As the summer progressed, a variety of musical productions were on offer. These included a revival of The Merry Widow; musical comedies concerning class difference, including The Street Singer, about a countess who falls in love with a Parisian street painter, and Tilly, about a wealthy man and an impoverished woman who, planning to marry, meet each other’s families; a modernist work called Midsummer Madness that includes a play-within-a-play and starred Marie Tempest in her return to the musical stage; and Victor Herbert’s final musical, a time-travel fantasy called The Dream Girl, which opened posthumously.

On the first two days of September, two musicals opened that offered descriptions of different peoples of colour for white Broadway audiences: Sissle and Blake’s The Chocolate Dandies (African Americans); and Friml, Stothart, Harbach and Hammerstein’s Rose-Marie (Indigenous peoples of Canada). Problematic stereotypes were performed in both instances, though The Chocolate Dandies featured Josephine Baker and Elisabeth Welch in its cast. Musicals opening later in the month included a new edition of The Passing Show and George Gershwin’s musical written expressly for London, Primrose, with a book by Guy Bolton supervised by George Grossmith, Jr.

Many of the musicals that opened in 1923 and played into 1924 hearkened back, somewhat nostalgically, for simpler times, though the stories were often fraught with deceit and sometimes could be a bit salacious. The lead female characters in such works ranged from a young waif who ends up travelling with a circus (Poppy) to a Russian empress (Catherine), a royal mistress (Madame Pompadour) and a young Spanish woman who finds herself in a complex labyrinth of romantic entailments (Doña Francisquita).

Early on, Bernstein often conducted operas (Cherubini, Bellini) and other sung stage works (Blitzstein, Weill). He would later make renowned opera recordings in New York and Vienna. His greatest contributions to the genre are three quite varied compositions. The short, all-sung Trouble in Tahiti (1952) is bitingly satirical. Candide (1956) is an operetta, with plentiful spoken dialogue. The words were provided by a half-dozen collaborators, partly for later productions (each production included a somewhat different selection of musical numbers). The entirely serious A Quiet Place (1983−86) deals with family tensions and disappointments. Its style is highly eclectic, ranging from blues to twelve-tone. A Quiet Place has one official version (in which Trouble in Tahiti becomes two interludes in Act 2) and one in which the orchestration has been reduced by Garth Edwin Sunderland. The latter omits Tahiti but restores important passages that the official version omits.

This essay describes a set of unconventional performances that I codirected with cultural historian John Sienicki. It demonstrates how we mixed genres, combining vocal music with related theatrical scenes, novels, and lectures; how historical research and musical praxis intersected in our creative process; how our improvisational rehearsal style worked; and how we designed performances with performers and intended audiences in mind. Some specific topics discussed are Schubert’s songs for female characters; the Vienna Volkstheater and its music; Lieder duets; and links between Schubert and the German historical-fiction writer Benedikte Naubert. These shows grew out of historical research and sometimes led to new research projects. I argue for the value of teaching Lieder performance by bringing in awareness of the songs’ historical and literary contexts. As some songs crossed genre boundaries, the worlds of theatrical music and art song can blend. Lieder existed in a complex, interconnected world, and nonstandard performances can accentuate their beauty and illuminate their meaning.

This chapter examines Puccini’s relationship with Milan, the city that was most important to his career. It begins with a detailed discussion of the Milan of the composer’s student years, outlining its importance as both an industrial and a cultural centre characterised by cosmopolitanism and modernity. Milan was also the capital of the nineteenth-century operatic world, where many singers, publishers, and critics were based, and with several leading opera houses, most notably La Scala. The chapter discusses how Puccini launched his career in Milan, securing a premiere at La Scala at a very early stage (Edgar). The ill-fated first performance of Madama Butterfly is also discussed, as is the posthumous premiere of Turandot. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of Puccini’s oeuvre at La Scala since his death and the ways in which Puccini came, in a sense, to symbolise the city’s self-image.

This chapter provides a summary of the increasingly independent careers of Johann Strauss (Son) and Eduard up to the death of the former. While Johann focussed on the composition of operettas and one comic opera, with occasional appearances as the director of dance music, Eduard was fully committed to the Strauss Orchestra, in Vienna and internationally (including the United States, Russia and Britain). Johann Strauss became an increasingly celebrated figure in Vienna, notably in 1894 (the fiftieth anniversary of his debut). Eduard, on the other hand, became disillusioned with the city, aggravated by the secret embezzlement of his savings by members of his family.

Mahler’s youth in Iglau exposed him to a rich variety of music, much of it originating outside the symphonic and operatic traditions that eventually would occupy him professionally and creatively. The enclave’s provincial location and ethnic diversity gave rise to a singular mixture of folk music traditions. The garrison’s military bands made varied contributions to the city’s everyday sounds and musical life. And as a bastion of German liberalism, Iglau sustained many social, sacred, and municipal organizations that promoted the cultivation and performance of music. This chapter examines these repertories (fiddle music, folk song, rustic dances; military band repertoire, including dances, tunes from operettas, and original works for the ensemble; and music for choral societies and community bands), along with the institutions and performance circumstances that supported them, illuminating sources from which Mahler appropriated materials vitally important to his idiosyncratic compositional voice.

