The story of opera in what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire tends to be particularly convoluted, given the complexity of the region’s history and its political twists and turns. It is perhaps not a stretch to say that nowhere else in Europe had the same level of interest in opera and art music combined with the remarkable mutability of borders, governments and nationalist allegiances across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; indeed, as the three books discussed here show in great detail, opera was a key reason for, and indicator of, the social and political ferment of Habsburg Central Europe. Ranging across a chronological scope that stretches from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first, each book explores operatic life in one of three important regional capitals: Vienna, Prague and Budapest, with occasional departures to other places like Brno/Brünn, Sarajevo and Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg. Each volume focuses on the work of a single canonic composer: Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) and Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), though in the final case calling the works discussed Offenbach’s is tenuous at best. Finally, each book uses the lens of reception history, exploring the context for operatic creation and performance, and how the meanings of the various operas examined here – Die Frau ohne Schatten (1917), Don Giovanni (1787), Orphée aux enfers (1858) and others – changed according to the shifts in various political, cultural and social environments over time.

How each of the books differs, however, is another matter. Each takes unique approaches to its subject material, thus producing three volumes that are in many respects quite dissimilar. Larry Wolff’s The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy is undoubtedly the most narratively engaging of the three, reflecting the author’s training and long career as a historian. At the same time, it is also the volume that focuses the most on the textures of opera itself, with musical examples and hermeneutic analysis of various aspects of Die Frau ohne Schatten. In what is perhaps a nod to the genre conventions of opera, the book tells its story through not two but three couples: the real-life dynastic pair of Emperor Karl and Empress Zita of Austria, the intellectual and artistic partners Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and the fairy-tale duo of the Emperor and the Empress, the royal couple at the centre of what Strauss and Hofmannsthal termed their operatic Schmerzenskind (problem child).

In terms of repertoire, the book is solely focused on Die Frau ohne Schatten, and initially I thought other fairy-tale operas might figure more prominently somehow, though Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1791) and Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (1892) both make appearances. However, the main subject of the book is not so much the opera itself as what it represents and illuminates: the glamour and charisma of imperial rulers, if not of the Habsburg Empire itself. Wolff in essence argues that the end and afterlives of the Habsburg monarchy can be explained through two central figures. One is the Empress Zita, who was born in 1892, reigned from 1916 to 1918 and died seventy years later, in 1989. The changing meanings of imperialism and empresses are then reflected and nuanced by the changing reception of the second of Wolff’s central figures, the opera Die Frau ohne Schatten itself. By interweaving the empress, the opera and their Habsburg and post-Habsburg contexts, the author creates a narrative that is engaging, insightful and eminently readable.

The majority of the chapters of The Shadow of the Empress follow a similar format wherein the narrative shifts back and forth regularly between episodes from Habsburg and post-Habsburg history and moments from the Strauss/Hofmannsthal collaboration, concluded by an examination of Die Frau ohne Schatten itself. This gives the author an opportunity to discuss musical specifics of key, orchestration and vocal expressivity, as well as to engage with the libretto of the opera. The book proceeds chronologically through three large parts, Prewar, Wartime and Postwar, each with six or seven chapters. Two-thirds of the book is more specifically focused on the period 1911–19, and while the majority of the narrative concerns imperial and musical happenings in Vienna, there are frequent excursions to more far-flung parts of the empire like Galicia and Serbia. Such moments help to give a sense of the vastness and complexity of Austria-Hungary, and Wolff also draws connections between aspects of the empire’s cultural geography and the world of Die Frau ohne Schatten.

For example, in Chapter 3, the author describes the far-flung province of Galicia, then the poorest province in the empire and considered a backward hinterland worlds away from the sophistication of Vienna, as well as the intensely negative regard Hofmannsthal had for the region when he was posted there while serving in the military. Wolff then connects this to the moment early on in Strauss’s opera where the Empress and her Nurse descend from their heavenly imperial palace down to the rough, poor and dirty human world. He points out that at this moment in 1912, as the poet was working on the first act of the libretto, the real-life sovereigns Zita and Karl were themselves posted to Galicia for summer military manoeuvres, in turn suggesting the ways in which the textures of life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the Empress journeying from splendour to misery – could also be found in the fairy-tale world of Die Frau ohne Schatten.

