Characteristics of Musical Style in Operetta

The music of operetta occupied a number of positions between popular musical theatre and opera. Lehár’s most operatic scores were Zigeunerliebe (Gipsy Love in London, Gypsy Love in New York) and Giuditta. Findon remarked on the operatic qualities of Gipsy Love, noting that it demanded skilled singers, such as Robert Michaelis and Sári Petráss.Footnote ³ Kálmán’s most operatic score was Die Bajadere (The Yankee Princess on Broadway), and Gilbert’s most operatic score was Die Frau im Hermelin (The Lady of the Rose in London, The Lady in Ermine in New York). Findon commented on the ambitious character of the latter, its being almost through-composed, with little dialogue until the third act.Footnote ⁴ There were composers who moved in the opposite direction, introducing an operetta-like character into their operas, as did Puccini in La Rondine and Richard Strauss in Der Rosenkavalier. Ironically, when Hugo von Hofmannsthal heard Lehár’s Libellentanz, he said how beautiful it would have been if Lehár had composed the music to his Rosenkavalier libretto.Footnote ⁵

Dance rhythms formed an important part of the style of every operetta composer but did not prevent the cultivation of individual stylistic characteristics. Leo Fall’s distinctiveness is explained by Richard Traubner:

That said, Fall produced for the same market as other operetta composers and had life experiences in common with them. His father was a military bandmaster, as was Lehár’s (and Sullivan’s), and, like Lehár and Kálmán, he was not Austrian. His nationality at the time of his birth was Moravian, which would be Czech today. In his teens, he had studied at Vienna Conservatory, but then, like Oscar Straus, he worked in Berlin in the 1890s. He was the least fortunate among the most admired of silver-age composers in having his career cut short by cancer, resulting in his death in 1925, aged 52. Like many of the most successful operetta composers, Fall was Jewish. Thus, it seems no coincidence that composers involved in the American invasion of London’s West End in the mid-1920s were mostly of European Jewish stock (the fathers of Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers were German Jewish immigrants, and George Gershwin’s father was a Russian Jewish immigrant).

In Adorno’s opinion, Straus and Fall possessed some artistic merit because they retained links to Viennese classicism:

However, it needs to be borne in mind that Straus was also influenced by cabaret music. He lived for several years in Berlin, where he built a reputation at the Überbrettl cabaret in Alexanderplatz, and he had also toured with cabaret singer Božena Bradzky. Heinrich Reinhardt, the composer of Der Opernball, distanced Straus from the Viennese tradition by claiming that the sounds of the Überbrettl gave a certain elegant capriciousness to his music that was not at all Viennese.Footnote ⁸ It is heard in Die lustigen Nibelungen (1904), with a libretto by Rideamus (Fritz Oliven), in which satire is directed at earnest Wagnerians more than at Wagner. Yet Reinhardt’s comment goes too far in the case of Ein Walzertraum, the Viennese qualities of which can be distinctly heard in the waltz duet for two tenors, ‘Leise, ganz leise’. Straus was receptive to a variety of music, and one of the biggest impressions made on him occurred on 1 September 1886, when, aged 16, he went to the Carltheater to see The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan. It opened his eyes and ears to new possibilities and remained one of his favourite stage works.Footnote ⁹ He had intended to study composition with Léo Delibes in Paris in January 1891, but Delibes died just before his arrival. So, instead, he endured three years of Prussian musical discipline from Max Bruch in Berlin, who castigated him for his ‘wretched inclination towards frivolity’.Footnote ¹⁰

Lehár, too, wins Adorno’s respect for being acquainted with the demands of ‘art music’, and possessing a sense of aesthetic responsibility that prevented his operettas from becoming mere market articles, even if they bore ‘the musical sign of industrialized production’, which was ‘the complete elimination of all contrasts within melodies, and their replacement with sequences’.Footnote ¹¹ He cites the waltz in Die lustige Witwe as an example. A melodic sequence entails the repetition of a musical motive or phrase at a higher or lower pitch – often modified in some way – and may simultaneously include sequential harmony. Ascending sequences, such as found in ‘Mein Held’ in Der tapfere Soldat (The Chocolate Soldier in New York and London) are more common than descending sequences. ‘Leise, ganz leise’ in Ein Walzertraum has a descending modified sequence in the first eight bars. Yet sequences are by no means omnipresent in operetta: for instance, Achmed’s song ‘O Rose von Stambul’ in Fall’s Die Rose von Stambul is not in the slightest sequential.

In composing songs for operetta, consideration might be given to the technique of a particular singer. Lehár often composed with Richard Tauber’s voice in mind, knowing the range of timbre he possessed across the vocal registers, and how gently he could sing high notes. Stefan Frey remarks that Lehár’s later lyrical operettas were tailored to the Tauber style.Footnote ¹²

By the turn of the twentieth century, the free-floating sixths, sevenths, and ninths that had worked their way into the Viennese popular style were a regular feature, and could be used confidently without even a hint of resolution.Footnote ¹³ ‘Walzer, wer hat dich wohl erdacht’ in Act 3 of Das Fürstenkind shows how, by 1909, free floating sixths and sevenths could be used flexibly as colourings of tonic harmony (Example 1.1).

Example 1.1

‘Walzer, wer hat dich wohl erdacht’.

These dissonances add stimulating tension to the music. Note how the melodic phrase at ‘Walzer ganz allein’, which ends on a major 7th, lends an erotic frisson to ‘Ein Walzer muß es sein’ in Die Rose von Stambul (Example 1.2). Volker Klotz describes this duet as ‘utterly Viennese dance eroticism’.Footnote ¹⁴

Example 1.2

‘Ein Walzer muß es sein’.

The harmonies used in operetta could sometimes be adventurous. ‘Tiefe Nacht’ from Eduard Künneke’s Zauberin Lola (1937), for example, has harmonies and modulations reminiscent of Richard Strauss. Writing of Künneke’s Der Tenor der Herzogin (1930), Adorno declared: ‘It cannot be denied that Künneke is musically superior to the operetta average; by competent and careful instrumentation, a (relatively) selective awareness of harmonic or melodic shape; also, some knowledge of more advanced jazz achievements’.Footnote ¹⁵ Künneke had spent 1924–25 in New York, and, by the time he came to compose Traumland (1941), his music was influenced extensively by American styles, including the new swing style.

Künneke aside, Adorno comments sarcastically on operetta harmony: ‘Genuine modern operetta melodies must be harmonized with impressionistic ninth-chords and whole tones’.Footnote ¹⁶ Extended harmonies are not difficult to find, but they sometimes go further than may be expected: for example, a supertonic eleventh harmony appears six bars before the close of ‘Fredys Lied’ in Act 1 of Die Dollarprinzessin (see the first bar of Example 1.3). In earlier times, this would have been harmonized with a second-inversion tonic triad.

Example 1.3

Close of ‘Fredys Lied’.

Gilbert extends the tonic chord with major sevenths and ninths in the song ‘Silhouettes’ in Act 1 of The Lady of the Rose (1922) (see bars two and four of Example 1.4).

Example 1.4

‘Silhouettes’.

Abraham employed bold extended harmonies in Ball im Savoy (1932), as the end of the Prelude illustrates (Example 1.5).

Example 1.5

End of Prelude, Ball im Savoy.

Operetta is not celebrated for its imaginative use of polyphony, but contrapuntal interplay does exist. For example, the uniting of two themes, a favourite device in the Savoy operas, is found in the duet ‘Komm mit nach Madrid’ in Lady Hamilton (Song of the Sea in London) alongside other examples of Künneke’s contrapuntal skill in that operetta. His technical ability in counterpoint was already evident in Der Vetter aus Dingsda (Caroline in New York, The Cousin from Nowhere in London) which replaced choruses with subtle ensemble work, such as the ‘Roderich’ and ‘Batavia’ septets in Act 2. He had studied composition in Berlin with Max Bruch, who despised operetta and took pleasure in setting contrapuntal exercises. Künneke, like Abraham, was at first drawn to ernste Musik, and his first stage work, Robins Ende (1909), was designated a comic opera rather than an operetta. Kálmán, too, shows an understanding of polyphony in the finales of Das Hollandweibchen (1920), given in London as A Little Dutch Girl, although his interest in counterpoint declined in later works. The counterpoint in the duet ‘Niemand liebt dich so wie ich’ in Paganini shows that Lehár also possessed skill in this area, even if he did not always reveal it in his ensembles. It is far from the sweetly harmonizing thirds and sixths of the typical romantic love duet. The Act 2 duet between Pipsi and Dagobert in Eva contains a canon at one bar’s distance. The learned device of canon is not what one would expect to find in operetta, but there is also canon (at two bars’ distance) in the Act 2 finale of Offenbach’s Fantasio, between the Prince and Marinoni (‘Princesse si charmante’).

Silver-age operetta differs in its musical representation of love and romance from the music of the Savoy operas. A comparison of the Fairy Queen’s song ‘Oh Foolish Fay’ in Iolanthe (1882) with Nadine’s ‘Komm’, Komm’! Held meiner Träume’ (‘My Hero’) in Der tapfere Soldat (1908) demonstrates the changes in representational technique. Both characters sing of the man they desire, and the need to control their longing. Both songs contrast a lyrical refrain with a narrative verse containing shorter note values. But that is where the similarity ends. Sullivan employs a throbbing accompaniment in his refrain and composes a melody with sighing appoggiaturas over passing chromatic harmonies. It is marked to be performed softly throughout, even at its climactic point, and there is a decline in tension as it attains closure (Example 1.6).

Example 1.6

Fairy Queen’s song from Iolanthe.

In contrast, Oscar Straus conveys longing with an ever-rising exhortation to ‘come, come’, coupled to a crescendo that it is interrupted unexpectedly by a soft augmented chord at ‘calm my longing, calm my desire’, creating a peculiarly sensual effect. The augmented chord moves, in apparent resolution, to the tonic harmony, but the vocal melody wanders around a dissonant major seventh, sustaining a yearning tension (Example 1.7). The more pronounced sensuality of Straus’s music is then emphasized by another crescendo, which reaches a passionate climax in the final bars.

Example 1.7

‘Komm’, Komm’!’

Richard Rodgers told Alan Jay Lerner that he thought ‘My Hero’ was ‘the most perfectly constructed song in modern musical literature’.Footnote ¹⁷

The Importance of Dance

Dance was a vital ingredient in operetta, and performers were generally expected to be able to both dance and sing. The importance of dance to operetta is apparent in titles, such as Ein Walzertraum, Die Csárdásfürstin, and Die blaue Mazur.Footnote ¹⁸ In the first decade of the twentieth century, waltzes were the favourite numbers, and this led to a new waltz craze in the UK and USA. Ironically, it was often the continental European take on the English waltz, or what was known in the USA as the Boston waltz (valse Boston), that had the greatest impact. The slower tempo waltz (early examples of which were James Molloy’s ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ of 1884 and Charles Harris’s ‘After the Ball’ of 1891) is closer to the famous ‘Merry Widow Waltz’ (‘Lippen schweigen’) than is the faster Viennese waltz. Indeed, the Viennese waltz was beginning to be regarded as less modern than the English waltz, which, by 1912, had become the urban preference, while the former remained the predilection of the rural Hunt Ball.Footnote ¹⁹

Twentieth-century operettas were more diverse in musical style than those of the preceding century, and happy to embrace dance rhythms from a variety of sources. The cakewalk was the first distinctly American dance to be imitated in Europe and was included in a number of operettas in the first decade of the twentieth century. Modern dances for couples differed from the old sequence dances, which had preset patterns or figures for groups of dancers. In the half-dozen years before the outbreak of the First World War, the most popular dances were the waltz, the two-step and the lancers (a sequence dance). The two-step gave way to the one-step around 1911. In the years that followed, first the tango, then the fox trot, Charleston, and pasodoble became indispensable parts of the modern dance repertoire and made their way into operettas. The polka remained popular in the UK and USA and continued to be heard in operetta. The csárdás is a special case: it had developed in the nineteenth century into a couple’s dance, although it was danced in and out of hold, especially in the fast section. It continued to appear frequently in operetta but was too associated with Hungarian folk dancing to gain a place in British and American ballrooms.

Lehár kept abreast of the fashionable dances and was the first to include a cakewalk (Die lustige Witwe, 1905), a tango (Die ideale Gattin, 1913), and a fox trot (Wo die Leche singt, 1918). The tango had found its way from Buenos Aires, via Paris, to other cities in Europe and the USA. It may have carried vague associations of the gauchos and headstrong women of the Argentine pampas, but it was actually a modern metropolitan product. There were two main styles of tango rhythm: the march-style and the more modern milonga-style (Example 1.8).

Example 1.8

Tango rhythms.

Most tangos have the syncopated milonga rhythm, but the older style was also liked, and both can be found in operettas of the 1930s: for example, ‘Es muß was wunderbares sein’ in Benatzky’s Im weißen Rössl (1930) is milonga-style, but ‘Sie kommen zum Tee’ in the same composer’s Bezauberndes Fräulein (1933) is march-style. Sometimes a feeling grew that certain dances were overdone in operetta. Hence, the waltz became the subject of parody in Fall’s The Eternal Waltz (1911), as did the csárdás in Kálmán’s Der Teufelsreiter (1932). There are signs that the waltz song was losing its fascination in the 1920s. A critic remarked that José Collins sang ‘the inevitable waltz song’ in Straus’s The Last Waltz ‘with consummate ease’. The word ‘inevitable’ may be a sign of increasing fatigue with the waltz, or an indication of its predictability in operetta. Many composers were already looking to America for musical inspiration – Künneke being one of the first. Ironically, a decade earlier, a New York critic had praised Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier for its variety of music containing ‘everything, fortunately, but rag-time’.Footnote ²⁰

The Impact of Jazz

American music began to increase its presence in London during the First World War, making up for the lack of Austro-German entertainment in those years. When war concluded, jazz of a more pronounced character began to be heard (starting with the visit of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919). American influence on German operetta had its source in the music-making of African Americans in the period just before the jazz craze of the 1920s. An influential figure was Will Marion Cook, whose significant contributions to musical theatre included Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898) and In Dahomey (1902), and who founded the New York Syncopated Orchestra in 1918. Another was James Reece Europe, who, in 1913, became the personal musical director of dancers Irene and Vernon Castle. The Castles were the initiators of the fox trot – before the advent of this dance, ragtime was danced to the two-step. Reece Europe performed with his military band in Europe during the whole of the final year of the First World War. Both Tim Brymn and Will Vodery also conducted military bands in Europe during wartime.

In the next decade, white bandleader Paul Whiteman, whose band played in Berlin with great success in 1926, proved a major influence, especially by demonstrating that a syncopated style could work with Tin Pan Alley songs and was not restricted to ragtime and blues. Cornet player Bix Beiderbecke, the son of German immigrants to the USA, performed with Whiteman’s band for a time and was a pioneer in developing a jazz ballad style.

It needs to be borne in mind that the term ‘jazz’ was, for most people in Europe, a general label for modern popular music. The merest association with popular musical theatre or modern dancing could be enough for something to be labelled ‘jazz’. The waltz from Shostakovich’s second Jazz Suite (1938), for instance, bears far more resemblance to ‘Weißt du es noch?’ from Die Csárdásfürstin (1915) than anything that would now be categorized as jazz. Künneke, in Der Vetter aus Dingsda (1921), was one of the first to incorporate styles more closely related to jazz, but Bruno Granichstaedten went further in Der Orlow (1925) by including a jazz band (with saxophones, banjo, and drum kit) playing a shimmy in the third act (Example 1.9).

Example 1.9

Shimmy in Der Orlow.

The excuse for the jazz band was that, in Ernst Marischka’s libretto, a Russian grand duke is living in exile in New York.Footnote ²¹ Der Orlow enjoyed, perhaps surprisingly, a huge success in Vienna, stimulating demand for American music on the operetta stage there and in Berlin.Footnote ²² It was adapted by P. G. Wodehouse and given as Hearts and Diamonds at the Strand Theatre, London, in 1926.

In post-war London and New York, the waltz had become old fashioned. MacQueen-Pope described Lehár’s The Three Graces, at the Empire Theatre in 1924, as belonging to ‘the London of Waltz Time, not the London of Ragtime and Jazz’.Footnote ²³ It did include a fox trot but came across in sum as old fashioned, despite reaping praise for being ‘brimful of delightful melody’.Footnote ²⁴ The modern was now represented by Irving Berlin, Nat Ayer, and Jerome Kern. The next year, Lehár changed tack. Clo-Clo, at the Shaftesbury, was set in the present, and also contained music by Max Darewski – the first time Lehár had permitted interpolations by another composer. A critic complained, ‘Franz Lehár’s melodious Muse has sold herself to that body-shaking St Vitus of discordant orchestral screech sounds known as “Jazz”’.Footnote ²⁵ But Lehár did not continue along the jazz pathway, and such sounds are absent from Das Veilchen von Montmartre (1930). Some dances went out of fashion quickly, but others did not: the one-step, popular just before the war, is still found in ‘Heute Abend komm’ ich zu dir’, in Lehár’s Der Zarewitsch of 1927. In particular, despite the popularity of syncopated dance music, the waltz continued to retain its appeal, and it was to the strains of Oscar Straus’s Three Waltzes, at the Majestic in 1937, that operetta bid farewell to its years of popularity on Broadway.

Knowledge of certain dance rhythms could be imprecise, and J. Bradford Robinson has argued that the German shimmy differed rhythmically, if not metrically, from the American version, which began to be popular around 1920 and was banned as immoral in many dance halls. The shimmy was related to the fox trot in musical style, but not in movement. Couples danced close together in a small space, shaking their shoulders and hips. Instead of the typical American ragtime pattern (quaver, crotchet, quaver, two crotchets), the characteristic rhythm for the shimmy in Berlin consisted of two quavers followed by three crotchets. Robinson cites the shimmy in Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf and Karol Rathaus’s Der letzte Pierrot as the earliest German sources of the rhythm.Footnote ²⁶ However, these works premiered in 1927, and the rhythm is already being used in Künneke’s Lady Hamilton of 1926, in the duet ‘Komm mit nach Madrid’ (Example 1.10).

Example. 1.10

‘Komm mit nach Madrid’.

The shimmy in Der Orlow had a related rhythm in the saxophone, beginning with four rather than two quavers, as does ‘Fräulein, bitte, woll’n Sie Shimmy tanzen’, a duet in Act 3 of Kálmán’s Die Bajadere, premiered in Vienna in 1921 (Example 1.11).

Example 1.11

‘Fräulein, bitte, woll’n Sie Shimmy tanzen’.

The earliest example of a shimmy in operetta is found in the second act of Stolz’s Das Tanz ins Glück (1920), a work produced in London as Whirled into Happiness in 1922, and given in New York as Sky High in 1925. It could easily be mistaken for a fox trot, but the significant difference is that the fox trot’s musical phrases were generally punctuated rhythmically by repeated chords, whereas Stolz’s shimmy has undulations (Example 1.12).

Example 1.12

Fox trot and shimmy rhythmic punctuations from Act 2 of Stolz, Das Tanz ins Glück. The shimmy is transposed for ease of comparison.

The rhythm stuck around, and one of the most familiar examples occurs in the verse accompaniment of ‘Seeräuber Jenny’ (‘Pirate Jenny’) in Die Dreigroschenoper (Example 1.13).

Example 1.13

‘Seeräuber Jenny’.

It is possible that the shimmy rhythm found in ‘Komm mit nach Madrid’ and ‘Seeräuber Jenny’ had a source in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which contains many examples of this rhythm. Paul Whiteman recorded it in June 1924,Footnote ²⁷ and recordings of Paul Whiteman’s dance orchestra became available under a matrix-exchange programme in 1926. Sheet music from the USA had also become more readily available. Robinson suggests the song ‘Papa Loves Mama, Mama Loves Papa’ (by Cliff Friend and Abel Baer) as a possible source of the shimmy figure, because it was a hit in the Weimar Republic in 1924, as ‘Vater liebt Mutter, Mutter liebt Vater’, and spawned imitations.Footnote ²⁸ However, neither Rhapsody in Blue nor ‘Vater liebt Mutter’ help to explain the early date of Kálmán’s shimmy. The explanation may simply be that undulating or repeating notes were intended as a counterpart to shaking of the body when dancing the shimmy. The rhythm certainly had long-lasting appeal: as late as 1930, we find a shimmy, ‘Ich lade Sie ein, Fräulein’ in Bentazky’s Meine Schwester und ich (Meet My Sister on Broadway, My Sister and I in the West End).

The instrumentation of the modern dance band was an influence on Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper of 1928. The Berlin theatre orchestra sound had been dominated by strings, but some new operettas highlighted wind instruments and included piano, banjo, and drum kit. Several revues by African-American troupes were given in Berlin, 1924–26, and nurtured a familiarity with syncopated styles.Footnote ²⁹ The Berlin theatre critic Alfred Kerr saw nothing particularly original in Kurt Weill’s stage music, claiming that Weill enticed the audience with older, existing, reliable melodies behind a mask of jazz.Footnote ³⁰ Yet Adorno was struck deeply by Weill’s achievement. After hearing Die Dreigroschenoper for the first time, he wrote that it seemed to him ‘the most important event of the musical theatre since Berg’s Wozzeck’.Footnote ³¹

Nevertheless, as The 3-Penny Opera, it lasted for only twelve performances at the Empire Theatre, New York, in 1933.

A Mixture of Styles

There was delight in mixing musical styles, and it is common to find Austro-German, Hungarian, and American styles in the same piece. This mixture is rarely suggestive of any cultural clash: Künneke’s Der Vetter aus Dingsda (1921), set in the Netherlands, covered a gamut of styles, from the valse boston (‘Strahlender Mond’) to the ragtime two-step (‘Überleg’ Dir’s’ and ‘Mann, o Mann’), the tango (‘Weißt du noch?’) and the fox trot (‘Batavia’). Also present was the Schubertian lyricism that had proved so appealing in Berté’s Das Dreimäderlhaus, which Künneke had spent many evenings conducting at the Friedrich Wilhelmstädtisches Theater in 1916. The biggest hit of Der Vetter was ‘Ich bin nur ein armer Wandergesell’ (in London ‘I’m Only a Strolling Vagabond’, in New York ‘I’m Only a Pilgrim’). The middle section of this song could easily be exchanged with bars 9–12 of ‘Das Wandern ist der Müllers Lust’ from Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin, such is the stylistic affinity (Examples 1.14 and 1.15).

Example 1.14

‘Ich bin nur ein armer Wandergesell’.

Example 1.15

‘Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust’.

Kálmán’s Die Herzogin von Chicago (1928) is unusual in containing a stylistic conflict that creates a reaction among its dramatis personae, because it pits the csárdás and waltz against the Charleston and fox trot, and, in so doing, symbolizes a broader cultural struggle between national tradition and cosmopolitan fashion.Footnote ³³ Die Herzogin illustrates a change in the representation of America on the German stage. Kálmán had benefitted from advice on American style given to him by Herbert Stothart when composing Golden Dawn for Broadway in the previous year.Footnote ³⁴ There had been little in the way of an American idiom in Fall’s Die Dollarprinzessin (1907), setting aside the interpolated numbers Jerome Kern composed for the Broadway version. The quartet describing dollar princesses, for example, had a waltz refrain. In contrast, the Duchess of Chicago’s song, ‘Wie sich’s schickt’, distinctly evokes America – even if it is a fox trot without syncopation – as a consequence of the occasional use of blue notes, especially in the accompaniment. She sings about travelling through Europe, cheque book in hand, buying anything she fancies, because she is from Chicago, where only the dollar rules. The musical conflict between csárdás and Charleston in this operetta did not have the same resonance in the USA as in Europe, and that may have been the cause of its lack of success. Alternatively, it may have been owing to its containing sharper satire than Die Dollarprinzessin. The Shubert brothers decided not to stage it on Broadway, after a disappointing reception at try-out performances in 1929.

Brecht and Weill went a step further in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) of 1930, by ensuring that satire permeated the music as well the words. An illustration is the ‘Alabama Song’, with its sour dissonances and self-consciously emotional lyricism, which capture the Gestus that Brecht believed necessary to ensure an audience would remain critically alert, rather than succumb to theatrical illusionism. There was no American staging of this work until an off-Broadway production in 1970. Paul Abraham’s operettas often relied heavily on American musical styles, but did so for fashionable appeal, rather than satirical purpose. The song ‘My Golden Baby’ from Die Blume von Hawaii (1931), for example, resembles a popular dance-band number (and, indeed, became one), even though Alfred Grünwald and Fritz Löhner-Beda’s libretto for this operetta touched on political issues relating to the American occupation of Hawaii in the late nineteenth century. Satire disappeared from Kálmán’s work, and his last operetta Arizona Lady (libretto by Alfred Grünwald and Gustav Beer, music completed by his son Charles in 1954) contains a song, ‘Arizona’ that could easily be regarded as a tribute to the Rodgers and Hammerstein song ‘Oklahoma!’ from the 1943 musical of that name. It undoubtedly has musical features in common when the chorus sings in praise of Arizona.

