and four actors’.¹⁴ Clearly, the low artistic status of film at this time meant that stage actors were perceived as more stylish. Films were part of the technological advance of modernity, even if they were for many years more conservative than operetta in representing women. In 1932, Siegfried Kracauer wrote that working women who appeared in popular film had previously been pretty young secretaries or typists who end up marrying the boss, but increasing tension between reality and illusion meant that women in the audience were no longer easily enchanted by this.¹⁵ With the advent of radio, it was not long before a wireless set appeared on stage. The one used in Act 2, scene 2, of Straus’s Mother of Pearl was supplied by McMichael Radio of the Strand, who advertised in the programme that their radio equipment would be used by Mount Everist Expedition members for receiving weather reports.¹⁶

Communications technology was improving and speeding up booking processes for theatre patrons. Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless telegraphy transmissions (begun in 1897) led to a regular transatlantic radio-telegraph service in 1907. Daly’s Theatre was the first to receive a seat booking via ‘Marconigram’.¹⁷ The telephone enabled efficient booking of tickets. Private telephone lines in the 1920s meant that the Keith Prowse ticket agency could promise their customers that they would be able to book the seats they wanted at any of their many branches. Several of the firm’s branches had 5 telephone lines, and the branch in New Bond Street had 12 lines.¹⁸ For those choosing to listen to the music of operetta at home, technology was changing that experience, too. With the development of microphone technology, location recordings became possible that could then be played on the gramophone. The Columbia records of The Blue Train were advertised as being ‘actually recorded in the Prince of Wales Theatre’.¹⁹ Other developments in communications media were discussed in the Chapter 6.

American Capitalism and Dollar Princesses

The modernity of Die Dollarprinzessin was most striking in its American orientation; the transatlantic gaze was characteristic of a modern sensibility. Yet the dramatic situations were not altogether new: the jibe that dollar princesses never know if men want them for themselves or for their gold might be thrown at the ‘merry widow’ herself.²⁰ Moreover, she, too, had status because of money and not aristocratic lineage. Even so, Fall’s operetta engages more directly with modernity than Die lustige Witwe by pitting the power of American capitalist enterprise against the declining economic fortunes of the landed gentry. The Dollar Princess records the emergence of a new era when financial capital conquers all, turning the landed aristocracy into what Antonio Gramsci called ‘pensioners of economic history’.²¹ In Act 1, the following exchange takes place between the American, Conder, and his head groom, the former Earl of Quorn.

Quorn: I understand it amuses you to recruit your servants from the ranks of the British aristocracy.

Conder: That’s it. It amuses me, and I can afford it. Besides, I’m doing the Mother country a good turn by reducing the number of her unemployed.

The chorus in the opening scene of the London production recognizes the social change brought about by capitalist enterprise:

There’s no more use for rank or birth,

It’s the Dollar, Dollar, Dollar!

In the UK, the political tide was ebbing away from the aristocracy. In 1909, the year of the London premiere of The Dollar Princess, new land taxes were introduced by the Liberal government. Implementation was delayed until 1910 by the House of Lords, but that served only to pave the way to a reform of the Lords’ veto in the Parliamentary Act of 1911. The clash between businessmen and landed gentry was a social reality, but the operetta treads a fine line, neither celebrating nor bemoaning social change.

The expansion of the railroads in the later nineteenth century, and the electrification of factories in the early years of the twentieth, gave a huge boost to the American economy, enabling the USA to ride out the depression of 1893–97 and become more productive in manufacturing than the UK.²² The Edwardian era was a time when ‘all-conquering “dollar princesses” married their way into a third of the titles represented in the House of Lords’.²³ An early precedent was Lord Randolph Churchill’s marriage in 1874 to Jennie Jerome, the daughter of a Wall Street financier (she was to be Winston Churchill’s mother). The operetta does not, however, reference the sneering that wealthy American women had to face from those who placed status and value on ‘breeding’ and the distant date in history that their family acquired the charismatic capital of an aristocratic title. Despite pride in heritage, noble families were now showing that, in certain circumstances, they were willing to come to an arrangement with the right kind of moneyed person.

Sometimes, stage glamour rather than wealth drew the attention of eligible male aristocrats. It is remarkable how many women, especially in the years 1906–13, abandoned theatrical careers to marry peers of the realm. The legal constraints of morganatic marriage, which prohibits the passage of a husband’s title to a commoner and disallows its descent to children born from that marriage, did not exist in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, in going strongly against tradition, these marriages were symptomatic of modernity, even if defended frequently by the argument that they strengthened a weakened blood line. Among those who married into the aristocracy after performing on the West End stage were Connie Gilchrist (Countess of Orkney, 1892), Rosie Boote (Marchioness of Headfort, 1901), Silvia Storey (Countess Poulett, 1908), Eleanor Souray (Countess of Torrington, 1910), Zena Dare (Lady Esher, 1911), May Etheridge (Duchess of Leinster, 1913), Olive May (Lady Paget, 1913), Irene Richards (Marchioness of Queensberry, 1917), José Collins (Lady Innes, 1920), and Gertie Millar (Countess of Dudley, 1924).²⁴ The jaded story of the beautiful young woman that improves her social status by marrying someone with wealth and, preferably, aristocratic connections gained a new resonance with the number of female stage performers who found themselves in this position. Yet it worked against the interests of the New Woman, who was bent upon making her own distinctive mark on the world through intellect and ambition.

The Modern Woman and Issues of Gender

Department stores, restaurants, railway stations, and theatres were modern spaces that men and women could occupy without moral suspicion of their motives. Department stores strove to attract women and encourage frequent visits. Many middle-class women took trains into town for a shopping trip and a visit to a matinée performance at the theatre. Matinées had been introduced in the 1870s and proved popular with women. George Edwardes told a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1892 that ‘suburban ladies’ were his most important clientele.²⁵ Department stores and theatres had more in common than their urban proximity; they were, as Erika Rapport observes, ‘partners dedicated to igniting consumer appetites’.²⁶ The stage functioned like a shop window for costumes, furniture, and other desirable items.