Wolff manages likewise to have his chronological narrative of the fall of Habsburg Austria mirror the progress of the opera through most of the book. The discussion of the opera’s finale closes Chapter 13, the opening chapter of Part III ‘Postwar’, and the next chapter immediately picks up with the premiere of the opera in 1919 Vienna. From that point on, with the opera out in the world, the book discusses only historical events and their resonances. Even these chapters, though, benefit from the rich cast of real-life characters that Wolff develops over the course of the book, and from his granular knowledge of the intricacies of Viennese and Austrian history. For example, in the final chapter of the book he dramatises the funeral of Empress Zita in 1989 Vienna, attended by Austrian President Kurt Waldheim and presided over at St Stephen’s Cathedral by Cardinal and Archbishop of Vienna Hermann Groër, both of whom had careers marked by the history of the Anschluss (1938) and the relationship of Austria to the Nazi Third Reich, a subject of discussion earlier in the book. The revelation of Waldheim’s Nazi past not long before the funeral, and the scandal of Groër’s history of child sexual abuse years after it, were both broken by the same journalist, Hubertus Czernin. Czernin, in turn, was the grandson of Count Ottokar Czernin, who served as foreign minister to Emperor Karl and Empress Zita in 1917 and 1918. Wolff’s command of such details reminds us that the world of the Habsburg Empire is in some ways still very much with us, not least through the continuing presence of Die Frau ohne Schatten itself.

As a fairy-tale glorification of imperial majesty, to say nothing of the gendered politics of women’s childbearing capacity as key to their humanity, this opera certainly reflected the pre-World-War-I world of Habsburg Austria in which it was conceived. Wolff traces the growing disillusionment of Strauss and Hofmannsthal with the opera that accompanied the increasing casualty counts and rising sense of the barbarism of war, leading eventually to Strauss’s famous desire for Die Frau ohne Schatten to be the ‘last Romantic opera’.Footnote ¹ If at its 1919 premiere it represented both a nostalgic hearkening back to a pre-war world and a call for the repopulation of Austria after so much bloodshed, after World War II it became, as Wolff argues, ‘a postwar affirmation of social and political renewal for governments and societies in search of a new humanity, leaving behind the violence and brutality of the recent past’.Footnote ² That this transformation was effected by conductors like Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan, who both went before tribunals and hearings because of their artistic collaboration with the Nazis, underscores either the impossibility of such tidy resolutions or the transformative power of art, depending on your point of view and level of cynicism.

In either case, Die Frau ohne Schatten remains a useful cipher for the history of the twentieth century in Wolff’s handling. The author’s enthusiasm for the opera, its music and its dramaturgy are evident throughout the book, though this may also be what leads to one of the volume’s few missed opportunities: the musical narration in the sections focusing on the opera itself proceeds in descriptive language emphasising particular details that seem underexplored, such as which high notes are sung by which characters. While there are certainly conclusions to be drawn from changes of tessitura, such passages end up feeling less meaningful than other parts of the book. These brief sections do not ultimately detract from the impact of The Shadow of the Empress, centred as the book is primarily on twentieth-century history and the dissolution and afterlife of the Habsburg monarchy. This focus is where the strength of the book lies: in its richly textured narrative, engaging style and seemingly effortless command of the complex history of Habsburg and post-Habsburg Austria.

