It is clear that the productions in the West End and on Broadway of The Merry Widow marked a distinctive new phase in operetta reception. The massive success of The Merry Widow opened up a flourishing market for operettas from Vienna and Berlin. This was confirmed by the huge success of Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier in New York (1909) and London (1910). The Berlin operettas of Jean Gilbert were soon in demand in the West End and on Broadway. Continental European operetta entered a marketplace dominated by musical comedy. The first major blow to the operetta market, especially in the UK, was the outbreak of the First World War. After the war, many creators of operetta were eager to escape to the comfort of historical romances. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, many people were prepared to pay for operetta, and an assortment of theatres and ticket prices enabled a broad social mixture to do so. In addition to critical-aesthetic reception, theatrical productions were open to moral concerns. The chapter ends with reflections on the reasons for the decline in productions on Broadway and in the West End post-1933.

Cosmopolitanism involves a taste for cultural products of other countries and requires a disposition of openness towards new cultural experience. Like jazz, operetta appealed to people from different cultural backgrounds. This chapter examines operetta from the perspective of both the social and the aesthetic. It explores the social conditions that allowed operetta and its cultural networks to flourish, but also seeks to explain what is cosmopolitan about the stage works themselves, in their musical style and dramatic content. A cosmopolitan genre is one that is open to international musical influences, as European operetta demonstrated when responding to jazz and dance band music. A diasporic cosmopolitanism forms another dimension of the art world of operetta. A diaspora may make great efforts to retain cultural traditions but can also assimilate other cultural knowledge and practices. Operetta involved a large number of Jews working in all aspects of its production. By engaging with culture across borders of all kinds, cosmopolitanism challenges ideas of Self and Other. To be cosmopolitan is to recognize a common humanity in the world’s diverse cultural artefacts.