The female glamour on display raises questions. To what extent can it be regarded as encouraging an erotic gaze and to what extent did it incite consumerist desire? Does operetta glamour address a feminine gaze as much as a masculine one? Rita Detmold’s column ‘Frocks and Frills’ in the Play Pictorial comments that A Waltz Dream ‘might easily be re-christened “The Ladies’ Dream,” for the gowns worn throughout this charming production are alone worthy of a visit to Daly’s’.²⁷ Other columns of this magazine readily assume that its women readers embrace the modern. Jennie Pickworth’s column ‘What-Not’, in 1927, contains advice on perfume, hair styles, and shampoo, and she asserts: ‘Modern woman has certainly become educated in the subtle niceties of scent.’²⁸ The ‘modern woman’, we are told, prefers floral fragrances to obtrusive exotic scents.

With regard to fashionable and personal items of dress, men are targeted less and less in Play Pictorial advertisements after 1910. In the Merry Widow issue of 1907, for example, Morris Angel & Son announce that they made the ‘Gentlemen’s costumes’ in the first and third act, and the makers of the Velvet Grip stocking supports advertise their ‘Boston Garters’ for men’s socks, whereas in December 1909 their advertisements target women consumers only.²⁹ In 1912, there is an advertisement for Southalls’ sanitary towels, which possess ‘health advantages that are a boon to womankind’, and will be sent post free under plain cover.³⁰ In the 1920s, there is another sign of progress, this time in the technology for managing and controlling hair, and there are many advertisements about ‘permanent wave’ products, and ‘bobbed’ and ‘shingled’ coiffures.

The labelling of young women as ‘girls’, which became frequent in the titles of musical comedies of the 1890s and in reference to the Gaiety Theatre’s women performers, has been described by Peter Bailey as a strategy to frame them as ‘naughty but nice’.³¹ There was a new decorum in the presentation of women on stage, and the burlesque days of short skirts had largely disappeared by the 1890s. The Gaiety Girl was not prim or over-zealous in religion and politics, nor intellectually ambitious in the manner of the New Woman.³² James Jupp, for many years the stage door-keeper at the Gaiety, sets out the qualities that were sought when young women were auditioned:

They are chosen not only on account of their figures, height, and beauty – necessary attributes, it is true – but chiefly on account of their drawing power. Brains are not asked for so long as the show girl knows how to wear the beautiful gowns provided for her; but the most important question is: how many stalls and boxes can she fill, with whom is she well acquainted? If she is a woman of great personal attraction and boasts a lover or two of the aristocracy, she is certain of a position. She is then the means of attracting to the theatre nightly thrice or four times her weekly salary.³³

Jupp is perfectly aware that some of those selected are highly intelligent women, but his point is that brains were not an essential requirement; what really counted was the woman’s ability to draw into the theatre those who purchased expensive seats.

The ‘merry widow’ is not a girl, even if played in London by the young Lily Elsie. She has a confidence and self-drive that is unusual among opera heroines, and must be categorically distinguished from the typically doomed characters discussed by Catherine Clément.³⁴ She was lowly born but became the wife of a wealthy banker after Danilo’s father forbade his son’s marriage to her. The novelty of her character was noted by theatre historian MacQueen-Pope: ‘Here was no ordinary heroine, shrinking in maidenly modesty before the man she loved; here was a rich woman of the world, coming face to face with a man whom she considered had slighted her.’³⁵ Alice, the ‘dollar princess’ is a similar force to be reckoned with, and, as a ‘self-made Mädel’, knows about the world of business. The American ‘duchess’ in Kálmán’s Die Herzogin von Chicago is also headstrong. Her money comes from the profits of her father’s sausage factory (no doubt intended as satire of American mass production). In this operetta, the impecunious Prince of Sylvaria finds himself in a similar position to Alice’s lover Freddy: both of those wealthy women see them as commodities to be purchased.

Many operettas stage a form of duel between the sexes. It was not uncommon for the woman to have a more dominant role in the drama than the man. The modern woman in operetta differed from what Frey describes as ‘the legendary pig-tailed, sweet and innocent Viennese girl’.³⁶ Ironically, the latter returned when Viennese operetta had passed its heyday in London, in Novello’s The Dancing Years. The modern young woman rode a bike, played tennis, and rebelled against ‘wasp waists’ and tight corsets. Evelyn Laye, as Alice in the revival of The Dollar Princess at Daly’s, was featured in a publicity photograph holding a tennis racket.³⁷

Fall’s operetta Jung-England (libretto by Rudolf Bernauer and Ernst Welisch), first performed in Berlin in 1914, focuses on the British ‘Votes for Women’ campaign, but the outbreak of war later that year meant it had no chance of being seen in London. A suffragette rally had taken place in Hyde Park in 1908, and women soon resorted to direct action. Much attention was given to the death of Emily Davison, who ran onto the racetrack at the Epsom Derby in 1913 and died after falling between the hooves of the King’s horse. These events stimulated wider interest, and, in this operetta, a police chief has a daughter who sympathizes with the suffragettes and warns them about his plans. This being an operetta, the suffragette leader settles down as a contented wife before the final curtain falls. At the time of its premiere, the only European countries to have granted full voting rights to women were Finland (1906) and Norway (1913). Austria and Germany granted these rights in 1918, and that same year the UK allowed women to vote who were over 30 and met certain property requirements (equal voting rights with men had to wait until 1928). Women’s suffrage campaigns were becoming more radical in the USA from 1906 on, with the efforts of Harriet Stanton Blatch and Emma Smith DeVoe. Gradually, voting rights were won in more and more States, but violent incidents were also occurring, such as the attack on a suffrage parade in New York in 1913 that left hundreds of women injured. In 1920, universal suffrage was endorsed in the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

