The Operetta Empire

Music Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna

Micaela Baranello

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520976542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Opera Music

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 "When the world comes to an end, " Viennese writer Karl Kraus lamented in 1908, "all the big city orchestras will still be playing The Merry Widow." Viennese operettas like Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow were preeminent cultural texts during the Austro-Hungarian Empire's final years. Alternately hopeful and nihilistic, operetta staged contemporary debates about gender, nationality, and labor. The Operetta Empire delves intothis vibrant theatrical culture, whosecreators simultaneously sought the respectability of high art and the popularity of low entertainment.Case studies examine works by Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, Oscar Straus, and Leo Fall in light of current musicological conversations about hybridity and middlebrow culture. Demonstrating a thorough mastery of the complex early twentieth?century Viennese cultural scene, and a sympathetic and redemptive critique of a neglected popular genre, Micaela Baranelloestablishes operetta as an important element of Viennese cultural life—one whose transgressions helped define the musical hierarchies of its day.

1

Die lustige Witwe and the Creation of Silver Age Viennese Operetta

When Wilhelm Karczag first heard Franz Lehár’s score to Die lustige Witwe, he supposedly exclaimed, “Das is ka Musik!” (That ain’t music!). The setting was Lehár’s own apartment on the Mariahilferstrasse in Vienna in the summer of 1905, half a year before the operetta was to premiere at Karczag’s Theater an der Wien. This anecdote, not celebrated in print until 1924 and disputed by several of those who claim to have been present, makes Karczag the butt of a joke, for Die lustige Witwe was the music that would rule operetta for the next two and a half decades.¹ Karczag’s Hungarian accent—he had moved from Budapest only four years earlier—is rendered phonetically, marking him as an outsider who could not hear what the rest of the Vienna later recognized.

Lehár’s audition for Karczag became an iconic event in Die lustige Witwe’s origin myth as an underdog success. The operetta’s purportedly hostile initial reception, which included not only the resistance of the theatrical management but also its ostensibly lukewarm opening night, positions it as a Naturkind, so radically different in tone from Karczag’s operetta habits that he was unable to recognize it as music. Against all odds, it emerged to conquer the theatrical world and launch what would become known as the Silver Age of Viennese operetta. This story was told over and over again in Viennese newspapers.² The anecdote’s constantly shifting details were, in large part, reflective of a dispute over ownership. Everyone—composer, librettists, impresarios, and actors—was eager to claim credit for (and preferably also some of the profits from) the greatest theatrical success of the time. Die lustige Witwe racked up 483 performances in its initial run in Vienna and 8,338 performances on all German-speaking stages by 1921.³ At one point Karczag’s co-director, Karl Wallner, even claimed to have conceived the third act of the operetta himself. Librettist Victor Léon vehemently refuted this and denied that Wallner had heard the operetta at the fateful audition at all.⁴

The “Das is ka Musik” anecdote was popularized in the 1920s and recirculated through the early 1930s, just as Viennese operetta was beginning its inexorable decline. Mythmaking attempted to rescue this most successful work from anachronism by transforming it into an autonomous classic, worthy of lasting esteem. Indeed, Die lustige Witwe is one of the few Viennese operettas still to be regularly performed today—and not in its original commercial environs but in the sanctified space of modern opera houses. But this development occludes the very different circumstances under which the operetta was conceived. The energetic self-advocacy of the operetta’s creators helped to conceal the fact that Die lustige Witwe was created not with high-art aims nor with thoughts of how it would play decades later, but rather to please, and to please immediately.

The popular operetta literature has tended to describe Die lustige Witwe in the same superlative terms used by its creators, positioning it as a work whose inherent qualities and immense success elevated it from its colleagues in fundamental yet vaguely defined ways. Richard Traubner introduces his discussion of Die lustige Witwe with a generalized paean to its fantastic success: the operetta is “ravishing,” “as good or better than any other of its day,” “exciting,” “fragrant,” and “fabulously effective.”⁵ In Traubner’s teleology, Die lustige Witwe is described as extraordinary before it is put in the context in which it began: as an ordinary operetta. In fact, in contrast to the conventional narrative of Die lustige Witwe as a work that transcended its era, a look at the world of operetta of 1905 reveals it as an encapsulation of its time—and an instance in which the hybridized musical style of operetta is integral to the dramatic action.

Die lustige Witwe was created while operetta was in crisis, following the deaths of Johann Strauss II and several other major composers, at a point when the genre’s direction and purpose were uncertain. Set to a plot about a group of hapless “Pontevedrans” playing matchmaker in the midst of Parisian society, the operetta’s music embodies and utilizes this instability. Die lustige Witwe dramatizes the contrast between Paris and the imaginary Balkan principality as a contrast between Parisian (and English) and Austro-Hungarian operetta styles. Its score presents a binary division between these styles, and its drama is generated by the friction between the two. This allegorical deployment of stylistic juxtaposition is a defining feature of the Silver Age.⁶

The operetta was also created for a particular audience. The true geographical home of Die lustige Witwe is not Paris nor Pontevedro, but 1905 Vienna. Die lustige Witwe captures the experience of a city of immigrants in the throes of modernization. The Austro-Hungarian Empire’s belated industrialization was transforming the city’s demographics, bringing an influx of new citizens, new models of social organization, and new technology. The Pontevedrans of the operetta are ethnic outsiders, planted in the center of a dazzling urban metropolis, forced to balance the boredom of wage labor and the pull of urban temptation against the weight and value of their indigenous traditions. Like many operettas, Die lustige Witwe is wish fulfillment, displaying an opulently staged, romantic solution to problems found in its audience’s everyday lives.

