This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of operetta in Russia, starting with performances and reception of German and French operettas from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and exploring home-grown, Soviet operetta. It will show that operetta was big business in tsarist Russia, and later in the Soviet Union, and demonstrate that it was a valuable resource, a laughter therapy, for the Soviet authorities with which to anaesthetize the masses to the realities of life. The works by German and French composers dominated Russian operetta stages, with the most popular composers being Suppé, Offenbach, Planquette, Hervé and Lecocq, until Soviet composers began to create operettas according to the new, official socialist realism style. This chapter will briefly introduce significant operetta composers – Dunayevsky, Strelnikov, Aleksandrov and Milyutin – and discuss contributions to the genre from such well-known composers as Shostakovich and Kabalevsky. It also gives a brief account of how operetta was instrumental to boosting the morale of the population ravaged by World War II, especially in blockaded Leningrad, and shows that operetta (both European and Soviet) is still popular in today’s Russia.

During the long nineteenth century, the Nordic countries witnessed economic growth, the industrial revolution and the prominent expansion of the bourgeois classes. The growing need for entertainment explains the popularity and increase in production of operettas from the 1850s onwards. Jacques Offenbach and his satirical operettas enjoyed success in Copenhagen at the Folketeatret. During the great Lehár craze, Danish performers toured Scandinavian cities. By the 1870s, Christiania (now Oslo) in Norway also had an operetta epidemic, and new venues opened for the active Danish and Swedish companies and some domestic initiatives. The first production of Offenbach’s Orfeus i underjorden in Stockholm was staged by Pierre Deland in 1860. An elegant new venue, the Oscarsteatern (built in 1906) had its first major success with Lehár’s Den glada änkan in 1907. A Swedish Theatre was erected in Helsinki 1860 and opened with Deland’s production of Orfeus i underjorden. Helsinki also accommodated Russian officers and their families, who found entertainment first in the Arkadia-theatre, where several Russian-language operetta productions were given. Operettas in Finnish found their best home at the Kansan Näyttämö (People’s Stage) founded in 1907 in Helsinki.

This introduction serves as an overview of the development of operetta and points to the neglect of operetta by many scholars of music and theatre. The editors begin by defining this genre, which is multi-faceted and often difficult to categorize. The introduction sets the stage for the following chapters by guiding the reader towards the important landmarks in the historical developments of operetta, such as those that occurred in France, Austria and London, and, in the twentieth century, in Berlin. In doing so, it also comments on notable composers and works. It concludes with some reflections on operetta reception in the twenty-first century.

Operettas and their creation have long been considered a system of standardized production. This chapter examines the ‘operetta industry’ as it developed in Vienna around 1900 with a focus on theatrical production practice and the ways it shaped the genre’s artistic development. Sources include librettos, periodicals, archival sources and Operettenkönige, a backstage operetta novel of unknown authorship, published in 1911. Vienna’s operetta circle was a self-contained, vertically integrated system which controlled all aspects of operetta composition and production, from the mentorship of young composers to press reception and the publication and export of successful works. Critics saw this regulation as an impediment to artistic innovation, but to insiders the high level of control was necessary to set genre conventions. For them, innovation belonged in the small-scale, self-conscious manipulation of these norms. While lucrative and popular, the industry did not often easily respond to large-scale change, and eventually became so highly leveraged that a single unsuccessful season could put a major theatre out of business. As operetta declined in favour of the revue and film, the industry disintegrated.

This chapter will show that although Warsaw is not a city readily associated with the global success of operetta, it was the place where operetta performances were not only popular but lucrative, and that they rivalled Vienna and Berlin with the quality of their productions and star-studded casts. Before World War I, operetta had no competition in Warsaw: it had publicity, stars, excellent productions, stunning stage sets and the latest lighting and stage equipment. Polish musicians, actors and directors had direct links with European theatres, and Warsaw was close to such operetta centres as Vienna, Berlin and Budapest. Warsaw operetta divas were celebrities adored by the public and critics alike. Some of them died leaving astronomical fortunes and lasting memories and recordings, some died tragically, and some died in complete oblivion. The chapter will look at the most significant operetta theatre not only in Warsaw but arguably in the whole of Poland, Teatr Nowosci, and some of the people who made it one of the city’s biggest attractions: Ludwik Sliwinski, Wiktoria Kawecka, Kazimira Niewiarowska, Jósef Redo and Lycina Messal.

Four prominent ‘origin stories’ for the American musical intertwine with the history of American operetta, which bifurcated, through the American legacies of Gilbert and Sullivan (including Cohan’s musical comedies) and The Merry Widow, into two distinct types: fast-paced musical comedies with an American profile, and the more romantically tinged, Viennese-derived American operetta. In balancing elements of these types, the American musical stage fostered camp reception modes, overtly emergent especially in Naughty Marietta, but becoming more closeted in the 1920s, when the two types again reached an extreme point of separation, with Gershwin’s and other musical comedies on one side of the divide, and Romberg’s and Friml’s hit operettas (along with Deep River), on the other, with operetta (or the ‘musical play’) bolstered by Hammerstein’s rhetoric laying claim to the higher aesthetic ground. Show Boat marked a probably deliberate attempt to remix and fuse the two types in a hybrid form that eventually stabilized in the wake of Oklahoma! Throughout, the element of camp, often passing as unintentional, governed the negotiations between the two types, allowing them to coexist in the musical play as it (re)emerged in the 1940s.

The history of operetta in Italy is inextricably entangled with discourses about the status of Italian opera and the formation of an Italian national identity. In the 1860s, it was Offenbach, Hervé and Lecocq that conquered the Italian stages, then, later, the ‘Viennese’ imports of Suppé, Strauss Jr and Lehár. Italian operettas based on parodies of foreign works and combining elements of dialect and couleur locale flourished at this time but struggled to undermine both the foreign monopoly and the time-honoured tradition of opera buffa. The relationship between operetta and Italian opera – not only buffa but also seria – was central also to critical discourses about the rise of the Italian bourgeois, becoming closely intertwined with questions on the position of musical theatre between entertainment and art. Inevitably, discussions of operetta also took strong nationalistic undertones in a country that was struggling to find a unifying national identity and that recognized operetta as a foreign import that could contaminate opera or illegitimately undermine its primacy on Italian stages. The extraordinary success of La vedova allegra in Milan in 1907 and the growing political tensions between Italy and Austria-Hungary in ensuing years sparked new interest in the creation of a national operetta.

This chapter examines the work and significance of Offenbach in the field of French operetta. With the rise of Napoleon III in the 1850s, a combination of political optimism, renewed prosperity, an abundance of artistic talent and a cultural obsession with appearances made Paris the perfect environment for a new form of entertainment to appear and thrive – operetta. Pioneered by Hervé, it became an international sensation thanks to the creativity and determination of Jacques Offenbach, whose opéras bouffes remain the musical embodiments of France’s Second Empire. He composed and produced dozens of hits that took comic aim at the foibles of all levels of society, from beggars to the royal court. With France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Parisian public briefly turned against the German-born Offenbach. But he found new success by composing light-hearted spectacles. Composer Charles Lecoq, whose career took off thanks to Offenbach, achieved a major success with La fille de Madame Angot. Lecoq and others continued to compose operettas for Parisian audiences, but none matched the popularity French operetta had enjoyed with Offenbach.