Orchestration and Orchestrators

Reviewing a performance of Das Land des Lächelns by Frankfurt Opera in 1930, Theodor Adorno commented:

Adorno was seizing an opportunity to take a shot at Lehár’s orchestral imagination, knowing that his skills in this domain had been praised as exceptional in the 1920s, when he was often called the Puccini of operetta.Footnote ³⁶ Lehár, who was actually on friendly terms with Puccini, demonstrates consistent orchestral skill in his operettas – for example, in the striking writing for wind instruments in Eva (1911), or the delicate effects achieved in the duet ‘Fern wie aus vergangen Tagen’ from Wo die Lerche singt (1918). Each of his operettas has its own characteristic orchestral sound, and his expertise as a violinist informs the scores of Zigeunerliebe (1910) and Paganini (1925). His orchestration frequently plays a role in the drama. As an example, Stefan Frey cites the trilling clarinet that ironically questions Valencienne’s assertion in Act 1, No. 2 of Die lustige Witwe that she is a respectable wife.Footnote ³⁷ Lehár’s imaginative scoring is heard in his tone painting during the first number of Zigeunerliebe, which Frey describes as a dialogue with the forces of nature.Footnote ³⁸ Contemporary critics praised the tunefulness of Austrian and German operettas, but they also, especially when listening to Lehár, appreciated the skill with which they were scored. Reviews in The Times speak of the ‘grace and vivacity’ of the orchestration of The Count of Luxembourg, and the care taken with that of Gipsy Love.Footnote ³⁹ A critic in the New York Times, in contrast, expresses unhappiness at Leo Fall’s orchestration in The Girl in the Train, accusing the composer of being too influenced by Wagner. He likens the opening to that of the second act of Die Walküre, and complains of an excess of percussion and trombones, even if, sometimes, ‘dear old Vienna calls him away from Bayreuth, and he bursts into a spontaneous waltz rhythm’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Most operetta composers in Vienna and Berlin were happy to have the help of orchestrators. Orchestrators were also on hand for New York productions. Vienna-born Hans Spialek was prominent among them and was credited with the orchestration of the Broadway White Horse Inn. He was also responsible for the orchestration of Kálmán’s Marinka, produced at the Winter Garden in 1945. Unlike opera, operettas were likely to be given updated orchestration when revived.

Oscar Straus was a fine orchestrator: an early example of his ability to characterize in orchestral sound is heard in the piquant scoring of the duet ‘Piccolo! Piccolo! Tsin, tsin, tsin’ in Ein Walzertraum. Nevertheless, he began to look for help with orchestration in the 1920s, and when his Three Waltzes was produced at the Majestic in 1937, Conrad Salinger, Hilding Anderson, Don Walker, and others were responsible for its re-orchestration.Footnote ⁴¹ Lehár found collaboration with orchestrators unthinkable, even if that meant his turning up with complete parts only at the dress rehearsal.Footnote ⁴² He argued that he could develop and perfect his imagination and shape his own musical ideas more effectively than anyone else.Footnote ⁴³ All the same, he was unable, once rights had been purchased, to prevent re-orchestration. Sometimes this meant changes were made for a reduced orchestra, and sometimes it went further, as in Frederika (1937), the Broadway version of Friederike, which was re-orchestrated by Hilding Anderson and William Challis. Kálmán did his own orchestration, with the exception of Golden Dawn and Marinka, and Weill, too, took full control of orchestrating his work, whether in Berlin or New York. Künneke, another operetta composer skilled in orchestral technique, believed a composer needed to understand in the smallest detail the individuality and technical possibilities of every instrument of the orchestra. For him, orchestral colour was as important to a composer as pigment to a painter.

According to a report in the Berliner Tageblatt, Paul Abraham orchestrated his works himself.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet he did not always seem averse to collaboration. Egon Kemény, for example, was given the job of arranging a score in which Abraham specified instrumental groups but not the exact notes each instrument was to play.Footnote ⁴⁶ This resembled contemporary Broadway practice.

The size of operetta orchestras had grown over the years. The first version of Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers (1858) had two flutes (both doubling piccolo), two clarinets, one bassoon, two horns, two cornets, two trombones, timpani, untuned percussion, and strings. It required, in all, around twenty-four players. Die Fledermaus (1874) had, in addition, two oboes, a second bassoon, two further horns, trumpets instead of cornets, an extra trombone, tuned and untuned percussion, and a harp. The string section would have contained more players, too. Therefore, some forty players were needed. Die lustige Witwe (1905) required a similar orchestra to Die Fledermaus but also called for a small on-stage band. In tandem with the growth in orchestra size, there was increasing diversity in instrumentation. Romberg included a saxophone in Blossom Time (1921). Künneke added a banjo to the score of Der Vetter aus Dingsda (1921), and a saxophone to that of Lady Hamilton (1926). Lehár asked for a saxophone in Der Zarewitsch (1927), as well as three balalaikas.

Im weißen Rössl (1930), given as White Horse Inn in London and New York, went well beyond any instrumental resources demanded hitherto. The original score (lost for many years) called for a pit orchestra of two flutes (doubling piccolos), oboe (doubling English horn), two clarinets, three alto saxophones, tenor saxophone, bassoon, three horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, two percussion players and a kit drummer, harp, banjo, guitar, celeste, and strings. In addition, several stage bands were needed: a zither trio (violin, zither, guitar), a jazz band (alternative line-ups are given, but one example comprises trumpet, saxophone, trombone, banjo, and drum kit), a steam boat band (piccolo, E♭ clarinet, B♭ clarinet, trumpet, tenor horn, trombone, and reduced drum kit), and a fire brigade band (E♭ clarinet, B♭ clarinet, two trumpets, two tenor horns, tuba, and reduced drum kit).Footnote ⁴⁷

Although a full orchestral score is now available to the conductor of Im weißen Rössl, it was far more common before 1940 to find musical directors using piano-conductor scores.Footnote ⁴⁸ These would be piano vocal scores with additional handwritten indications of instrumentation and instrumental solos. Figure 1.1 shows part of the conductor’s score of Blossom Time, with handwritten notation and indications of instruments. It is a copy, reproduced with a spirit duplicator, a machine that removed the necessity to hand-copy scores when several companies were putting on performances simultaneously. The Shubert Archive possesses five identical hardbound copies, which must date from 1923 at the earliest, because that is the year Wilhelm Ritzerfeld invented the spirit duplicator, with its distinctive lilac ink.

Figure 1.1

Excerpt from the Overture to Blossom Time in a copy of the piano-conductor score.

Music and Drama

Music may be an appendage to drama or may play a more active role. Musical variety is not present for its own sake in Der Vetter aus Dingsda; it is there to enrich specific dramatic scenes. Otto Schneidereit remarks that Künneke chose a rhythm for each musical number that helped to characterize the corresponding action.Footnote ⁴⁹ Der Vetter has numbers, but they are part of a dramatic whole. Schneiderheit believes that Künneke was not usually so careful, because his focus was often on the music more than the drama. Nobody praised him, he says, for being a skilled and trained music dramatist.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet the way the waltz duet ‘Nicht Wahr, hier ist’s wie im Zauberreich’ is interrupted in the finale of Act 1, and the melodrama that follows, is clear evidence of musical-dramatic skill on Künneke’s part.

Lehár, too, was interested in dramatic wholes, and his employment of recurring melodic motives was a means of achieving large-scale coherence. In Eva, the title character’s song ‘War’ es auch nichts als ein Augenbick’ provides a melodic motive the recurs at significant points of the drama. Lehár was to give ever-increasing cohesion to his operettas via the use of motives. Frey discusses his use of the ‘O Mädchen, mein Mädchen’ motive in Friederike.Footnote ⁵¹ This song is more than a detachable Schlager; it is a source of important unifying material that adds to the drama and to the psychological representation of character. Giuditta is the most thematically organized of his operettas, its motives and melodic reminiscences contributing powerfully to the dramatic action. In its final scene, the harmony and orchestration make the reprise of the muted trumpet’s motive from ‘Meer von Liebe’ a strangely otherworldly reminiscence, a wistful evocation of the fairy-tale of which Octavio speaks. Lehár was not alone in conceiving methods for lending musical coherence to larger structures: Kálmán, for instance, makes use of leitmotifs in Die Bajadere.

Lehár’s through-composed second act finale of Der Graf von Luxemburg, in which motives and short reprises play a role, was an attempt to create a seamless flow of drama and musical numbers. This was lost in the London and New York productions, as a consequence of its revision from three acts to two. Lehár was not the only composer to find that efforts to embed a dramatic scene in music was overturned. Changes made to a scene can negate the intentions of the composer, even if the musical structure is unaltered. In the London version of Die Dollarprinzessin, Adrian Ross’s lyrics, unlike those of George Grossmith for the Broadway version, make no reference to typists in the opening chorus. As a consequence, although music of that chorus is unchanged, its semiotic import – its representation of clicking typewriters – is lost (Example 1.16).

Example 1.16

Typewriter chorus.

Structural changes were often made because there were different expectations of operatic productions when they transferred to Broadway or the West End. Oscar Straus pointed out some of the differences between London and Vienna productions to a journalist: ‘Your choruses are much bigger, and … you have many more songs than we are content with.’Footnote ⁵²

Operetta was structured in acts, or sometimes just scenes (the usual format of revue), with musical numbers – songs, duets, ensembles, and so forth. Berlin operetta, as represented by Walter Kollo and Jean Gilbert, privileged songs over ensembles, and avoided complex finales. Frey points to the second-act finale as ‘normally the showpiece of every Viennese operetta’.Footnote ⁵³ The finale of an act (typically the first or second) was normally the only place through-composition would be found. An exception is the second act of Lehár’s Endlich Allein (1914), which concludes with a protracted love duet that occupies over twenty pages of vocal score and includes ten changes of key signature. Lehár was already working towards an extended love duet with ‘Wenn zwei sich lieben’ in Der Rastelbinder (1902), which lasts over seven minutes in performance.

Another way in which cohesion could be brought to the whole, was by giving an operetta a particular character. That happened in the nineteenth century with the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas (no one could mistake the music of The Gondoliers for that of The Mikado). Fall’s Der fidele Bauer of 1907 has a different sound character to Die Dollarprinzessin later the same year, and each of Künneke’s operettas has a different overall character. Andrew Lamb has argued, with reference to The Count of Luxembourg, that Lehár’s genius ‘lay not just in his ability to provide supremely popular melodies, nor in his rich command of orchestral colour’, but, more particularly, ‘in his ability to capture in musical terms the atmosphere of the romantic situations and the various passions of the characters’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Characters in operetta are constructed not just by the words, but by the music as well.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Die lustige Witwe, Danilo and Hanna (Sonia) are musically distinct from Camille and Valencienne (Natalie). Romantic lovers are also characterized differently from one operetta to another: Danilo and Hanna are distinct from Goethe and Friederike, who, in turn, are distinct from Sou Chong and Lisa in Das Land des Lächelns.

While Lehár was seeking greater overall cohesion through musical characterization and motivic connections, others, such as Kollo, were interested in the loose structures of vaudeville and revue. Writer-producer Erik Charell takes credit for creating revue operetta. His biggest triumph was Im weißen Rössl, in which Ralph Benatzky’s music was supplemented by that of Robert Stolz, Bruno Granichstaedten, Robert Gilbert, and an unacknowledged Eduard Künneke, who composed scene music, arranged choruses, and even gave a hand with the orchestration.Footnote ⁵⁶ Revue operetta tended to be multi-authored from the start – necessitated by the tight production schedule – and is therefore to be distinguished from the practice of interpolating numbers.

Lehár had long been aware that music on its own could function as psychological drama. It is the music that reveals the secret emotions of Danilo and Hanna while their lips remain silent. Heike Quissek comments that it is in their waltz duet, ‘Lippen schweigen’, that the latent psychologization of these figures reaches its climax.Footnote ⁵⁷ The few words it contains is significant, because it is not the lyrics but music that characterizes them: lips may be silent but their emotions unfold to the steps of the waltz.Footnote ⁵⁸

The musical continuity of the Act 1 finale of Künneke’s Der Vetter aus Dingsda is an example of how music can function as part of dramatic and psychological characterization. There is recitative and arioso in this operetta, not just songs and ensembles. It also possesses an unusual intimacy because it is cast on small scale. Another composer alert to characterization and the role of music in drama was Kálmán. Frey says of Gräfin Mariza, ‘every number characterizes the one who sings it’, and ‘every number develops from the situation’.Footnote ⁵⁹ This takes precedence over what was conventional: for example, the tenor’s duet is with the soubrette, rather than the diva. A common way of characterizing a person is to use an obbligato instrument: for example, a rhapsodic solo violin accompanying a Gipsy’s singing.

While some operettas began to reduce spoken dialogue, others continued to include large quantities. Act 3 of Edmund Eysler’s Die goldene Meisterin (1927) contains around six minutes of music and over twenty minutes of dialogue. It is an example of an older ‘musical play’ type of operetta surviving on the German stage into the 1920s. The spoken word offers a simpler means of advancing the action than does music, which so often creates a pause in the drama. In what has become known as an ‘integrated musical’, musical numbers are designed to be a necessary part of the drama, meaning that a song cannot be omitted without damaging the drama or narrative. Integration was clearly a growing concern for some operetta composers (consider Lehár’s Friederike). The use of reprise (in German, Reminiszenz) can be an integrating device and an equivalent of analepsis (‘flashback’), or it can simply be a case of ‘here’s another chance to hear an attractive tune’. The employment of motivic connections, already discussed, was another technique contributing to large-scale integration.

In addition to conceiving an operetta as a whole, decisions about structure needed to be taken on a small scale. Here, the fashionable structures of popular song bore an influence, as can be seen in the adaptation of the bullfinch duet (‘Wer uns getraut’) from Johann Strauss’s Der Zigeunerbaron (1885) for the MGM film The Great Waltz (1938). Dimitri Tiomkin was responsible for the musical arrangement, and it was given fresh lyrics, ‘One Day When We Were Young’, by Oscar Hammerstein II. It was already fashionable in tempo because, unusually for its original date of composition, it was the slower type of waltz. The original, however, had been in verse and refrain form, the typical popular song structure of the later nineteenth century, but the later version was converted to AABA form, the typical structure of Tin Pan Alley songs. To achieve that, the original verse music was scrapped and the 16-bar refrain became the basis of the whole song. It was stated and repeated, then, after a new melodic passage added for the ‘B’ section, repeated again.

The perception that operetta creation had developed into a type of industrial production, encouraged ideas about preformed musical units assembled on conveyor belts. Adorno asserted, ‘the law that rules operetta lies in the objective force of banal, ready-made shapes’.Footnote ⁶⁰ On the occasion of a revival of Die lustige Witwe by Frankfurt Opera in 1934, he claimed that Lehár’s work illustrated the turning point of the genre, before it slipped into unremitting decline:

In Adorno’s mind, Lehár and Kálmán had failed to realize their early promise through having succumbed to the demands of industrial methods of production. Writing of Die Herzogin von Chicago, he asserted: ‘One knows that the earlier Kálmán, in his commercial art manner, created much that was pretty and imaginative. Today there is nothing left of this; a composing template (Komposnierschablone) prevails that turns plagiarism and his own past into a system.’Footnote ⁶² Adorno invariably sees commercial music production as the replication of successful formats, and yet it is patently evident that commercial music undergoes changes in its structure and parameters (harmony, rhythm, timbre, and so forth) over any given period of time. The operettas of the 1920s and 1930s are not the same as those of the first two decades of the twentieth century, despite certain genre-related continuities.

Operettas on Historic Subjects

There were three main types of operetta content: the modern, the exotic, and the historic. The latter subdivided into those that had newly composed music (such as Madame Pompadour and Lady Hamilton) and those that contained reworked music by earlier composers (such as Das Dreimäderlhaus and Casanova). Some operettas with historic themes adopted elements of period style, as do Lehár’s Friederike (1928) and Kálmán’s Kaiserin Josephine (1936), both of which included gavottes.

Among operettas on historic topics containing reworkings of older music, one of the best received was Walzer aus Wien (1930). It loosely followed the career of Johann Strauss Jr and had music by him and his father, adapted by Erich Korngold and Julius Bittner. Some music is readily recognizable: for example, the song ‘With All My Heart’ is based on the waltz Künstlerleben, and the refrain of ‘Morning’ draws predictably on Morgenblätter. In other numbers, Korngold was drawn to elaborating musical motives and phrases from unfamiliar operettas by Strauss, building them into longer spans. In London, as Waltzes from Vienna in 1931, the music was further reworked by G. H. Clutsam and Herbert Griffiths. On Broadway, as The Great Waltz (1934), Frank Tours and Robert Russell Bennet took a hand in its arrangement.

Oscar Straus’s operetta Die drei Wälzer (1935), which told the tale of three generations of one family and their romances, also contained arrangements of the music of Strauss Sr and Strauss Jr, to which was added music by Straus himself for the modern day third act. Its premiere was in Zürich, but it went on to huge acclaim when it was produced in Paris, starring Yvonne Printemps, at the time of the World Exhibition of 1937. It then opened on Broadway but was not seen in London until March 1945 (its run of 189 performances coinciding with the final months of the Second World War). The three waltzes of the title appear one in each act: ‘Wien ist ein Liebeslied’ (Act 1), ‘Ich liebe das Leben’ (Act 2), and ‘Man sagt sich beim Abschied Adieu’ (Act 3).

Perhaps the most beloved of operettas on historic themes that also used historic music was Das Dreimäderlhaus (1916), for which Heinrich Berté adapted compositions by Schubert. Adorno wrote of this work: ‘It is no coincidence that just when the last chances of producing light music have shrunk, operetta glorifies the “creative” artist by stealing his tunes.’Footnote ⁶³ To be fair, Berté had originally composed most of the music himself but had come under increasing pressure from Wilhelm Karczag to replace it with arrangements of Schubert before a production at the Raimund-Theater would be agreed.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1921, one critic thought that the time for jazz had passed, and greeted the production of Blossom Time, Sigmund Romberg’s American version of this operetta, with the words: ‘After jazz, what? They tried a new answer on Broadway last evening when “Blossom Time” was produced at the Ambassador.’Footnote ⁶⁵ A comparative study of Das Dreimäderlhaus and its British and American adaptations features in Chapter 2.

The spectacular revue operetta Casanova (1928) contained music of Strauss Jr, arranged by Ralph Benatzky, and was thus odd in using historic music but not that of the period in which its title character lived. It was first produced by Erik Charell at the Großes Schauspielhaus, Berlin, and brought to the London Coliseum by Stoll in 1932. Another unusual case was Die Dubarry (1931), Paul Knepler and Ignaz Michael Welleminsky’s revision of Carl Millöcker’s Gräfin Dubarry of 1879. Knepler was historical operetta’s most skilful librettist; he had worked with Béla Jenbach on Paganini for Lehár (1925) and went on to collaborate with Arnim Robinson on Die drei Wälzer for Oscar Straus (1935). Millöcker’s operetta contained no historical music related to the period of the Comtesse du Barry, but his own music had acquired a historic character related to its date of composition. Therefore, in this case, the music was updated and elaborated by Theo Mackeben. Its English version, The Dubarry (1932), by Desmond Carter and Rowland Leigh, was a huge hit with the West End audience but ran less successfully on Broadway.

Die Fledermaus was twice ‘brought up to date’ for a modern audience on Broadway, as The Merry Countess and A Wonderful Night, in 1912 and 1929, respectively. Sometimes, the process of updating could change the fortunes of a previously unsuccessful operetta: Indigo und die vierzig Räuber, Strauss Jr’s first operetta, had not enjoyed much attention since its premiere in 1871, but its reworking by Ernst Reiterer as Tausendundeine Nacht in 1906 won full audience approbation.

Operettas on Exotic Subjects

While operettas with modern themes were increasingly characterized by syncopated rhythms in the 1920s, those with exotic themes were spiced up with augmented intervals, modal harmony, and ostinato rhythms. Hungary was often represented an exotic domain, with Gipsy music emphasized. It may be argued that some composers were Hungarian, but the question is of style and representation rather than the composer’s ethnicity. Thus, it is necessary to ask: ‘How Hungarian is Kálmán’s Hungarian style?’ Would Béla Bartók have considered it Hungarian? Consider ‘Höre ich Zigeunergeigen’ from Gräfin Mariza (1924). It uses the Dorian mode, but that mode was often selected to represent the mysteriously exotic, after Rimsky-Korsakov’s effective use of it for that purpose in his Scheherazade (1888). Choosing another example, how convincing is the Gipsy song ‘Ich bin ein Zigeunerkind’ in Lehár’s Zigeunerliebe? Neither Kálmán nor Lehár were Gipsies, but, equally, neither had been immersed in Viennese culture before becoming purveyors of ‘authentic’ Viennese style. It may be that Gipsy culture suggested ethnic community, whereas Vienna suggested cosmopolitanism.

Lehár used different dance rhythms to characterize a modern Western Europe (Paris) and an Ottoman Eastern Europe (Pontevedro) in Die lustige Witwe.Footnote ⁶⁶ The cultural clash is less East and West, however, than that of the traditional rural and the modern city. The Viennese audience, with its mixed ethnicity, no doubt identified with urban modernity, while retaining a certain degree of nostalgia for rural tradition, but this was an operetta that broke with the typical emphasis on Vienna, and its wine, women, and song. Stan Czech, in his Lehár biography, sees in it the birth of a new type of operetta, one that heralded a revolution in dramatic content, musical style, and orchestral technique.Footnote ⁶⁷

Operetta often employed signifiers of ‘national style’ as colour. Frey describes the Orientalism in both the music and libretto of Fall’s The Rose of Stamboul as merely decorative.Footnote ⁶⁸ Fall had not previously tried his hand at Oriental colouring of his music, and applies it inconsistently here. It is heard immediately in the drone bass and Lydian modal melody of the prelude. It emerges from time to time elsewhere but is not particularly noticeable in Achmed Bey’s big solo ‘O Rose von Stambul, nur Du allein’. Achmed’s ‘Ihr stillen süßen Frauen’ has more of the Spanish seguidilla than the Orient about it, and exoticism disappears entirely for ‘Ein Walzer muß es sein’. One might imagine some ‘Oriental’ eroticism would reappear for the Act 3 ‘Schnucki’ duet (‘lovey-dovey’ on Broadway), but Fall can handle seductive comedy without it.

Lehár provides a ‘Russian’ score for Der Zarewitsch and ‘Chinese’ score for Das Land des Lächelns, but this merely emphasizes the constructed character of national identification. Representation of the foreign in operetta can also have an ironic tone, as Volker Klotz has flagged up in discussing the Batavia septet in Der Vetter aus Dingsda.Footnote ⁶⁹ Despite the exotic chords and slithering bass notes, the narration, here, is a fiction, and, what is more, references to a gnu, wildebeest, and kangaroo in the lyrics seem designed to make this obvious (Batavia was a former name of Jakarta in Indonesia). Then, there is the ‘jazz’ style that may connote place, but without necessarily connoting a nation or even a time period. The on-stage jazz band, the White Horse Inn Syncopaters, raises interesting questions. How does this work, when the piece is notionally set in the period before the death of the Emperor Franz Joseph? Is the use of jazz dance styles in White Horse Inn no stranger than the anachronistic dance styles in Strauss’s Der lustige Krieg (1881, but set in 1730), or Millöcker’s Der Bettelstudent (1882, but set in 1704)?

The operetta that comes closest to offering an ironic critique of musical Orientalism is Kálmán’s Die Bajadere. The representation of ethnic identity is problematized in this piece because a young prince from Lahore has fallen in love not with a Hindu dancer, as he believes, but with a French singer who is merely playing the role of a bayadere on the Parisian stage.Footnote ⁷⁰ Kálmán’s music is more Hungarian in character than Indian (just as it is more Hungarian than African in Golden Dawn). Even its shimmy has something suggestive of Hungary or, perhaps, Klezmer about it. When an ironic mood is not evoked, the general tendency of operetta exoticism is to offer little more than spectacular scenes and extraordinary sounds. Since this cannot be maintained for long periods, the exoticism is usually applied inconsistently; it is a dressing-up that comes on and off during the course of the musical drama. ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz’, the best-known song of Lehar’s Das Land des Lächelns is not in the least exotic; yet, elsewhere, the singer, Sou Chong, is given exotic signifiers. The melismas on ‘ah’ in his ‘Von Apfelblüten einen Kranz’ are indebted to Orientalist representation – one has only to think of the song about the jeune Indou (the ‘Bell Song’) in Léo Delibes’s Lakmé (1883).

Operetta of the twentieth century does not fail to recognize the complexities of ethnic identities: a hit song from Paul Abraham’s Viktoria und ihr Husar, ‘Meine Mama war aus Yokohama – aus Paris war der Papa’, prompts the question, do you necessarily need to choose to identify with either East or West if you are half Japanese and half French? A French listener to French music may have an advantage over a Japanese listener in possessing greater familiarity with musical signs of ‘Frenchness’, but signs recognized by a cultural insider are no less arbitrary. There is not ‘something in the blood’ that allows people to represent their own ethnic group but not a different ethnic group. It is not a person’s genetic make-up, but, rather, cultural knowledge that enables such representation to work convincingly and win acceptance from those who are personally immersed in the culture represented.