I begin this chapter by surveying the world of operetta in Vienna up to 1905, considering its French heritage and quickly acquired Germanic identity. The passing of the nineteenth century’s “Golden Age” composers resulted in both an identity crisis, endlessly debated in the contemporary press, and a richly experimental period for a new generation of composers and librettists. This led directly to the allegorical character of Die lustige Witwe, which emerges as a meta-operetta dramatizing the polemics of this unstable era. It can also hint, perhaps, at some of its resonances. Describing Die lustige Witwe, Felix Salten wrote, “All that resonates and hums in our daily lives, what we read, write, think, praise, and the new, modern clothes our expressions wear, all these are intoned in this operetta.”⁷ Quotidian entertainment engaged with its audiences’ most urgent concerns, and the polemics of newspaper critics extended into operettas themselves. Despite its current status as the rare operetta to withstand the test of time, Die lustige Witwe is inseparable from the aesthetic and social concerns that surrounded its creation.

THE “GOLDEN AGE”

Viennese operetta scavenged from many other genres. Containing elements of French opérette and opéra comique and German Singspiel and komische Oper, it also borrowed from Viennese theater genres like the Lustspiel, Schwank, and Posse; the traditional Germanic Volksstück; the French boulevard theater that bequeathed the Viennese so many librettos; and even Italian opera. Operetta was an urban genre, but one that often incorporated elements of older folk traditions.⁸ Critics perennially dismissed it as the banal bastard of one of its more artistic or more ancient progenitors.⁹ But it was the breadth of this family tree that allowed operetta to build its rich vocabulary of conventions and codes with remarkable speed, and it was the diversity of its city, theaters, and audiences that made these codes intelligible. Many operettas wear their hybrid character proudly, using stylistic variation allegorically for dramatic effect and characterization. Serious characters sing with operatic breadth, modern ones dance the cakewalk, and Balkan ones do Balkan dances. Folk song in general connotes sincerity and interiority, quasi-French music the intrigues and debauchery of a night at the Folies Bergère. The talents and personas of the leading actors were written into their roles. If anything did not make sense in a revival, it was simply adjusted to fit new circumstances.¹⁰

Operetta arrived in Vienna in the form of opérettes by Offenbach, which first gained popularity in commercial Viennese theaters in the late 1850s. What in Vienna was considered an Offenbachian style would continue to be a building block of operetta. Offenbach’s musical language was based on the opéra comique template of Boieldieu, Auber, and others. The songs are cast in a few predictable and simple forms, the most important being the couplet, in this context meaning a comic number in strophic form, often including a chorus echoing the soloist and sometimes improvised texts.¹¹ The melodic construction is similarly regular. The music makes a kind of anxious chatter, unfolding in short motives of straight eighth or sixteenth notes in scalar motion. Text and music are often juxtaposed for comic effect.

An example of both Offenbach’s musical syntax and this characteristically acerbic relationship between music and text can be found near the start of his satiric Orphée aux enfers, whose title characters are not the lovebirds depicted in classical mythology. In their Act 1 duet, they debate the appeal of Orphée’s music: he loves it, she hates it (ex. 1.1). The music is brisk and patter-like; Eurydice’s vocal line repeats a compact melodic turn cell while Orphée’s stays on the same pitch, providing additional rhythmic propulsion. The obsessive repetition of short motivic cells, usually with short note values in conjunct motion in a narrow range is Offenbach’s melodic signature: phrases are not forward directed or expansive, and they avoid significant harmonic development. Instead they have a formulaic, relentlessly predictable cadence.

EXAMPLE 1.1. Jacques Offenbach, Orpheée aux enfers, No. 2, Duo, refrain

The music’s mundane but manic energy is enhanced by its relation to the text. Orphée and Eurydice both string together adjectives describing Orphée’s violin solo. Their words rhyme, but her descriptions are entirely negative (deplorable, dreadful, boring, irritating) and his entirely positive (adorable, delectable, ravishing, catchy). These directly conflicting sentiments are set to exactly the same music. Eventually, Eurydice seems to run out of words, and her language breaks down into a series of “ah”s, as Orphée switches from singing to playing his violin. They make an ironic statement regarding the expressive possibilities of music itself: the two have differing opinions of the same music, and their expressions of those differing opinions are set to identical music. Just as Orphée’s violin solo lacks a single definit...