Patrick Bade
Viennese Operetta, Part 1

Patrick Bade - Viennese Operetta, Part 1

- Anyway, I’ll get stuck into Viennese operetta, Vienna and operetta, they seem to go hand-in-hand, and from the 1870s to the 1920s, there was an endless flow from these two theatres, Theatre an der Wien on the left, and the Carltheater on the right of gorgeous melodies in waltz-time, that went out and conquered the world. Here are the two kings of operetta, king of Viennese operetta, Johann Strauss II, and king of French operetta, Jacques Offenbach on the right-hand side. Now, operetta was not in fact a Viennese invention, it was a Parisian invention, or to be more precise, it was the invention of a German Jew who lived in Paris, and that was Jacob, later Jacques Offenbach, whose father was a cantor in Cologne, he often referred to himself as Eu de Cologne, and it’s not often with a particular genre in the arts that you can precisely date it’s birth, or who the father was, you know? Who is the father of modern art? I would say the mother of modern art got around quite a bit, with all the people who claimed to for that, but I think you can very clearly say, “Yes, operetta was the invention of Offenbach.” There are some questions already, I bet somebody’s saying, well can I define what operetta is? And that is really not so easy, the borderlines between grand opera, opera comic, operetta, musical comedy, musicals, they’re all really quite blurred, and in fact if there was probably the only time when you really could’ve given it a sharp definition, was in France, in the middle of the 19th century, we know how the French loved their categorizations, they love their rules and regulations, and they had very strict regulations for what was opera, what was opera comic, what was operetta, and so on, and I’ll come back to that in a minute.

But we can date the birth of operetta to the world exhibition, the first Paris World Exhibition, which was in 1855, now Offenbach had already been in Paris for some time, he was not only a great composer, he was a very clever entrepreneur, and he’d been writing music for the theatre, and he could see that with the huge crowds that were going to come from all over the world, to visit the world exhibition, that they would want some kind of entertainment in the evening. So, he commissioned and constructed a theatre close to the Champs-Élysées, close to where the exhibition was taking place, in the spring and summer of 1855, and he put on a series of one act musical plays that were tremendously popular. So, when the exhibition closed down, in the autumn Champs-Élysées at that time was actually way away from the centre of Paris, it was far to the west of the centre of Paris. So, he moved back into centre of Paris, and he took this little theatre called des Bouffes-Parisiens, it still stands and it’s a small theatre, it can seat 600 people. And he continued with these short, one-act musical comedies, and one of the first, and it was a great success it was called Bataclan…

Well, you got two images here that show you the different kind of public that you would’ve found in 1855 at the Paris opera, at that time in… Can see, rather smart, audience on the left, a family sitting in a box, and altogether a rather earthier audience, at des Bouffes-Parisiens, more mixed socially and here is… You can actually see Offenbach on the right-hand side, close to the stage. This little operetta, I’m going to play you an excerpt, it’s called Bataclan, and it’s a farce about five French people who find themselves in China and all pretend to be Chinese, and there’s a wonderful moment of revelation when they all realise that they’re French. But it’s a crazy subversive, outrageous little piece really, and that’s one of the things I want to stress, that when operetta started, it was actually a very subversive art form, with often quite strong political content, and so I’m going to play you a short excerpt from the end of Bataclan where there’s a big battle scene, and one of the things that delighted the public about Offenbach was that he was so naughty, and he’s being very, very naughty in this scene, ‘cause he’s parodying, in this battle scene, he parodies the climactic scene of Meyerbeer’s opera, Les Huguenots, which is about the massacre of St. Bartholomew, when the Huguenots had been shot down by the Catholics, and in that opera, as the Huguenots die, they all sing the Lutheran hymn, so the cultivated people in the audience at least would all have known this, so there would’ve been a frisson really of outrage that Offenbach quotes this Lutheran hymn in the middle of this mad farce.