Abraham had composed music for several operettas before achieving worldwide fame with Viktoria und ihr Husar, which included a variety of dance rhythms from around the world: fox trot (‘Mausi’), English waltz (‘Pardon, Madame’), csárdás (‘Nur ein Mädel’) as well as a pasodoble and tango. After its triumphant premiere as Viktória in Budapest, it reappeared in a German version as part of Leipzig’s ‘week of operetta’ in the summer of 1930 and went on to great success at the Metropol in Berlin and then in London. Abraham had studied at the Franz Liszt Music Academy and, initially, was committed to ‘serious’ music. However, when he discovered the money to be made by serving the lighter muse, he changed direction.Footnote ⁷¹ His first big hit was ‘Bin kein Hauptmann’ (I’m not a captain), a song written for the film Melodie des Herzens (1929), but he was already composing for the theatre. He eventually composed 16 operettas and contributed music to over 20 films.Footnote ⁷² Abraham was the subject of a newspaper article in 1931 headed ‘Berlin’s Stage Looks Toward America’. It was a reference both to the composer’s interest in American music and to his having chosen an American theme for his operetta Die Blume von Hawaii (Leipzig, 1931).Footnote ⁷³ The jazz element had increased in this work compared to Viktoria, and when it was given a production in Budapest, Abraham took five American jazz musicians from Berlin with him.Footnote ⁷⁴ His operetta of the following year, Ball im Savoy (given as Ball at the Savoy at Drury Lane in 1933), contained a remarkable mixture of American and Latin dance styles.

The sound world of Abraham’s operettas is distinct from the older Viennese operas, and his enthusiasm for incorporating styles from different countries marks his cosmopolitan disposition. He was not averse to including novel, sometimes parodic, syncopated dance routines in his work, examples being ‘Känguruh’ (Example 1.17) in Ball im Savoy and ‘Black-Walk’ in Roxy und ihr Wunderteam (1937).

Example 1.17

‘Känguruh’.

Abraham’s eclecticism was seen by some in a negative light: an American reviewer of the premiere of Ball im Savoy at the Großes Schauspielhaus, Berlin, announced that Abraham was ‘at the moment the most popular operetta composer of Central Europe’, although it was difficult to identify a characteristic Abraham song: ‘He flits from style to style without leaving a mark.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Abraham was not the first to be criticized on stylistic grounds: Kálmán’s Tatárjárás (which became Ein Herbstmanöver) was criticized for lack of stylistic unity: ‘From every single number sounds a different dialect.’Footnote ⁷⁶

Sometimes the rural areas of a country can form an exotic contrast to the city, as occurs when the city dwellers meet the Wolfgangsee locals in White Horse Inn. ‘Im Salzkammergut’ is a Ländler, and also a humorous slap dance (Watschentanz). It demonstrates that country folk have their own ways of enjoying themselves. Dialect is used in this song, for instance ‘kann i net’ instead of ‘kann ich nicht’, and the words ‘da kann man gut lustig sein’ (as Giesecke the Berliner sings them) are sung by Josepha and the locals as either ‘da kamer gut lustig sein’ or ‘da kama gut’ (no doubt because of the humorous rhyming with ‘Salzkammergut’).Footnote ⁷⁷

America was perceived by some European critics as a kind of ‘vulgar’ Other, rather than ethnic Other. In Paganini, one London critic was beginning to detect that Lehár was writing ‘music in two kinds’, part Viennese and part American. He declared that Tauber’s song ‘Girls Were Made to Love and Kiss’ would give less pleasure than some other numbers to the conservative members of the audience: ‘there is a moan in it from across the Atlantic that will not compensate them for the rhythm of Vienna’. Then, allowing us to recognize that the ‘conservative’ are those in the expensive stalls (those possessing both money and good taste), the critic continued, ‘but the circles and gallery at the Lyceum could not have too much of it and Herr Tauber was tumultuously invited to “plug” it again and again’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Note the term ‘plug’, which was associated with the brash commercial marketing of New York’s Tin Pan Alley.

Musical Emulation and Cross-Fertilization

I conclude with a few words on the mutual influence that can be perceived on the stages of Berlin, London, New York, and Vienna. European composers were seeking opportunities in New York at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. Gustave Kerker, who was one of the first to make a success with operetta in New York, was German, but had lived in America since childhood. His The Belle of New York had a disappointing run at the Casino in 1897, but created a major impact on London theatre the following year. Victor Herbert was Irish born, but, before moving to the USA in 1886, he had acquired extensive experience of music in continental Europe and played cello in the Strauss Orchestra during 1880–81. Rudolf Friml was Czech and was in his twenties when he moved to the USA in 1906. Sigmund Romberg (born Siegmund Rosenberg) was of Austro-Hungarian Jewish heritage and also in his twenties when he moved to the USA in 1909.

Some composers of German operetta purposely adopted American elements, but at other times the influence from Broadway crept into the music in a less conscious way.Footnote ⁷⁹ It seems likely that Azuri’s Dance, ‘Soft as a Pigeon Lights upon the Sand’, from Act 1 of Romberg’s The Desert Song, was lurking somewhere in Lehár’s mind when he wrote the final scene of Giuditta. However, it appears equally likely that ‘Mädel fein, Mädel klein’ from Der Graf von Luxemburg was in Romberg’s mind when he composed ‘Just We Two’ for The Student Prince. Librettists were not immune to unconscious reminiscence, either: the duet for Gonda and the President in Die geschiedene Frau, contains the lines ‘Then she goes to the left / And he goes to the right’, which are echoed in Angèle and René’s duet in Der Graf von Luxemburg. A memory of popular tunes can lurk in the unconscious of a composer and be recollected unintentionally. The tune of ‘Ich bin dein Untertan’ in Fall’s Madame Pompadour (1922) sounds remarkably similar in places to that of ‘Ein Glaserl Wein’ from Kálmán’s Das Hollandweibchen (1920). ‘Warum bin ich verliebt in dich’ in Abraham’s Ball im Savoy resembles ‘Das Leben wirklich spaßig ist’ in Georg Jarno’s Die Försterchristl. These similarities are no doubt the result of unconscious processes, and stand apart from deliberate quotation, such as that of the ‘fate motive’ from Bizet’s Carmen in the duet ‘Josef, ach Josef, was bist du so keusch?’ sung by Madame Pompadour and Calicot. The quotation is consciously employed, with a degree of humour, to characterize Pompadour as a femme fatale (see the final bars of Example 1.18).

Example 1.18

‘Josef, ach Josef’ Madame Pompadour (German lyrics by Rudolf Schanzer and Ernst Welisch, English lyrics by Harry Graham).

Composers of British musical comedy were not averse to taking note of the techniques of German operetta composers, and, although they sometimes failed to equal the sensual harmony, the melodic style was easier to imitate. ‘Love Will Find a Way’, the waltz hit in Fraser-Simson’s Maid of the Mountains (1917), bases itself on the Merry Widow waltz by doubling each of the first few notes of Lehár’s melody (Examples 1.19 and 1.20). Note that it is Lehár’s characteristic tempo of valse moderato.

Example 1.19

‘Lippen schweigen’.

Example 1.20

‘Love Will Find a Way’.

In the late 1920s and 1930s, it was Noël Coward and Ivor Novello who rose to the operetta challenge in London. When Coward composed his first operetta, Bitter Sweet (1929), he wanted Evelyn Laye, known for her roles in continental European operetta, to play the lead role of Sari (she did so on Broadway, but Peggy Wood was Sari in London). In Operette (1938), he composed specifically for the Berlin operetta star Fritzi Massary, who played Liesl Haren.

From Veuve Madeleine to Witwe Hanna to Widow Sonia

In Meilhac’s comedy L’Attaché d’ambassade, the embassy’s attaché is Count Prax, who becomes Danilo, its secretary, in Die lustige Witwe. The widow is Madeleine Palmer, and it is she, with the new name Hanna, that becomes the focus of the operetta, rather than Danilo – hence, the change of title. The homeland threatened with financial ruin is Birkenfeld, the name of a small Principality that was, at the time of the play’s first performance in 1861, part of the widely dispersed Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. The plot revolves around the difficulty faced by the wealthy Madeleine in finding another husband. Prax tells her that the banker’s fortune she has inherited creates a constant suspicion in her mind, and whenever a man tells her he loves her, it whispers in her ear, ‘it’s not you he loves, but the banker’s fortune’.Footnote ²⁵ Madeleine and Prax did not love one another in the past, as in the operetta. In the play, Prax accompanies Madeleine at the piano while she sings a Spanish song, rather than a homeland song. They perform no waltz with silent lips, because dancing would cause the drama to lose pace. Musical adaptations of spoken plays require reductions to the text in order to compensate for the time taken by music.

The first act is in the home of the Birkenfeld ambassador, the second in Madeleine Palmer’s home, and the third in the home of the Baron and Baroness Scarpa. All are located in Paris. There is no scene in Maxim’s restaurant, which did not exist when the play was written. Instead, the widow holds a fête in order to gauge Danilo’s reactions. When Victor Léon and Leo Stein revised the play they first renamed Birkenfield as Montenegro, and Montenegrin costumes were still used when they changed it to Pontevedro.Footnote ²⁶ This created a political stir: Montenegrin students demonstrated outside the Parliament building in Vienna.Footnote ²⁷ Montenegrins protested in Istanbul, and Serbians and Croatians rioted in Trieste.Footnote ²⁸ Relations were tense between Austria and Serbia; they became even more so in 1909, and this would bring tragic consequences a few years later, following the opportunistic assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

In The Merry Widow, the dignified Ambassador, Baron Zeta, became the comic figure Baron Popoff played by George Graves, who was at one with Basil Hood’s remodelling of the character, commenting: ‘Of course in Vienna they do not allow their comics so much rope, and he had to take the British mentality into account.’Footnote ²⁹ The name change from Zeta to Popoff was made for humorous effect – sounding both Slavic and like the English slang phrase ‘pop off’ (disappear quickly). Hood created another comic role, Nisch, for W. H. Berry. Lehár composed the music to an interpolated number for him, ‘Quite Parisien’. It contradicts the sentiments of another song, ‘A Balkan State’, which features in the LCP copy.Footnote ³⁰ In this, Nisch, far from loving Paris, declares:

Alas, this inventive rhyming was lost to the public when the number was cut.

George Edwardes commissioned Edward Morton to adapt Die lustige Witwe, but decided Morton had made a confused job of it. So he persuaded Hood to produce rapidly another English version (the lyrics were the responsibility of Adrian Ross). It was only on the opening night that Morton realized his libretto had been replaced. Edwardes was obliged to pay royalties to both authors in order to deter a law suit. The basic plot remained the same, with various name changes: for example, Hanna became Sonia, and Pontevedro became Marsova. The LCP copy shows that Act 3 was written in a hurry: dialogue is occasionally altered, or added, in pencil, and there is a note to say that some comments from Danilo need to be moved to later in the scene. It was Graves, not Hood, who decided to bolster the role of Popoff with additional comic material, a practice for which he was well known. Indeed, some half-dozen years before his appearance in The Merry Widow, he had been obliged to sign a contract prohibiting him from introducing ‘gags’ into his performance.Footnote ³¹

In Graves’s opinion, Hood had provided insufficient material for the comic role of Popoff and something had to be done about it. He began to make jokes about having a pet hen called Hetty, and they soon developed into humorous anecdotes about his hen’s strange habit of laying bent eggs, and how, after eating brass filings, she laid a door knob. This fictional character gained fame of her own. Graves confessed that his ‘nightly bulletins became so lengthy that the stage-manager used to blow a whistle at half-time’.Footnote ³² He was aware that some adapters and authors disliked interpolated gags, but he insisted that the majority of them realized that ‘the successful musical show is more than merely a book, lyrics, music, and acting’.Footnote ³³ He was conscious of making his own contribution to the art world of musical-theatrical entertainment: ‘It is a composite job of work in which the co-operation of the whole team and a liberal spirit of give-and-take all round under the leadership of a single competent director give the best results.’Footnote ³⁴

The differences between this operetta’s productions in London and Vienna were several. The West End widow was younger, and the male lead was a comedian rather than a romantic tenor. Moreover, as the Times critic observed: ‘Miss Elsie is not lustige; she could not be. Gentle, appealing, charming, a little strange and remote, she is everything delightful – except “merry”.’Footnote ³⁵ That was the only marked contrast with the New York production at the New Amsterdam Theatre, which otherwise followed the version at Daly’s. On Broadway, Ethel Jackson was not the ‘demure widow’ of Lily Elsie, wrote the critic for the New York Times; she understood ‘the verve and joy of the part, as well as its seductiveness’.Footnote ³⁶

Lyric Writing

Those writing lyrics for English-language versions of German operetta were generally keen to offer appropriate translations, except when a number’s purpose and character had been altered (as in the opening chorus of the London version of The Dollar Princess). A skilful lyricist would often try to retain the tone of the German text while translating loosely into idiomatic English. An example is Reginald Arkell’s translation of the song ‘Der letzte Walzer’ from Straus’s operetta of that title, for which Julius Brammer and Alfred Grünwald provided the book and lyrics. First, I am quoting it alongside a literal translation.

Here, for comparison, are Arkell’s lyrics.

Note that it has poetic metre and does not seem as if it was designed for existing music.

Particular problems sometimes arise for the lyricist. Puns, for example, are almost impossible to translate.Footnote ³⁷ Alfred Willner and Fritz Grünbaum’s original lyrics for the refrain of the quartet in Die Dollarprinzessin describe dollar princesses as ‘die kühnsten Schönen der Welt!’ Adrian Ross, in the London version, translates this as ‘The proudest beauties on earth!’ Although ‘die kühnsten Schönen’ does mean ‘boldest beauties’ it can also suggest ‘enterprising beauties’, and, at the same time, is a pun on ‘die schönen Künste’, meaning the fine arts. Ross must have been aware of these nuances, having developed his German language skills while a lecturer at King’s College, Cambridge, in order to enrich his lectures on Frederick the Great.Footnote ³⁸ It should be added, that no attempt was made to deal with these nuances, either, in George Grossmith’s version for Broadway (which, at times, seems to lean heavily on Ross’s work).

Although there were difficulties in finding apt translations for German puns, there was no problem in adding word-play in English, as Ross shows in his lyrics to Franzi and Lothar’s duet ‘Piccolo! Picolo!’ in A Waltz Dream:

It is designed to add humour, and goes much further than anything in the German lyrics by Felix Dörmann and Leopold Jacobson:

Another problem could occur when dealing with a composer like Lehár, whose practice it was to set pre-written lyrics to music. This might prompt him to find a musical device that would add significance to a word. For example, in the duet ‘Wer hat die Liebe uns ins Herz gesenkt’ in Act 2 of Das Land des Lächelns, Lehár, working from Fritz Löhner’s lyrics, gives unexpected harmonic colour to the word ‘Harmonie’ when Lisa and Sou-Chong sing about there being a paradise-sent harmony between them. In Harry Graham’s English version for Drury Lane, Lehár’s chord remains unexpected, but the reason for its presence is inexplicable in terms of the new lyrics (Example 2.1). Graham was an important British lyricist, who began writing lyrics for musical comedies during the First World War and enjoyed his biggest success with The Maid of the Mountains. He was clearly at a loss in this instance, even though he was fluent in French and German, and created English versions of Madame Pompadour, The Lady of the Rose, Katja, the Dancer, The Land of Smiles, Casanova, White Horse Inn, and Viktoria and Her Hussar.

Example 2.1

‘Wer hat die Liebe uns ins Herz gesenkt’, Das Land des Lächelns.

Harry B. Smith was among the leading adapters of operetta from the German stage for Broadway. He had the advantage of having collaborated many times with Reginald De Koven and Victor Herbert.Footnote ³⁹ Smith, whose brother Robert often partnered him as a lyric writer, was admired by Charles Frohman, who engaged him for Broadway productions of The Siren (Fall), The Doll Girl (Fall), and The Girl from Montmartre (Berény). Smith set out some ground rules for lyric writing. The musical play should be constructed ‘so the lyrics can carry the action’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The lyricist has to supply words that not only have sense and rhyme, but ‘must fit the notes perfectly, be correctly accented and have the right vowel sounds for certain tones’.Footnote ⁴¹

Besides the Smith brothers, prominent Broadway librettists and lyricists were: Harold Atteridge, who created the American version of The Last Waltz and worked on over twenty shows for the Shuberts; the actor and producer Dorothy Donnelly, who often collaborated with Sigmund Romberg; and Stanislaus Stange, who spent his early life in Liverpool before emigrating to the USA in 1881, and whose English version of Der tapfere Soldat as The Chocolate Soldier was performed in both New York and London. It departed considerably from Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, which was its source, and B. W. Findon, editor of The Play Pictorial, remarked that ‘only in the first act is the musical version at all like the play’.Footnote ⁴²

‘The lyrics of your song being written … the next consideration is the melody’, Charles Harris instructed his readers in 1906.Footnote ⁴³ But musical theatre began to depart from such advice, especially in the 1920s. The tune now came first, and lyrics were tailored to fit its melodic phrases. Lyricists P. G. Wodehouse, Lorenz Hart, and Ira Gershwin were influential exponents of such practice on Broadway. Kálmán’s normal method was to compose the music and have words set to it, in line with Broadway practice. Musical numbers in his manuscripts sometimes have no words.Footnote ⁴⁴ Lehár, Straus, and Fall preferred to compose melodies to an existing text. Lehár explained that the book and lyrics suggested to him the overall musical character of an operetta.Footnote ⁴⁵

‘Manhattan’ (1925) was a pioneering song in which Lorenz Hart demonstrated how sophisticated lyrics – with internal rhymes, such as ‘And tell me what street compares to Mott street in July’ – could fit and enhance the musical phrases of Richard Rodgers’s melody. Internal rhyming, in itself, was not new: in Robert B. Smith’s lyrics to the song ‘Lilac Domino’ (from the 1914 operetta of that name), the phrase ‘flutter by’ appears in the middle of a line and rhymes with ‘butterfly’ at the end of the previous line.

When putting words to an existing melody, an internal rhyme is generally prompted by the repetition of a short musical phrase. Writing lyrics to fit a composer’s tune often made it impossible to make lines scan. Instead, a lyricist would find a means of matching the musical phrasing and the accented notes.Footnote ⁴⁶ Skilful lyricists would also consider which vowels might best suit held notes, avoid lots of consonants in rapid passages or legato melodies, place diphthongs carefully, and take into account the pitch at which a word is to be sung.

‘Improving’ on Earlier Productions

Basil Hood explained the problems he faced in making an operetta from the German stage meet the expectations of a West End audience:

He was of the belief that a national culture shaped aesthetic sensibility. He was, therefore, guided by what he imagined to be English taste when revising continental European operetta. Whether there was really a difference in taste, rather than audience expectations is a moot point, and nobody can regard taste as an unproblematic concept after Pierre Bourdieu’s elaborations on this topic.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is not known how Hood reacted when Glen MacDonough subjected his version of The Count of Luxembourg to further revisions to suit an American audience.

Hood was keen to point out that the activity on which he was engaged differed from translation: ‘a translation would not suit or satisfy the taste of our English audiences … because [they] desire different methods of construction and treatment’.Footnote ⁴⁹ West End audiences preferred one interval, rather than a second interval followed by a short third act. Hood was particularly worried by Act 3, which in its 1909 version (Lehár later revised it) was barely twenty minutes long, including dialogue. He claimed that, in his version, fewer than thirty lines of dialogue were translated from the German. His task, as he saw it, lay in taking a stage story told in one manner and re-telling it in another, preserving essential situations, but arriving at them and developing them in a different way. In doing so, proper regard needed to be paid to the existing music, but consideration had also to be given to any additional numbers that the new structure might demand. One big structural change occurred at the end of Act 2, when Angèle and René discover each other’s true identity.

Hood insists that he regarded both Willner and Lehár as collaborators in his adaptation and visited them several times in Austria for friendly consultations. Willner was not new to revising this libretto, because it was already a reworking by himself and Robert Bodanzky of an earlier libretto he had written with Bernhard Buchbinder for Johann Strauss’s Die Göttin der Vernunft (1897).Footnote ⁵¹

Hood introduced new minor characters and made Brissard a much more significant character, tailored to suit comedian W. H. Berry. He confessed that, in consequence, ‘new situations and scenes have arisen which do not exist in the original’.Footnote ⁵² There were plenty of interpolated numbers, too (Table 2.1). Lehár was not entirely happy about the changes made to his operettas in London, and complained to an American reporter that no producer would think of changing a piece by Gilbert and Sullivan.Footnote ⁵³ However, he was not averse to revising his own work. The 1937 publication by Lehár’s self-owned Glocken Verlag had twenty-two numbers compared to eighteen in the 1909 version published by Karczag and Wallner.Footnote ⁵⁴ Notable additions were the trio ‘Ach, she’n Sie doch’ in Act 2 and the song ‘Alles mit Ruhe genießen’ in Act 3. There were also some structural alterations: the Count makes his entrance, with a new song, as part of the first number instead of entering during the fourth number. Act 3 ended with a short closing song in 1909, whereas in the later edition there is a ‘finaletto’. Lehár would have some justification, however, for thinking that his carefully crafted second act finale had been ruined in Hood’s version. Stefan Frey likens the dramatic weaving in and out of melodic themes (in the context of the characters’ hidden identities) to ‘a kind of diminished Wagnerian leitmotiv opera’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Where Lehár gave the drama to the music, Hood gave it to the spoken word.

Table 2.1Interpolations and alterations in The Count of Luxembourg at Daly’s Theatre.

George Edwardes believed in ‘improving’ continental European productions and informed the Manchester Evening Chronicle that he had succeeded in doing so.

Of The Dollar Princess, he boasted that he ‘bought it’ and ‘altered it’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Basil Hood wrote the book, and Adrian Ross the lyrics. The changes agreed with the predilections of the British audience, because the operetta achieved 428 consecutive London performances compared to 117 over a period of six years in Vienna.

In the German version by A. M. Willner and Fritz Grünbaum (after a comedy by Gatti-Trotha), John Couder, a millionaire living in New York, has made his money from coal. Wealthy coal industrialists being familiar in the UK, something more distinctly American was needed. In the Manchester try-out, Phineas Conder was an oil tycoon and the father of Alice, the ‘dollar princess’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the West End, his name was changed to Harry Q. Conder, and, because the part was given to Joe Coyne (who lacked the technique to sing the romantic role of Freddy), Alice became his sister (played by Lily Elsie). Conder takes pleasure in hiring European aristocrats as servants, and Alice has fallen in love with her aristocratic English secretary, Freddy, but he is too proud to marry her for money (echoes of Danilo, there). Conder is attracted to a visitor who claims to be a Russian princess but is, in fact, a ‘lion queen’ in variety performance. A new character, Bulger, was added in London to show off the talents of comedian W. H. Berry. Act 3 was set in Freddy’s bungalow in California, instead of a country house in Canada, and slight changes were made to the storyline. Alice does not pretend to have lost all her money, and there is no suggestion that Freddy has become a wealthy man. When they meet again, he tells her that he is leaving for home. She tells him she cares no more for gold without love in her heart, and they make up.

The Broadway version had a rewritten book by George Grossmith, Jr, in which Alice returns to being the daughter of a coal millionaire, now named John W. Cowder. The opening number retains the chorus of typists (as in the German version), whose tapping is imitated in the music. In the West End this musical representation was ignored (see Chapter 1). The setting of Act 3 is the Franco-British Exhibition in London, a change of scene that indicates the differing directions in which British and American audiences looked for stimulating distant locations. The Broadway version had two extra songs by Jerome Kern in Act 3. In the Vienna version, this final act was set in Aliceville, Canada, once important for maple syrup, but deserted today.Footnote ⁵⁹ It was probably chosen to suggest that Freddy still has Alice in his thoughts, but those working on the English versions saw no appeal in Aliceville.

A scene in Act 3 of the West End production illustrates the kind of topical humour incorporated into English versions.Footnote ⁶⁰ Dick wants to stop his cousin Conder marrying Olga from the Volga, because he is aware of her real profession, and ‘it isn’t right for a lady who tames lions to marry into our family’. Conder’s confidential clerk, Bulger, tells Dick that knowing this will not prevent the marriage, because Conder is ‘very fond of lions, he drinks their tea’. The original Lyons Tea Room at 213 Piccadilly had been a high-status affair, but gradually Lyons had been expanding to cater for those of lower social standing. In 1909, the year of the operetta’s London performance, Joseph Lyons began opening a chain of modest tea shops in the West End called Lyons Corner Houses.Footnote ⁶¹ Thus, the joke would be picked up by everyone in the audience. Bulger and Dick decide that it would be a good idea to tell Conder that Olga is a dangerous Bolshevik whose special mission is ‘to blow up all multi-millionaires in America’. Ironically, it was not long before the Lyons Corner Houses became meeting places for political agitators.Footnote ⁶²

The scene for Dick and Bulger also incorporates gags that are added neither for satirical reasons, nor for the purpose of advancing the action. One of the jokes has remained current for many years, although it is difficult to say how fresh it was in 1909.

It should be borne in mind that this was from the pen of Basil Hood, and that ad lib gags were frequently added by comic performers.