Suffragettes feature elsewhere in operetta: The Girl on the Film (1913) begins with a scene involving a women’s rights agitator, although she turns out to be acting a role. The Girl in the Taxi (1914) has a duet in which a couple claim, with considerable irony, that their marriage is perfect – the man remarking that his wife is not a suffragette. Department stores usually had restaurants in which women felt comfortable ordering a table and, when it became known that Gordon Selfridge sympathized with the suffragette cause, the store he founded in 1909 on Oxford Street became a favourite meeting place. A Selfridge executive, Percy Nash, wrote a play, The Suffrage Girl, which was performed by the store’s employees at the Court Theatre in 1911.³⁸

Another issue for women was equal opportunities and fair treatment in the workplace. During the war, women took on a lot of what had formerly been men’s work; yet, in 1921, they constituted the same 29 per cent of the workforce as before the war.³⁹ A young working-class woman in a Belgian glass factory is the leading character of Lehár’s Eva (1911). Belgium did have a large glass factory, Val-St-Lambert, located in Liège, which traded internationally in everything from car headlamps to vases. The factory in Eva is in Brussels, which may have been a strategic decision, given the political dimension of this operetta. Eva was seen by many in Vienna as fuel for the cause of social democracy, and the press seized the opportunity to label it as such. Wilhelm Karczag, the Intendant of the Theatre an der Wien in 1911, felt compelled to reject publicly the claims made ‘over and over again’ that it was socialist propaganda, asking irritably, ‘because workers revolt, is that Socialism?’⁴⁰ He preferred to interpret the men’s action in protecting Eva from her sexually predatory employer as chivalry rather than socialism. Ideas of social change were very much in the air after the death of the right-wing mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger in 1910, and helped to prepare the ground for the dominance of the Social Democrats during 1918–34, when the city became known as Rotes Wien (Red Vienna). Willner and Bodanzky manage to be politically evasive in their libretto, because the leader of the workers’ revolt is in love with Eva. Without that compromise – and its implication that Eros was as much a stimulus to action as socialism – it might have seemed too rebellious. Another toning-down feature is found in its reference to fairy tale, and Eva’s Cinderella-like aspirations.

Socialism was a fiery topic at this time in the UK, and that may explain why Eva did not receive a production in the West End (it did so on Broadway). Trade Unionism had strengthened after the London dock strikes and the Liverpool general transport strike of 1911, and there was a succession of labour disputes the following year. In Act 1 of the West End production of The Cinema Star in 1914, the cooks have gone on strike at the Ritzroy Hotel, London, where the housemaids and waiters have been on strike previously. It soon transpires that the telephone operators and taxi men are on strike, too.

The ‘factory girl’ was not completely new as a stage heroine. Paul Rubens’s musical comedy The Sunshine Girl (1912) had a plot revolving around Delia Dale who works in a soap factory inherited by a man who has fallen in love with her. It was clearly meant to call up associations with the Lever Brothers’ soap factory and their ‘Sunlight’ cleaning agent, but it was primarily a comedy of mistaken identity and lacks the political edge of Eva. Other urban working women appear in The Blue House, produced at the London Hippodrome in 1912. It was Kálmán’s setting of an English libretto by Austen Hurgon. Regrettably, the score has been lost, but the short operetta was set in a launderette. Publicity described its women workers as ‘40 examples of female loveliness’, which suggests that this was not, perhaps, a gritty social drama.⁴¹

A new professional class of women also finds a place in operetta: the achievements of modern women are celebrated in a quintet in The Lilac Domino (1914) titled ‘Ladies’ Day’ (with lyrics by Robert B. Smith):

Ev’rywhere in ev’ry place, the women are showing the way,

Ev’rywhere you’ll find a trace of Emancipation day.

Next, we hear of ‘lady teachers’, lecturers, aeronauts and ‘girl chauffeurs’, and, later, lawyers, poets, barbers, and doctors. Women musicians are not mentioned, but there was a ten-strong ‘Ladies’ Orchestra’ on stage in the Hicks’s Theatre production of A Waltz Dream in 1908. The principal character in Gilbert’s Moderne Eva (1911), given on Broadway in 1915 as A Modern Eve, is a woman doctor, and her mother is a lawyer. In Abraham’s Roxy und ihr Wunderteam (Budapest, 1936; Vienna, 1937) the heroine is an English woman who becomes the coach of the Hungarian national football team. Given growing political tension in Europe, this operetta arrived too late to be considered for a Broadway or West End production.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the power structures controlling theatrical production were largely in the hands of men.⁴² However, a number of women were involved in the writing of operetta. Rida Johnson Young, the librettist of Herbert’s Naughty Marietta, was responsible for Her Soldier Boy, the Broadway version of Kálmán’s Gold gab ich für Eisen, in 1916. She worked with Romberg on Maytime the following year and made the tactful decision to shift the action of its German source Wie einst im Mai to New York (the USA having now become embroiled in the war). Dorothy Donnelly collaborated with Romberg, too, writing the book and lyrics for Blossom Time (1921), the Broadway version of Das Dreimäderlhaus.⁴³ Fanny Todd Mitchell took charge of Emil Berté’s Musik im Mai in 1929, and, in the same year, reworked Die Fledermaus as A Wonderful Night for production by the Shuberts at the Majestic. Other women involved with German operetta for Broadway were: Catherine Cushing (Kálmán’s Sári 1914), Anne Caldwell (Winterberg’s The Lady in Red, 1919), Marie Armstrong Hecht and Gertrude Purcell (Kollo’s Three Little Girls, 1930), and Clare Kummer (Heuberger’s The Opera Ball, 1912, and Straus’s Three Waltzes, 1937). In London, Mrs Caley Robinson (Winifred Lucy Dalley) worked with Adrian Ross on the West End version of Lincke’s Castles in the Air in 1911. Findon informs us that Gladys Unger, an American who lived in England from the 1890s to the 1920s, translated Victor Jacobi’s The Marriage Market from the original Hungarian libretto by Max Brody and Ferenc Martos.⁴⁴ The English lyrics were written by Arthur Anderson and Adrian Ross, so must have been based on the German version by E. Motz & Eugen Spero.