Now, I said the French loved rules and regulations, and there were very, very strict regulations about what an opera was, it had to be five acts long, it had to include a ballet, an opera comic was an opera that where the musical numbers are linked by spoken-dialogue, but for this kind of more popular musical comedy, in the 1850s, there were very strict regulations, they couldn’t be more than one act, and the regulations changed from time to time, but there were strict rules about how many people could go onto the stage at one time, Offenbach had a lot of fun working his way around all these regulations, but he also had influence in high places, he had a patron in the Duc de Morny, who was the half-brother of the emperor Louis Napoleon, who managed to get these regulations dissolved. So, for the first time in 1858, Offenbach could write a full-length operetta that was going to last a whole evening, so this one claimed to be the absolute first operetta, and this is Orpheus in the Underworld, and he joined up with a team of librettist, Ludovic Halévy, who was the son of the great composer… Was he the son or the nephew? I’m not sure. Anyway, he was from the Halévy family, it’s the same composer who wrote La Juive, and Henri Meilhac. This image of Ludovic Halévy on the left-hand side, where on the right you’ve got a photograph of Halévy seated and Henri Meilhac, and they can claim I think to be one of the most successful team of librettists in the history of opera, they also wrote the libretto for Carmen, the most popular opera of all, Meilhac wrote the libretto for Manon, and they worked with Offenbach on his greatest successes in the 1860s.

Now, it’s said at this point of operetta, it was really pushing the boundaries, and it was subversive, and so, everybody knew that the character of Jupiter in Orpheus in the Underworld, was actually based on the emperor himself, Louis Napoleon, you see him in the insert with his splendid moustaches, and obviously the whole operetta is making fun of the emperors love life, which was probably rather more complicated and interesting than our own Boris Johnson’s. And in the scene you see here, this is from the original production, of course Jupiter has this very convenient trick of being able to transform himself into any form, you know, he can become a swan, or he can become an eagle, and in this operetta he becomes a rather beautiful fly, in order to get through a keyhole, in order to seduce Euridice, who’s been captured and locked up in a room in the underworld, and so he buzzes around her, and she’s mysteriously attracted to this fly, and they have a little ziz together. Now, the team really reaches it’s full strength in 1864 with the opera La belle Hélène, and so you have Offenbach, Meilhac and Halévy, and the fourth member of the team for several years was a nice young Jewish girl from Bordeaux called Hortense Schneider, Schneider of course means tailor, and her father was a tailor, but she was a nice young girl, who I’m afraid rather went to the bad, she came to Paris and became a courtesan, and the problem really for Offenbach was that she could earn a lot more money horizontally than she could vertically, so it was quite difficult to get her to come to rehearsals, but it paid off, she was a sensation, and she really conquered Paris.

So, this is the theatre, the Théâtre de l'Atelier, that still exists in Paris and I often walk people past it on walking tours of Paris, I always say to them, “We should really get down and kiss the pavement in front of this theatre.” I never actually made anybody do that. But, this here is Hortense Schneider as Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, and this is an early production of La Belle Hélène, and again it’s wonderfully outrageous, it’s mocking so many sacred cows, particularly of course the French have this absolute reverence for the classical tradition, so here we have various heroes of the Trojan wars, Ajax and Achilles, and so on, they’re all introducing themselves, a lot of very naughty puns here. Achilles introducing himself as the Bouillon, the Bouillon Achilles, some of these puns cannot really be translated into English, I mean, he says he’s very proud of his… Of course, that has a double meaning, I don’t think I really need to explain about his big… And then we get Menelaus, the husband of Helen of Troy, and Offenbach, he never lost his German accent, but he had a wonderful sensitivity to the French language, and it’s so clever how he says this, 'cause Menelaus introduces himself as the husband of the Queen, And the way Offenbach sets it, the word, the two syllables are separated, so it sounds instead of, “I’m the husband of the Queen.”