A West End production praised for humour was Katja, the Dancer (given with few changes on Broadway as Katja). A London critic declared it ‘full of comedy, really amusing and mostly original stuff’.Footnote ⁶³ Although nothing seems to date as rapidly as comedy, I quote some examples to demonstrate its various types of comic dialogue:

It was not a succession of gags, however, and Findon commended its dramatic narrative: ‘I am trying to think if any piece had been produced at the Gaiety with a story so complete in itself, so logically developed as “Katja, the Dancer”.’Footnote ⁶⁴

Interpolated Numbers

Until around 1840, it was common for British and American audiences to hear interpolated numbers in operas. In earlier times, it was usually a singer who decided to include them: for instance, Maria Garcia (later, Madame Malibran) chose to sing ‘Home, Sweet Home!’ (lyrics by John Howard Payne, music by Henry Bishop, 1823) as an encore in Act 2 of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia in New York, in 1825.Footnote ⁶⁵ The practice was discontinued in opera, but freshly composed production songs were regularly interpolated in operetta, usually because of the desire to cater for the skills of particular singers (comedians, in particular). In 1906, Charles Harris offers advice on this type of composition in his instruction manual How To Write a Popular Song, pointing out that it often has to fit in with scenic effects or stage business.Footnote ⁶⁶

Sometimes the score’s original composer contributed new numbers. Lehár was willing to add new songs, such as ‘Cosmopolitan’ and ‘Love and Wine’, for Gipsy Love in London. More usually, another composer located in the city of production was engaged for this task: Jerome Kern supplied two extra numbers for the Broadway Dollar Princess. Sigmund Romberg and Al Goodman provided additional numbers for Kálmán’s Countess Maritza, and Romberg composed additional songs to Gilbert’s The Lady in Ermine, which, as The Lady of the Rose in London, had already been given an extra song by Leslie Stuart. New York critic Alexander Woollcott, remarks wryly of the 1922 production of Fall’s The Rose of Stamboul that upon the original score ‘there seems to have fallen one Sigmund Romberg, a local composer, and now the piece is adorned at intervals with songs that Vienna has yet to hear’.Footnote ⁶⁷ In Austria and Germany, it was not uncommon for revived operettas to be given new numbers, for instance, ‘Ich hol’ dir vom Himmel das Blau’ was added for Fritzi Massary in the 1928 Charell production of Die lustige Witwe.

Another reason for interpolation was to introduce a fashionable musical style that the main composer lacked the skill to provide, which is why Kern was in demand on Broadway. When Robert Stolz’s Mädi (1923) was produced in London as The Blue Train in 1927, it included ‘Hop Like the Blackbirds Do’, one of several interpolated numbers by composer, lyricist, and actor Ivy St Helier (real name, Ivy Janet Aitchison). This song demonstrates a familiarity with syncopated rhythms not shown by Stolz at this time. His previous London production Whirled into Happiness (1922) contained a song ‘New Moon’ marked ‘Tempo di fox-trot’ but lacking syncopation.

It was not always clear what extra contributions had been written and by whom. An unwary critic of the Daly’s revival of A Waltz Dream in 1911 confessed that he did not find the music as alluring as in 1908, but added, ‘the most individual and attractive things of all are in the third act, where we come to Princess Helena’s last song and its delightful introduction’. This particular song, ‘I Chose a Man to Wed’, was actually one of the interpolated numbers supplied by Scottish composer Hamish MacCunn (who conducted the performance) as part of a rewritten Act 3.Footnote ⁶⁸

An American reviewer of Fall’s Lieber Augustin in 1913 is more cautious. He praises the ‘succession of very delightful melodies’, but adds:

Another critic suspects, on hearing the New York adaptation of The Last Waltz, that some of the numbers are not by Oscar Straus: ‘There are several interpolated numbers, unidentified except by internal evidence. You suspect “Charming Ladies” and “A Baby in Love” of having been baptized in the East River rather than the blue Danube.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Both of these songs were, in fact, interpolated numbers by Alfred Goodman.

Substantial Changes

Sometimes, it was felt necessary to rework a libretto in a radical manner. In Chapter 6, the wholesale changes made for the MGM film of The Chocolate Soldier are discussed, but even Stanislaus Stange’s Broadway version had been, just like Rudolf Bernauer and Leopold Jacobson’s Der tapfere Soldat, a liberal reworking of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man (1894). George Edwardes admitted that he had turned down an opportunity to acquire the rights because he was worried that Bernard Shaw would become litigious and bring an injunction against him.Footnote ⁷¹ A reviewer in the New York Times remarked that the operetta was ‘more Shavings than Shavian’ and continued:

Kálmán found that substantial changes in English versions of his operettas reduced his income from royalties. In the London production of Autumn Manoeuvres (1912), only three of his numbers survived, as five other composers were involved (including musical comedy composers Monckton and Talbot). Henry Hamilton’s book and lyrics clearly departed considerably from Robert Bodanzky’s Ein Herbstmanöver for Vienna (1909) – and that production was, itself, an adaptation of the Hungarian Tatárjárás, given at the Vigszínház Theatre, Budapest (1908), which had a book by Károly von Bakyonyi and lyrics by Andor Gabor. Kálmán lost further royalties after the outbreak of war. Rida Johnson Young had reworked Gold gab ich für Eisen as Her Soldier Boy for Broadway in December 1916, cleverly overcoming its implausible incident of a mother who fails to realize an imposter is impersonating her son, by having her go blind. It was well received and still running when the USA entered the First World War in April 1917. As Soldier Boy!, it also ran in the West End in 1918, its origins unnoticed by the censors, who may have been distracted by the interpolated soldier’s song ‘Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’ (George and Felix Powell), which was already present in the Broadway production.Footnote ⁷³

P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, who had made a successful Broadway version of Kálmán’s Die Faschingsfee as Miss Springtime in 1916, were surprised at the flop of their adaptation of Kálmán’s Die Csárdásfürstin as The Riviera Girl the next year. The USA was now at war, so they changed the Hungarian and Austrian scenes to Monte Carlo.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Riviera Girl had a lot going for it: as with Miss Springtime, it was a lavish Klaw and Erlanger production, with scenery designed by the skilful Joseph Urban, and was given at the New Amsterdam Theatre. Wodehouse and Bolton did not criticize the score, which they admired, and shouldered the blame for its failure themselves, deciding that they had been ‘too ingenious’ in devising a plot to replace the existing libretto, which they held in low regard.Footnote ⁷⁵

The Cousin from Nowhere had stuck closely to the Berlin version of Künneke’s operetta when given in the West End. It had a book by Fred Thompson, and lyrics by Adrian Ross, Robert C. Tharp, and Douglas Furber. It retained the location of the Netherlands, and the stranger who arrives on the scene has supposedly spent several years in Batavia, on the island of Java, which was the most important trading city of the Dutch East Indies (since 1945, the city has been known as Jakarta, capital of the Republic of Indonesia). However, the Broadway version shifted attention onto the leading female role and transplanted the action into Virginia during the American Civil War. It was now titled Caroline and was summed up by its librettist Harry B. Smith as the story of a Southern Cinderella in love with a Yankee officer.Footnote ⁷⁶

The ‘In Batavia’ quintet became ‘Argentine’.Footnote ⁷⁷

It is a fox trot, not a tango, but that makes sense since the stranger (Bob) is the only one who claims to have experienced the Argentine. The tango rhythm of ‘Weißt du noch?’ now has particular relevance in the duet ‘Sweethearts’, because of Bob’s supposed sojourn in Argentina.

There are also two interpolated numbers: ‘Some Day’ (a slow waltz), with words by Adrian Ross and Smith, and music by Benatzky; and ‘Way Down South’ (a fox trot, but not labelled as such), with words by Smith, and music by Alfred Goodman.

The changes were substantial in Caroline, as they were, also, in the rewriting of Zigeunerliebe as Gipsy Love for the West End. Edwardes commissioned Hood to rework the piece and persuaded Lehár to write new numbers. Edwardes commented in an interview:

In Willner and Bodanzky’s version, the whole of the action of Act 2 turns out to be Zorika’s dream of Gipsy life. In discussing Zigeunerliebe, Heike Quissek categorizes the anticipation of events through a dream as a special form of fairy-tale vision.Footnote ⁷⁹ In Act 3, Zorika wakes up, and no longer wishes to rebel against bourgeois social convention. The Gipsies represent freedom from the regulations of bureaucratic society, their rules are in the heart, as Jozsi says. Gipsy love, however, turns out to be a fantasy in which faithfulness plays no part. In the end, Zorika rejects freedom from rules for her reliable suitor Jonel.

In Hood’s version, as Findon explains to readers of The Play Pictorial, the adventures of Zorika, now named Ilona, no longer take place in a dream: ‘the dream has materialized and Ilona actually goes through the episodes which end in her return to her father’s house a chastened and penitent girl, ready to appreciate the calm happiness of a peaceful existence and the love of an honest and courteous gentleman’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Hood gave his reason for rejecting the ‘dream’ act:

In addition, Hood created new male and female comic roles, for, as Findon remarks, however much the appreciation of ‘good-class music’ had increased, the public still could not accept an operetta that was not ‘well punctuated with the humorous sallies of the light-hearted comedian’.Footnote ⁸² Gertie Millar was cast as Lady Babby, and W. H. Berry as Dragotin. Hood was proud of his achievement and believed Lehár recognized how much he had improved upon the Vienna version, claiming that the composer was ‘so struck with my version of Gipsy Love that he asked me if I would be agreeable to it being translated into French and German for presentation on the Continent, in preference to the original version’.Footnote ⁸³ However, when Lehár put together the final revisions of his operettas for Glocken Verlag, he decided against Hood’s version.

Occasionally, an operetta’s subject matter could be politically delicate. In Song of the Sea (1928), Arthur Wimperis and Lauri Wylie reworked the libretto by Richard Bars and Leopold Jacobson to Künneke’s Lady Hamilton (1926). In the German version, Amy Lyons flirts with a Spanish naval officer Alfredo Bartos, but leaves for London with Lord William Hamilton. Later, Alfredo ends up as a prisoner of war, but Amy becomes Lord Nelson’s mistress and obtains his release (although she remains with Nelson). To succeed in the West End, it needed to be sensitive to the British political context in which the naval hero Lord Nelson was held in high esteem. Thus, in the English version, the heroine is Nancy, courted by Richard Manners, a lieutenant of the Royal Navy. She is persuaded to go to London with Sir William Candysshe to be surrounded in luxury, but without promise of marriage. Later, installed at the British Embassy in Naples, an altercation occurs between her former and present lovers. Richard is imprisoned, but Nancy craftily obtains his release, and the implied ending is a marriage between herself and Richard.

Schubert’s Variegated Blossoms

A person who translates lyrics is, to a certain extent, in a similar position to those who write lyrics to existing music, except that, in the former case, the music already has lyrics in another language. However, in Das Dreimäderlhaus it may be that Heinrich Berté is, at times, trying to fit already existing music to already existing lyrics. That is because Berté had originally composed the music himself; however, when doubts began to arise about the suitability of his music, he was asked to use Schubert’s music instead. He was angry at first, especially when this caused his publisher to demand the repayment of an advance, but a deal was done that recompensed him for his work as arranger.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Broadway and West End versions, Blossom Time and Lilac Time, both present different reworkings of Dreimäderlhaus and must have involved significant collaboration between Sigmund Romberg and Dorothy Donnelly in the first case, and George Clutsam and Adrian Ross in the second.

The Nazi Lexikon der Juden in der Musik (1940) finds it necessary to explain why the party appears to be banning Schubert’s music by proscribing this stage work.Footnote ⁸⁵ It points out that Berté [born Bettelheim] was Jewish and so were his librettists, Alfred Willner and Heinz Reichert. To demonstrate objectivity, a court order is quoted, stating: ‘the music of Franz Schubert has been presented throughout in such a way that it could no longer be called Schubert’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet there is less manipulation of Schubert’s music in Berté’s operetta than in its successors, Blossom Time and Lilac Time. Recognition of a change to a Schubert composition can be mistaken. In Act 2, Hannerl und Schober’s duet uses the melody of the second movement of Piano Sonata in A Minor, D537 (1817) at ‘Mädel sei nicht dumm’. Schubert revised this melody for the Rondo of his better-known A Major Sonata, D959 (1828), but Berté used the earlier version.

Blossom Time was one of the Shuberts’ most successful shows,Footnote ⁸⁷ and extensive holdings for it are in the Shubert Archive. Romberg goes further than Berté in cutting, pasting, and changing. He replaces some of the numbers with his own compositions (for example, ‘There Is in Old Vienna Town’ in Act 1, ‘Let Me Awake’ in Act 2, and ‘Keep It Dark’ in Act 3), and he adds a saxophone to the score. He replaces other numbers with more familiar compositions of Schubert: for example, ‘Die Forelle’ (The Trout) and ‘Ständchen’ (the Serenade from Schwanengesang) in the Act 1 ensemble ‘Good Morning’; ‘Heidenrösslein’ in ‘Love’s a Riddle’ (Act 2); and ‘Ave Maria’ in ‘Peace to Your Lonely Heart’ (Act 3). ‘Speak, Daisy, Yes or No!’, in Act 2, is an example of Romberg’s cutting and pasting: he bases the opening notes on bars 3–5 of the first subject of the second movement of the Unfinished Symphony and the second phrase on bar 15.

Two examples illustrate how Romberg occasionally reworked material substantially. The quintet ‘My Springtime Thou Art’ in Act 1 makes use of Waltz D365, No. 2, which featured in a similar quintet in Das Dreimäderlhaus. Berté remained close to Schubert’s piano piece, but Romberg changes metre, first giving it a rhythmic syncopated character and then converting it into a polka (Examples 2.2 and 2.3).

Example 2.2

‘Es soll der Frühling mir künden’, Das Dreimäderlhaus, Act 1.

Example 2.3

‘My Springtime of Love Thou Art’, Blossom Time, Act 1.

Most striking, perhaps, is the way Romberg managed to create a hit song, ‘You Are My Song of Love’, out of the second subject of the first movement of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. This tune features in Das Dreimäderlhaus and Lilac Time, too, but it is not long enough in itself to fill the requirements of a song. Romberg’s solution is to insert a ‘middle eight’ taken from the seventh of Schubert’s German Dances, D783. None of this troubled a New York Times critic in 1921, who had paid tribute to Blossom Time, claiming it had ‘done service to his [Schubert’s] memory for musicians today’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Clutsam had enjoyed a modest success in 1916–17 with Young England, an opera co-composed with Hubert Bath to a libretto by Basil Hood, but this paled into insignificance compared to the success of Lilac Time. Clutsam published a short biography of Schubert in the same year as the production of Lilac Time and he began with the statement: ‘There is no more pathetic and touching career recorded in musical history that that of Franz Peter Schubert, and there are few composers whose works contain slighter trace of their personal history.’Footnote ⁸⁹ Like Romberg, Clutsam replaces some of the rarer Shubert melodies with those more familiar, including several chosen by Romberg, such as ‘Die Forelle’ in ‘The Golden Song’ (Act 1), ‘Ständchen’ (Act 2), and ‘Heidenrösslein’ in ‘My Sweetest Song of All’ (Act 3). He also includes a variant of bars 47 onwards of Impromptu No. 4, D899 in the new quartet he adds to Act 1 (‘Four Jolly Brothers’). He adds a Prelude to Act 2 making use of ‘Die Post’ from Schwanengesang, and the first subject of the first movement of the Unfinished Symphony. Later, he uses the third of the Six Moments Musicaux, D780, for a dance of bridesmaids and children. Like Romberg, he is tempted to change metre. The sextet ‘When Skies Are Blue’ is a 2/4 version of the 3/4 ‘Wer’s Mädel freit’ in Das Dreimäderlhaus. His most substantial change is the elongated waltz-time reworking of the second subject of the first movement of Piano Sonata in E♭ Major, D568 for the refrain of ‘The Flower’. Berté had used the melody for ‘Liebes Schicksalsblümlein spricht’, No. 9 of Das Dreimäderlhaus, and in Clutsam’s own copy of the vocal score of that work he has written ‘valse’ at this point (Figure 2.1 and Example 2.4).Footnote ⁹⁰

Figure 2.1

Clutsam’s copy of the vocal score of Das Dreimäderlhaus.

Example 2.4

‘Tell Me, Dear Flower’. Clutsam’s waltz-time arrangement in Lilac Time.

A Diminishing of Revision in the 1920s and 1930s?

In the 1920s and 1930s, revisions for stage productions were rarely as substantial as in the earlier years. Tobias Becker cites the West End productions of Das Land des Lächelns and Im weißen Rössl as evidence that a more literal form of translation took over in the 1920s.Footnote ⁹¹ In the 1930s, there developed a concept of operetta production as a homogeneous whole made not only of music and text but of stage sets, costume, and choreography, all of which should be retained in some way. This idea persuaded impresarios to purchase not just the production rights, as they had done in the past, but everything connected to the original production, including performers, directors, and designers. Oswald Stoll was one of the first to do so, when he presented White Horse Inn and Casanova at the London Coliseum, replicating the spectacular productions seen at Berlin’s Großes Schauspielhaus. This was a foretaste of the ‘lock, stock and barrel’ transfers of late twentieth-century musicals, such as Cats, Phantom of the Opera, and Les Misérables. White Horse Inn became one of the most successful operettas globally, with initial runs of over 650 performances in London, and over 700 in Vienna and in Paris. Like some other operettas, it derives humour from the culture clash between city and countryside. The unusual thing in this case being that the cosmopolitan space – the hotel – is situated in the country rather than the city.

In the Berlin version, Leopold, the head waiter, loves Josepha, owner of the inn in St Wolfgang, but she prefers Dr Siedler, a Berlin solicitor. Siedler, however, has his eye on Ottilie, daughter of Berlin businessman Wilhelm Giesecke. Sigismund, the son of Giesecke’s business rival, has been told to ask Ottilie to marry him, but he flirts with another woman, Klärchen, and Ottilie goes off with Dr Siedler. It takes none other than the Emperor Franz Josef to sort things out, enabling Josepha and Leopold get together in the end. Having featured historical characters in his two previous revue operettas, Erik Charell asked his co-librettist Hans Müller-Einigen to include a part for the Emperor, whose summer residence had been in Bad Ischl, not far from St Wolfgang. Müller-Einigen had worked in Hollywood in the 1920s and shared Charell’s desire to create a spectacular modern operetta. The modernity was evident in the fashionable costumes (contrasting with the folk costumes of the locals), the jazz band on stage, and the latest theatre technology, which was used to create thrilling effects (see Chapter 7). Giesecke no longer manufactures gas mantles as in the play by Oscar Blumenthal and Gustav Kadelburg of 1897; he has a thriving male underwear factory (his garments button up in the front unlike those of his business rival). Grumpy but likeable, Giesecke is a Berliner who contrasts with the openly friendly country folk. The role of Franz Josef was not originally intended to be interpreted in a serious manner, although this began to happen later. Irony and camp were always guiding lights for Charell.

In Harry Graham’s West End version, Giesecke became John Ebenezer Grinkle, his daughter Ottilie became Ottoline, Dr Otto Siedler became Valentine Sutton, a solicitor, and Sigismund Sülzheimer became Sigismund Smith. Graham’s text was not used in New York because it was considered to represent an old-fashioned operetta style,Footnote ⁹² so David Freeman took charge of the book, and new lyrics were provided by experienced Broadway revue writer Irving Caesar: thus, for instance, ‘It Would Be Wonderful’ became ‘I Cannot Live without Your Love’, and ‘Your Eyes’ became ‘Blue Eyes’, and, in the song praising the White Horse Inn, Wolfgangsee became ‘silver lake’. Names were changed again: Josepha became Katarina (played by Kitty Carlisle), Giesecke became McGonigle, Ottilie became Natalie, Siedler became Donald Sutton an American lawyer, and Sigismund was now a non-singing role, Sylvester S. Somerset from Massachusetts. To give the score an up-to-date Broadway sound, it was re-orchestrated by Hans Spialek, who had worked with Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter.

New music was added, or an earlier song was replaced with another. After the arrival of the tourists in Act 1, a song by Jára Benes was added to allow Katarina to introduce herself. Surprisingly, Stolz’s ‘Good-Bye’, which Charell had interpolated in Act 2 of the West End production, and was one of the show’s hits, was exchanged for ‘Goodbye, Au Revoir, Auf Wiederseh’n’, with lyrics by Irving Caesar to a tune from Eric Coates’s Knightsbridge March. Another of Stolz’s songs, ‘You Too’ was replaced by ‘I Would Like to Have You Love Me’ (lyrics by Irving Caesar and Sammy Lerner, music by Gerald Marks), and, in Act 3, Stolz’s ‘My Song of Love’ was cut and replaced with ‘The Waltz of Love’ by Richard Fall. It would appear that the cutting of Stolz’s music must have been related to a rights issue. Having composed more than one number for Im weißen Rössl, Stolz had gone to court to try to enforce his demand to have his name on the score. He was not successful, except in the UK, where ‘Good-Bye’ had proven so popular.

There is satire of rustic life as well as of city folk in Im weißen Rössl. The countryside offers charming cows and jolly slap dancing; the city offers vanity (Sigismund) and grumpiness (Giesecke). The cow song is a parody of nature-loving sentimentality.

The irony of the cow song appears to have worked in both London and New York, perhaps because of cosmopolitan attitudes to bucolic simplicity.

The Emperor’s appearance as deus ex machina is in keeping with the caricaturing found in this operetta. Norbert Abels describes him as being dragged out of the imperial crypt to set things right.Footnote ⁹³ Josepha tells him her problems, and he replies in his imperial wisdom: ‘Es ist einmal im Leben so, jedem geht es ebenso, was möcht’ so gern, ist so fern’ (It’s like this in every lifetime and the same for everyone: what you really want is out of reach). Yet his words have taken on a serious tone over the years. Tobias Becker goes to the heart of the matter, when he says they are both truth and parody: ‘the mixture is what makes them appealing’.Footnote ⁹⁴ At a performance at Schloss Haindorf in Langenlois in July 2016, I was surprised to hear many members of the audience simultaneously whispering along with the Emperor as he delivered his words. However, evidence that they were treated seriously in the Broadway production of 1936 is provided by an RCA Radio broadcast that year.Footnote ⁹⁵

New Operetta Versions of the 1950s and Later

Updating the words and music of operettas introduces the social concerns and sounds of a later period. In one sense, there is a positive quality to updating if the purpose is to demonstrate continuing relevance. However, an audience may also want to enjoy moments when the cultural past itself seems relevant. The link between the time in which these operettas were ‘modern’ and the later age in which we consume them is often the basis of a rewarding experience. When, for example, we hear an operetta of the first decade of the twentieth century decked out in a 1950s musical arrangement, it is usually a recognition of the later decade that dominates. Furthermore, there is often a feeling of mismatch between the workings of an early musical style and a later arrangement. Perhaps that explains why there is no generally accepted concept of Dirigent-Theater to set alongside Regie-Theater. All updated arrangements lock the music into another time frame that, itself, swiftly becomes historic. The main point I wish to make is that we do not just enjoy an operetta because of its relevance to us today, we also take pleasure from its being a social and cultural document that enhances our understanding of the time in which it was written.

The fact remains that operettas have generally been updated when revived. This happened during the 1926–27 season at the Großes Schauspielhaus, when Charell produced revivals of Die lustige Witwe and Madame Pompadour. Nevertheless, there was no musical updating of the disproportionate type found in some recordings of operettas made in the 1970s, such as Die Csárdásfürstin (BMG Entertainment, 1972), Im weißen Rössl (BMG Entertainment, 1974), or the pop version of Die Dollarprinzessin (Phonogram, 1975). Those examples all demonstrate that updating the music creates different problems to updating the book or lyrics.

The arranging and reworking of earlier music found in operettas such as Casanova and Die Dubarry is very different to the desire after the Second World War to update revivals of operettas like Die Dollarprinzessin and Die Csárdásfürstin largely by the simply expedient of increasing the brassy sound and adding a drum kit. Part of what is misguided is that they are thereby clothed in a style that has its roots in the American music that was, in the early decades of the century, heard as contrasting with European traditions. The updating by composers like Benatzky and Korngold was done with care for, and cultural knowledge of, the musical tradition within which they were working. Korngold’s reworking of Strauss Jr’s music in Walzer aus Wien, for example, was in line with the development of that same style of music in the years since Strauss’s death.

New English versions were being published with some regularity from the late 1950s on, designed to appeal to amateur operatic and dramatic societies. Two different English versions of The Merry Widow were published by Glocken Verlag in 1958: one was by Phil Park with musical arrangements by Ronald Hanmer (who transposed much of the music down a tone) and the other by Christopher Hassall based on the edition published by Doblinger in Vienna. Both versions included new lyrics, alterations to dramatic action, and musical re-arrangement. This was the norm for such publications, many of which are revisions by Park and Hanmer: for example, The Gipsy Princess (Chappell, 1957), Waltzes from Vienna (Chappell, 1966), The Dollar Princess (Weinberger, 1968), Lilac Time (Weinberger, 1971), and Gipsy Love (Weinberger, 1980). Other new versions were produced with the aid of Agnes Bernelle, Adam Carstairs, Nigel Douglas, Bernard Dunn, Michael Flanders, Edmund Tracey, Eric Maschwitz, and Bernard Grun. In the 1990s, Richard Bonynge’s recording of The Land of Smiles (1996) used a version by Jerry Hadley, and Paganini (1997) used an English version by David Kram and Dennis Olsen.Footnote ⁹⁶ A new production of The Merry Widow opened at the Metropolitan Opera in December 2014, with a translation by Jeremy Sams that clearly aimed to be punchy and contemporary: ‘Who can tell what the hell women are?’ sang the men in the familiar ‘Weib, Weib, Weib’ ensemble.Footnote ⁹⁷ In spite of its Broadway-style internal rhyme, it probably needs updating again.