In the fictional world of Paul Abraham’s Ball im Savoy, the jazz composer Daisy Darlington enters and sings her latest dance hit ‘Kanguruh’ (Kangaroo), composed under her pseudonym José Pasadoble. The song claims that the fox trot has been passé for a long time, nobody knows if people dance the rumba, and you don’t see the tango much anymore. The new, fashionable dance in Europe in the Kangaroo. Paris is bewitched by it, and London is crazy for it; soon, Berlin will be delighted with it. In reality, very few women were involved in the theatre as composers. Elsa Maxwell was responsible for an interpolated number ‘A Tango Dream’ for Eysler’s The Girl Who Didn’t (1913), which was a hit for American singer Grace La Rue, who appeared in the West End production. Ivy St Helier was a composer, lyricist, and actor, and responsible for interpolated numbers in Stolz’s The Blue Train (1927). Kay Swift was the first woman to compose a successful Broadway musical, Fine and Dandy (1930), to a book by Donald Ogden Stewart and lyrics by Paul James. Her music was orchestrated by Hans Spialek.

Tobias Becker remarks on how often a woman occupied the central role in an operetta and how common it was for a woman to feature in its title, but he points out that, rather than depict the emancipated and political ‘new woman’, operetta preferred self-confident but ultimately harmless young women who did not threaten traditional social order.⁴⁵ There are, however, plenty of exceptions. Self-assured women who threaten social order include Hanna/Sonia (Die lustige Witwe), Olga (Die Dollarprinzessin), Gonda (Die geschiedene Frau), Jeanne (Madame Pompadour), Anna Elisa (Paganini), Amy (Lady Hamilton), Manon (Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will!), Daisy (Ball im Savoy), and Marie Jeanne (Die Dubarry). Heike Quissek, in her study of German operetta librettos, describes Amy Hamilton as having an unusual degree of ‘impertinence bordering on self-assurance’.⁴⁶ Many of these women are confident in their sexuality. Of the London production of Straus’s Cleopatra, Findon remarks:

It was a somewhat daring experiment to make ‘Cleopatra’ the heroine of a musical play. … The authors in the present instance, however, deal lightly with the lady whose charm and infinite variety made her the beauty-witch of her generation, and the type for succeeding ages of erotic womanhood.⁴⁷

Evelyn Laye, who took the role of Cleopatra, had previously played Madame Pompadour, to whom, a critic commented, Laye brought charm as well as naughtiness.⁴⁸ Manon Cavallini, in Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will!, asks defiantly why a women should not have a relationship. The operetta includes in its cast ‘former partners or friends from whom she is partly separated’. The very title of the operetta seems to fly in the face of Freud’s famous question ‘was will das Weib?’⁴⁹ Here is a woman who knows what she wants. Operetta, observes Marion Linhardt, placed women on stage in two differing ways: she is either in a group that functions in a non-individualistic and mechanistic manner, or, she is the ‘extraordinary’ woman (played by the diva), whose characteristics are moodiness, eccentricity, obstinacy, self-confidence, and seductiveness.⁵⁰ Such is often the case, but those qualities apply only selectively to the characters mentioned in this paragraph.

Modernity and Sexuality

In the UK, concerns about morality became more relaxed in the early twentieth century than the 1890s. In 1892, the Lord Chamberlain had refused a licence for Oscar Wilde’s French play Salomé, and Aubrey Beardsley’s erotic illustrations that accompanied the English translation of the play in 1894 were considered an affront to bourgeois respectability. In 1908, none of that prevented the first prize at a Fancy Dress Carnival held at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, being awarded to theatrical costumier Mary Fisher dressed as Salomé⁵¹ or, in 1910, the performance of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, based on Wilde’s play, at Covent Garden. The phrase ‘dance of the seven veils’ had been invented by Wilde for Salome’s dance, and, in the early 1900s, it became associated with pseudo-Oriental striptease shows.

The more open attitude to sexuality, that is a feature of modernism, is found in Die geschiedene Frau (1908), the operetta Fall composed immediately after Die Dollarprinzessin to a libretto by Victor Léon. It was based on Sardou’s play Divorçons!, which was popular in continental Europe. In Austria, at the time of the production of this operetta, civil marriages did not exist and divorce was difficult. Rumours, however, had circulated about a divorce that had taken place within Viennese high society.⁵² Ironically, a little over five years after this operetta’s premiere, Leo Fall’s wife Bertha filed for divorce.

The first scene is set in the divorce court of the Palace of Justice, Amsterdam. The defendant, Karel, alleges he was trying to assist Gonda van der Loo, while travelling on the Nice express: ‘She had omitted to book a sleeping compartment’ and was ‘in great distress’. He shared his lunchbox with her in a compartment reserved for himself, and it included – to the consternation of those in court – a bottle of Cliquot champagne. There was nothing else to drink. Finding a dirty collar on the seat, he complained to an attendant about the untidiness of the compartment. The attendant became angry and departed slamming the door, causing the lock to break and leaving them trapped inside. The attendant is called to give evidence and is asked if he works for the Trans-European Sleeping Car Company. In the German version, he is an unemployed academic, but in the West End version he is a socialist, who assures the court that the word ‘work’ has been ‘expunged from the vocabulary of the Labour Party of which I am a prominent member’. The Labour Party had been formed in 1900 but had adopted this name only four years before the West End production of 1910, and its political agenda was becoming a target for satire. The attendant claims he gently closed the door after Karel had been rude to him, but later found the door locked and could hear a woman laughing. The plot is resolved when it turns out that there was a third person in the sleeping car, who, having failed to purchase a ticket, had hidden under the seat all night. He had previously taken off his collar, and this was the dirty collar Karel found.

