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Revising Lehár’s Rastelbinder for the Reich
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 July 2014
Abstract
Operetta held an ambiguous position within Nazi German entertainment culture: while suitably diverting and escapist, many of the most successful hits had Jewish authors and were thus increasingly avoided by theatre directors. To replenish the Reich’s performable repertory, Goebbels founded the ‘Reichsstelle für Musikbearbeitungen’, whose revisions of classical works including Handel’s oratorios and Mozart’s Da Ponte operas have been widely discussed. This article focuses on one of the institution’s many operetta commissions, Viennese satirist Rudolf Weys’s unfinished 1944 version of Franz Lehár’s Der Rastelbinder (1902), a box office success that featured an itinerant Jewish peddler as the central character. Weys’s revisions as well as his own story show that this kind of Reichsstelle commission could be a lifeline for artists who could not afford to attract attention or leave the Reich.
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References
1 Most of the contributions to the topic can be found in a book of conference proceedings, Wolfgang Schaller’s Operette unterm Hakenkreuz: Zwischen hoffähiger Kunst und ‘Entartung’ (Berlin, 2007) and in Arnbom, Marie-Therese, Kevin Clarke and Thomas Trabitsch, eds., Welt der Operette: Glamour, Stars und Showbusiness (Vienna, 2011)Google Scholar, 14. See also Christoph Dompke, Unterhaltungsmusik und NS-Verfolgung, Musik im ‘Dritten Reich’ und im Exil, 15 (Neumünster, 2011).
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22 Lehár himself called it this, since Wiener Frauen (1901) had involved a lot of piecing together of different materials in order to fit the contemporary operetta conventions. See Stefan Frey, liner notes to Franz Lehár, Der Rastelbinder with Fritz Muliar, the ORF Choir and Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hans Graf, recorded November 1981, CPO, 777 038-2, 2004, compact disc, 14.
23 Frey, Rastelbinder CD liner notes, 17.
24 See Frey, ‘Dann kann ich leicht vergessen’, 96–7.
25 Frey, Rastelbinder CD liner notes, 15. Louis Treumann recreated this character, his first big success, in the 1926 silent film version.
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27 Even Hans Veigl, the author of the most critical account of Weys and the Wiener Werkel so far, reckons that the cabaret artist’s work for Nazi organisations was solely a ‘survival strategy’. Veigl, Hans, Tränen und Gelächter: Kleinkunst im Wiederaufbau (Straden, 2009)Google Scholar, 18.
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41 Quoted in Herbert Staud, ‘Das Ostmark-Kabarett “Wiener Werkel” – Kollaboration oder Demonstration?’, Österreichische Literatur im Exil, www.literaturepochen.at/exil/lecture_5034.pdf, 8 (accessed 3 February 2013). For a detailed discussion of the concept of Gemütlichkeit in Vienna, see Lutz Musner, ‘Eine Archäologie der Wiener Gemütlichkeit’, in idem, Der Geschmack von Wien: Kultur und Habitus einer Stadt, Interdisziplinäre Stadtforschung, 3 (Frankfurt am Main, 2009) 173–204.
42 Rudolf Weys, ‘Der Wiener Januskopf’; reproduced in Österreichische Literatur im Exil, www.literaturepochen.at/exil/multimedia/pdf/weysjanuskopf.pdf (accessed 1 February 2013).
43 Goebbels, diary entry on December 9, 1940; see Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part I vol. 9, 42. See also Weys, Rudolf, Wien bleibt Wien und das geschieht ihm ganz recht (Vienna, 1974)Google Scholar, 249 and Kühn, Volker, Die Zehnte Muse: 111 Jahre Kabarett (Cologne, 1993)Google Scholar, 97.
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47 Weys to ‘Robert’, March 12, 1946.
48 Moser to Sikorski, June 3, 1944.
49 Weys to Moser, June 23, 1944.
50 Weys to Lehár, July 27, 1944.
51 Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung zu meiner Bearbeitung des “Rastelbinder”’, n.d.
52 For example, the dialogue of the prologue is significantly altered to make the children’s engagement more plausible to a 1945 audience.
53 Moser, , ‘Von der Tätigkeit’, 79Google Scholar. The Reichsstelle also applied the same principle to the music, particularly the instrumentation: with a ‘cautious hand’ the editors aimed to raise the standard of the – for modern audiences, sometimes ‘scanty’ – orchestration to match that of the ‘master himself at the height of his artistry’. They treated what they considered to be ‘weak numbers’ next to ‘valuable pearls’ with a ‘careful blood transfusion … in order to breathe juvenile vitality into any works of the light muse with an elderly appearance’. See Drewes, ‘Die Reichsstelle für Musikbearbeitungen’, 25.