The Purchase of Rights

Rewards for composers varied, especially at the start of their careers. Lehár sold the publishing rights to Der Rastelbinder for the equivalent of £80, but claimed the publisher made a hundred times that amount from sales.Footnote ¹⁹ Even at the height of his success with The Merry Widow, he experienced some financial problems. One involved his original publishing contract, and the other with the fact that the USA was not a signatory to the Berne Convention on copyright. However, a degree of amicable resolution proved possible, as the Daily Mail made clear in its tribute to this operetta, just after the second anniversary of its first performance in Vienna.

In 1924, Eduard Künneke was engaged by the International Copyright Bureau, located in the Haymarket, London, to compose four operettas for the Anglo-American market. He visited New York, where he was to work for the Shubert brothers. He adapted and arranged music of Offenbach, and added some of his own, for The Love Song at the Century Theatre, 1925; he composed Lover’s Lane to a libretto by Arthur Wimperis und Harry M. Vernon for production in London; and he then set to work on Mayflowers for the Forrest Theatre, New York (1925) and Riki-Tiki for London’s Gaiety Theatre (1926). In January 1927, however, Künneke signed a highly disadvantageous contract with Ernest Mayer, the manager of the International Copyright Bureau. He did so in return for £100, which he needed at a time of financial difficulty. There had been massive inflation in post-war Germany, and in 1924 the Reichsmark had replaced the Papiermark – one Reichsmark being worth 1000,000,000,000 of the latter. Künneke already had an agreement in place with his regular librettists Haller and Rideamus to split royalties 70/30 in their favour. Now he signed an agreement with Mayer that, with respect to six operettas, allocated to the Bureau half of his 30 per cent performance royalties, as well as a share of his publication royalties, until a figure of £200 was reached. By this means, the firm, during 1928–39, was to make around £1,300 for their initial outlay of £100.Footnote ²¹

The buying of rights was one of the most important activities of the entrepreneur. George Edwardes had secured the American rights as well as the British rights to Die lustige Witwe, and was therefore able to sell the American rights to Henry W. Savage. The operetta still made a fortune for Savage, and exceeded 5000 performances when the production went on tour.Footnote ²² Nevertheless, the lesson was learned, and Savage was quick to seize the opportunity to purchase the exclusive right to produce Kálmán’s operettas in any English-speaking country.Footnote ²³

Fred C. Whitney jumped in early – even before the Vienna premiere – to buy the rights of Straus’s Der tapfere Soldat for production as The Chocolate Soldier on Broadway. Rudolf Bernauer and Leopold Jacobson had based their libretto on George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man (1894), but Whitney had cared less about annoying Shaw than did Edwardes. He was, nevertheless, disappointed by its Viennese reception, and decided to have a try-out in Philadelphia. Finding that it was a hit there, he arranged for 250,000 copies of an enthusiastic New York Times review to be published and distributed in New York. He then made arrangements with Philp Michael Faraday, manager of the Lyric Theatre, London, for the Broadway version to be performed there, produced by its librettist, Stanislaw Stange. Beneath the title on the programme, the audience read the following: ‘With apologies to Mr BERNARD SHAW for an unauthorized parody on one of his Comedies.’

Faraday profited from The Chocolate Soldier and Gilbert’s The Girl in the Taxi at the Lyric Theatre, but lost money on other pieces. He was declared bankrupt in 1914 but was able to discharge his debts over the next six months. He also had touring companies bringing out-of-town profits. Herbert Carter, the general manager for tours of Faraday’s principal companies, organized six tours of The Chocolate Soldier, as well as tours of The Girl in the Taxi and Edmund Eysler’s The Girl Who Didn’t (Der lachende Ehemann). Inquiries about booking touring companies could be made at the appropriate London theatre, or correspondence could be directed to the Manager’s Club, 5 Wardour Street. Tours were usually undertaken by the London company after the production closed in that city, but, before that happened, some theatres sent out touring companies to the provinces and abroad. The same was true of New York, where the Shuberts lost no time sending out successful productions on tour. It did not always work out as expected: between May and September, Straus’s The Last Waltz made a total net profit of $34,717.65 at the Century Theatre but lost heavily on performances by the touring company.Footnote ²⁴

Joseph Sacks, a theatrical entrepreneur of Polish or Russian Jewish descent (he was unsure himself), bought the UK rights to The Lilac Domino (Der Lila Domino) and produced it at the Empire, Leicester Square, in 1918. On Broadway, The Lilac Domino had enjoyed good press notices, but low box-office returns. When he bought the rights from the Smith brothers, he rejected as too risky their offer to sell their entire interests for a small sum.Footnote ²⁵ This proved fortunate for the brothers, but galling for Sacks, because the operetta ran for 747 performances in London. Sacks was responsible for the first production of a new Lehár operetta after the First World War, The Three Graces (Der Libellentanz), again at the Empire (1924).

Copyright and Performing Right

Operetta, as a transnational genre, required international copyright protection for business to flourish, and this protection had been lacking or proven inadequate in the nineteenth century. Symptomatic of that were the problems Gilbert and Sullivan suffered with piracy in the USA; it was probably an ironic coincidence that their first attempt to establish an incontestable American copyright was with The Pirates of Penzance. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886, and later revisions) played an important role in stimulating the European entertainment business. The USA, although not a signatory to that agreement, offered a measure of copyright protection to selected nations in the Chace Act of 1891, and signed acceptance of the Buenos Aires Convention, a copyright treaty of 1910. The UK’s Copyright Act of 1911, the first important legislation since 1842, had been made necessary by the desire to implement the terms of the Berne Convention. International copyright agreements built up the confidence of transnational financial institutions.Footnote ²⁶ Performances of operetta in England, France, and the USA brought the biggest royalties.Footnote ²⁷

Provision was made for a performing right (in addition to copyright) in the UK’s 1842 Act, but it was seldom enforced by publishers. In France, performing rights were collected from 1851 on, including those from performances of French works in the UK. The English Performing Right Society (PRS) was not founded until 1914 but, from then on, argued that all public venues where music was performed should hold licences for music and fees should be collected. It was, in the end, the sudden drop in royalties from record sales, seemingly caused by radio broadcasts, that clinched the argument. No provision for broadcasting had been made in the 1911 Act. The PRS came to an arrangement with the BBC and the Postmaster General whereby owners of wireless sets (that is, radios) paid for a licence, and the PRS received a fee from the BBC based on the number of licences issued. Music publisher Frederick Day became the PRS’s Director in 1926. Royalties collected were normally distributed in three equal parts to author, composer, and publisher. In the USA, in 1924, there was a proposal before Congress for a change in copyright law that would mean authors and composers would receive no payment for their productions when they were broadcast by radio. Harry B. Smith, the distinguished operetta librettist, was part of a delegation sent to Washington to protest by ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, founded in 1914).Footnote ²⁸ Some singers were slow to understand the profits record royalties could bring. Richard Tauber’s wife Diana claimed that he earned royalties on only 66 of the 700-odd records he made, and that he sold the rights of his massive international hit ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’ to Odeon Records for an outright sum of £80.Footnote ²⁹

Theatres in London and New York

The most important theatres for musical comedy and operetta in London were the new Gaiety (1903), Daly’s (1893), the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (the present building dates back to 1812), the Lyric (1888), and the Shaftesbury (1888). Daly’s Theatre, situated at the junction of Cranbourne Street and Leicester Square, was the most celebrated of West End operetta theatres, especially under the management of George Edwardes. It was the first theatre in London built for an American, Augustin Daly, although Edwardes was involved from the start, because he owned the lease to the land on which it was erected, having originally hoped to build his own theatre. Cranbourne Street was at the time a dilapidated neighbourhood. The building of this theatre is an early example of using the arts to regenerate a rundown urban area, something more associated with the 1990s than the 1890s. It was designed by architects Spencer Chadwick and C. J. Phipps with an Italian renaissance exterior and a plentiful assortment of cupids inside. The old Gaiety was a joint-stock company in the 1890s, with Alfred de Rothschild holding the majority of shares, but it was replaced by a new theatre of the same name in 1903, designed by Ernest Runz, and built at a cost of £88,000.Footnote ³⁰ It was situated at the corner of Aldwych and the Strand and survived until 1938, when London County Council’s demand for £20,000 worth of alterations was considered uneconomic.Footnote ³¹

Theatres that promoted operetta in New York were of more recent build, although the Casino had been built specifically for operetta in 1882 and opened with Strauss Jr’s Queen’s Lace Handkerchief. Other important theatres for operetta were the Knickerbocker (1893, called the Abbey until 1896), the New Amsterdam (1903), the Century (1909), the Globe (1910, now the Lunt-Fontanne), and the Shubert (1913). The New Amsterdam in West 42nd Street was the flagship of the Abraham Erlanger theatrical empire.Footnote ³² Its façade was beaux arts (French neo-classical), but its interior was art nouveau. It was New York’s first building to embrace that new cosmopolitan style. With a seating capacity of 1702, the New Amsterdam was Broadway’s largest theatre at the time of its opening. In October 1907, The Merry Widow was given there, and at the end of December it was reported that the production was ‘likely to make an unparalleled profit of one million dollars by the end of the Broadway season’.Footnote ³³

There was an entertainment boom in the first decade of the twentieth century in New York, and the entrepreneurial Shubert brothers began building lavish theatres. They leased their first, the Herald Square, in 1900. Sam Shubert had worked his way into theatre management from humble beginnings as a ticket taker and, being rewarded with some success, his older and younger brothers took interest. The Shuberts soon acquired other theatres, among them the Casino and the Lyric (both in 1903). They cooperated initially with the Theatrical Syndicate headed by Erlanger but began to feel it was too controlling. Erlanger was someone who liked to have his own way; P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton refer to him as ‘the Czar of New York theatre’, but his anxiety about competition from ‘the up-and-coming Shuberts’ increased in the 1910s.Footnote ³⁴ Sam had died in a train crash in 1905, leaving his brother Lee to take charge of finances, and Jacob (always known as J. J.) to deal with productions. Cars and taxi-cabs were replacing the horses and carriages of Times Square, and it was a Horse Exchange property that Sam and J. J. chose to convert into their Winter Garden Theatre, which architect William Albert Swasey modelled on the Wintergarten in Berlin. It opened in 1911 and held an audience of over 1500. It was a home to spectacle and revue, from 1912 hosting the long-running series of summer revues called The Passing Show. Yet Eysler’s Vera Violetta was produced in the first year of opening, and Kálmán’s The Circus Princess (Die Zirkusprinzessin) was given there in 1927.

Theatre productions of various kinds rose to nearly 200 in the 1921–22 New York season. One reason was the number of new theatres opening, so that there were now 55 Broadway theatres. Nonetheless, some plays failed quickly.Footnote ³⁵ Broadway was booming almost out of control in 1925–26, with around 260 productions, of which 42 were musical plays. At the height of their success in 1927, the Shuberts owned 104 theatres, and booked performances into more than 1000 theatres throughout the USA.Footnote ³⁶ Sam and Lee had opened a London theatre, the Waldorf, in 1905, which became the Strand Theatre in 1909. It was bought by F. C. Whitney in 1911, who sold it two years later to Louis B. Mayer (before the latter turned his attention to film). Today it is the Novello Theatre.

The brothers’ flagship theatre, the Shubert, was built in 1913. Its sgraffito exterior, designed by Henry B. Herts, and the plasterwork and series of panels in the interior, painted by J. Mortimer Lichtenhauer, gave considerable distinction to this edifice. One of the theatre’s triumphs was Kálmán’s Countess Maritza, starring Yvonne d’Arle and Walter Woolf, which opened there in September 1926, in a version by Harry B. Smith. Additional numbers were provided by Sigmund Romberg and Al Goodman. The architect Herbert J. Krapp, who had trained under Herts’s supervision, became a key designer for the Shubert theatre enterprise from 1916 on. It was to him the Shuberts turned when, in 1917, they built the Broadhurst and the Plymouth theatres, which strengthened their presence in the 44th and 45th Street area. Krapp was to be involved in the construction of many more, including the Ambassador, which opened in February 1921, and was home to the hugely successful Blossom Time in September that year, and the Imperial, which opened in December 1923. Despite all the brothers’ business acumen, however, the Shubert Theatre Corporation went into receivership in October 1931, in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash. A meeting of creditors was arranged in December 1931 to discuss the problem of raising money to continue business, after discovering that the Corporation had been losing over $21,000 weekly since the receivership.Footnote ³⁷ Surprisingly, in April 1933, when a sale of their theatres took place, the Shubert brothers were able to buy many of them back.Footnote ³⁸ In 1937, the Imperial was the location for Frederika (Friederike), the final production of a new Lehár operetta by the Shuberts until after the Second World War, when Yours Is My Heart (Das Land des Lächelns) was given its belated first Broadway outing in 1946 at the Shubert Theatre.

Theatre Finances: A Short Case Study of Daly’s

A sense of the complexity of theatre finances can be gleaned from the income and expenditure of Daly’s in London. In the years before the First World War, Edwardes would spend an average of £1500 a week on the salaries of those performing on stage, and £1600 for some 200 other staff.Footnote ³⁹ These included clerks, scene shifters, lighting technicians, prompters, dressers, a wardrobe mistress, a wig maker (Willie Clarkson), a commissionaire (Mr Robinson held this position for 35 years), cleaners (both for the theatre and for costumes), programme sellers, and, importantly, a rat catcher. There were additional expenses relating to rent and taxes, and there was greater expenditure on scenery and costumes in London than in Vienna. The Daly’s orchestra was reputed to be ‘one of the most expensive in Europe’,Footnote ⁴⁰ even if Lehár was disappointed to find 28 players for The Merry Widow, when he had asked for 34 (the Daly’s orchestra later grew to 40 strong).Footnote ⁴¹ If the rise in value of the pound between 1909 and 2017 is assessed alongside the rise in the RPI in the UK and the CPI in the USA, then the weekly spending on staff alone would be equivalent in 2017 to £148,600 ($193,000) for performers, and £158,500 ($205,000) for other staff.Footnote ⁴² A particular problem in financing operetta productions is that they are subject to the ‘law of Baumol’ because they stand apart from the normal rules of labour productivity: it is not easy for a manager to engage fewer performers than the operetta requires, and performers are not in a position to become more efficient and productive as the weeks pass.Footnote ⁴³

The costs of production presented no difficulty if the theatre enjoyed a runaway success. The Merry Widow, for example, played for two years at Daly’s, and was seen by approximately 1,167,000 people, which brought in box office receipts in excess of £1 million (£99 m and $128 m in 2017).Footnote ⁴⁴ On 31 January 1909, a dinner was held at the Hotel Cecil to celebrate its achievement. Forbes-Winslow had no doubt that, eventually, the gross receipts ‘ran into many millions sterling’.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, profits such as these were the exception. Edwardes regarded box office returns of £2000 a week as ‘moderately good business’, although an income at this level meant that production expenses could not be covered for weeks.Footnote ⁴⁶ He summed up his opinion of the theatre business as follows:

It might be added that Edwardes sent companies to both North and South America, and to India, too.Footnote ⁴⁸ For a long time, The Merry Widow was bringing in £2000 a week in the provinces,Footnote ⁴⁹ where touring companies avoided the huge expenses of the capital.

This brief account of finances is enough to reveal the complexity of the dealings in which Edwardes was involved, although he did not have to cope entirely on his own. Fred King was his assistant manager, and, for many years, his main business assistant at Daly’s was Emilie Reid, who, after he died, was hired by Alfred Butt for Drury Lane. The estate debt after Edwardes’s death in October 1915 was £80,000, but the profits generated by the success of The Maid of the Mountains during its three-year run (1917–20) paid that off comfortably.Footnote ⁵⁰

Edwardes’s successors at Daly’s were James White, who became chairman of directors, and Robert Evett, who took over as managing director. Evett went to Berlin looking for something to produce and was recommended to see Straus’s Der letzte Walzer. He recognized the attraction of the music but realized ‘certain revisions would have to be made in order to bring it into line with British requirements’.Footnote ⁵¹ It is significant that he chooses the word ‘requirements’ and not ‘taste’, thus implying practicalities rather than aesthetic sensibilities. He discovered that this operetta had been bought by an American syndicate for film adaptation (silent film at this time).Footnote ⁵² He contacted them and secured the rights to produce it in London in December 1922. Next on his itinerary was Vienna, but, the evening before his departure, Jean Gilbert arrived at his hotel and played him selections from his new operetta Die Frau im Hermelin, which became The Lady of the Rose in London, ten months before the production of The Last Waltz. When Evett reached Vienna, he went to see Das Dreimäderlhaus, but he considered that ‘the interest was too local’ to warrant his purchasing it for the London stage.Footnote ⁵³ He acknowledged later that, as Lilac Time, it was a great success, but he put that down to William Boosey’s having asked George Clutsam to re-arrange the music.

In 1922, to Evett’s shock, White bought Daly’s at a price rumoured to be over £200,000.Footnote ⁵⁴ Unfortunately, the annual costs of this theatre in the 1920s were running at a similar figure.Footnote ⁵⁵ White came from a poor background in Rochdale but his business acumen had made him wealthy. He was no stage director, even if he sometimes sat in the stalls at rehearsals and passed comments. José Collins remarks that there was as much knowledge of the theatre in Evett’s little toe ‘as there was in the whole of Jimmy White’s anatomy’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Evett soon left Daly’s and began producing at the Gaiety. White decided to revive The Merry Widow in 1923 and was delighted to see it achieve a run of 238 performances. That success encouraged comedian George Graves to promote another revival at the Lyceum a year later.Footnote ⁵⁷ At first, the hot summer threatened the success of the Lyceum revival, which opened at the end of May, but the good weather did not continue. Sunshine must be considered a negative factor for summer productions indoors (it badly affected theatre attendance in the West End in 1925), although, conversely, it is vital to the success of open-air stage performances. Like Edwardes, White was a gambler, but one who took one too many risks. On 29 June 1927, he committed suicide, leaving a note confessing, ‘I have been guilty of the folly of gambling, and the price has to be paid’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Although sympathetic to his fate, Graves was scornful about White. The actor-manager was in decline in the 1920s and, although London’s leading theatre impresarios, such as Alfred Butt, had been involved with theatres for many years, there were others attracted to theatre simply as a commercial business opportunity.Footnote ⁵⁹ Graves clearly thought White was only interested in personal profit, and declared that White was ‘about as competent to run a theatre in succession to George Edwardes’ as he himself would be deputizing for Albert Einstein in a BBC talk ‘on the velocity of light-waves’.Footnote ⁶⁰ On the other hand, according to Graves, Solly Joel the diamond millionaire who bought Drury Lane Theatre showed an interest that ‘was never purely financial’.Footnote ⁶¹ Another person who entered the theatre business primarily as a financial backer of productions – but was generally liked – was William Gaunt.Footnote ⁶² He owned several West End theatres in the 1920s, including the Gaiety.

The next manager of Daly’s was Harry Welchman, who had performed many leading roles in operettas. Two months after taking up his post in early 1929, he resumed his role as Colonel Belovar in a revival of The Lady of the Rose, advertised as the work of Harry Welchman Productions Ltd. He was disappointed to find that he was unable to make the theatre profitable and concluded that, with a seating capacity of around 1225, it was too small to compete with the larger cinemas and their cheaper seats.Footnote ⁶³ There had been a boom in cinema building during the 1920s: the number of cinemas controlled by circuit groups (such as Associated British Cinemas and Gaumont) was 862 in 1927, 1382 in 1932, and 2252 in 1938.Footnote ⁶⁴ George Grossmith commented on the competition theatre faced in 1929:

Worse was to come because, unlike theatres, cinemas began opening on Sundays in the 1930s. The cast of a West End production would normally have given a matinee performance as well as an evening performance on Saturday, so a day of recuperation was needed.

Theatres in the Great Depression

South African millionaire Isidore W. Schlesinger bought Daly’s for a sum in excess of £230,000 in June 1929, but financial misery was around the corner. The London Stock Exchange crashed on 20 September, and on 29 October came the Wall Street Crash. This was the twentieth century’s worst international financial crisis, and the following Great Depression affected cities in the USA, Western Europe, and further afield until 1934. The flow of international capital was reduced, and a deflationary spiral began, leading to a decline in industrial production and a rapid rise in unemployment. As the world economy took a downward turn, exports and investment in new projects became difficult and consumers were worried about spending money.

In Vienna and Berlin, the situation was worse than in the war years, when Die Csárdásfürstin, Die Rose von Stambul, and Das Dreimäderlhaus all played to full houses.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the early 1930s, when audience numbers could not be relied on, Berlin’s biggest theatrical entrepreneurs, the Rotter brothers, devised various marketing tricks to lure people into theatres, such as leaving half-price vouchers in cigarette shops, hairdressers, and bars.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Charell revues at the city’s largest theatre, the Großes Schauspielhaus, helped to stem the decline of theatre attendance at the turn of the decade. Theatres in Vienna were seeing profits fall in the late 1920s, and with harsh consequences: in 1929, the Carltheater, second place only to the Theater an der Wien for operetta productions, was the first to close its doors. Two years later, the Johann-Strauß-Theater became the Scala Cinema, although it was occasionally used for theatrical performances. The Theater an der Wien was not doing well, either, and faced bankruptcy in 1935 (under Hubert Marischka’s management). It became, for most of the time, a cinema in 1936, but closed down completely in 1938 just before the Anschluss. In 1939, operetta was found only at the Raimund-Theater and, occasionally, the Volksoper.

Adding to the problems brought on by the Depression in the USA, was the Eighteenth Amendment, passed in January 1920, which made it illegal to sell alcoholic drinks or produce them for sale. Drinking them was not itself illegal, and the production of wine and cider (not beer) for consumption in the home was permitted. Bootlegging became common by 1925. In that year, Graves was invited to New York by the Shuberts, who wanted him to take the comedy role in The Student Prince. Having last been there in 1907, he noticed how much the city had changed following Prohibition. Racketeers and gangsters appeared to be undermining municipal, state, and federal politics, and the welcoming hospitality he was given was ‘mixed up with furtive mumblings about bootleggers and speakeasies’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1930, when Oscar Straus was in Hollywood, he was one of many hiding bootleg liquor in an office cupboard.Footnote ⁶⁹ Prohibition persisted until December 1933.

Burns Mantle described the 1928–29 season as one of the worst within living memory, and managers and producers (now lacking the presence of the astute Henry Savage, who had died during the previous season) were unsure what direction to take.Footnote ⁷⁰ The chief cause was the threat of competition from film ‘talkies’ but there were also concerns about theatre immorality and anxiety about patrons and speculators. Fear of the talkies subsided somewhat in the next season, when it was discovered that successful plays could be resold to Hollywood ‘at extravagant figures’.Footnote ⁷¹ Nevertheless. theatre profits were not what they once were, and there was a drop in productions. The Shuberts mounted revivals of operettas by Victor Herbert, who had died in 1924. This was the season before the economic Depression; in that next season, takings fell steeply and two theatres known for operetta, the Casino and the Knickerbocker, were both demolished in 1930. Financial misery continued in 1931–32, which Mantle judged ‘commercially, the worst year the theatre has suffered in its recent history’.Footnote ⁷² The dust that followed in the wake of the Wall Street Crash was settling, however, and the rivalry between Erlanger and the Shuberts was attenuated by the newly organized American Theatre Society and the mutual protection offered by the combined booking office.

