3. Central Europe.

During the late 1850s Viennese theatres began staging Offenbach’s opéras bouffes, at times in pirated versions, but often under the composer’s own direction. These in turn inspired one-act comic and satirical operettas in similar style from locally active composers, of whom the most notable was Franz Suppé.

Offenbach’s virtual monopoly of larger-scale productions remained unchallenged in Vienna until Johann Strauss (ii) was recruited from the dance hall. Strauss introduced the distinctively Viennese operetta style, with more exotic settings, romantic rather than satirical stories, and scores built around dance forms, especially the waltz. His Die Fledermaus (1874), based on a play by Meilhac and Halévy, became the most widely celebrated of all operettas, though he lacked the greater theatrical flair displayed in works such as Suppé’s Boccaccio (1879) and Carl Millöcker’s Der Bettelstudent (1882).

Thereafter Strauss demonstrated ambitions to move towards full-scale opera, most notably in Der Zigeunerbaron (1885). The major operetta successes of the 1890s came from composers who favoured a more relaxed, more charming and insinuating style, especially Carl Zeller and Richard Heuberger. In the early 20th century the classical operetta found a new lease of life when Lehár perfected his technically assured, sensuous musical style in Die lustige Witwe. It achieved the most wide-ranging contemporary success of any operetta and was followed by a string of internationally successful works, by Lehár himself, Oscar Straus and Leo Fall.

Before World War I temporarily restricted the international currency of Viennese operetta, these three composers had been joined in the forefront of the Viennese school by Emmerich Kálmán, who fused the Viennese waltz style with an intensely rhythmic Hungarian sound. Kálmán’s contribution highlighted an extension of operetta’s field of play, for he had begun his career in a burgeoning Hungarian school of operetta. The taste for Lehár also struck an especial chord in Italy, later inspiring native Italian works such as Virgilio Ranzato’s I paesi dei campanelli (1923).

However, shifts in the political and popular musical balance had moved the centre of German operetta to Berlin, and it was with works such as Paul Lincke’s one-act ‘spectacular burlesque-fantasy operetta’ Frau Luna (1899) that a recognizably different Berlin school of operetta emerged. Later, the considerable international success of Eduard Künneke’s Der Vetter aus Dingsda (1921) helped to consolidate the shift of the centre of German-language operetta production to Berlin, which saw the premières of works of Viennese composers, such as Fall’s Madame Pompadour (1922) and Lehár’s Das Land des Lächelns (1929), with the tenor Richard Tauber. By now the German operetta formula provided less for an integrated set of characters than a series of operatic-style solos and duets for the leading soprano and tenor, interspersed with comic duets for a buffo and soubrette and supported by choral contribution. Moreover, in Lehár’s works the often zany plots of 50 or 60 years earlier were now replaced by stories with unhappy endings.

Signs of the terminal decline of the classical operetta could now be found not only in the raiding of melodies by the classical masters for ‘new’ works, but also in works such as Paul Abraham’s Viktoria und ihr Husar and Ralph Benatzky’s Im weissen Rössl (both 1930) that sought to combine the traditional romance of operetta with modern stories and dance styles.

Operetta