“I’m the Queen’s flea.” Now, belle Hélène had a incredible success in Vienna in 1865, the whole city went crazy for this new genre of operetta, and the immediate response, the very first Viennese opera, operetta was not by Johann Strauss, it was by a composer called Suppè, or to give him his proper full name, he was Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo Cavaliere Suppé Demelli, and he was of rather mixed aristocratic origin, Belgium, Czech and Polish, but he was an Italian speaker working in Vienna, and so the first Viennese opera is Die schöne Galathée, The Beautiful Galatea, so it’s also mocking Greek myth very much as Offenbach did, it’s still quite frequently formed I think in German-speaking countries, but outside of Germany, it’s chiefly known today for it’s very lovely, and melodious overture. Now, this is the operetta king Johann Strauss, I mentioned in a recent lecture that he had his great breakthrough to world-reputation conducting at the Paris World Fair of 1867 following one, and that’s where he launched the Blue Danub, and it was Offenbach who said to Strauss, “Really, you should try your hand at writing operettas, not just restrict yourself to writing waltzes and polkas.” And eventually he wrote 16 operettas, including the one which I suppose is the greatest of all, which is Die Fledermaus, which was first performed in 1874 at Theatre an der Wien, which we see here again. And once again, of course it’s a piece that has a very famous overture, that has really an independent life, it’s often played on the radio, and you often get it in concert hall programmes.

All of Johann Strauss’ operettas are full of gorgeous music, but he had a much lower success rate with his 16 operettas that Offenbach did, and I think that’s because he lacked Offenbach’s sure theatrical instincts, he wasn’t good at choosing libretto, the one great exception of course is Die Fledermaus, and it’s no coincidence I think that Die Fledermaus is closely based on a French farse that was actually written by Offenbach’s team of Halévy and Meilhac, so it works really well as a piece of musical theatre, and it’s funny, very funny and it holds your interest. So, I’m going to play you two excerpts, firstly in the first act, the year of Eisenstein has been sentenced to eight days in prison and he’s supposed to go off, and deliver it himself to the prison. And we have a trio here between Eisenstein, his wife Rosalinda, and her maid Adele. And so, they’re all bemoaning you know, this terrible situation that he’s got to go off to prison for eight days, so they all you know, start off saying, “I’m so moved, this is so awful.” But actually, all three of them have got secret plans for misbehaving, he’s not going to deliver himself to prison, immediately anyway, he’s going to go off and have fun at a party, and Rosalinda’s going to receive her lover, and Adele is also hoping to go to the party. So, this trio, they keep starting off in very sorrowful mode, but each time it builds up into something like riotous joy as their secret thoughts come out. Now, the other record I wanted to play you is Adele’s song from the last act, she has decided she doesn’t want to be a lady’s maid anymore, she wanted to be an actress, and in this little song, she rehearses all the different parts that she’d like to play from the innocent country girl, to a Queen.

Now, this record is one of my earliest memories actually, my grandmother gave it to me on a 78RPM disc when I was five years old, and I played it just constantly, to I think the great irritation of everybody else in my household, I remember my mother’s cleaning woman protesting saying, “Oh my God. Not that record again. That woman sounds like she’s got tummy ache!” So, if my very dear sister is listening to this, she will, I’m sure she’ll probably shudder at the thought of it, she had to put up with an awful lot from me when we were children, including, I forgot to tell you last time, when she had a beauty contest for her dolls, I insisted that my favourite opera singer should win it, and she let me have my way. But anyway, this is I think, I still think this is a delightful record, and I still play it quite often actually, Elizabeth Schuman does go a little bit over the top in this, but there’s also some wonderful singing, notice her beautiful trills. The other operetta by Strauss, which has entered the repertoire, and you’re likely to hear, anywhere in the world is Der Zigeunerbaron, The Gypsy Baron. It’s not such a clever, clever sophisticated text as Die Fledermaus, but it’s very charming, I think a lot of it’s appeal is a kind of nostalgic evocation of the old world of the Austria Hungarian Empire, and it just is so full of wonderful tunes. So, here the gypsy hero Barinkay, The Gypsy Baron of the title, sung by Richard Tauber. There’s so many gorgeous and seductive melodies in this piece, you think, “Where does this come from?” This kind of diving inspiration. Here’s a duet sung by Saffi the heroine, and Barinkay, here with Hilde Zadek, and Julius Patzak. Ah, Hilde Zadek has such a gorgeous, creamy voice.