The complexity of Habsburg Austria and her subject lands is dispatched with similar proficiency, though in very different ways, by Martin Nedbal in Mozart’s Operas and National Politics: Canon Formation in Prague from 1791 to the Present. This volume is a work of careful and finely wrought scholarship, and it makes an extremely important intervention especially in the history of music in the Czech lands. As the author himself details, ever since the nineteenth century and the rise of ethnic nationalism as one of the fundamental possibilities for organising social, cultural and political relations, the music history of the Czech lands (the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia) was told from either a German or a Czech point of view. With the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire and the rise of the first Czechoslovak Republic, followed by the Nazi Protectorate and the subsequent expulsion of the ethnic German population of postwar Czechoslovakia, the music history of the region became almost exclusively based on the Czech perspective. This is also evident, for example, in the fact that what are now called the Czech lands were, when first organised as the domain of hereditary kings under the Přemyslid dynasty (ninth century to 1306), called the Bohemian crownlands, a designation that does not privilege a particular ethnolinguistic group. Thus, in the post-World-War-II historiography of the region, contributions by those who would today be considered ethnic Germans were discounted, ignored or, as in the case of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, sometimes appropriated as intrinsically Czech.

This methodological nationalism has long shadowed the field of Czech music studies, and Nedbal’s book is a welcome corrective. Through his multilayered examination of the reception of Mozart’s operas and the composer himself, the author convincingly argues that their reception shows how a particular sense of Bohemian patriotism, one that focused on one’s connection to the region itself as an autonomous unit within the Habsburg Empire, eventually bifurcated into competing Czech and German ethnolinguistic identity groups, and how such a divergence in turn profoundly affected music history and historiography in the region. At the same time, Mozart’s Operas and National Politics also represents an intervention in Mozart reception studies and historiography by taking seriously Czech-language scholarship and positioning the composer’s Bohemian context as key to understanding his canonic position today – rather than replicating what Nedbal terms the neocolonialist tendency toward viewing Germanophone, Francophone and Anglophone contexts as the centre, to which all else is subordinated as periphery.

Reflecting this concern for contextual specificity and careful unpacking of the historical baggage surrounding different aspects of Mozart’s reception, the book is organised thematically and conceptually rather than chronologically. Each chapter therefore stands as somewhat independent of the others, though Nedbal frequently points the reader toward other relevant chapters. The freestanding nature of the chapters, in addition to the scholarly rigour they display in using archival materials to critique the formation of both the classical canon and ethnic identities, makes them eminently suitable as reading assignments for advanced undergraduate or graduate students. Organised into three larger parts – ‘Authenticity and Ethnicity’, ‘Monuments and Politics’ and ‘Translations and Adaptations’ – Nedbal’s chapters explore revisions and adaptations to a wide range of Mozart’s operas, most frequently Don Giovanni.

The central work of the Da Ponte trilogy had its premiere in Prague in 1787 and served as one of the core elements of the various myths that sprang up around the composer. As the author effectively demonstrates in Part I, made up of the chapters ‘Werktreue, Patriotism, and Nationalism in Prague Productions of Mozart’s Operas’ and ‘Mozart and Ethnic Identity’, eighteenth-century biographers and commenters such as Franz Xaver Niemetscek seized on Mozart’s remark that he was best understood in Prague to argue at first for a regional Bohemian specificity, in which ‘national and ethnic identities were fluid and multivalent’.Footnote ³ It was only in the early nineteenth century that circumscribed ethnolinguistic identities began to appear and to be projected anachronistically backward onto Mozart’s life and context. By the 1880s, Guido Adler (then a professor of musicology at the German university in Prague) could argue that Mozart represented ‘the purest treasure of German spirit and German culture’Footnote ⁴ on the occasion of the centennial of Don Giovanni’s premiere in Prague, and this despite the fact that Mozart followed Italian operatic examples and set an Italian-language text. Right around the same time, Otakar Hostinský (an aesthetician and critic who was Adler’s counterpart in musicology at the Czech university) repeated elements of earlier Czech discourse with the suggestion that some sort of intrinsic spiritual connection existed between Mozart’s music and Czech folk song melodies.Footnote ⁵

