Description
Book SynopsisCHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 When the world comes to an end, Viennese writer Karl Kraus lamented in 1908, all the big city orchestras will still be playingThe Merry Widow. Viennese operettas like Franz Lehár'sThe Merry Widowwere preeminent cultural texts during the Austro-Hungarian Empire's final years. Alternately hopeful and nihilistic, operetta staged contemporary debates about gender, nationality, and labor. The Operetta Empire delves intothis vibrant theatrical culture, whosecreators simultaneously sought the respectability of high art and the popularity of low entertainment.Case studies examine works by Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, Oscar Straus, and Leo Fall in light of current musicological conversations about hybridity and middlebrow culture. Demonstrating a thorough mastery of the complex early twentieth-century Viennese cultural scene, and a sympathetic and redemptive critique of a neglected popular genre, Micaela Baranelloestablishes operetta as an important element of
Trade Review“Ultimately,
The Operetta Empire makes a powerful case for us to engage with operetta afresh with a new awareness of its complicated ambitions, the ambivalent mixture of emotions it conveys, and its difficult reception in history. . . . It all adds up to a deeply satisfying and fascinating book that no one interested in operetta—or this period of Vienna’s musical history—will want to miss.” * Opera Magazine *
"This is an excellent study of the musical, historical, economic, social, and political background of the Silver Age Viennese operetta, which is generally supposed to have begun with Franz Lehár’s composition The Merry Widow in 1905. Baranello brings operetta into the mainstream of musicological studies, continuing a trend toward scholarly consideration of popular forms of music theater, such as the American musical." * CHOICE *
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
Map of Vienna
Introduction: Operetta in Vienna
1.
Die lustige Witwe and the Creation of Silver Age Viennese Operetta
2. Sentimentality, Satire, and Labor
3. Hungary, Vienna, and the "Gypsy Operetta"
4. Operetta and the Great War
5. Exotic Liaisons
6. Operetta in the Past Tense
Notes
Bibliography
Index