54 Ibid. In order to bring old operettas up to date, the Reichsstelle considered it necessary to change several libretto locations to what were then German or German-occupied locations: Millöcker’s Bettelstudent was moved from Cracow to Breslau, Nedbal’s Polenblut was renamed Erntebraut and set in Bohemia, and Suppé’s Fatinitza was removed from its original 1854 setting at the Battle of Sebastopol and updated to Bulgaria’s 1940s ‘war of liberation’.
55 Moser to Sikorski, October 7, 1943, transcript.
56 ‘daß so ä dumme Sitt’ besteht? Die Leut sind doch verschroben!’ Franz Lehár and Victor Léon, Der Rastelbinder: Operette in einem Vorspiel und zwei Acten, Vollständiger Clavier-Auszug mit Text (Vienna, 1902), 20.
57 ‘daß immer noch der Brauch besteht, ich find das zu verschroben’; Weys, ‘Der Rastelbinder’, libretto manuscript, 20–1.
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61 Moser to Sikorski, June 3, 1944. Indeed, contemporary critics, for example of the Völkischer Beobachter, praised operettas that ‘could entertain a full house without salaciousness and ambiguous suggestive innuendos’. Vonsien, Karl F., ‘“Liebe lacht im Lärchenhof”: Erfolgreiche Operette Schweriner Autoren’, Völkischer Beobachter, 9 May, 1942Google Scholar; reproduced in Klotz, , ‘Der Widerspenstigen Lähmung’, 80Google Scholar. On the de-eroticising of operetta under the Nazis, see Kevin Clarke, ‘Einleitung: Homosexualität und Operette?’, in Clarke, Glitter and be Gay, 8.
62 See Lehár and Léon, Der Rastelbinder, libretto, 48–9; Weys, ‘Der Rastelbinder’, libretto manuscript, 58–60.
63 Weys to Moser, June 23, 1944. See also Weys to Moser, July 1, 1944.
64 Moser to Sikorski, October 7, 1943, transcript. In 1943 Moser had already written to Sikorski about Zampach’s ‘boring and hardly effective’ edition.
65 Weys to Sikorski, July 1944. In order to persuade Moser and Lehár, Weys even wrote a ‘psychological analysis’, showing what each of the main characters would most naturally be doing immediately after the end of Act I, and that for the characters to meet again, all other locations would look forced. Weys to Moser, July 19, 1944 and Weys, ‘Beilage A’, n.d.; see also Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung’.
66 Weys to Moser, July 19, 1944.
67 Weys to Sikorski, July 9, 1944 and Weys to Moser, July 19, 1944.
68 Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung’.
69 Moser to Sikorski, June 3, 1944.
70 Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung’.
71 Weys, reporting to Seidel about his meeting with Lehár in Ischl, August 9, 1944.
72 Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung’.
73 Weys, ‘Der Rastelbinder’, libretto manuscript, 30.
74 Ibid., 31.
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77 Fritz Eckhardt and Franz Paul, ‘Das chinesische Wunder: En Spiel um den Chinesen, der net untergeht’, Österreichische Literatur im Exil, www.literaturepochen.at/exil/multimedia/pdf/eckhardtchinese.pdf (accessed 13 October 2010).
78 Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung’.
79 The same melismatic melody was also woven into the introduction to the prologue; however, one easily could have cut out the corresponding parts there.
80 Ludwig Karpath; quoted in Frey, Rastelbinder CD liner notes, 16.
81 Weys to Sikorski, July 9, 1944 and Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung’.
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84 Steinweis, Art, Ideology, & Economics in Nazi Germany, 169–70.
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87 Weys to Sikorski and wife, August 9, 1944.
88 Lehár to Weys, October 1, 1944.
89 Weys to the Vienna employment office, August 16, 1944.
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92 Weys to Lehár, September 25, 1944.
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95 Weys to Lehár, September 25, 1944.
96 Weys to Sikorski, November 15, 1944. The Organisation Todt was a civil and military engineering organisation founded by Fritz Todt and led, after 1942, by Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments. The institution was notorious for using forced labour for their often dangerous large-scale construction work.
97 Weys to the Vienna employment office, December 30, 1944.
98 Sikorski to Weys, November 27, 1944.
99 Weys to the Vienna employment office, December 30, 1944. See also Weys to the Vienna employment office, September 12, 1944.
100 Lehár to Weys, October 1, 1944.
101 Weys to Louis Barcata, December 19, 1944.
102 Weys to unknown recipients (a couple), December 14, 1944.
103 Weys to Lehár, March 26, 1945.
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108 Moser, ‘Schlußwort Hans Joachim Moser am 19.9.1947’; Moser Papers, Box 5.
109 Moser, December 10, 1947; Moser Papers, Box 1. Also Moser, ‘Selbstbericht des Forschers und Schriftstellers Hans Joachim Moser’, 22; Moser Papers, Box 15.
110 Moser to Curt Sachs, December 25, 1948; Moser Papers, Box 6.