I had the great privilege of interviewing her, must have been around about 1990 I think, at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, that photograph on the right was taken on that occasion, and I asked her about that recording, because it was made just after the war, she had fled to Palestine before the war, and she came back immediately afterwards, and was taken on by the Vienna opera, and became a Kammersängerin, and she was a much loved singer in Vienna. But to me it was really strange, this recording was made in the late 1940s, just after war, so you have an operetta, which is celebrating gipsies who’d been destined for extermination like the Jews, and we don’t know how many million gipsies, whether it’s one or two were murdered in death camps. So, you have a recording made just after that with a Jewish singer and other singers, and the conductor Strauss, who’d actually been very prominently active, all the way through the second world war, and the Holocaust. So, I said to her, “What was that like? You know, what did you think about that?” And she said, “Well, I didn’t really think about it at all.” But she did say to me that one thing she remembered was that Julius Patzak, her tenor was constantly making Jewish jokes, which she thought was odd, pretty tasteless I would say at the time, but she didn’t seem to hold it against him, and she worked with him frequently. Well, there’s a third Strauss operetta that Gertz performed from time to time, at least in German speaking countries, and it’s either Carnival in Venedig, or Eine Nacht in Venedig, A Night in Venice, it has a completely confusing and hopeless plot, so when it does get performed, it sometimes gets a new plot, but it does contain again, some very lovely numbers, so I’m going to play you this piece sung by the Viennese singer Erich Kunz, and boy does he do Viennese charm, he just oozes this oleaginous, what can I say?

Slightly sinister Viennese charm and he’s singing about the wilds, and the dangers of womankind. Now, as the other, how many is it? 13 operettas, which are often regarded as unstageable, nevertheless have lots of wonderful things in them. So, people have attempted to concoct new operettas using the music from these, more or less abandoned operettas, or Johann Strauss II. The most successful of these was in the 1920s in Berlin, a piece that was called Casanova, about the life of the great diarist, and lover of the 18th century, it was a very, very lascivious spectacle, as you can see from this slightly dim photograph, it was put on at the enormous Schauspielhaus in Vienna, and it was premiered on the 28th of September 1928, interestingly just three days before and in the opera was staged in the same city, gives you some idea of the incredible range of theatrical and musical experience you could have in Vienna at the time. And the great hit number from this was the Nuns’ Chorus, and the record made at the time by Anni Frind became a worldwide best-seller. I imagine that’s a record that’ll bring back memories for many people, ‘cause I think probably pretty well every household in Europe had a copy of that record.

Now, during Johann Strauss’ reign as waltz and operatic king of Vienna, there were two other composers who had big one-off hits and the first of these was Carl Millöcker, he’s a contemporary of Strauss and in 1882, at the Theatre an der Wien, he had a tremendous success with Bettelftudent, it’s being filmed two or three times, it still performed in the German-speaking world, but not very much elsewhere, and here is the tenor hit number from that. I’m going to finish with Carl Zeller’s Der Vogelhändler, which was premiered in the 1890s, he was a rather eccentric, interesting character, he was a civil servant for most of his life, but was actually imprisoned for perjury, rather like Eisenstein in Die Fledermaus. And he had his one great success with this piece, but it’s particularly the number I’m going to play you of course that became very, very famous and very popular around the world, and this is the Nightingale song, in the first performance it was sung by Alexander Girardi, who you see on the right-hand side he was a big, big star of the golden age of Viennese operetta. We’re going to hear it with my great favourite, Elizabeth Schuman, and she had the distinction, she was a brilliant virtuoso whistler, as well as a wonderful singer, she used to reduce Richard Strauss to helpless laughter and at dinner parties she would keep them entertained by alternately whistling and singing as you will hear now. Wrong thing. Oh, dear. I’ve put the wrong… You’re going to miss out on the fabulous Elizabeth Schuman, because I’ve put the wrong thing in here. Oh, dear. I’m really sad about that, but go on YouTube and listen to Elizabeth Schuman singing the Nightingale song. Right, well that’s it then for tonight. So, I’ll see what we’ve got in the way of questions.

