Class 1: "European Visitors"

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1. European Visitors. In 1907, a show reached Broadway from Europe that ran for an unprecedented 417 performances. This was The Merry Widow (pictured above), the English translation of a 1905 operetta in the Viennese style by Franz Lehár. Within years, American composers were trying their hands at the new style, and younger emigrants from Eastern Europe were coming over to write American works that nonetheless reflected this style with which they had grown up.

The term operetta generally refers to a type of light opera that was popular in Europe at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Its plots are always comic or romantic, and often both. There is generally more dialogue than even operas with spoken text, and for many of the roles acting skill is more important than a classically-trained voice. Spectacle and dance also play an important part, especially in Viennese operettas, which are steeped in mystery and wish-fulfilment and the magic of the waltz. rb.

The script, videos, and images will be posted immediately after class.

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Q AND A

What would a performer have been paid in the early days of Broadway?
Details are not easily available. Before 1919, the scale and rules for compensation was entirely at the discretion of individual promoters, who paid as little as they could get away with. The Broadway strike of 1919 led to the creation of Actors' Equity—and also the separate Chorus Equity, later folded into one organization. Marie Dressler, the founder of the latter, was making $8/week as a chorus girl at the time: about $250 in today's dollar, but with no rules for rehearsal pay, extra services, or overtime. The standard pay for a Broadway chorus performer today is $2,465/week, with numerous guarantees about working conditions.

In Vienna around 1900, was there a firewall between the performers of opera and operetta?
This is a hard one to answer. Nineteenth-century operetta basically came about as an enhancement of the spoken theater, so its performers would be actors who also sang (as indeed on Broadway today). As dance grew as a significant ingredient, so dance ability would play a greater part than operatic vocal skills. However, the classic Viennese operetta offered romantic characters and melodies that attracted major opera stars like Richard Tauber, and crossover casting was not uncommon in major roles. This would be much less the case with supporting and ensemble roles. I do not know of historical examples of the opposite: when a well-known operetta singer would be engaged in a role of similar size in opera. But this is beginning to happen today in an attempt to make opera attractive to a wider public; the Broadway star Kelli O'Hara, for instance, whom we saw as Valencienne in The Merry Widow today, is a frequent guest performer at the Met.

"That reminded me of XYZ; could one composer have been influenced by the other?"
Very likely. However the Broadway musical, even more than opera, and certainly more than the spoken theater, quickly developed its own repertoire of standard tropes, musical forms, and textures. So a composer or lyricist might deliberately evoke an earlier type of number, knowing that the reference would be recognized, and that the family connection would be part of the effect, ironical or otherwise. I will deal with this in more detail later in the course.

VIDEO LINKS

YouTube is only partially helpful in reviewing today's class: while two of the productions shown are indeed available complete, the other two can be sampled with trailers or excerpts only. For La vie Parisienne, I have three very short teasers of the Christian Lacroix production we watched, but the updated Laurent Pelly production that I mentioned is complete; I have cued it to the equivalent of the excerpts played in class. For HMS Pinafore, I have the Stratford Ontario production we saw plus another more authentic one from the old D'Oyly Carte company itself; both are complete, but cued to the two excerpts we saw; neither has titles. The Vienna production of Die Fledermaus is complete, with titles; I have cued it to the Act II finale. The Met Merry Widow is not complete, but the numerous short clips cover most of what we saw.

*Asterisks indicate clips not shown in class.

LA VIE PARISIENNE
	Christian Lacroix, Paris 2022	* Excerpt (shown in class, but not these excerpts) * Teaser 1 * Teaser 2
	Laurent Pelly, Lyon 2008	* Brazilian's entrance (production is complete) * Finale

HMS PINAFORE
	Stratford Ontario, 1981	* Sir Joseph's entrance * Act II trio
	D'Oyly Carte, 1973	* Sir Joseph's entrance * Act II trio

DIE FLEDERMAUS
	Vienna, 1971	* Act II finale (production is complete)

THE MERRY WIDOW
	Met, 2015	* Act II, Vilja song (Susan Graham, not Renée Fleming) * Act II, ensemble about women * Act II, Hanna/Danilo duet * Act II finale (excerpt) * Act III Grisette scene


IMAGES
The thumbnails below cover the slides shown in class, though there may be a few small discrepancies. Click the thumbnail to see a larger image. Click on the right or left of the larger picture to go forward or back, or outside it to close.

Here are brief bios of the artists, composers, and writers considered in the class, listed in order of birth.

	William Schwenk Gilbert, 1813–1911. English writer. The author of many straight plays as well, Gilbert gained lasting fame as the librettist and theatrical genius behind the 14 operettas ("Savoy Operas") written with Arthur Sullivan between 1871 and 1896. These became almost as popular in America as the were in Britain.
	Jacques Offenbach, 1819–80. German-French composer. The son of a cantor, Offenbach took the name of the German town in which he was born. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire, he began to write operettas, composing over 90 in the course of a long and wildly successful career. He is also known for his unfinished grand opera The Tales of Hoffmann.
	Johann Strauss II, 1825—99. Austrian composer. His musician father did not want his son to follow in his foosteps, so he worked as a bank clerk while studying privately. His first professional appearances were as a conductor of his father's waltzes, to which he added his own and eventually became hailed as the Waltz King of Vienna. His Die Fledermaus (1874) virtually defines the genre of Viennese operetta.
	Arthur Seymour Sullivan, 1842–1900. English composer. Sullivan essentially had two careers: as a classical composer of orchestra music and oratorios on suitably uplifting subjects, and as the musical partner to W. S. Gilbert on the highly successful series of Savoy Operas from HMS Pinafore (1878) to The Gondoliers (1889) and beyond. History only remembers him in the latter role.
	Franz Lehár, 1870–1948. Austro-Hungarian composer. The son of an Austrian army bandmaster, and at first speaking only Hungarian, Lehár studied violin at conservatory, but was self-taught as a composer. Beginning in 1896, he became known for his operettas, of which the most famous is The Merry Widow (1905), a worldwide hit. Later in his career he formed a close professional association with tenor Richard Tauber.