Superficially, then, all appears to be light-hearted innocence and unrelated to modern notions of sexual audaciousness. Bernard Grun writes that the first act is filled with an amusing trial scene ‘à la Gilbert und Sullivan’.⁵³ Indeed, the difficulties are all resolved by the judge, as in Trial by Jury, although, in this case, the judge pairs off with a woman accused of improper behaviour. An ‘innocent’ reading, however, faces complications from the fact that, in the German version, Gonda is the editor of the journal Freie Liebe (Free Love). She makes clear her views on this subject, claiming that love does not need, and usually does not long survive, the shackles of marriage: ‘frei sei Weib und frei sei Mann, Liebe sei nicht Pflicht!’ (‘let women be free and men be free, love shouldn’t be a duty!’) Those sentiments accorded with the views of the Verband Fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine (League of Progressive Women’s Associations), who were active in Germany from 1891 to 1919, and called for a boycott of marriage and for the enjoyment of sexuality. The league was founded by Lily Braun and Minna Cauer, and had among its aims the unionization of prostitution, the teaching of contraceptive methods, abortion rights, and the abolition of laws prohibiting same-sex relationships. In 1895 and 1897, Berlin school teacher Emma Trosse published pamphlets on homosexuality and free love.⁵⁴ Advancing these thoughts could attract penalties: Adelheid Popp, editor of the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, was prosecuted in Austria in 1895 for publishing a free love article that was deemed to degrade marriage.⁵⁵ Nevertheless, the debate continued after the war. Hugo Bettauer, in his article ‘Die erotische Revolution’ (1924), states that men created the ‘fundamental principle, that the erotic belongs to marriage’, and argues that ‘the man has access to free love through secret means whereas for the woman there is only subjection’.⁵⁶ Such ideas were also promulgated in the UK and USA. Victoria Woodhull, leader of the American suffrage movement, defended free love in a speech in Steinway Hall, New York, in 1871.⁵⁷ In the UK, Edward Carpenter, one of the founders of the Fellowship of the New Life in 1883 and of the Fabian Society the following year, was a champion of sexual freedom and what would now be called gay rights.

The West End version ignores completely Gonda’s first verse in the Act 2 duet ‘Gonda liebe, kleine, Gonda’, in which she declares that she is unconcerned about fidelity and the rights of wives. She claims that marriage is demanded only because of conventional ideas of social duty and good reputation.

Nicht um Ihre Liebe, noch Ihre Treu’ ist mir’s zu tun!

Gattinrechte ich gar nicht möchte! Was sagen Sie wohl nun?

Brauch’ nicht alles dies, was wohl ganz süss Natur erschuf!

Nein, ich leist’ drauf Verzicht!

Gesellschaftspflicht verlangt nur diese Heirat und mein guter Ruf.

I’m not bothered about your love, or your fidelity!

I wouldn’t want a wife’s rights! What do you say now?

I don’t need all that which, no doubt, sweet nature created!

No, I renounce it!

It is merely social duty that demands this marriage and my good reputation.

After the first performance in Berlin at the Theater des Westens, 6 Sep. 1910, the Berliner Zeitung commented that Die geschiedene Frau had all the necessary ingredients for a modern operetta.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, as mentioned in Chapter 2, it was found necessary to tone down this operetta in both its West End and Broadway versions as The Girl in the Train (1910), although the unconventional Gonda replaced the wife as the title character.

Sexuality was being explored more broadly and openly in the early twentieth century. The visual arts spring first to mind. One of the themes of ‘The Women of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka’, an exhibition held at the Belvedere, Vienna, in 2015 was an exploration of gender politics in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘when both women and men’s sexuality were undergoing a revolution’.⁵⁹ There was cross-dressing from female to male in Filmzauber and from male to female in Die Rose von Stambul. There was also erotic dressing in the Viennese version of Die Dollarprinzessin: Olga’s arrival with her women Cossacks was striking because of her costume, which, she admits knowingly, is so close and tight that it ‘gets many guessing’.⁶⁰ This entrance scene was omitted in the London and New York versions.

Sigmund Freud published three essays on sexual theory, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, in 1905.⁶¹ The following year, Austrian author Robert Musil offered a study of transgressive sexuality in his novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless. Sexuality was also a topic in the air in the UK, where, Mica Niva informs us, ‘Free love and the idea of sexual pleasure as an entitlement for women as well as men were gradually put on the agenda, albeit in mainly urban Bohemian and intellectual circles’.⁶² Telling questions are posed in operetta songs: for example, ‘Was hat eine Frau von der treue?’ (‘What does a woman gain from fidelity?’) from Ball im Savoy and ‘Warum soll eine Frau kein Verhältnis haben’ (‘Why shouldn’t a woman have a relationship?’) from Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will! The question of an age of consent is raised in Friederike, in the title character’s poignant song, ‘Warum hast Du mich Wach geküsst?’ (‘Why did you kiss me awake?’). Friederike asserts, ‘Ich war kein Weib, ich war ein Kind’ (‘I wasn’t a woman, I was a child’). Her love involved more than kissing, as the line ‘Mit jeder Faser war ich Dein’ (‘With every fibre I was yours’) makes plain.

When the focus shifts to queering the production and consumption of operetta, much light is shed by the arguments compiled and edited by Kevin Clarke in Glitter and Be Gay (2007).⁶³ It requires little effort to queer certain operatic characters, such as Fränze, who passes incognito as a drummer boy in Filmzauber, the Zarewitsch in Lehár’s operetta of that name, Schubert (Das Dreimäderlhaus), and Josepha Vogelhuber (Im weißen Rössl). Camp representation was part of operetta from its early days, but is perhaps most associated with the productions of Erik Charell. Charell had been far from discreet about his sexuality in the 1920s, when he found a gay partner in African-American Louis Douglas, a star of La Revue nègre (Hopkins). Regarding the various male groups in Charell’s production of Im weißen Rössl, Clarke writes that no gay cliché was left out, although it could all be viewed ‘innocently’ as local colour.⁶⁴ Charell was also aware of the erotic spectacle of his boys in lederhosen and girls in short dirndls. Today, it is possible to regain a sense of how camp functioned in the silver age of operetta by watching certain operetta films of the period. The consciously ‘tacked on’ operetta finale to Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930) with its high-kicking chorus line is a good place to begin.

