Operetta Empire: Music Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna by Micaela Baranello

Abstract

Reviewed by: Operetta Empire: Music Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna by Micaela Baranello Ruth V. Gross Micaela Baranello, Operetta Empire: Music Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna. Oakland: U California P, 2021. 235 pp. Micaela Baranello has a lot to say about the world of Viennese operetta. Her recent book, The Operetta Empire: Music Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna, provides readers with a detailed analysis of the connections between the “Silver Age” of operetta—a term that came into wide use only after World War II to designate operettas between 1905 and World War II—and the Austro-Hungarian world in which it developed and flourished. Her major focus is the period between 1905, the year that Franz Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe premiered, and the mid-1930s, just before the Anschluss. Operetta has long been considered an art form inferior to its higher-brow relative, opera; Baranello, however, makes a strong case for the operettas of the early twentieth [End Page 178] century as important and, until now, underrated players in the world of musical modernism. They are highly self-reflective works that often reveal aesthetic and social concerns regarding class, race, and gender and uncover truths about the world in which they were created. As such they deserve both scholarly investigation and respect, both of which she offers in this study. Baranello approaches her topic chronologically and lays out a clear historical overview. A quick summary of operetta in nineteenth-century Vienna (the “Golden Age”) provides us with the necessary information to understand how different the compositions of the new century seemed to critics at the time, several of whom she cites. Offenbach’s operettas, modeled on the musical style of the French opera comique, were generally considered the pinnacle of the genre, as they were not only extremely witty but also biting in their political satire. When Johann Strauss II came on the scene, he created a more local context that focused on Austro-Hungarian culture and folk culture and introduced the tradition of dance (particularly waltz) music, emotional peaks reminiscent of opera, and dramatic clichés. By the end of the century, there seemed to be a dearth of Viennese composers who could continue the tradition, but then Franz Lehár, after having composed a few operettas that were less well con- and re-ceived, succeeded in establishing himself and launching a new age of operetta with Die lustige Witwe. Baranello chooses to focus on a few key composers to explain the development and historical focus of the decades before and after World War I. Some of her selections are essential, but others seem a bit arbitrary. Her choice of Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe and Zigeunerliebe, Oscar Straus’s Ein Walzertraum, and Emmerich Kálmán’s operettas with gypsy themes and flair, like Die Czardasfürstin, are of great interest because the discussion centers on operettas that we can still see performed today, and in this way, Baranello’s study also speaks to those of us who may not necessarily be operetta experts, even if we are operetta fans. Her section on Kálmán’s earlier gypsy opera Der Zigeunerprimas—an operetta no longer in current repertory—is also extremely illuminating for its historical context as a forerunner for the more popular Hungarian folk-style operettas still performed. But when the study delves into other operettas that have long been forgotten and are remembered mostly as historical oddities, the book, although providing information about performance practices and performers themselves, sometimes becomes less engaging, for example her discussion of Lehár’s Eva or Kálmán’s Gold gab ich für Eisen. To be sure, these more esoteric artefacts are used to illustrate [End Page 179] important societal concerns in Viennese history—in these two examples specifically labor and working-class issues before World War I in Eva and war propaganda in the Kálmán work. For the operetta scholar or musicologist, these may be significant, but the study bogs down in these moments. Two of Baranello’s longer discussions provide a great deal of insight into important topics for anyone familiar with Viennese operetta. The section...