An operetta is a light theatrical work set to music. It occupies the artistic middle ground between opera and musicals, but differs from most opera in that spoken dialogue, rather than sung recitative, links the songs. Because of the importance placed on dialogue, operetta is generally performed in the language of the audience.
Traditionally the subject matter of operetta tends to steer clear of realism, usually opting for romantic escapism, and a happy ending instead. Many early operettas had elements of farce or satire. Other elements include extensive dance sequences and, like 20th-century musicals, the use of melodies that are “catchy” and easy to sing.
In England, the light opera tradition began in 1728 with John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which was a reaction to the noble works of Handel. Gay used popular ballad tunes sung by street singers. Two hundred years later, The Beggar’s Opera became the basis for The Threepenny Opera, written in 1928 by Kurt WEILL and Bertolt Brecht.
The Beggar’s Opera began a tradition in England that continued into the late Victorian era with William S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, whose work for the impresario D’Oyly Carte became a national mania and is still performed to this day. Gilbert and Sullivan operetta is characterised by witty lyrics and topical satire, and the love interest is typically tongue-in-cheek. Some of their most popular works are The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado (1885), and The Yeomen of the Guard (1888).
In the early 20th century, English operetta retreated from the sparkling wit of Gilbert and took on a more nationalistic tone. For example, Edward German’s light operas, Merry England (1902) and Tom Jones (1907) are both good-humoured, amusing, tuneful, and mildly patriotic, but they lack the sharpness and inspiration of the earlier Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.
In Europe, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Mozart and Rossini had written comic operas with spoken dialogue. Later in the 19th century Jacques Offenbach took over where Mozart and Rossini had left off, and became the most successful 19th-century operetta composer. Offenbach’s works were often irreverent and full of risqué double-entendres.
In Austria, Franz von Suppé and Johann Strauss II (who was known as the “waltz king”) were that country’s most famous composers of operettas (among other styles of music). The composers’ work became popular worldwide, and performing Strauss’s Die Fledermaus remains a tradition on New Year’s Eve at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
The last of the great Viennese operetta composers was Franz Lehár. In 1905, the librettists Victor Léon and Leo Stein were searching for a composer and offered Lehár a chance to audition for the job by writing a single song. Lehár called Léon the next day with his song, and the operetta The Merry Widow was underway. Although the plot of The Merry Widow is vintage operetta—the playboy Count Danilo must marry his first sweetheart, the widow Sonia, or else her great riches will be lost to their mythical country of Marsovia—the mood is more romantic than comic, the music more sentimental than playful.
The popularity of The Merry Widow grew slowly. The production moved to bigger theatres, and touring companies spun off through Europe and America. It is now hard to imagine a time when a revival of The Merry Widow is not playing somewhere in the world. Lehár wrote several more operettas before World War I, and then, between the wars, his work became the vehicle for the warm tenor voice of the Austrian singer, Richard Tauber.
Probably the greatest success of the composer-singer duo was with Das Land des Lächelns in 1929, with its most famous aria “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz” (My Whole Heart Is Thine), which Tauber recorded many times. Das Land des Lächelns had its premiere in Berlin, but also had great success at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, in 1931. Lehár wrote a total of 30 operettas before his death in 1948.
Other Austrian operetta composers were Leo Fall (best known for The Chocolate Soldier, 1908), Oscar Straus (A Waltz Dream, 1904) and Emmerich Kalman (b. Victor Hirschfeld, who wrote Gay Hussars, 1909). The appetite for operetta was so great in Vienna that 23 works by Kalman were staged. Robert Stolz was responsible for 90 operettas, six of them in 1921 alone.
American operetta was derived from the European rather than the English tradition: many European composers emigrated to America, taking the romantic sentimentality of Paris and Vienna with them, and early American composers tended to go to the European conservatories for training.
Aside from the importation of European works and homegrown minstrel shows and reviews, America began its own operetta tradition with Reginald De Koven, who had studied in Europe. De Koven’s most successful operetta, Robin Hood, written in 1891, contained the song “Oh, Promise Me,” which became a popular tune sung at weddings.
John Philip SOUSA, whose El Capitan was produced in 1899, was the first American-born and trained operetta composer. He is best known for his marches and, not surprisingly, El Capitan has a distinctly military flavour.
Victor HERBERT, who was born in Ireland and educated in Stuttgart, came to America in 1894. In the first decade of the 20th century, he wrote Babes in Toyland, Mlle. Modiste, The Red Mill, and Naughty Marietta. This last was filmed in 1935 with Jeanette MacDonald in the role that Emma Trentini had created at the Manhattan Opera House. Emma Trentini’s quarrel with Herbert over an encore led to the hiring of the Czech-born Rudolf FRIML as composer for The Firefly (1912). Friml went on to compose 20 operettas, the most famous of which were Rose-Marie (1923) and The Vagabond King (1925). The libretti of Friml’s operettas were more romantic than farcical, a continuation and intensification of the trend that Lehár had initiated in Austria.
The last American operetta composer in the European tradition was Sigmund Romberg, an immigrant from Hungary. He too stayed with the frothy Viennese style with Blossom Time (1921), based on the life of Franz Schubert; The Student Prince (1924), popular despite its sad ending; and most famously the romantic The Desert Song, written in 1926 with Oscar HAMMERSTEIN II and Otto Harbach. Hollywood loved operettas and there were three film versions of The Desert Song, and The Student Prince was filmed in 1954. Romberg moved to Hollywood in the 1930s to compose film scores—a sign of the writing on the wall for the operetta genre.
After Romberg, the operetta form began to change. There was no longer an audience for a form which was so divorced from the reality of its listeners. The style had retained much of the feel of grand opera, but it was of 18th-century opéra bouffe, rather than the harsher adventurousness of 20th-century composers.
America was ready for rhythms derived from American speech rather than marching or waltzing feet, and for harmonies that hinted at the blues. The result was songs like “Ol’ Man River” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from Show Boat (1927), by Jerome KERN. Kern had begun his career by writing songs to be inserted in operettas by other composers, and Show Boat was his first independent success. It is considered the link between operetta and musical comedy. These later operettas began to deal with important social issues such as racism (Show Boat and South Pacific, 1949).
Some musical comedies did capture the feeling of operetta. Lerner and LOEWE’S My Fair Lady (1951), with its cheerful story and classic waltz number “I Could Have Danced All Night,” is a good candidate for the genre. Even Leonard BERNSTEIN referred to his Candide (1956) as operetta. Yet each differs from the classic operetta in several ways. Perhaps it is best to say that some elements of operetta still survive in today’s musical theatre, though composers have gone far beyond the boundaries of the earlier form.
Jane Prendergast
SEE ALSO:
FILM MUSICALS; MUSICALS; OPERA.
FURTHER READING
Boardman, Gerald. American Operetta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981);
Gänzl, Kurt. The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theater (New York: Schirmer Books, 1994);
Traubner, Richard. Operetta: A Theatrical History (New York: Doubleday, 1983).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Gilbert and Sullivan: The Pirates of Penzance; Lehár: The Merry Widow; Offenbach: La belle Hélène; Johann Strauss: Die Fledermaus.