Modern ‘Enlightenment’ and Spectacle

New York began to move from gas to electric street lighting in the 1880s, and, by 1895, electric signs were common. Electric lighting had become familiar in theatres in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Hollingshead had been the first to use electric lights in a London theatre (the Gaiety, 1878) using the Lontin light.⁶⁵ At the turn of the twentieth century, New York had more electric illumination than either London or Berlin. Broadway was already known as the ‘Great White Way’ in the 1890s, mainly because of its electric advertising.⁶⁶ Charles Dillingham introduced the first electrically illuminated advertising sign on Broadway the season before the Merry Widow premiere.⁶⁷ Striking modern poster design was developing, too: a widely used poster for The Chocolate Soldier showed Captain Massakoff’s finger pointing directly at the viewer, and carried the accusation: ‘You haven’t seen the Chocolate Soldier yet!’ It was a forerunner of Alfred Leete’s famous Kitchener recruitment poster for the First World War.

New York was even better served by electric trams in the early 1900s than Berlin, which possessed the best tram network in Europe. New York’s first underground line opened in 1904, three years before The Merry Widow.⁶⁸ The world’s first underground railway line (the Metropolitan) opened in London in 1863 and had 40 million passenger journeys a year by the 1870s.⁶⁹ With increased transport available, the urban consumer’s attitude to country life and its villages changed. If a city dweller moves to the country, he or she soon desires city features (reliable telecommunications, street lighting, and roads free of mud). The countryside that lacks these attributes is consumed as scenery – a green field, a tranquil lake, a misty mountain – or as rural heritage (a national park). Onstage, such scenery became spectacle enhanced by modern technology.

Revolving stages were speeding up scene changes. A complicated revolving stage mechanism had been installed at the Coliseum in 1904 and was used to great effect in the production of White Horse Inn.

It is much more than merely a ‘mammoth’ show. It is like nothing that has yet been presented. It surrounds and wraps one up in jollity, colour, and music, attacking from both sides as well as in front. The three revolving stages bring the scenes on and off with a rhythm that is an inspiration in itself.⁷⁰

The revolving stage was especially effective for showing the trip round the lake.

Stoll re-engaged Charell for the next Coliseum production, Casanova, which was proclaimed ‘the ultimate limit in stage spectacle’.⁷¹ The revolving stage was in action again, enabling ‘scenes of loveliness’ to succeed one another in ‘marvellous sequence’.⁷² After ‘an extraordinary pageant of scenery’, the performance culminated in a revolving panorama of the carnival in Venice, ‘with hundreds of gaily clad revelers, gondolas, canals and palazzos paying tribute to the producer’s genius’⁷³ (Figure 7.1). Not everyone was bowled over by it all: Charles Morgan, reporting from London for the New York Times, complained that it created ‘an impression of unselective excess’.⁷⁴

Figure 7.1 Venetian Scene in Casanova (Coliseum, 1932). The Play Pictorial, vol. 61, no. 364 (Dec. 1932), 20.

Technological developments in stage lighting also played an important role, making possible realistic effects of thunder, lightning, and rain. The Morning Post praised the cyclorama (the background scenery) of the Coliseum production of White Horse Inn in April 1931.

[T]here is the ‘cyclorama’ of the Alps standing out just as if they were real, with a quite marvelous moment of storm; a lake with a steamer from which the Emperor arrives; mountain-top scenes with goats and comic cows and reveling yodelers, and above all, an inexhaustible wealth of design, richness, and variety in Ernst Stein’s costumes.⁷⁵

Lehár expressed surprise at the stage lighting employed at Daly’s and the costs it must entail,⁷⁶ but great strides were being made in stage lighting in Germany in the 1920s, and they soon crossed the English Channel. The London firm Ventreco claimed that a new era had begun with the lighting of White Horse Inn, and although they admit to having achieved it under Schwabe-Hasait patents, they stress that it was with the employment of British material and labour (Figure 7.2).⁷⁷

Figure 7.2 Advertisement in the Sunday Referee, 5 Apr. 1931.

Hans Schwabe had been active in Berlin before the First World War. He had developed a battery of 1000-watt lanterns that replaced the large central lanterns at the Deutches Theater and gave an even spread of light. Schwabe’s assistant Reiche developed a machine that projected clouds onto the cyclorama (Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3 Reiche’s 3000-watt cloud machine, containing two tiers of lenses and mirrors.

Max Hasait was stage manager of the Residenz Theater, Munich, and developed a cyclorama that could be set very quickly from either side of the stage, allowing realistic effects of storm, lighting and rain. The Schwabe-Hasait system had already been tried out in St Martin’s Theatre and Drury Lane in the mid-1920s.⁷⁸

It took several years for White Horse Inn to reach New York, but on 1 October 1936 it opened at the Center Theatre, where ‘the genii of American spectacle making [had] done one of their handsomest jobs on this international holiday to music’.⁷⁹ It involved:

mountain scenery and hotel architecture, costumes beautiful and varied enough to bankrupt a designer’s imagination, choruses that can do anything from the hornpipe to a resounding slapdance, grand processionals with royalty loitering before the commoners, a steamboat, a yacht, a char-à-banc, four real cows and a great deal more of the same.⁸⁰

The cows had been distinctly and purposefully unreal in the London production. The songs, by Benatzky and others were characterized without condescension as, ‘for the most part, simple things which are well-bred and daintily imposing’. The director Erik Charell, who was also partly responsible for the libretto, was praised for ‘the general spirit of good humor that keeps “White Horse Inn” a congenial tavern’.⁸¹ A report three days later claimed that the second night’s gross taking at the Center Theatre was $7,240, ‘a sum which smacks of success’.⁸²

Spectacle was a way of engaging with modernity, with the new means of representation that technology made possible. Even operettas that were set in Ruritanian principalities related to modernism: first, because they offered spectacle, but also because they depicted a type of social formation that was failing in the modern age. Not every theatre critic was bowled over by spectacle. After describing the London production of Abraham’s Ball at the Savoy as ‘a spectacle’, the reviewer elucidates as follows: ‘Bits of the stage and bits of the chorus keep on going up and down.’ The costumes are treated to equally sardonic comment: ‘its dresses are, not beautiful, but an entertainment in themselves’.⁸³