In their efforts to consolidate the terms of their ethnic identities and in so doing be able to more effectively jockey for power within the hierarchy of the Habsburgs’ many subject populations, Czechs and Germans both laid claim to Mozart and his music as one of their own cultural touchstones. This process represents a quintessential example of the tangled cultural politics of Habsburg Central Europe. As Nedbal argues later in the book, if the ideologues of ethnonationalism and music could deploy Mozart in service of their goals, then so too could nationalist allegiances define the shape of music scholarship. His examination of the Don Giovanni adaptation of Wenzel Mihule, relatively unknown in the literature and the subject of Chapter 6, reveals that Mihule’s adaptation, which originated at the Patriotic Theatre in Prague in the early 1790s, was in fact quite an important point of reference in the early reception and spread of Mozart’s operas. Mihule’s work was nevertheless devalued by twentieth-century Czech musicologists who saw German-Bohemian musical culture as unimportant, if not actively deserving of opprobrium. Meanwhile, musicologists writing in other languages largely dismissed Prague for reasons of perceived unimportance, Cold War political difficulties, or both.Footnote ⁶ While such attitudes have begun to shift, their legacy – and by extension the legacy of Habsburg Austria – continues to be felt in the present. Overall, Mozart’s Operas and National Politics stands as an impressive work of scholarship that draws on a wide variety of archives and subjects. It makes key interventions into the historiography of what has often been considered a ‘peripheral’ region in the narrative of Western classical music through one of the tradition’s most central canonical figures, Mozart.

While Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a figure of contention in the battles of cultural nationalism in Central Europe makes a certain amount of sense even for those uninitiated in the turbulent history of the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the idea of French operetta composer Jacques Offenbach as a cipher for the political shifts of twentieth-century Hungary perhaps requires a bit more explanation. Péter Bozó’s Offenbach Performance in Budapest, 1920–1956: Orpheus on the Danube sets out to offer just such an explanation, but in contrast to the other two books reviewed here, it does not attain the same level of archival and narrative detail, coming in at only 69 pages of text as compared to Nedbal’s 260-page monograph and Wolff’s 365-page tale. This is in part due to the very different state of the literature: Hungarian secondary sources about Offenbach did not exist until Bozó’s own prior study of Offenbach’s performance history in Hungary, published in 2021.Footnote ⁷ Although there has been a spate of publications about the history of Viennese operetta in the last thirty or so years, research into operetta practice in Budapest, especially from Hungarian scholars, has seemingly lagged behind.Footnote ⁸ As Bozó points out, this too is a legacy of Habsburg-era national tensions: filtered through the prism of Viennese culture, performed in German, and often antisemitically associated with Jewish people (not just in Budapest, but in Vienna as well), operetta was seen as ‘unnational’ by generations of Hungarian scholars. More practically, however, the book’s brevity is also a function of it being part of the Cambridge Elements series, which publishes texts that are limited to 20,000 to 30,000 words.

Offenbach Performance in Budapest, 1920–1956 is divided into four chapters of increasing length, with Bozó spending the most time on the fate of Offenbach’s operas during the post-World-War-II Rákosi era.Footnote ⁹ The thesis of the work is effectively that changes made to Offenbach’s works between 1920 and 1956 is the reason for their unpopularity and low level of performance standards in Hungary today. While more narrow claims are not necessarily worse, in comparison with Wolff and Nedbal’s thematically broad and chronologically sweeping efforts, I could not help but feel as though I was left wanting more. This was in part due to the truly radical changes that Hungarian theatre professionals and musicians made to Offenbach’s operettas. La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) became A gerolsteini nagyhercegnő (1950), which dispenses with practically everything but the central love triangle and the Benelux stand-in in favour of an unsubtle allegorical criticism of the Marshall Plan and the imperialist ambitions of Western capitalism as they related to small states. Two years later Orphée aux enfers likewise became Orfeusz (1952), in which the title character was a freedom fighter arrayed against the exploitative capitalists in the Washington White House (the gods of Olympus), who are in league with the American underworld (Pluto and the inhabitants of Hades), who are themselves again unsubtly represented by devils in Ku Klux Klan hoods carrying Eurydice down to hell.