Q&A and Comments:

“Good morning from Toronto.” Good evening from London. Bataclan it was yes, it was also the name of the nightclub, that’s true, I don’t think there’s any particular connection with the operetta.

Q: “Who made the rules, and the regulations?”

A: Well, I suppose the officials of the French government. Thank you, Bobby.

Q: “What is the defining…” I knew somebody was going to ask me that, “Between opera, and operetta?”

A: Well, there isn’t really and you know, there are certain pieces that are really on the borderline, I mean, even Fledermaus, which is regularly done by opera singers in opera houses. But by and large, of course opera is much more serious, and operetta is more lighthearted, and usually operetta incorporates spoken dialogue, but not always. Actually, there are really no very hard and fast rules.

Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Nice little joke.

Q: “How would I compare?”

A: Well, you know, I think that great Broadway musical composer who’s just died… You all know who I mean, into the woods, and so on. That, or a little night music little night music is for me an operetta, as well as a Broadway musical, and quite often, early on with the Broadway musicals, the European operetta composers like Robert Schtoltz and Oscar Strauss, they wrote pieces for Broadway musicals, so again there are very, very blurred boarders.

Let me see, where do we go from here? It’s Die Fledermaus. Yes, it’s Die Fledermaus. Quite right, yeah. Yes, it’s Die Fledermaus. Sorry, did I say Der Fledermaus? That was definitely a mistake.

Well, she gave me her whole collection, my grandmother gave me her whole collection of 78RPM records and it was in that collection, ‘cause they’d moved onto LPs. Ernest Lough, of course everybody had that, that was Hear My Prayer by Mendelssohn, and I had to sing that for my grandmother actually, an imitation of Ernest Lough.

Q: Were the singers in operettas generally also high opera?

A: Well, do you know, it’s interesting, at the time, Offenbach demands very, very high vocal skills, I mean, there are trills all over the place, coloratura and so on, but also nobody I think ever said that Hortense Schneider was a great singer in an operatic sense. Operetta singers had… It was more important that they could put across the text, so they tended to be singing actors, rather than trained opera singers, but Die Fledermaus for instance, it was in Covent Garden in 1930 with the greatest opera singers of the period, Lotte Lehmann, and Elizabeth Schuman.

Q: “What is the problem with Gilbert Sulivan at the Royal Opera House?”

A: Yes, 'cause it is done at the English National Opera, it’s a kind of snobbery I suppose, there’s a element of snobbery. Yes, I’m very proud of that picture with Hilde Zadek, what a wonderful woman, and that was one of the most memorable evenings when I…

I can’t increase the volume, you have to do it from your end I’m afraid, I have no control over that.

We have these wonderful… I’m going to talk next week… Yes, I know. I’d love to hear all of these operettas, and next week of course I’m going to talk about the silver age and I’ll talk about Kálmán, and another unforgettable experience for me was hearing the Kálmán operettas performed at Sadler’s Wells in the 1980s, and the entire surviving middle-European Jewish population of London attended those, and it was really a memorable, and extraordinary…

This is Heather saying she first heard Fledermaus when she was 10. “And spending my Christmas holidays in a trailer up North in Ontario, while my dad was starting to build the Uranian town of Elliot Lake on a portable record player.” Yes, I think it’s quite important to be introduced to these things at an early age, so I do hope you’re all introducing your grandchildren to opera and operetta.

I have, I’ve been very, very lucky. I met Hilde Zadek over a dinner party, and I was absolutely bowled over by her, an extraordinary, extraordinary woman.

What do I mean the operettas… I mean, they have incredibly silly librettist that would try the patience of any modern audience. It’s not that it’s not musically unstageable, they’re theatrically unstageable. Oh, you sold many copies of the Nuns’ Chorus, ‘cause there was a later very popular version with Joan Sutherland, so that was probably the version that you were selling in the '50s and '60s.