Stoll brought spectacle to another of his theatres, the Alhambra. After having this theatre reconstructed, he invited Hassard Short to produce Waltzes from Vienna there in 1931. Findon writes of a ‘slight plot which bears so valiantly the mighty framework of scenic design and elaborate stagecraft’, but extols the production for having ‘amazed the world of amusement seekers’.⁸⁴ Besides the beautiful costumes and scenery, there were the modern stage lighting effects of the Strand Electrical Company. Hassard Short was English, but ‘discovered’ in America. He was a lighting expert, and one of his innovations at the Alhambra was to move the footlights to the dress circle, from where they threw a stream of light onto the stage.⁸⁵ He illuminated the stage further by using the latest lighting towers and a granulated reflector with a 1000-watt lamp that diffused and amplified the light at the same time.⁸⁶

The Strand Electric Company was again manufacturing and installing special lighting for Hassard Short’s production of Wild Violets (1933), this time at Drury Lane rather than the Alhambra. There was a cast of over 160 actors and 120 stage hands, and the production involved 16 scene changes and 260 costumes. The revolving stage allowed scenes to be built up invisibly, behind the scene the audience was currently viewing. The lighting system included a new bridge on the stage side of the proscenium arch employing 120 spotlights, many with telescopic lenses of three or four colours. There were 900 small electric lamps used to create a star-spangled background in the elopement scene, and 500 of them were used for the skating scene.⁸⁷ Findon remarks that the revolving stage and Short’s ‘bewildering, lighting effects’ made the strongest impressions – in spite of the ‘many tuneful melodies’. The scene of the ice-skating rink (with real ice) in the snowy Swiss Alps was ‘a joy to the eye’.⁸⁸ Another scene had the chorus on bicycles, but the precariousness of modern mobilities was also on display when a car was shown failing to climb a steep hill. In a comment that underlines some of the observations on intermediality presented in Chapter 6, the News Chronicle remarked that the revolving stage took the audience from scene to scene ‘with almost the rapidity of a film’.⁸⁹

Modernity and Mobility

Act 3 of the German-language version of Die Dollarprinzessin opened with an ‘Automobil-Terzett’ in praise of the motor car (omitted in the Broadway and West End versions).

Ja das Auto ihr Leute bewundert’s, ist die Krone des Jahrhunderts, ein Geschenk, das vom Himmel gesendet auf die Erd’, wenn man vorsichtig fährt! All Heil! All Heil!

Yes, the car you people admire is the crown of the century, a gift sent from heaven to earth, if you drive carefully! All hail! All hail!

Shortly after the Vienna premiere of Die Dollarprinzessin in November 1907, the American economy was further boosted by car manufacturing using ‘mass production’ techniques. The Ford Model T motor car was first produced in 1908, the year before Broadway premiere of The Chocolate Soldier. The fact that The Chocolate Soldier is set in Bulgaria during 1885–86 does not prevent Bumerli informing Colonel Popoff towards the end of Act 3 that he can supply ‘every make and style of motor car’.⁹⁰ One of Jean Gilbert’s operettas, Das Autoliebchen (1912), takes the love of cars as its theme – it was produced in the West End as The Joy-Ride Lady (1914).

Mimi Sheller and John Urry complain that early sociologists of urban life ‘failed to consider the overwhelming impact of the automobile in transforming the time–space “scapes” of the modern urban/suburban dweller’.⁹¹ It might be added that the train had already had a similar effect. Transport was a subject taken up by scholars developing the ‘mobilities paradigm’ of early twenty-first-century sociology, which emphasizes that ‘all places are tied into at least thin networks of connections that stretch beyond each such place’.⁹² Much of the focus of mobilities research is on later developments (for instance, airports and mobile technologies, and the distinction between mobility and migration), but in the first decade of the twentieth century, cars, motorbikes, trains, ocean liners, and airships were transforming connections between people and cultures. In the second decade, horses were disappearing from the roads to be replaced by cars and motor buses. In the mid-1920s, regular articles appeared in the Play Pictorial under the title ‘Players, Playgoers and the Car’. An advertisement in a 1924 issue gives the price of a basic Morris four-seater as £225.⁹³ In 2017, the relative cost would have been around £12,200 or $15,600; so this mode of transport was within the reach of some middle-class theatre goers.⁹⁴ Furthermore, second-hand models were appearing on the market.⁹⁵

The growth of tram networks and the asphalting of roads and streets enhanced mobility in cities. For travel further afield, transport by steamship and rail was improving. The synchronizing of clocks throughout a country was a consequence of the latter. The travel bureau was part of modernity: Lehár’s Der Mann mit den drei Frauen of 1908 (given on Broadway as The Man with Three Wives, 1913) features a travel guide as the leading male character, and the desire for tourism adds appeal to Benatzky’s Im weißen Rössl (1930) and Künneke’s Glückliche Reise (Bon Voyage) of 1932. Stolz’s Mädi (1923) concerns the Calais-Mediterranée Express, which ran between Calais and the French Riviera. The tile of the West End version was The Blue Train, a reference to the train’s alternative name, which it owed to the colour of its sleeping cars.

Dennis Kennedy remarks on the commonalities between tourists and theatre spectators:

As travelers approach a touristic site, so spectators encounter a performance through the gaze, which implies a distance of subject to object. Both spectators and tourists are temporary visitors to another realm who expect to return to the quotidian.⁹⁶

He adds: ‘Modernity and tourism are intertwined: as the technology of travel increased so more and more of the world became objectified as sights to wonder over or visit for private refreshment.’⁹⁷

The appeal of the Austrian alps as a tourist destination offers an explanation for the appeal of White Horse Inn, as it was to do later in the case of The Sound of Music. The Observer referred to White Horse Inn at the Coliseum as ‘Baedecker gone mad’.⁹⁸ Indeed, an updated edition of Baedecker drew on the operetta in describing the actual Weißes Rössl hotel in St Wolfgang, its lakeside setting and the availability of steamboat trips on the Wolfgangsee, before awarding it a Baedecker star.⁹⁹ Charell had envisaged a revue operetta that would appeal to ‘summer-resort addicted Berlin’.¹⁰⁰ Economic depression in Germany meant that a lakeside holiday was out of the question for many people. However, the idea of a visit to the real White Horse Inn was an attractive proposition for London’s more affluent theatre-goers. The programme for the Coliseum production carried an advertisement recommending this establishment to ‘discriminating people’ (Figure 7.4).