Erlanger, who had controlled over 700 theatres at the height of his power, was suffering badly and saw the necessity of ending his rivalry with the Shuberts by agreeing to combine subscription audiences and work amicably together in the American Theatre Society. Unfortunately, he died in 1930 before witnessing much progress, but an important subsequent change was an end to conflict and unfair competition when sending plays on tour, which sometimes left audiences facing the clash of a successful New York revue and a well-received musical comedy on the same evening.Footnote ⁷³ Broadway business began to rally in 1932–33, although Mantle claimed it was surviving on ‘half rations’, because only half the theatres were open, and revivals represented nearly a third of the total number of productions.Footnote ⁷⁴

On West 44th Street, Erlanger’s Theatre had been lost in the Depression and was now the St James Theatre. Mantle sums up the effects of the Depression on Broadway:

The gloom had not abated when the new season began in August 1933, but, remarkably, in October, the theatre began to recover. Mantle offers three reasons: first, there was curiosity on the part of a younger public brought up on the movies and eager for a change; second, actors that had deserted the theatre for Hollywood were returning to the stage; and, third, audience enthusiasm was stimulated by the quality of some of the early-season plays.Footnote ⁷⁶ Mantle concedes that the repeal of laws prohibiting alcohol consumption may have had an effect on theatre attendance but adds that New York ‘was never exactly athirst in the driest days of prohibition’.Footnote ⁷⁷ What is more, the introduction of bars into the theatres was consistently refused by ‘liquor boards’. During 1934–35, the Depression was abating, and large numbers of motion picture talent scouts flocked to the Broadway theatres. Some film producers sponsored productions.Footnote ⁷⁸ The biggest single operetta success of the season was The Great Waltz (Walzer aus Wien), the first theatrical enterprise of the Rockefellers at the large Center Theatre. Alan Jay Lerner was clearly premature in dating the end of operetta to ‘the last days of the twenties’.Footnote ⁷⁹

At the end of the 1935–36 season, which featured no premieres of operettas from the German stage, Hollywood producers took umbrage at the provisions in a new contract made between play producers and the new Dramatists’ Guild-League of New York Theatre. It divided the money paid for rights to a play into 60 per cent for the author and 40 per cent for the producer, and, even if a film producer had financed the play, the film rights were still to be offered on the open market.Footnote ⁸⁰ This was the first season in which the WPA (Works Progress Administration) sponsored the Federal Theatre Project, allocating government funding to unemployed artists, writers, and directors, in recognition of the impact of the economic crisis. The vision was the establishment of a national theatre, but that was never realized. In the next Broadway season, there was an inevitable reduction in interest from Hollywood because of the new contractual conditions. However, Warner Brothers were obliged under the terms of an old contract, to help finance, together with the Rockefellers, the extravagant production of Ralph Benatzky’s White Horse Inn at the Center Theatre in October 1936.Footnote ⁸¹ Any worries must have soon dissipated when the box office recorded a second-night gross of $7,240.Footnote ⁸²

In London, Daly’s financial difficulties became evident in 1932, when, in a desperate attempt to balance the books, it put on a non-stop variety season and, at the end of the year, a pantomime. The curtain came down for last time at Daly’s on 25 September 1937, and on that sad occasion there was no celebration, just a simple tribute paid by the manager Cecil Paget. The last operetta to be performed there had been Offenbach’s The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein (from the end of April to the middle of June). The last production of all was of Emmet Lavery’s play The First Legion. The theatre was bought by Warner Brothers for some £250,000,Footnote ⁸³ and demolished in order to build a cinema.Footnote ⁸⁴

Selecting a Suitable Operetta for Production

In 1904, the impresario Oswald Stoll employed renowned theatre architect Frank Matcham to build the London Coliseum Theatre of Varieties. It was an opulent free baroque design with lavish interiors and a huge auditorium. Stoll owned a chain of variety theatres but always wanted this one to be special. It was renovated and renamed simply the Coliseum Theatre in 1931, and Stoll sought a spectacular show for the reopening. With a seating capacity of nearly 2500, it was London’s second largest theatre (Drury Lane had just over 2500 at this time), so he looked at what was on offer at Berlin’s Großes Schauspielhaus, which held an audience of over 3000. The size of these theatres meant that they were able to ward off competition from large cinemas, provided they offered something exciting. Erik Charell’s production of Im weißen Rössl, with music by Benatzky, Stolz, and others, had been a runaway success, and so, despite the gloomy economic climate, Stoll decided to bring it to London and to hire Charell to direct it personally.Footnote ⁸⁵ Under the title White Horse Inn, it was the most elaborate production ever seen on the West End stage and cost Stoll around £50,000.Footnote ⁸⁶ Nevertheless, once the first reviews appeared, there were bookings for £60,000 worth of seats.Footnote ⁸⁷ The Play Pictorial describes the stage spectacle:

Stoll wanted the production at the Coliseum to resemble closely that at the Großes Schauspielhaus, even to the extent of having scenery overlap into the auditorium.

Although the spectacle of White Horse Inn was admired, one critic described the music offhandedly as having ‘a jolly ring, moving generally to the hearty thumping of beer mugs on tables’.Footnote ⁹⁰

The programme for the production advertises the availability of Edison Bell records of the most popular items, at one shilling and sixpence each, and The Play Pictorial issue devoted to White Horse Inn contains an advertisement for Columbia records featuring Jack Payne and His BBC Dance Orchestra (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1

Advertisement for records of music from White Horse Inn in The Play Pictorial, May 1931.

Operetta was not just a theatrical medium, it was intermedial, and records were an important and profitable media platform. The subject of operetta and intermediality is taken up in Chapter 6. Technology, which played an important role in this production, especially in stage lighting, is discussed in Chapter 7.

Theatre Tickets

By adding new theatres to his business, Stoll was operating in a manner known as horizontal integration. Ticket agent Keith Prowse adopted a similar strategy, by opening new branches.Footnote ⁹¹ Keith Prowse also moved into related businesses (vertical integration). The firm had traded in sheet music and musical instruments in the previous century, but in the 1920s they were selling records and gramophones, and supplying bands and concert parties for various social functions.Footnote ⁹² When, the advertisement shown in Figure 3.2 appeared, the Keith Prowse ticket agency had become the largest in London, with dozens of branches, some of them located in hotels (such as the Grosvenor, Claridge’s, and the Savoy). Their strapline was: ‘YOU want Best Seats. WE have them’.

Figure 3.2

Advertisement from the programme to the Coliseum production of White Horse Inn, 1931.

The cost of tickets is not given in Figure 3.2, but a year later for Casanova, Charell’s next production at the Coliseum, prices were six shillings to fifteen shillings for reserved seats (approximately £20/$28, and £49/$64 in 2017) and two shillings and sixpence for unreserved (approximately £8/$13 in 2017).Footnote ⁹³ Matinee performances had slightly cheaper reserved seats (four shillings to twelve shillings and sixpence).Footnote ⁹⁴ In February 2017, ticket prices in the stalls and dress circle at the London Coliseum for The Pirates of Penzance ranged from £20 to £105 ($25 to $132 at that month’s exchange rate), plus a booking charge per ticket of £1.50. It is evident that, in relative terms, seats at the Coliseum for an operetta performance were more expensive in 2017 than in 1932.

Ticket speculators were not the problem in the West End that they were on Broadway. Arthur Hammerstein blamed the premature closure of Kálmán’s Golden Dawn in 1928 on speculators and ticket touts, and accused some agencies of deliberately diverting patrons from this production as a reprisal for his activity against various brokers.Footnote ⁹⁵ The 1930–31 season witnessed a sustained attack on their practices when the League of New York Theatres was created. This body aimed to control sales via accredited brokers, who were not permitted to charge more than 75 cents above the ticket price for their service. The non-accredited brokers claimed their trade was perfectly legitimate and fought back with an injunction against the League. The battle ended when the Postal Telegraph Company offered to sell tickets at no more than a 50-cents mark-up at all its branches (which numbered around 160). The League immediately accepted.Footnote ⁹⁶

Music Publishers

Businesses involved with theatre were never single-mindedly focused on the stage. The Savoy was famed not only as a theatre but also as a hotel and restaurant. Music publishers knew the value of investing in theatres, since these were places in which their wares were promoted, and they were keen to be involved in the purchasing of rights. In London, Chappell, a major publisher of operetta with branches in New York, Toronto, and Melbourne, held shares in both the Gaiety and the Adelphi, and later shared a half-lease of the Lyric and a part-lease of the Savoy.Footnote ⁹⁷ Chappell published the music of the two biggest West End operetta successes, The Merry Widow and Lilac Time, and it was Chappell’s managing director, William Boosey, who bought the rights to the latter (Das Dreimäderlhaus) in Vienna and produced at the Lyric in partnership with Alfred Butt. He was unaware that another English-language version was already being performed on Broadway as Blossom Time.Footnote ⁹⁸ In New York, the Shuberts were involved with two companies publishing sheet music.Footnote ⁹⁹

The world of publishing was cosmopolitan, and an intermingling of personnel among the various houses was common. The brothers Max and Louis Dreyfus revived New York’s ailing firm of T. B. Harms in the early twentieth century and struck a partnership deal with London’s Francis, Day, and Hunter in 1908. Harms parted with Francis, Day, and Hunter in 1920 because Chappell did a deal with Louis and Max that allowed them to take over Chappell in New York, in return for Chappell’s taking over the Harms agency in London. Francis, Day, and Hunter then did a deal with Leo Feist in New York. Louis Dreyfus later became Managing Director of Chappell in London, while his brother Max took charge of Chappell in New York, which had Walter Eastman as Managing Director. Eastman then moved to London to take up the same position at Ascherberg, Hopwood & Crew.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The first manager of Chappell in New York (in 1891) had been George Maxwell, who went on to work for Ricordi in the USA. Chappell in New York had sufficient autonomy to pay $40,000 for the English rights to Lehár’s Eva in 1911.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Copyright law facilitated arrangements between publishers, so that, for example, Die Dollarprinzessin was available in Vienna from Karczag, in Berlin from Harmonie, and in English versions from Ascherberg, Hopwood & Crew in London, and Harms in New York. The tightening of copyright law and the tougher penalties for infringement had dealt a blow to piracy. Publishers no longer felt the need to introduce heavily discounted editions to combat piracy, although that policy had tended to affect single songs, rather than vocal scores. In fact, the price of vocal scores remained stable for many years: from 1910–30 the typical cost would be 6 shillings (or 8 shillings, cloth bound) in the UK and $2 (or $2.50, cloth bound) in the USA. Individual songs were usually two shillings in the UK and sixty cents in the USA. Covers were generally pictorial, being designed to catch the eye of the customer (Figure 3.3). There were lots of arrangements of operetta for other media platforms, recital rooms, dance halls, park bandstands, and so forth (see Chapter 6).

Figure 3.3

Front cover of the vocal score of The Count of Luxembourg, published in 1911.

by Chappell’s New York branch, 41 East 34th Street, at a price of $2

Theatre and Fashion

An easily forgotten attraction of operetta is costume, which fed into fashion and consumerism on the High Street. Leading fashion designers were involved with operetta, from Lucile and The Merry Widow in 1907, to Norman Hartnell and Paul Abraham’s Viktoria and Her Hussar in 1931. One of the most admired costume designers of the early twentieth century was Attilio Comelli. Alongside his work as house designer of the Royal Opera House from the late 1880s to the early 1920s, he was responsible for a number of costumes for operettas at Daly’s Theatre.Footnote ¹⁰²

Lucile acknowledged that the hat she created for Lily Elsie to wear in the London production of The Merry Widow ‘brought in a fashion which carried the name of “Lucile” … all over Europe and the States’ (Figure 3.4).Footnote ¹⁰³ The ‘Merry Widow’ hat kept increasing in width and, by Spring 1908, there were versions available with spans of three feet or more.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Lucile was a prominent fashion designer, whose formal name in London society was Lady Duff Gordon. She claimed to have invented the fashion show with the ‘mannequin parades’ held at her London shop.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Her career was nearly cut short when she booked a trip on the Titanic in April 1912, but she was fortunate to be one of the survivors, and was back in October designing Shirley Kellogg’s dresses for Kálmán’s The Blue House at the London Hippodrome.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Figure 3.4

Lily Elsie as Sonia, wearing the ‘Merry Widow’ hat, from The Play Pictorial, vol. 10, no. 61 (Sep. 1907).

The stage acted as a shop window for costume design. The Times commented that Lily Elsie, as the merry widow, made ‘an unusually beautiful picture in Parisian and Marsovian dresses’,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ and, regarding The Count of Luxembourg at Daly’s, informed readers that the ‘accessories in dresses and wearers of dresses were as sumptuous as ever’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In an age of conspicuous consumption, the spectacle of glamorous costume was an enticement to the purchase of similar garments that would function as a display of status.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Play Pictorial was sure to carry photographs of the costumes worn. It gave a detailed description of the Lily Elsie’s gown as the bride, hidden from the Count of Luxembourg’s view by a screen (see Figure 3.5):

The cost of such gowns is rarely mentioned but high prices were involved. José Collins documented that the white gown she wore in the second act of Sybil (1921) was designed by Reville and cost £1000 (the equivalent commodity value of around £42,000 or $54,000 in 2017). It was covered in feathers, each set with an emerald.Footnote ¹¹¹

Figure 3.5

Bertram Wallace as the Count and Lily Elsie dressed as the screened bride in a scene from Lehár’s The Count of Luxembourg, from the front cover of The Play Pictorial, vol. 18, no. 108 (Aug. 1911).

Fashion was not of interest only to women. Men began taking notice when, in musical comedies of the 1890s, smart suits replaced the formerly eccentric clothes given to male characters. George Grossmith Jr, who performed in musical comedy and operetta before becoming a producer, acquired a reputation as ‘an acknowledged fashion leader’.Footnote ¹¹² Sometimes a cynical eyebrow was raised at costumes: of the lavish production of A Waltz Dream, the Times reviewer declared, ‘At no Court in the world, least of all that of a German prince, do they wear so many spangles’.Footnote ¹¹³

Costume continued to be an attraction in the 1930s, when Theodor Adorno remarked that the fashionable dresses he saw around him in Frankfurt appeared to have been stolen from operettas.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In London, the dresses designed by Professor Ernst Stein for White Horse Inn at the Coliseum created a sensation.Footnote ¹¹⁵ A eulogy appeared on The Times ‘London Fashions’ page:

It was not only the frocks and suits that caught the eye but also hats and shoes. Gamba advertised that their shop on Shaftesbury Avenue sold the sandal shoes supplied for the production of White Horse Inn.Footnote ¹¹⁷ H. & M. Rayne of Charing Cross Road had boasted back in 1907 that they supplied shoes to the principal theatres of London. They also knew the value of an endorsement from a star (Figure 3.6). Women operetta stars were often called upon, for an appropriate fee, to appear in advertisements endorsing a variety of commodities related to the body, from corsets to cosmetics.

Figure 3.6

Advertisement for Rayne shoes, The Play Pictorial, vol. 10, no. 61 (Sep. 1907).

In New York, the Shuberts ran an in-house design company for their stage costumes, and made frequent use of a dozen designers, among whom Cora MacGeachy and Homer B. Conant were most prominent.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This side of the Shuberts’ interests was picked up by the reviewer of Fall’s The Rose of Stamboul in 1922:

Costume was not only a matter for the stage. The foyers and auditoriums of West End and Broadway theatres were spaces where members of an audience could flaunt their fashionable dress and social standing. As Thorstein Veblen remarked in his Theory of the Leisure Class, money spent on clothes has an advantage over other methods of expenditure for display, in that ‘our apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of our pecuniary standing to all observers at the first glance’.Footnote ¹²⁰

Merchandizing

Operetta could be used to promote sales of various goods by coordinating its production with media advertising and other sales strategies that fall under the general classification of merchandizing. Stars provided many opportunities for this practice, for example, as images on picture postcards, cigarette cards, and sheet music title-page lithography. The manufacture and marketing of operetta is linked in Adorno’s mind with modern consumerism, and he likened the success of Die lustige Witwe to that of the new department stores.Footnote ¹²¹ In the UK, as in the USA, the success of this operetta led to merchandizing on a huge scale, including ‘Merry Widow’ hats (of broad width), chocolates, beef steaks, a ‘Merry Widow’ sauce, and even a corset.Footnote ¹²² A cartoon in The Evening American satirizes the craze for products carrying the ‘Merry Widow’ brand (Figure 3.7). The impact of the ‘Merry Widow’ brand was seen to extend beyond the world of merchandizing, when Sonia, the title character’s name in the English version, became popular for baby girls.Footnote ¹²³

Figure 3.7

The Merry Widow, cartoon by T. E. Powers, 1908, published in The Evening American, 1909.

Stage Photography and Theatre Periodicals

Foulsham and Banfield, the most admired firm of stage photographers in London, made at least £600 out of press pictures of The Merry Widow.Footnote ¹²⁴ They also launched the craze for picture postcards of star performers. In the early twentieth century, the market for postcards bearing a photograph of a celebrity grew enormously. Phyllis Dare claims to have signed between 75,000 to 100,000 picture postcards during 1904–7, years in which she was still in her teens (Figure 3.8).Footnote ¹²⁵ In New York, two of the most frequent firms involved in stage photography during this period were the White studio, which developed the flash pan and flare for this kind of work, and the Vandamm organization.Footnote ¹²⁶ Wide-range shots were generally taken at dress rehearsal.Footnote ¹²⁷

Figure 3.8

Picture postcard of Phyllis Dare, who took the role of Gonda van der Loo in Leo Fall’s The Girl in the Train, Vaudeville Theatre, 1910.

One of the ‘Celebrities of the Stage’ series by Raphael Tuck & Sons.

Photographs were also a prominent feature of the theatre periodicals, such as The Play Pictorial and Theatre World in London, and Theatre Magazine and Dramatic Mirror in New York. Theatre magazines sold in large numbers, especially if there was a production gaining special attention. For the issue of Play Pictorial concentrating on The Count of Luxembourg, 50,000 copies were ordered from the printer, as well as 1000 additional copies of the coloured cover illustration.Footnote ¹²⁸ There was also a market for books about the lives of theatre stars. Phyllis Dare wrote her autobiographical From School to Stage (with the assistance of Bernard Parsons) at the remarkably young age of 17. The term ‘stars’ was being used regularly in the first decade of the century to describe well-known and admired performers. At this time, it was often enclosed in quotation marks, indicating its colloquial usage.Footnote ¹²⁹

Agencies, Associations, and Entrepreneurs

A variety of agents was involved in the promotion of operetta. There were advertising agents, such as the Theatrical and General Advertising Company, which, by the 1930s, became the sole agent for advertising in the programmes of the major West End theatres (with the exception of the Savoy). There were publishers acting as agents for other publishers: Ascherberg, Hopwood & Crew, for example, relied on the agency of Chappell for the sale and distribution of their publications in Australia and New Zealand. Most importantly, there were entrepreneurial agents involved in the selling of rights. After marrying the widow of Felix Bloch, publisher and manager of a Berlin theatrical agency, Adolf Sliwinski [Śliwiński] built an international reputation by handling the rights to Die lustige Witwe and many other operettas. William Boosey, who, as previously mentioned, was Chappell’s managing director, pressed George Edwardes to secure the English rights to The Merry Widow from Sliwinski, after having persuaded Edwardes to go with him to Vienna to hear this operetta.Footnote ¹³⁰ The English version was then published by Chappell. The Bloch agency, which also had Leo Fall and Oscar Straus on its list, dominated the German operetta market, and dealt with English rights through its London office. There was a little competition from others, such as Karczag in Vienna. Lehár joined the latter after falling out with Felix Bloch, but when Karczag went into liquidation in 1935, he founded his own press, Glocken Verlag. It was an act of vertical integration that allowed him to take control of both the production and distribution of his music. Glocken Verlag later became affiliated to Josef Weinberger’s publishing house.

In Berlin, Fritz and Alfred Rotter were among the most important contacts for foreign entrepreneurs after the death of Sliwinski in 1916.Footnote ¹³¹ The Rotter brothers, who ran the Metropol Theater, were always good at spotting a potential success. After the enthusiastic reception of Abraham’s Viktoria und ihr Husar at the July 1930 operetta festival in Leipzig, they lost no time in producing it at the Metropol. Unfortunately, they became a casualty of the Great Depression, and their theatre empire ended in bankruptcy. An arrest warrant was issued against them on 22 January 1933.Footnote ¹³² The Rotters took off for Liechtenstein, but soon found, being Jewish, they had not escaped Nazi persecution.Footnote ¹³³ Alfred Rotter and his wife died in a car crash in highly suspicious circumstances while being pursued in the mountains of Liechtenstein in April 1933.

The Theatrical Syndicate was formed in New York in 1896 by Abraham Erlanger, Marc Klaw, Charles Frohman, and Al Hayman to centralize the booking system, but then began to control theatres by dictating terms. In 1909 the Theatre Managers’ Association was founded at Erlanger’s New Amsterdam Theatre.Footnote ¹³⁴ Unsurprisingly, Erlanger was chosen President. Some important figures, such as Henry W. Savage, President of the National Association of Producing Managers, began to rebel against Erlanger’s dominance, and irritation grew on the part of Sam Shubert (a committee member of the Theatre Managers’ Association).Footnote ¹³⁵ In 1919, Klaw sold his theatre interests to the Shuberts, after splitting with Erlanger, and this forced the latter to join the Shubert controlled United Booking Office.Footnote ¹³⁶

Charles Frohman’s theatrical entrepreneurship was not limited to the USA; he was a theatre manager in London, having leased the Duke of York’s Theatre in 1897. A few years later, he was involved with the building of the Aldwych and Hicks’s Theatres, both for Seymour Hicks. The latter said of him that nobody ever produced plays ‘with so little thought of the financial side of their success’.Footnote ¹³⁷ When visiting London, Charles Frohman travelled on the Lusitania, a luxury ocean liner, with wireless telegraph and electric lighting, launched by Cunard in 1906 as part of an effort to challenge the German dominance of transatlantic travel. It had a speed of 29 miles per hour (25 knots) – four miles an hour faster than the SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. It made a total of 202 transatlantic crossings before being sunk by a torpedo from a German submarine on 7 May 1915, killing 1198 passengers and crew. Frohman was among those who died.

In the early 1930s, impresario Stanley H. Scott specialized in the import of German stage entertainments into the West End. It was Scott who first brought Tauber to the UK, although he was relatively inexperienced in theatrical production at that time. Tauber was to appear in the West End premiere of The Land of Smiles, and this helped Scott win the consent of George Grossmith, general manager of Drury Lane, to produce the operetta there in May 1931. The theatre had not been faring too well since producing the Broadway successes Rose-Marie and The Desert Song. It was a time of economic depression, and the previous manager, Alfred Butt,Footnote ¹³⁸ had left earlier in 1931. Unfortunately, the production of The Land of Smiles was blighted by Tauber’s recurring throat problems. Scott had more success with Maschewitz and Mackeben’s revision of Millöcker’s Gräfin Dubarry, which he brought to His Majesty’s Theatre as The Dubarry the following year. Yet, once again, its star performer, Anny Ahlers, was the cause of its closing before time. Performers form a significant part of the subject matter of Chapter 4, and both Tauber’s throat trouble and the death of Ahlers are discussed there. In addition, the activities of stage directors and stage designers receive attention. A little overlap with the present chapter is inevitable, however, given that some entrepreneurs and managers also took part in directing.Footnote ¹³⁹

Producer Directors

George Edwardes combined the skills of artistic director and impresario. Although he appointed Pat Malone (always billed as J. A. E. Malone) stage director at Daly’s and, from 1909, asked Edward Royce to direct at times (especially the No. 1 Touring Company), Edwardes remained involved in all aspects of production, and everything took place under his supervision.Footnote ¹ He was born (without the second ‘e’ in his family name) in Clee, near Grimsby, the son of a customs officer, and first became interested in theatre while looking after a touring company organized by a cousin.Footnote ² His first London job was as acting manager for D’Oyly Carte at the Opera Comique in 1875. In the 1890s he was credited with the invention of musical comedy, which mixed styles from both operetta and music hall and had romantic, often contemporary, plots.Footnote ³ He experimented first at the Prince of Wales Theatre, before trying out this new type of show at the Gaiety. He enjoyed a breakthrough success there during 1894–96 with Ivan Caryll’s musical comedy The Shop Girl.Footnote ⁴ By the time the new Gaiety opened in 1903, Edwardes’s reputation as an entrepreneur and producer was without equal.

In 1894, he took over management of Daly’s Theatre, and turned it into a major West End attraction. Long runs were a sign of his accomplishment: between 1898 and 1913 there were only eleven productions at Daly’s. Yet, though Edwardes was regarded as having a keen aptitude for spotting a hit show, he was not infallible. Far from foreseeing the success of The Merry Widow, he ‘had little faith in its drawing power’, and, indeed, presented it only as ‘a stopgap’.Footnote ⁵ A hitch in negotiations had prevented him from producing Fall’s The Dollar Princess instead. An indication that Edwardes thought it risky was that he anticipated no more than a six-week run, and asked inventive scene designer Joseph Harker to adapt a set for Act 2 that had been used in the previous Daly’s production, Hugo Felix’s The Merveilleuses.Footnote ⁶ Expecting a short run, Edwardes had commissioned a piece from Leslie Stuart (Havana) to follow, and had to stage it at the Gaiety instead.Footnote ⁷ Edwardes knew Lehár’s operetta had faced a mixed reception in Vienna (part enthusiastic, part critical), but it seemed as if a change in public taste was in the air. He had responded to a previous change in public taste in the 1890s by developing musical comedy. In the first decade of the twentieth century, he was again correct in sensing the winds of change. The success of The Merry Widow in London was hailed by MacQueen-Pope as inaugurating ‘a new era in musical plays’.Footnote ⁸

Edwardes took risks with his productions, as he did in his gambling at the racetrack. André Messager’s Véronique had been very successful in the West End in 1904, and it encouraged him to invest more money in the production of foreign operetta by bringing the same composer’s The Little Michus (Les P’tites Michu) to Daly’s the following year. He began travelling to continental Europe regularly, on the lookout for something new and exciting. He took interest in the stage works of Jean Gilbert produced in Berlin during 1910–11, while that composer was in residence at the Adolph-Ernst-Theater.Footnote ⁹ In 1914, Edwardes had the misfortune of being in Germany when war broke out and found himself interned for a month. It damaged his already ailing health and he died on 4 October 1915, a few days before his sixtieth birthday. Although this occurred during the First World War, Lehár managed to send a wreath to his funeral. Edwardes was remarkable for being strong willed and astute in his judgement, but his attitude was not that of the autocrat. He would, in the end, stand by his own individual opinion, but ‘was eager to elicit criticism from all and sundry’, including general theatre staff.Footnote ¹⁰ He was widely admired for his skills in both managing and producing.