“Living in Bratislava, 40km from Vienna, we grew up listening to operetta. My younger brother and I entertained our family by trying to compete with the singers.” No, a lot of Strauss’ music is in waltz time, but not all of it.

On business visits to Germany, I was able to hear some of the provincial German city productions very good, I was surprised by how everybody dressed up to go to the opera.“ They do much more, don’t they? Than we do.

Q: "Did the Austrians sing better in the mountains?”

A: I really can’t tell you, I don’t know. I don’t like mountains myself.

“Later my brother continued to be inspired by the music and singing in the choir, I’d sing for Pope John Paul II.” Well, he was Polish. I wonder if he liked operetta. Yes they were, and like Johann Strauss of course, they were directly inspired by Offenbach.

Oh, Beer. Thank you, that’s nice to know that you’re listening.

Q: “The record you played is a little boy, what song was that?”

A: The title is, It’s from the last act of Der Fledermaus. Die Fledermaus, sorry about that. That was getting my genders in a twist there.

Thank you, Carla. Sondheim, why couldn’t I think of that? Stephen Sondheim, I think he’s a genius actually, I think they’re absolutely wonderful. My grandmother’s a musical accompanist, and she did sing, she had quite a nice contralto voice, her party piece was more from Samson & Delilah. Stephen Sondheim, everybody’s helping me there.

Q: “You went to see on new years eve?”

A: Yes, that’s another Strauss of course.

“Some great voices.” I go through a lot of trouble to try and pick the best voices I can to play to you. Of course.

Andrew, whose wife Sam is the daughter of the very great Broadway singer Alfred Drake, and I know that Belle Hélène is her favourite operetta. Right.

Q: “Where does Robert fit in?”

A: Which Robert are you talking about?

Q: “Please tell me the melodious overture?”

A: Well, I played you two, didn’t I? I played you Die schöne Galathée, that’s by Suppé, and also of course the Die Fledermaus, Die Fledermaus has a wonderfully melodious overture. I’m so glad to hear Dagmar, that I transported you to your childhood years in Bratislava. That for me you know, well it’s a sort of thing, isn’t it? Memories of music you heard in your early childhood.

Q: “Did Vienna blood happen at this time?”

A: Vienna Blood. Are you thinking of Strauss? Yes it did. And Sullivan of course very much active in the 1880s & ‘90s. Leihhaus coming in the next talk, the silver age.

Q: “Was Elizabeth Schuman?”

A: Yes, she’s so delightful, isn’t she? Elizabeth Schuman, one of the joys of my life. As I said, Leihhaus will come up next time. I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do about the balance from this end, it’s beyond my control.

Q: “First opera operetta?” “Was Mary Widow?”

A: Yes, that was a good one to go to, I’ll talk about that next time.

“Love Die Fledermaus.” Heinz Rhuman, my goodness. That does date you. Was that pre-war, or? 'Cause he did go on after the war. He was one of the most popular actors in… I suppose he was singing… It was probably late, wasn’t it? Probably after the war and he would’ve been doing The Jailer, singing the non-singing part of The Jailer.

“Hitler, I’m not surprised that Hitler hated Offenbach.” Well, of course his music was totally banned, all the way through the Third Reich.

Yes, of course Die Fledermaus, thank you. There is a bat. I mean, if you actually look up Fledermaus in the dictionary, it will be “der” and not “die”, but nevertheless the operetta is “die” and not “der”.

“I feel some operetta’s so over the top, but so much lighthearted fun.” I’m glad I took you back to your… Nicolai, he’s not really an operetta composer, that’s comic opera. Mary Windsor and so on. It’s amazing to think that… I think it was Nicolai who was originally commissioned to set the text of Navaco to music and quite rightly decided it wasn’t for him, and that’s why Verdi got to do it.

So, that seems to be the end of the questions. Thank you all very much indeed, and I will move onto Mary Widow, and Leihhaus, and Kálmán, and all those wonderful silver-age operatic composers on Sunday.