Figure 7.4 Advertisement from the Coliseum White Horse Inn programme (1931).

Staging the Modern World

The period 1880–1900 witnessed the growth of theatre quarters in Berlin, London, and New York. Len Platt argues that one of the most important struggles among competing theatrical centres was over the concept of modernity: ‘This was the real domain that musical theatres fought over, because, even in the sphere of light entertainment – then as now – whoever authorised the modern authorized the world.’¹⁰¹ Kerston Lange offers the comment: ‘Musical theatre was where “the world” in the city was staged.’¹⁰²

The twentieth century witnessed changes in the representation of other cultures. Fall’s Die Rose von Stambul of 1916 (given on Broadway as The Rose of Stamboul, 1922) is full of historical references, but makes constant reference to westernizing reforms.¹⁰³ Its topicality and connection to events in Turkey at the time of its 1916 premiere in Vienna were evident when Hubert Marischka, playing the lead role Achmed Bey,¹⁰⁴ wanted his costume to be a khaki uniform with black fur hat and high black boots. This outfit was familiar from images of the Turkish general Mustafa Kemal, who had driven the British from the Dardanelles in the previous year.¹⁰⁵ Kemal had been born in what is today the Greek city of Thessaloniki, which, in Ottoman days, was known as Selanik. Although he had many years of active service in the Ottoman Army, he regarded his struggle for an independent Turkey during 1919–22 as a fight against Ottoman oppression.

The operetta is set in the early twentieth century, when the Ottoman Empire had declined and its receptiveness to western European influence had increased. In 1908, ideas of liberal reform and democracy were very much in the air, and the Young Turk Revolution began. Reform is an important issue in Die Rose von Stambul. Kondja Güll, the daughter of Kemal Pasha, rebels against her father’s plans for her marriage because she is corresponding with the poet André Lery, who believes in fighting for the emancipation of women. She has read his novels, but they have never actually met. With typical operetta felicity, he turns out to be Achmed Bey, the very man her father wishes her to marry, who writes under a pen name. Kondja’s girlfriend is named Midilli, the Turkish name for Mytilini, the capital of Lesbos. Both Thessaloniki and Mytilini were taken by Greek forces in the First Balkan War, which ended three years before Die Rose von Stambul was premiered. The women in the operetta look forward with eager anticipation to ‘reforms on the Bosphorus’ and the abolition of the veil.

The idea that there was an appetite for westernizing reform in Turkey received a jolt after the horrific destruction of the cosmopolitan city of Smyrna in 1922, but Mustafa Kemal began driving reforms through once he became the first president of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. In 1925, his wife witnessed a performance of Friml’s Rose-Marie at Drury Lane, and believed she had found a useful aid to her campaign to persuade Muslim women to drop the old policy of seclusion and advance ‘their education in the lighter phases of life’; and so she made arrangements for it to be presented as soon as possible in the new Republic of Turkey.¹⁰⁶ The issue of Turkish reform proved topical again, when the Die Rose von Stambul was performed at the Lehár Festival, Bad Ischl, in 2016, a hundred years after its premiere. The critic of the Salzburger Nachrichten found it ironic how times had changed, that the current Turkish leader wanted to ‘turn back history’, and that Istanbul had acquired notoriety as the scene of terrorist atrocities.¹⁰⁷

Orientalist devices in this operetta are infrequent, and often serve merely to frame a scene (as in the opening and close of the operetta). Elsewhere, they are applied unevenly (see Chapter 1). When the subject turns to fashionable pleasure (‘das Glück nach der Mode’), a waltz rhythm is heard. It is also significant that Achmed Bey tries to seduce Kondja with the song ‘Ein Walzer muß es sein’. That not as fanciful as it may seem; the Ottoman interest in the waltz was longstanding, and the nineteenth-century sultans Abdülaziz and Murad V both composed waltzes.

Modernity was no longer so exciting or chic after the outbreak of the First World War. It could feel threatening, and revues sometimes viewed it cynically. America was an exception to this mood, perhaps because of its new international power after the war: for one thing, the UK was left owing the USA $4.6 billion.¹⁰⁸ Berlin operetta had been more taken with modernity than Viennese operetta because Berlin was very much a modern city, whereas Vienna retained a certain nostalgia for the days of ‘alt Wien’ and its residents spoke fondly of times past. Yet, after the war, Platt and Becker suggest that Berlin operetta became conservative and indifferent to modernity: ‘the once-characteristic mix of localism and cosmopolitanism firmly positioned in terms of a confident negotiation of the modern gave way to spectaculars of a different kind – historical romances’.¹⁰⁹

There was usually more to a historically themed operetta, however, than mere sentimental romance. Indeed, Volker Klotz sees a lively return to the spirit of Offenbach in the ‘cheeky exuberance’ of Fall’s Madame Pompadour, and Christoph Dompke finds a camp element from the beginning.¹¹⁰ It may be true that modernity lost its attraction to a certain extent, but there were exceptions: for instance, Kálmán’s Die Herzogin von Chicago, Abraham’ s Ball im Savoy, Straus’s Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will!, and Dostal’s Clivia. Finally, it may also be argued that the presence of African-American elements in operettas by Künneke, Granichstaedten, Kálmán, Abraham, and Benatzky was a continuing assertion of the modern, even when an operetta was set in the past (like Lady Hamilton and Im weißen Rössl).

8 Operetta and Cosmopolitanism

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.