Robert Courtneidge, a contemporary of Edwardes, was another producer director in London, and he exercised additional skill as an actor manager. He was born in Glasgow, but his father’s death a month later made it necessary to move with his mother and sister to Edinburgh, where his mother had found employment in a factory. She earned three shillings and sixpence a week, and the family were so poor they slept on straw.Footnote ¹² Courtneidge’s first job, at 13, was as messenger boy for a stationer’s, and it was there that he met Frank Laubach, who was from a German family of musicians. Courtneidge was soon borrowing books from a circulating library kept by Frank’s sisters.Footnote ¹³ Frank was engaged to play in the orchestra of the newly rebuilt Theatre Royal, and this was how Courtneidge became familiar with the pleasures of theatrical entertainment.Footnote ¹⁴ Courtneidge was determined to become an actor. He moved to Manchester and got a job as ‘super’ (caretaker) at the Prince’s Theatre.Footnote ¹⁵ He then began to act in minor roles at various theatres, public halls, and even public houses. He continued as an actor for twenty years. At the close of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Courtneidge gained experience of production and management at Manchester’s Prince’s Theatre. It was there he made the acquaintance of George Edwardes, who attended its annual pantomimes. Edwardes offered him the opportunity of producing Ivan Caryll’s comic opera The Duchess of Dantzic at the Lyric, London, in 1903. Courtneidge then leased the Shaftesbury and spent £12,000 reconstructing the auditorium.Footnote ¹⁶ He went on to produce and direct Fall’s Princess Caprice (Der liebe Augustin) and Gilbert’s Cinema Star there.

Stage Directors

A stage director may appear in the programme as ‘stage manager’ or ‘stage producer’, sometimes as ‘producer’, and sometimes following the phrase ‘staged by’. To add to the complication, a producer might share in some of the direction. J. J. Shubert, for example, was credited with supervising The Lady in Ermine (1922), while Charles Sinclair directed, and with being supervisor of Katja (1926), which Jesse C. Huffman directed. Jacob Shubert, always known as J. J., enjoyed stage directing and was sometimes named as sole director, as he was for Kálmán’s Her Soldier Boy (1916), Straus’s Naughty Riquette (1926), Kálmán’s Countess Maritza (1926) and Kollo’s Three Little Girls (1930). He also shared credits as a co-director, as he did with J. Harry Benrimo for The Girl from Brazil (Winterberg’s Die schöne Schwedin) in 1915, J. C. Huffman for My Lady’s Glove (Straus’s Die schöne Unbekannte) in 1917, and, after the war, with Fred G. Latham for Künneke’s operettas Caroline (Der Vetter aus Dingsda) in 1923, and The Love Song in 1925. Huffman and Benrimo were both experienced operetta directors. Huffman directed the Broadway premiere of Fall’s Lieber Augustin at the Casino in 1913, and he and Benrimo shared the direction of Oskar Nedbal’s The Peasant Girl (Polenblut) at 44th Street Theatre in 1916 before Benrimo went on to conduct Lehár’s Alone at Last that same year at the Shubert Theatre.

There were others who directed operetta frequently, but whose reputations have faded. One such is George Marion, who directed Broadway productions of The Merry Widow, The Gay Hussars (Kálmán’s Ein Herbstmanöver), The Love Cure (Eysler’s Künstlerblut), The Spring Maid (Reinhardt’s Die Sprudelfee), Gypsy Love, Modest Suzanne, The Rose Maid (Granichstaedten’s Bub oder Mädel?), The Woman Haters (Eysler’s Die Frauenfresser), The Purple Road (Reinhardt’s Napoleon und die Frauen), Sári (Kálmán’s Der Zigeunerprimás), and Maids of Athens (Lehár’s Das Fürstenkind). Marion’s prestige dwindled, perhaps, as a consequence of his bestowing on his son the same given name as himself. When George Marion, Jr achieved fame as a Hollywood screenwriter, he eclipsed his father’s achievements.

Some prominent directors of operetta in London have already been mentioned, such as J. A. E. Malone. Philip Michael Faraday, like J. J. Shubert, mixed producing and directing. He directed The Girl in the Taxi, Nightbirds, Love and Laughter, The Laughing Husband, and Mam’selle Tralala at the Lyric, 1912–14. After the war, Fred J. Blackman and Felix Edwardes directed several well-received operettas. At the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, William Abingdon directed The Land of Smiles and Wild Violets in 1932, and Ball at the Savoy the year after. The producer of the latter was none other than Oscar Hammerstein II, who had also written the book and lyrics of the English version. It is another indication of links between the West End and Broadway, even if this particular operetta was not given in New York.

Musical Directors

The careers of directors working in both London and New York exemplify the cultural exchange taking place. Stanislav Stange directed both the Broadway and West End productions of The Chocolate Soldier (for which he had written the English book and lyrics), and J. Harry Benrimo conducted Soldier Boy! in London. Musical directors, too, would sometimes appear in both cities. Frank Tours, who worked for six years at Daly’s, the Gaiety, and the Prince of Wales Theatre, moved to New York in 1912 to conduct at the New Amsterdam and the Casino; he then returned to the UK in 1920, but went back in 1934 to conduct The Great Waltz at the Center Theatre. Harold Vicars, who conducted half a dozen operettas on Broadway, was musical director for The Dollar Princess at Daly’s in London, where Merlin Morgan was the regular conductor for many years.

Those responsible for the musical direction and conducting of English versions of continental European operetta in London and New York were often involved in more than coaching singers and conducting. They were expected to make arrangements of the music when necessary and were often asked to compose songs for interpolation into the operetta, perhaps to showcase the talent of a certain member of the cast. In addition, a publisher might ask a musical director to make medley of tunes from the operetta that could be sold as sheet music. Not least of the demands on a conductor were those made by record companies, who were keen to release discs of successful shows. That might entail rehearsing with one or more new singers, if members of the cast were not available for the recording dates.

Some conductors went on to build substantial reputations. Max Steiner, who was to achieve fame as a film composer, was invited to London by Edwardes to conduct a performance of The Merry Widow in 1909. Steiner’s paternal grandfather had been the manager of the Theater an der Wien in the later nineteenth century, and Steiner gained professional experience of the theatre from the age of 15. In London, Steiner soon found himself employed as musical director for all Edward Moss’s theatres, which included the Adelphi and the Hippodrome.Footnote ¹⁷ When war broke out, he was interned as an enemy alien, but the Duke of Westminster obtained exit papers allowing him to travel to New York in December 1914. In the USA, he was to be found on Broadway in 1921 conducting Walter Kollo’s operetta Drei alte Schachteln, given as Phoebe of Quality Street.

There were many other musical directors who left less of a historical trace and, in certain cases, time seems to have drawn a thick veil over their life in the theatre. Little is known of Gustave Salzer, who conducted many operettas on Broadway, or of Oscar Radin, a frequent musical director for the Shuberts. Gaetano Merola, who founded San Francisco Opera in 1923, has received little recognition for his previous work as a Broadway operetta conductor. Musical directors tend to fall between the cracks in dictionaries and encyclopedias of the stage. Consider the case of Jacques Heuval, who conducted many important shows at the Lyric Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. Between 1910 and 1930 he conducted the West End premieres of operettas by Straus (1910 and 1913), Gilbert (1912 and 1914), Eysler (1913), and Nightbirds (1911), an adaptation of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (see Appendix 1). After the war, he conducted Kálmán’s A Little Dutch Girl (Das Hollandweibchen) in 1920, Eduard Künneke’s Love’s Awakening (Wenn Liebe erwacht) at the Empire Theatre in 1922, Franz Lehár’s The Three Graces (Der Libellentanz) at the Empire in 1924, and the same composer’s Frederica (Friederike) at the Palace Theatre in 1930. Yet, in spite of all this activity, sources of information about his life and character are scarce.

Musical directors can be a source of insights not found elsewhere, and, because Broadway was less consistent in using particular musical directors for operetta from the German stage, I am choosing two British figures. The first is Ernest Irving, whose first extended employment was as musical director of Charles Cuvillier’s The Lilac Domino at the Empire Theatre in 1918. This was actually an operetta taken from the German stage, because Cuvillier, though French, had composed it to a German libretto for Leipzig in 1912. By 1930, Irving’s status was such that he was engaged as musical director for Franz Lehár’s The Land of Smiles at Drury Lane in 1931, starring the internationally renowned Richard Tauber.

Irving was engaged for Stanley Scott’s production of The Dubarry in 1932. The star was Anny Ahlers, who had previously performed in Berlin in Künneke’s Lady Hamilton and Benatzky’s Casanova. Irving wrote in his autobiography, ‘I have never seen anybody quite like Anny. Her personality was unique and overwhelming’.Footnote ¹⁸ He was determined to do his best for her, in spite of the troubles that beset her.

Irving explained how he coached Ahlers in the singing of the song ‘I Give My Heart’, which was actually Mackeben’s own composition and not in the original Millöcker operetta.

On the recording made of this song in 1932, it is evident that, despite the coaching, Irving is sometimes anticipating and sometimes following her performance, rather than directing it.Footnote ¹⁹ In the second verse, he is gauging her flexible approach to tempo and, at the end of the refrain, he is trying to assess exactly when she will begin each of the final two phrases that follow on from notes on which she pauses. Each time, he is just a little late bringing in the orchestra.

Musical directors developed a practical experience that gave them an awareness of what did and did not work on stage. In a letter to Ralph Vaughan Williams, Irving offers his opinion in verse on the use of an off-stage singing voice while dialogue is in progress. Here is an excerpt, addressed to an imaginary stage director or composer:

Humorous it may be, but the advice is that of the seasoned hand who knows what mixture of sounds fails to work in the theatre.

Long runs were welcome relief from the insecurity of the theatre world and, similarly, an operetta that was produced regularly could offer job security for performers who excelled in a particular role. In Germany, Artur Preuss played Schubert in Heinrich Berté’s Das Dreimäderlhaus over a period of ten years. In the UK, Frederick Blamey, who played the same role in George Clutsam’s adaption of Berté’s operetta as Lilac Time when it was revived in 1925, went on the play Schubert in some 1800 performances by 1930. Irving makes us aware, however, that a successful show such as Lilac Time, which ran initially for two years at the Lyric, can have its downside for a musical director.

Nevertheless, Irving conducted the revival of Lilac Time at the same theatre in 1925, and, in 1933, when Richard Tauber visited the UK to present his own version of Das Dreimäderlhaus at the Aldwych with a Viennese opera company, Irving accepted the role of musical director. He then began to work more and more in film music and was appointed musical director of Ealing Studios in 1935. Although he composed for films himself, he championed many British composers, such as John Ireland, Alan Rawsthorne and Ralph Vaughan Williams. When the latter turned his film score for Scott of the Antartic into Sinfonia Antartica he dedicated it to Irving.

Another well-known musical director was Arthur Henry Wood, who acquired early professional experience playing violin and conducting in such diverse places as Harrogate, Bournemouth, and Llandudno. His first experience of conducting continental European operetta in London was André Messager’s Véronique at the Apollo in 1904. His outstanding ability ensured that he was employed at the most prestigious of London theatres, most significantly, the Gaiety (1917–21), Daly’s (1922–26), and His Majesty’s (1928–29). Wood presided over West End premieres of operettas by Fall, Gilbert, Stolz, Straus, Lehár, and Benatzky. He also conducted the revival of The Merry Widow at Daly’s Theatre in 1922, a triumph despite the absence of its adored former star, Lily Elsie. In the 1930s, Wood was often on tour outside London.

Like Irving, he is a source of information regarding unexpected situations in which a musical director becomes embroiled. Forbes-Winslow relates a story told to him by Wood regarding a calamity that befell Straus’s Cleopatra (Die Perlen der Cleopatra) during its try-out at the Opera House, Manchester, on 11 May 1925.Footnote ²²

Thanks to Edison Bell cylinder recordings made in 1922, we can hear the Daly’s Theatre Orchestra, conducted by Wood in a selection from The Merry Widow.Footnote ²⁴ On recordings issued by Columbia in the 1920s, the Gaiety orchestra conducted by Wood, performs music from Gilbert’s Katja, the Dancer – although he was not the musical director for this operetta at the Gaiety.Footnote ²⁵

As with many other musical directors, Wood was not merely a conductor, but also contributed to performances as an arranger. Arranging was necessary if structural changes had been made in the English version of a German operetta, or if the theatre orchestra differed in size from that called for in the composer’s original score. Wood was co-arranger with Constant Lambert of Kálmán’s A Kiss in Spring (Das Veilchen von Montmartre) at the Alhambra in 1932. He also composed additional music, and contributed interpolated numbers to Gilbert’s The Cinema Star at the Shaftesbury 1914, Straus’s Cleopatra at Daly’s in 1925, and Gilbert’s Yvonne (Uschi) at Daly’s in 1926. Despite all this activity, Wood has been almost forgotten today – although millions of British radio listeners are familiar with one of his compositions that serves as the theme tune of the long-running BBC radio series The Archers.Footnote ²⁶

There was little social mingling between orchestral musicians and actors, but, as musical directors, Irving and Wood were closely involved with members of the cast – for instance, working with singers to shape their interpretations of songs. Robert Courtneidge remarked that the ‘erudite Ernest Irving’ and the ‘genial Arthur Wood’ were welcomed in dressing rooms, theatre clubs, and social gatherings, but not those who played in the orchestra.Footnote ²⁷

Professional musicians had begun to feel the necessity of organizing in order to have greater negotiating power over work conditions. T. L. Southgate wrote anxiously in 1894 of the associations of musicians being formed in Manchester and London, and their intention to control the work practices of all British musicians.Footnote ²⁸ However, not all musicians joined these associations, and they remained weak. The Amalgamated Musicians’ Union had been founded in 1893, but when the orchestra of the Grand Theatre, Leeds, walked out in dispute in 1895, the management hired a new orchestra and faced down the threats of boycotts and picketing.Footnote ²⁹

Theatre musicians in New York had also been making demands in the nineteenth century. The American Federation of Musicians replaced the National League of Musicians in 1896, but the status of the theatre musician rarely rose above that of professional skilled worker, whereas singers were regularly viewed as artists, albeit of lesser or greater quality. That did not mean that stage performers were without their own labour struggles. London variety artists went on strike in January and February 1907, demanding a minimum wage and a maximum working week. In New York, there was a five-week actors’ strike during August and September 1919, when the Actors’ Equity Association demanded reforms, such as payment for a stipulated number of rehearsals, and extra pay for extra performances. The Producing Managers’ Association at first refused to negotiate, but public sympathy was largely with the actors, and a compromise was reached.Footnote ³⁰

Dance Directors

The Merry Widow included a memorable waltz routine, which encouraged dance directors to find ways of capturing the audience’s attention. Act 2 of the production of Lehár’s The Count of Luxembourg at Daly’s contained an inspired sequence, devised by Edward Royce and choreographed by Jan Oy-Ray, in which Lily Elsie as Angèle and Bertram Wallis as René waltzed up a grand staircase on one side of the stage, continued along a balcony at the top, and descended a staircase on the opposite side. The effect was sensational and was imitated in the Broadway version.Footnote ³¹ Of course, waltzing on a staircase posed difficulties: Wallis tripped and fell one evening in 1912, but he was unhurt, so Daisy Irving who had taken over the role of Angèle at that time, gamely chose to join him in his fall, much to the audience’s amusement.Footnote ³² Ironically, the person most likely to have fallen was Elsie, who, in the early performances of this operetta, was taking morphine to counteract the pain of an operation for appendicitis.Footnote ³³

The task of an operetta dance director could differ markedly from that of an opera choreographer, as, for example, when Fred Farren had to arrange a variety of comic dance moves for the male sextet ‘Women!’ in The Merry Widow at Daly’s. It was a number that, in the words of cast member Bill Berry, ‘brought all the nuts of that “Marsovian” village together on the stage at one time’.Footnote ³⁴ Dance is vital to operetta, and singers are expected to be able to dance (Richard Tauber was a rare exception).Footnote ³⁵ Choreographers, therefore, were sorely needed – hence the importance of Louis Grundlach in Vienna and Berlin, and Julian Mitchell, Jack Mason, and Albertina Rasch in New York. Some dance arrangers worked on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Max Rivers, who was responsible for the choreography of White Horse Inn at both the Coliseum and the Center Theatre, Broadway. The innovative ballet choreographer Frederick Ashton devised the dances for Benatzky’s The Flying Trapeze (Zirkus aimé), produced at London’s Alhambra Theatre in 1935.

Designers

Designers involved in operetta fall into two categories: those concerned with sets and those who focus on costume. Costume designers received some attention in Chapter 3, and they included figures such as Comelli, Lucile, Ernst Stein, Cora MacGeachy, and Homer B. Conant. Another notable figure was Wilhelm [William John Charles Pitcher], who had designed costumes for Gilbert and Sullivan productions before he created the costumes for The Girl in the Train at the Vaudeville and Madame Pompadour at Daly’s. Prior to his becoming a celebrated director, Vincente Minelli had worked in costume and set design, and was responsible for the costumes in the New York production of The DuBarry at the George M. Cohan Theatre, in 1932. There were others who worked hard and long but whose names are less known: Mrs Field, wardrobe mistress at Daly’s, made the costumes for many of those in The Merry Widow. After twenty-five years of service to that theatre, she became wardrobe mistress at Drury Lane.

In preparation for the opening night, the importance of stage scenery for creating an impact on the theatre audience should not be neglected. Among West End set designers, few attained the prestige of Joseph Harker. Forbes-Winslow calls him ‘the greatest scene painter of his generation’.Footnote ³⁶ He was from Manchester, and his mother, a well-known actress, Maria O’Connor, had instilled in him a love of the stage. Before enhancing the visual impact of productions at Daly’s, he had worked for D’Oyly Carte creating memorable sets for the Savoy operas.Footnote ³⁷

One of the most admired scene designers on Broadway was Joe Urban, an Austrian who had emigrated to the USA in 1912 and worked frequently for Florenz Ziegfeld.Footnote ³⁸ P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, who provided the book and lyrics for Kálmán’s Miss Springtime (Der Faschingsfee) at the New Amsterdam in 1916, praised his work on that production and claimed Urban was ‘making history with his stage-settings and even more with his revolutionary stage lighting’.Footnote ³⁹ The next year, his scenery for The Riviera Girl (Die Csárdásfürstin) was acclaimed in the New York Times for its ‘monumental stateliness and rich simplicity in color’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The scene designer the Shuberts gave most consistent employment to in the 1920s and 1930s was Watson Barratt, although they hired others.

The Background and Training of Singers

The closing decades of the nineteenth century witnessed an increasing number of actors coming from higher social strata.Footnote ⁴¹ This was undoubtedly part and parcel of what Michael Booth has described as ‘the slow but sure upper-middle-class takeover’ of the theatre, and its consequent growing respectability.Footnote ⁴² There was also a striking growth in the number of women entering the theatrical profession. The English census of 1851 recorded 1398 male and 643 female actors but, in the census of 1891, women outnumbered men by 3696 to 3625.Footnote ⁴³ In the theatre, it was possible for women to earn more than men and for wives to earn more than husbands. Seymour Hicks, as a leading comic actor, accepted a three-year contract at the Gaiety in 1894 that gave him weekly earnings of £15 rising to £25 over that period, but his wife, Ellaline Terriss, as ‘leading lady’ was offered a similar contract for £25 rising to £35.Footnote ⁴⁴

A promising lead singer would be engaged at Daly’s at £10 a week, rising by £5 each year of a three-year contract.Footnote ⁴⁵ Audition days were held once a week, and could attract two hundred hopefuls from the UK and continental Europe each time. In the first decade of the twentieth century, salaries for theatre performers were higher in London than in Vienna or Berlin.Footnote ⁴⁶ Some of those auditioning were seeking a place in the chorus, which had now become professionalized.Footnote ⁴⁷ The chorus was a good training ground for learning stage craft – for example, how to move and gesture. Many ex-chorus girls became stars in their own right at Daly’s: Mabel Russell, Mabel Green, Gladys Cooper, Winifred Barnes, Maidie Andrews, Madeleine Seymour, Phyllis le Grand, Daisy Irving, Effie Mann, and Isobel Elsom. Evelyn Laye also began her career as a chorus girl, although not at Daly’s, and went on to become a highly paid star of operetta in London in the 1920s and 1930s, appearing in The Merry Widow (revival 1923); Madame Pompadour (1923); The Dollar Princess (revival 1925); Cleopatra (1925), Lilac Time (revivals 1927 and 1928), Helen! (Offenbach, arranged by Korngold, 1932); and Paganini (1937).

Singers often took their first steps on the stage in pantomime. Derek Oldham, who achieved stardom as Bumerli in the revival of The Chocolate Soldier at the Lyric in 1914, had performed as a child in pantomime in the North West. Phyllis Dare also started out in pantomime.Footnote ⁴⁸ In her teens, she studied music, singing, and dancing, while also performing in theatre. Robert Courtneidge regarded Dare with immense esteem, remarking, ‘I never had an artist under my management who worked more assiduously at rehearsal, gave less trouble, or for whom I have a greater respect’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1910, she played the divorce-case co-respondent Gonda van der Loo in The Girl in the Train. Ironically, Dare’s father was a divorce clerk. Her one and only appearance at Daly’s was as Mariana in The Lady of the Rose (1922).

Other singers had received operatic training, most notably Maggie Teyte, who had studied with the renowned Polish tenor Jean de Reszke in Paris. Teyte’s domain was opera, but she accepted the role of Princess Julia in the West End production of Kálmán’s The Little Dutch Girl. Constance Drever, born in Madras, India, and educated in Brussels and Paris, also had a trained operatic voice. She enjoyed huge success as Nadina in The Chocolate Soldier at the Lyric in 1910. Robert Evett, Daly’s leading tenor during 1905–8, honed his vocal technique singing with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, and later starred in The Merry Widow, A Waltz Dream, The Girl in the Train, and Kálmán’s Autumn Manoeuvres. Bertram Wallis had studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but first made his reputation in musical comedy on Broadway in the first decade of the twentieth century. He was sought out to play romantic leading roles in The Count of Luxembourg, Love and Laughter (Straus), Madame Pompadour, and A Waltz Dream (1934 revival). In some cases, professional training can only be assumed, given the roles performed. Wilda Bennett, for instance, sang the leading parts in Broadway productions of The Riviera Girl (1917), The Lady in Ermine (1922), and Madame Pompadour (1924), but little is known of her musical education – although her turbulent personal life was well reported.

Tenor Donald Brian became a major star of Broadway versions of German operetta in the first two decades of the twentieth century. He learned to sing in his local church choir in St John’s, Newfoundland, where he was born and remained until the age of eighteen.Footnote ⁵⁰ He won acclaim as Danilo in the Broadway premiere of The Merry Widow (Figure 4.1). His singing ability meant that, unlike Coyne, he was next able to play the romantic lead Freddy in The Dollar Princess. He also took leading parts in The Siren (1911), The Marriage Market (1913), Sybil (1916), and the revival of The Chocolate Soldier in 1921. Another prominent male singer was baritone John Charles Thomas, who had studied singing at the Peabody Institute, Baltimore. He made a distinguished reputation for himself in the second decade of the century, singing in Alone at Last (1911), Her Soldier Boy (1916), and The Star Gazer (1917). It can be seen in Appendix 1, however, that there was more diversity in performers taking leading roles in Broadway productions of operetta from the German stage than there was in the West End. Howard Marsh, for example, gained his reputation as a star tenor after singing Baron Schober in Blossom Time (1921) but appeared in just one more German operetta, The DuBarry (1932), and tenor Dennis King’s sole appearance in a German operetta was as Goethe in Frederika (1937).

Figure 4.1

Donald Brian (1877–1948) as Danilo, cover of The Theatre, vol. 8, no. 84 (Feb. 1908).

The least operatic of singers were the comedians, who played character roles more rooted in music hall, vaudeville, or burlesque, than opera. William Henry Berry was a favourite with West End audiences because of his skill in comedy roles.Footnote ⁵¹ He was always ‘W. H. Berry’ in cast lists, but known to acquaintances as Bill. Perhaps the name Bill Berry was thought too similar to bilberry for a theatre programme. He had worked initially for Keith Prowse, ticket agency.Footnote ⁵² After appearing first in The Merveilleuses (1906), he spent ten consecutive years at Daly’s Theatre. He played Foreign Office messenger Nisch in The Merry Widow (1907) and appeared, also, in A Waltz Dream (1908, and its revivals in 1911 and 1934), The Dollar Princess (1909), The Count of Luxembourg (1911), Gipsy Love (1912), The Marriage Market (1913), and the 1927 and 1928 revivals of Lilac Time at Daly’s. Leo Fall found Berry hilarious as Bulger in Dollar Princess despite the differences between Austrian and British comedians: the latter made more of movement and gesture, and often used comic props – one such being Berry’s tennis racket with an overlong handle in Act 2.Footnote ⁵³

George Graves, perhaps the most celebrated comedian of the period, was born in London of Irish parents. He first appeared at Daly’s in The Little Michus (1905), but his greatest triumph was playing Baron Popoff in The Merry Widow. Courtneidge asked him to appear in Princess Caprice at the Shaftesbury in 1912 and declared him ‘audaciously funny’.Footnote ⁵⁴ He had to pay him £200 a week, a far cry from the wage of £3.10s a week Graves had earned when he had hired him for the first time, years earlier.Footnote ⁵⁵ Like other British stars, Graves toured abroad (including the USA, Canada, Russia, and South Africa). Charles B. Cochran praised Graves’s ‘unexcelled talents as a comedian’.Footnote ⁵⁶ He was known for inserting extra comic material into his roles, but it was not a practice exercise unique to the West End. At the Liberty Theatre, New York, in 1910, Tom McNaughten, a comedian from the UK, found an excuse to interpolate a recitation in Heinrich Reinhardt’s The Spring Maid that had gone down well in London’s music halls.Footnote ⁵⁷

There is little room to do more than summarize some other comic performers. George Grossmith, Jr was both a comedian and actor-producer. He first made his name in musical comedy, but played a leading role in The Girl on the Film (Filmzauber) in 1913. G. P. Huntley [George Patrick Huntley], praised by Courtneidge as a ‘light comedian unsurpassed in his own particular time’,Footnote ⁵⁸ first appeared at Daly’s in Viktor Jacobi’s The Marriage Market (1913). Another celebrated comedian, Huntley Wright, performed at Daly’s more than 5000 times before the theatre closed.Footnote ⁵⁹ His appearances included roles in The Little Michus (1905), The Girl in the Train (1910), The Count of Luxembourg (1911), The Lady of the Rose (1922), and Madame Pompadour (1923).