Suffice to say that I wanted to know a lot more about how and why such adaptations could come to pass. Some of the most successful parts of the book indeed detail the context of theatrical practice at the time, including the at-times truly bizarre reasoning of the influential director Margit Gáspár (1905–94), who argued that operetta, rather than a primarily commercial genre that would therefore be unacceptable under the dictates of socialist realism, was instead the true successor of the Roman mimus, a form of popular theatre that she argued was, and I quote, ‘essentially identical’ to Offenbach’s operettas by way of medieval farces and the commedia dell’arte. Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, later in the final chapter Bozó quotes in full a long letter from Gáspár to the Secretary General of the Hungarian Communist Party, Mátyás Rákosi (1892–1971), in which she attempts to justify her changes to La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein and explain the poor reception of the new version. As the author puts it, the letter ‘aptly reflects the atmosphere of the period’, yet it raises so many extraordinary claims and contextual issues that unpacking it fully would probably have doubled the length of the book.Footnote ¹¹ In short, it felt like a missed opportunity, as Bozó quite quickly moves on from the letter and leaves the text simply to stand on its own.

In the end, I felt I had more questions than answers. Given the amount of fascinating primary source material the author has access to, this text could have easily been a monograph, and indeed it is likely a selection of elements from Bozó’s Hungarian-language text Fejezetek Jacques Offenbach magyarországi fogadtatásának történetéből (Chapters from the History of Jacques Offenbach’s Hungarian Reception). Offenbach Performance in Budapest, 1920–1956 certainly functions well on its own as an introduction to one aspect of Hungarian operatic reception and its politics in the twentieth century, and may well serve as an impetus for further research, translations or publications. For example, I wanted to know more about whether and how Hungarian music critics related to larger currents of Hungarian nationalism and European politics writ large. The translation into Hungarian of originally French works (even if filtered through the German translations popular in Vienna) and their performance at the National and Folk Theatres in Budapest surely must have caused some comment. At the risk of equating parts of the region with different histories and cultural milieux, elsewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the adaptation of French theatrical works was seen as a way of enriching the operatic repertoire. This enrichment not only lessened the influence of German culture, but it also provided a greater sense of cosmopolitan sophistication relative to the rest of Europe; Bedřich Smetana argued exactly this in the 1870s when he and librettist Emanuel Züngel adapted Jean Pierre Félicien Mallefille’s Les deux veuves (1860), a one-act salon comedy, into Dvě vdovy (The Two Widows, 1874, rev. 1878), emphasising the composer’s desire for a greater range of Czech-language works at the Provisional Theatre in Prague.Footnote ¹²

Taken together, the three books discussed here represent very different approaches to the larger topic of opera in Habsburg Central Europe. Nevertheless, all three in their own way showcase the importance of opera in the narrative of European cultural history. They do all focus on the work of canonic composers – whether Strauss and Offenbach enjoy the same level of centrality in musicology as they do in the concert hall is certainly arguable, and Mozart is Mozart – but as these volumes do so in ways that are novel and enriching, they will hopefully serve as inspiration for future scholars to explore how some of these same dynamics affected other aspects of musical production in the region beyond the well-known names. (To be fair, I myself am guilty of a focus largely on canonical composers in my own scholarship on music of the Czech lands.)

The last twenty or so years have seen a marked shift in the way scholars talk about the various lands, peoples and governments of Austria-Hungary. Rather than treating the Habsburg Empire as a moribund state that was ineluctably doomed by the centrifugally destructive force of nationalism, scholars in history and music studies have sought to better understand the region on its own terms, and to show how the competing demands of supranational, imperial centralisation and desires for various degrees of national autonomy were politically and culturally productive as much as they led to disjunction. Better understandings of these relationships have in turn led to deeper comprehension of the histories and cultures of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s successor states in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Even if nationalism and ethnic identity remain perennially unavoidable topics of discussion in the music scholarship on Central Europe, these three books demonstrate that there is much yet to be illuminated, often in fascinating and unexpected ways, when it comes to the relationship between opera and politics in the region.