Scholars writing about Gilbert and Sullivan prefer ‘Savoy Operas’ to ‘operettas’, taking their lead from history and often hoping to place these shows on a par with more highly regarded comic operas. Whatever one calls them, they provide plenty of interest for musicologists working on operetta, and the status anxiety surrounding them is especially revealing. An opening section on their history shows that concerns over respectability lay behind every aspect of the way the shows were created and marketed, and formed the background to changing perceptions of the two creators. New critical attention is given here to the continued entanglement of ethical and aesthetic concerns in scholarly writing on composer and librettist. The second section addresses distinctive features of the content, in particular Gilbert’s legal influences and stagecraft, and Sullivan’s musical deadpanning. Anxiety appears again over the quotations and references in both the music and text, but this can be understood as a fundamental part of the audience experience, closely tied to the creation of class identity. Finally, a discussion of modern Gilbert and Sullivan performances and enthusiast communities serves as a springboard for considering issues of politics in staging and performance and points the way to possible left-wing interpretations.

What is zarzuela? What is its relation to operetta? If the first question can only be addressed in general terms, the second requires a more complex answer. The development of Spanish-language music theatre has been shaped over four centuries by dialogue with opera on one side and operetta on the other. The influence of external operetta movements on zarzuela ranges from Parisian opéra comique and Offenbach’s opéra bouffe, through the English musical plays of Jones and Monckton to the Viennese ‘silver age’. All these nourished the Spanish genre while (as Nietzsche recognized) extending the concept of operetta. After examining classic género chico works such as Federico Chueca’s La Gran Vía and Ruperto Chapí’s La revoltosa, Christopher Webber highlights the period between 1910 and the early 1920s. In those years lavish opereta español was the fashion in Madrid, notably Pablo Luna’s key work El asombro de Damasco, written with London tastes in mind. A brief coda surveys developments after the Spanish Civil War, notably Pablo Sorozábal’s Black, el payaso. This daring 1942 satire on Francoist rule, masquerading as a homage to Emmerich Kálmán, was one the last works to yoke the societal concerns of romantic zarzuela with operetta.

Studies of opera during the Czech national revival of the 1860s and 1870s have understandably focused on the signal works of the burgeoning repertoire by the likes of Smetana, Dvořák and Fibich. But the stage of the Prague Provisional Theatre, the first establishment to perform plays and opera exclusively in Czech, was home to a much more omnivorous spread of works in which operetta played a highly significant role. With the arrival of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld in 1863, operetta rapidly grew to become a major part of the repertoire. Indeed, by the early 1870s performances of works by Offenbach outstripped those of any other composer. This chapter looks at the development of operetta in the Provisional Theatre, the polyglot nature of the repertoire, including its heavy emphasis on dance and a range other spectacles, and Czech composers’ somewhat ambivalent relationship with the genre; while comic opera certainly flourished among the Czechs, no native tradition of operetta managed to become established in these pioneering years.

This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of operetta in Russia, starting with performances and reception of German and French operettas from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and exploring home-grown, Soviet operetta. It will show that operetta was big business in tsarist Russia, and later in the Soviet Union, and demonstrate that it was a valuable resource, a laughter therapy, for the Soviet authorities with which to anaesthetize the masses to the realities of life. The works by German and French composers dominated Russian operetta stages, with the most popular composers being Suppé, Offenbach, Planquette, Hervé and Lecocq, until Soviet composers began to create operettas according to the new, official socialist realism style. This chapter will briefly introduce significant operetta composers – Dunayevsky, Strelnikov, Aleksandrov and Milyutin – and discuss contributions to the genre from such well-known composers as Shostakovich and Kabalevsky. It also gives a brief account of how operetta was instrumental to boosting the morale of the population ravaged by World War II, especially in blockaded Leningrad, and shows that operetta (both European and Soviet) is still popular in today’s Russia.

This chapter will show that although Warsaw is not a city readily associated with the global success of operetta, it was the place where operetta performances were not only popular but lucrative, and that they rivalled Vienna and Berlin with the quality of their productions and star-studded casts. Before World War I, operetta had no competition in Warsaw: it had publicity, stars, excellent productions, stunning stage sets and the latest lighting and stage equipment. Polish musicians, actors and directors had direct links with European theatres, and Warsaw was close to such operetta centres as Vienna, Berlin and Budapest. Warsaw operetta divas were celebrities adored by the public and critics alike. Some of them died leaving astronomical fortunes and lasting memories and recordings, some died tragically, and some died in complete oblivion. The chapter will look at the most significant operetta theatre not only in Warsaw but arguably in the whole of Poland, Teatr Nowosci, and some of the people who made it one of the city’s biggest attractions: Ludwik Sliwinski, Wiktoria Kawecka, Kazimira Niewiarowska, Jósef Redo and Lycina Messal.