The International Market for Singers

Pat Malone, stage director of The Merry Widow, appears to be the source of journalist Henry Hibbert’s assertion that Edwardes had at first booked the original star, Mizzi Günther, for the title role, but, taken aback at her size when she arrived in London, had felt obliged to reject her and pay financial compensation.Footnote ⁶⁰ It was, supposedly, only after attending operetta performances in Vienna with William Boosey, that Edwardes became aware that leading singers in Vienna tended to be larger in physique and some years older than those appearing in London’s musical comedies.Footnote ⁶¹ That said, Mizzi Günther was no more than 26 years of age when she appeared in Die lustige Witwe, and would have been only 28 had she performed at Daly’s in 1907. Ethel Jackson, who played the widow in New York, was 30. The story of Günther’s rejection does not square with William Boosey’s claim that he persuaded Edwardes to purchase the rights at the last minute on their joint continental trip.Footnote ⁶² Moreover, Boosey’s assertion that Edwardes was convinced that the 21-year-old Lily Elsie would be a hit in the title role casts further doubt upon the hiring of Günther.

Nevertheless, many performers from outside the UK appeared in operettas in the West End. Coyne was not the only American to land a role in The Merry Widow; it also featured Elizabeth Firth from New Jersey as Natalie, the ‘highly respectable wife’ of the ambassador. May de Sousa, who played Juliette in The Count of Luxembourg was American, too, and prior to her appearance at Daly’s had performed at the Moulin Rouge in Paris and the Winter Garden in Berlin.Footnote ⁶³ Charles Frohman had been unable to book her for The Dollar Princess on Broadway, but the Shuberts obtained her services for Lieber Augustin in 1913. Performance opportunities came in both directions across the Atlantic: Ethel Jackson, born in New York, had studied piano at the Vienna Conservatoire, before obtaining her first professional singing engagement in the chorus of The Yeomen of the Guard at the Savoy Theatre in 1897. Prior to taking the title role in The Merry Widow, she had appeared in operetta on Broadway playing Countess Sedlau in Johann Strauss’s posthumous Vienna Life (1901). Coincidentally, Ethel Jackson, like Lily Elsie, quit the stage unexpectedly early, although both were to return to the boards from time to time. Elsie surprised Edwardes by declaring her intention to marry and retire from performance after appearing in The Count of Luxembourg. Jackson fainted twice while performing in The Merry Widow in spring 1908 and suffered additional anxiety from rumours concerning her imminent divorce proceedings. She obtained her divorce in August, and promptly married the solicitor who handled her case in October.Footnote ⁶⁴

International stars were an important part of the transnational entertainment industry. Danish singer Carl Brisson (real name, Carl Pedersen), who had begun his career as a dancer and revue performer in Stockholm, played Danilo (to Evelyn Laye’s Sonia) in the Merry Widow revival at Daly’s in 1923 and, according to the musical director Arthur Wood, could barely speak English when he was hired.Footnote ⁶⁵ Robert Michaelis, who became a Daly’s favourite after playing Freddy Fairfax in The Dollar Princess, was born in St Petersburg, educated in London and Paris, and studied singing in Vienna from an Italian (Felice Bottelli). Among other roles, he played the romantic Gipsy lead, Jozsi, in Gipsy Love. Playing opposite him in that operetta was Sári Petráss, born in Budapest, and making her London debut. Edwardes said of her,

Her last London appearance was as Sylva in The Gipsy Princess (1921). She drowned at the age of 41, when a car in which she was travelling plunged into the River Scheldt in Antwerp in 1930.

Emmy Wehlen, born in Mannheim, was the substitute merry widow for two weeks in April 1909, while Elsie took a holiday. Wehlan played to great acclaim as Olga in The Dollar Princess, and starred in both the West End and Broadway productions of The Girl on the Film. Despite the public admiration she garnered, she came under suspicion as a foreigner during the First World War, as did Petráss.Footnote ⁶⁷ That did not prevent the renewed success of German and Hungarian singers in the West End once the memory of war began to fade. For example, Lea Seidl, who had sung the title role in the Viennese performance of Friederike in 1929, was warmly received in London playing the same role the following year. Theatre World was fulsome in its praise: ‘her singing of perhaps the most beautiful song in the score (“Why Did You Kiss My Heart Awake?”) is a revelation of the way in which good acting and singing may be combined’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Seidl also sang at the Coliseum in White Horse Inn. Hungarian soprano Rosy Barsony played Kathi Mihazy in Ball at the Savoy, Drury Lane, 1933, and her husband Oskar Dénes was Mustapha Bei, attaché at the Turkish Embassy. Findon, in The Play Pictorial was bowled over by their routines together: ‘They are as animated as quicksilver … They are here, there, and everywhere, laughing at and with themselves, and sending the audience into fits of hilarity with song and dance.’Footnote ⁶⁹

Two other well-known performers had a French connection. Yvonne Arnaud, who, like Ethel Jackson, originally planned to be a pianist, had studied at the Paris Conservatoire. She made her name in the West End playing Suzanne in The Girl in the Taxi, Zara in Love and Laughter, Etelka von Basewitz in The Girl Who Didn’t (Der lachende Ehemann), and Noisette in Mam’selle Tralala. Parisian Alice Delysia, a star in her home city and New York, sang the title role in Mother of Pearl (Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will!) at the Gaiety, a role that A. P. Herbert had reworked as a vehicle for her particular talents.

Operetta and Star Culture

Many singers already mentioned were part of a glamorous star culture (names of star performers and others playing key roles in operetta productions can be found in Appendix 1). One of the biggest names in Berlin was Vienna-born Fritzi Massary [Friederike Massaryk]. As a revue star at the Metropol, she demonstrated her skill at adopting different accents and playing a variety of characters. She gained recognition as an operetta singer after playing Princess Helene in Fall’s Der liebe Augustin at the Neues Theater, in 1912. Her status as Berlin’s leading female operetta star of the 1920s was established following her appearance in Straus’s Die Perlen der Cleopatra (1923). She was Lutheran by religion, but Jewish by heritage, and left Germany in late 1932. She resided for a while in London, where Noël Coward became a friend. His stage work Operette of 1938 contained a role specially written for her. From 1939 on, she lived mainly in Beverly Hills, California.

Richard Tauber was Berlin’s leading male star but rarely seen together with Massary. She was famed for roles in operettas by Fall and Straus (taking the lead in premieres of six Straus operettas), while Tauber became Lehár’s favourite tenor after playing Jószi in a revival of Zigeunerliebe in 1920. His frequent partner in Lehár premieres was Croatian singer Vera Schwarz (Paganini, Der Zarewitsch, Das Land des Lächelns). Tauber married the singer Carlotta Vanconti in 1927, but they divorced the next year. She continued to extract money from him, however, by threatening to write a book about his inability to satisfy her sexually. It ended when she was found guilty of extortion in 1932.Footnote ⁷⁰ Tauber’s earnings at that time were, indeed, large: the year before Vanconti’s conviction, Stanley Scott had engaged him at £1500 a week (worth £96,880 in 2017) for his London debut in The Land of Smiles (Figure 4.2).Footnote ⁷¹ George Grossmith described Tauber as an ‘indifferent actor’ with ‘no pretence of good looks’, who radiated a rare stage magnetism.Footnote ⁷² He sang the lyrics mainly in German but spoke dialogue in English. On 8 May, the opening night, at which Lehár was present, Tauber took many curtain calls, then sang ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’ in English.Footnote ⁷³ This was ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz’, specially composed by Lehár to display Tauber’s lyrical skill to advantage. The Times reviewer was not happy with Tauber mixing German and English in his singing:

Figure 4.2

Richard Tauber (1891–1948) in Lehár’s The Land of Smiles.

(Drury Lane, 1931)

According to MacQueen-Pope, Tauber began ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’ softly, then belted out the repeat of the refrain, at the close of which he was rewarded with a noise resembling the crowd at Wembley Stadium.Footnote ⁷⁵ The success of The Land of Smiles was, however, stopped in its tracks: an inflamed throat began to affect Tauber on the second night, and he failed to sing at the third performance. He took a week off, but it was soon clear that he needed to withdraw from the cast.Footnote ⁷⁶ Robert Naylor substituted for him and did well, but the audience wanted Tauber. Bookings dropped off and did not fully recover when Tauber returned, since his appearances could not now be relied on. MacQueen-Pope shows no sympathy for Tauber and claims he ‘just did as the whim took him’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Scott planned to replace Tauber with Alfred Piccaver (a British-American tenor at the Vienna State Opera). Tauber was intensely jealous of him, and persuaded Lehár to tell Piccaver that he should not go to London.Footnote ⁷⁸ Tauber returned but it was too late to rescue the show, and the operetta that promised to be the sensation of the season, thus petered out.Footnote ⁷⁹ Lehár had been unlucky enough to suffer a similar fate on Broadway, when the prospects of Gypsy Love were damaged by Marguerite Sylva’s loss of voice in the middle of the first act during its premiere.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the end, there were just seventy-two performances of The Land of Smiles, ‘all because of the temperament, the bad sportsmanship, the complete unreliability of a tenor’, railed MacQueen-Pope.Footnote ⁸¹ Nevertheless, Diana Napier Tauber insists in her biography This Was Richard Tauber, published in 1971, that his throat trouble was genuine.Footnote ⁸² The following year, Tauber sang in a three-week revival at the Dominion Theatre, accepting a reduced weekly salary of £900, but doubts about his reliability remained: the Theatre World hailed him as ‘Herr Tauber of the golden voice and temperamental larynx’.Footnote ⁸³

In September 1933, Tauber was back in the UK with his own version of Lilac Time at the Aldwych and began appearing in British films. In 1937, he sang in a production of Lehár’s Paganini at the Lyceum, managing, according to one reviewer, to solve the ‘difficulty of resemblance’ between himself and Paganini by ‘converting the hero into a portly flirt’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The sets and décor for Paganini were by Ernst Stein, whose costumes for White Horse Inn had been extensively praised, and who was almost always credited with the title ‘professor’. The reception of Paganini had been lukewarm in Vienna but was a major success at the Deutsches Künstlertheater, Berlin, in 1926, starring Tauber and Schwarz. The director of the theatre, Heinz Saltenburg, had been convinced Paganini would fail, as it had done in Vienna. He told Tauber, ‘I’ll be happy to get through the first night without scandalizing the audience!’Footnote ⁸⁵ Unfortunately, success eluded Paganini when Charles B. Cochran, whose name was a guarantee of quality, brought it to London, for, despite audience enthusiasm, the numbers attending were small. The Play Pictorial commented, ‘Franz Lehár’s operetta contains some of this distinguished composer’s finest work, and his flowing melodies are brilliantly sung by Richard Tauber and Evelyn Laye, two superb artists who give of their best’.Footnote ⁸⁶ It contained songs that soon became favourites – ‘Girls Were Made To Love and Kiss’, ‘Love at Last’, and ‘Love, Live Forever!’ – and Tauber took a cut in salary to help keep it going – but it still failed. It was a sign of decreasing appetite for operetta, because, six years earlier, Cochran had made £50,000 profit out of Coward’s Bitter Sweet at His Majesty’s, despite its higher production costs.Footnote ⁸⁷ This declining taste for operetta was occurring on both sides of the Atlantic; Paganini was not produced in New York, although the rights had been bought by J. J. Shubert in 1923.Footnote ⁸⁸

Tauber settled in the UK in 1938 and that year played Tamino in Die Zauberflöte at Covent Garden. In 1940, he took on British nationality. His final appearance in a London revival of The Land of Smiles was at the Lyric in summer 1942. Tauber’s talent was not confined to singing, he had studied composition at the Frankfurt Conservatory, and his operetta Der singende Traum had been given a warm reception in Vienna in 1934. He composed an English operetta, Old Chelsea, in 1943, which included the hit song ‘My Heart and I’. Tauber enjoyed conducting, too, and was the musical director for Gay Rosalinda, a version of Die Fledermaus, which had a lengthy run at the Palace Theatre, 1945–46. It was not until September 1946 that Tauber was engaged to sing at the Shubert Theatre in Yours Is My Heart, the Broadway version of Das Land des Lächelns.Footnote ⁸⁹

Lily Elsie, whose performance in the title role of The Merry Widow propelled her into West End stardom, was born in Wortley, Leeds, as Elsie Hodder (becoming Elsie Cotton after her mother’s marriage). She was always called Elsie, not Lily, by those who knew her. Her step-father William Cotton was a theatre worker, and, when the family moved to Manchester, Elsie showed talent for performance as a child in variety theatres in Manchester and Salford. Her West End début was in Howard Talbot and Ivan Caryll’s A Chinese Honeymoon (1903).Footnote ⁹⁰ She was then taken up by George Edwardes and appeared in several of his productions, including Felix’s Madame Sherry (1903) and Messager’s The Little Michus (1905). In addition to taking the title role in the London premiere of The Merry Widow, she also sang in the first Irish performance, at the Gaiety, Dublin, in August 1908, and, in October that year, played the widow at Manchester’s Prince’s Theatre with Edwardes’s No. 1 Touring Company. Her subsequent role was Alice Condor in The Dollar Princess (1908), which attracted the attendance of King Manuel of Portugal twice in one week in December 1909.Footnote ⁹¹ Next, she was Franzi in a Daly’s revival of A Waltz Dream and, after that, Angèle Didier in The Count of Luxembourg. She retired during October 1911, to prepare for her marriage in in November, and was replaced by Daisy Irving. She returned spasmodically to the stage during 1915–17, but then appeared rarely. She performed in Pamela (a comedy by Arthur Wimperis, with music by Frederic Norton) in 1917, and took the lead role in Stolz’s The Blue Train (Mädi) at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1927. Her marriage had ended in divorce in 1922 and, in that decade, the bouts of anxiety and melancholy she had long suffered were becoming more frequent. In later life, she underwent electric shock therapy, and then had a frontal lobotomy, which caused a severe personality change.Footnote ⁹² She died in St Andrew’s Hospital, Dollis Hill, of bronchopneumonia on 16 December 1962.

Her one-time co-star, Joe Coyne, was born in New York, where he performed at Niblo’s Garden at the age of 16. He tried his hand in London in 1901, then returned to New York, but came again to London in 1906. Like Lily Elsie, he lacked confidence in taking on a leading role in The Merry Widow. Nonetheless, George Graves recalls sardonically that Coyne believed his voice might someday ‘give birth to a demi-semi-quaver or two’, and thus, at times, he ‘had to be restrained’.Footnote ⁹³ In particular, his rendition at rehearsals of the melancholic ‘There once were two prince’s children’ proved disconcerting, until it was recommended that he recite rather than sing the lyrics. The effect was striking, and, according to Graves, the mood he created, affected all who heard him.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the 1923 revival, Carl Brisson continued the practice of reciting those lines, and can be heard doing so still on a recording made for Decca in 1931.Footnote ⁹⁵ Because Coyne lacked vocal technique, he could not play the romantic hero Freddy in the next Daly’s production, The Dollar Princess, so, instead, took the role of the millionaire Conder (Couder in the German version). Thus, in London, Conder became the brother of dollar princess Alice, rather than her father. In spite of these changes, Fall, who had conducted the rather different Manchester try-out, was informed by his London agent Ernest Mayer that the reviews were glittering.

One of the most prominent British stars was José Collins. Born in Salford, in 1893, she started her career in music hall, where her mother Lottie Collins had achieved fame with the song ‘Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay’ (words by Richard Morton, music arranged by Angelo A. Asher). Her acting and singing skills motivated the Shuberts to invite her to New York in 1911, and she appeared with Gaby Deslys in Eysler’s Vera Violetta at the Winter Garden. She achieved stardom at the Casino the next year playing the lead role of Countess Rosalinda Cliquot in The Merry Countess, an adaptation of Die Fledermaus by Gladys Unger (given as Nightbirds in London). She revealed herself capable of singing the notoriously difficult csárdás, and, at barely twenty years of age, was earning the equivalent of £100 a week.Footnote ⁹⁶ She then appeared in Lehár’s Alone at Last and in the Ziegfeld Follies. She returned to London to perform in Seymour Hicks’s The Happy Day at Daly’s in 1916, but it was the next production there, Fraser-Simson’s The Maid of the Mountains, that gave her the role with which she was forever associated and which provided her with the title of her autobiography published in 1932. After this remarkable success, Collins continued to play leading roles for six consecutive years at Daly’s Theatre. She took her leave after playing the title character in Sybil, in 1922, a role for which she had her hair bobbed and set a fashion for this new style among women in town.Footnote ⁹⁷ She then played the leading role of Vera Lisaveta in The Last Waltz at the Gaiety in December 1922 (Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3

José Collins (1887–1958) in Straus’s The Last Waltz.

(Gaiety Theatre, 1922)

She was a singer of exceptional skill as well as a fine actor. Her mother was of Jewish heritage, her father of Spanish heritage, and she also claimed a Gipsy ancestry. Her ethnic background was undoubtedly the reason she became associated with exotic roles. Some critics regretted that she never played Carmen, although she often played Carmen-type roles – Frasquita being an obvious example. Perhaps the mezzo role of Carmen was not ideally suited to a soprano who was comfortable singing the csárdás from Die Fledermaus. She had a nervous breakdown after the failure of Lehár’s Frasquita in 1925. Evett, its producer, decided to go into retirement after this flop. The following year, she found that her extravagant spending had brought her to bankruptcy. For a while she returned to performing in vaudeville and variety to try to pay off debts, but in 1927 she was left a large sum of money in the will of one of her friends, Frank Curzon.Footnote ⁹⁸ Her singing career did not take off again. She was never drawn to syncopated styles, and was happiest in the Ruritanian realm of stage entertainment. Her career faded simultaneously with the diminution of appetite for operetta from the German stage.

The Trials of Stardom

Many operetta performers in the early twentieth century were celebrities in the wider sense in which we now understand that term. This is not surprising, given that operetta in this period was one of the first examples of a global theatrical entertainment. The personal characters and day-to-day activities of operetta stars became of interest to the public, and the stars themselves could gain or suffer as a consequence of the attention of the communications media. On top of the demands of celebrity came the stress and insecurity of stage performance; as already mentioned, even the apparently self-assured José Collins suffered a nervous breakdown after the failure of Frasquita.

The leading stars of the West End Merry Widow were two of the first to suffer the stresses of the stage in the modern age of star culture. Edwardes had taken Elsie to Vienna to see Mizzi Günther in Die lustige Witwe. She liked the part but was ‘terrified’ that she would not be able to play it.Footnote ⁹⁹ In fact, nobody thought she was up to its demands except Edwardes.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Joe Coyne, too, was made anxious by the vocal requirements of his role. At the time of his engagement as Danilo in 1907 (Figure 4.4), David Slattery-Christy describes him thus:

He was prone to melancholy moods and dealt with increasing mental health problems after the First World War. Yet, according to George Grossmith, Coyne ‘made one of the greatest successes of his long career’ when he appeared as Jimmy Smith in No, No, Nanette at the Palace Theatre in 1925.Footnote ¹⁰² He died in England of pneumonia in 1941. It is often said that Coyne could barely sing at all.Footnote ¹⁰³ He may not have been a fine singer, but he was more than capable of putting over a song, and recordings reveal that when he sang he was generally in tune. He was also capable of singing a countermelody, as evidenced on his recording of the duet ‘That Dear Old Home of Mine’ with Violet Loraine.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Figure 4.4

Joseph Coyne (1867–1941) as Danilo in Lehár’s The Merry Widow.

(Daly’s Theatre, 1907)

Sometimes the pressures of stardom had tragic consequences, as in the case of the 25-year-old German singer Anny Ahlers. She was born in Hamburg and became famous in London as the star of Stanley Scott’s production of The Dubarry, which opened at His Majesty’s Theatre on 28 May 1932. Before that, she had played leading roles in German productions of Lady Hamilton, Madame Pompadour, Viktoria und ihr Husar, and Die Blume von Hawaii. The critic James Agate, who was not known for a love of operetta, wrote of her performance, ‘such vitality is altogether unknown among our lighter English actresses; her appearance over here will obviously do a world of good’. In unwitting tribute to Irving’s coaching, he adds: ‘Her singing voice is magnificent.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ A review in the Morning Post declared that Anny Ahlers possessed enormous fire and flung herself into the part of the courtesan ‘without any hypocritical pursuit of those dulcet ditherings which are deemed to make stage-play prostitutes safe, and even sacrosanct, in suburbia’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Unfortunately, she developed trouble with laryngitis, which meant the theatre had to close for a week in September. Far worse followed: Ahler’s life, like that of the real Dubarry, was cut short in a shocking manner. Countess Dubarry did, at least, enjoy fifty years of life before she was guillotined in 1793, but Anny Ahlers was just 25 when she was found with her neck broken, after having apparently jumped out of the window of her London flat on 14 March 1933. One theory was that she was sleep walking and unconsciously re-enacting the balcony scene from The Dubarry, since the window of her flat had a large balustrade outside. However, she was known to like a drink or two. A witness said that she had drunk one glass of champagne with her that evening but returned two hours later to find the bottle empty. At the theatre itself, Ahlers was said to regularly imbibe half a bottle of champagne, as well as drinking brandy between the acts. The coroner asked if she took rather a lot of brandy ‘for a young woman’.

A doctor’s report showed that that her liver had been affected by drugs and drink over a long period of time. The coroner, however, was concerned to make known that Ahlers overindulged only when feeling ‘the strain of her part’, and insisted: ‘She was worrying because she could not sleep properly or perform properly because of her nose, her headaches, and her voice.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ A large stash of narcotic drugs was discovered in her flat, some imported from Germany. The jury concluded that she had committed suicide, reaching a majority verdict of 7 to 2. Sylvia Welling took over her role briefly, but Ahlers was much loved and her death so upset the cast that Stanley Scott felt compelled to announce, ‘I am withdrawing “The Dubarry” … Ever since the death of Anny Ahlers the actors have been playing with tears in their eyes.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Whatever her technical weaknesses, Ahlers was a tremendous success in her role. Irving writes in his autobiography: ‘London rose to Anny. In all my sixty years I have never seen such a triumph.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Theatre World declared that she had ‘taken all London by Storm by her vivacious acting and dramatic singing in the role of the famous courtesan … she invests the role with any amount of fire and passion’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Figure 4.5 shows her in erotic attire that suggests the twentieth rather than eighteenth century.

Figure 4.5

Anny Ahlers (1907–33) in The Dubarry, 1932.

In addition to the anxiety engendered by stage performance, stars had to deal with the risks created by audience adulation. One morning after a rehearsal at the Vaudeville Theatre, Phyllis Dare writes that she was ‘almost mobbed by a crowd of several hundred people who had collected outside the stage door’.Footnote ¹¹¹ First, and foremost, however, stars required the stamina to cope with an exacting workload. Dare details her hectic schedule two days before a tour in 1907:

Over twenty years later, the time pressures had not diminished, as may be found in a report on the performers in White Horse Inn, which was playing twelve times a week at the London Coliseum (twice a day from Monday to Saturday, theatres being closed on Sunday). They were feeling the strain, and felt that life had become non-stop work. Lea Seidl told a reporter,

An interest in stage gossip grew on the part of the cheaper press in the 1920s. It put added pressure on performing artists, and B. W. Findon rails against the advent of ‘sensational journalism’ in his editorial to the Play Pictorial in December 1922: ‘now-a-days, we can see portrayed the progress of a popular actress from her bath to her motor, and the prettiest details of her unprofessional life are chronicled with chronic inaccuracy’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The strain of being a celebrity could land a stage performer in the newspapers for the wrong reasons.

Such strain, no doubt, led to the incidents that occurred during the run of Benatzky’s Casanova at the Coliseum. The German production of this work was, coincidentally, the operetta that had given Anny Ahlers her early celebrity. Things did not augur well when Greta Natler fainted on stage during the opening night in May 1932. Then, in August that year, Marianne Winkelstern, the prima ballerina in the production, faced manslaughter charges. To cap it all there was a fight on stage on the closing night in 1933 between Arthur Fear and Charles Mayhew. This meant that, next day, they shared headlines with Adolf Hitler on the front page of the Daily Express.Footnote ¹¹⁵ These two singing-and-dancing alpha males had both played the role of Casanova during the long run. Charles Mayhew turned up for the final night, determined to get his share of applause, and that displeased Arthur Fear. They threw punches at each other during the curtain call. Fortunately, in true operetta fashion, the Empress of Austria (in the shape of Marie Lohr) stepped between them and put an end to their fisticuffs.