Operetta not only transferred across borders but also from one media platform to another, a characteristic of industrialized production termed ‘intermediality’. A stage show was a multilayered communication medium that connected to other media, such as sheet music, records, film, and radio. The term ‘remediation’ refers to a change from one medium to another, and there were various ways in which the music of operetta might be remediated. For example, it could be turned into sheet music for private pleasure playing the home piano, or, reemerge as a military band medley for the enjoyment of the public spending a leisurely afternoon in the park. Player pianos and piano rolls, which had been produced all around the globe, faced a period of decline in the1930s, as attention turned to radio and records. The arrival of radio effected a change in music dissemination and made the collection of performing rights imperative. Operettas provided the subject matter of a number of classic films of the silent era, and sound film operetta was also in demand in the 1930s, giving rise to the new genre of screen operetta.

German operetta of the early twentieth century was part of a transcultural entertainment industry involving cross-border financial and production networks, international rights management, and migrating musicians and performers. Collaboration networks, in which groups of people worked as a team, were the norm in operetta production. In the early 1910s and again in the 1920s, Berlin, London, and New York were competing for dominance of the musical theatre market, but these cities were also collaborating on the transfer of cultural goods. Internationalization was evident in the presence of overseas offices of major Berlin companies associated with the theatre. The buying of rights was one of the most important activities of the entrepreneur. The chapter includes a study of the financial management of Daly’s Theatre in the West End and examines the impact of the depression on the West End and Broadway.

It is clear that the productions in the West End and on Broadway of The Merry Widow marked a distinctive new phase in operetta reception. The massive success of The Merry Widow opened up a flourishing market for operettas from Vienna and Berlin. This was confirmed by the huge success of Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier in New York (1909) and London (1910). The Berlin operettas of Jean Gilbert were soon in demand in the West End and on Broadway. Continental European operetta entered a marketplace dominated by musical comedy. The first major blow to the operetta market, especially in the UK, was the outbreak of the First World War. After the war, many creators of operetta were eager to escape to the comfort of historical romances. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, many people were prepared to pay for operetta, and an assortment of theatres and ticket prices enabled a broad social mixture to do so. In addition to critical-aesthetic reception, theatrical productions were open to moral concerns. The chapter ends with reflections on the reasons for the decline in productions on Broadway and in the West End post-1933.

It was, above all, the romantic melodies and rich harmonic textures of operetta that attracted British and American audiences. The music of operetta occupied a number of positions between popular musical theatre and opera. Dance rhythms formed an important part of the style of every operetta composer. American influence on German operetta had its source in the music-making of African Americans in the period just before the jazz craze of the 1920s. There was delight in mixing musical styles, and it is common to find Austro-German, Hungarian, and American styles in the same piece. While operettas with modern themes were increasingly characterized by syncopated rhythms in the 1920s, those with exotic themes were spiced up with augmented intervals, modal harmony, and ostinato rhythms. Most operetta composers in Vienna and Berlin were happy to have the help of orchestrators. Orchestrators were also on hand for New York productions.

Accounts of how modernity affected the arts frequently draw connections with the aesthetics of modernism. The concept of the modern was broader than this, however, and included all new developments that had produced marked effects on social and cultural life. In the early twentieth century, operetta frequently engaged with everyday life, and related to features of modernity such as trains, cars, planes, factories, cinemas and hotels. Familiar objects of the modern age that members of the audience might either possess or desire feature often on stage. Women’s issues surface in operetta, whether they involve marriage, voting rights, treatment at work, careers, or questions of sexuality. The chapter also includes an account of developments in stage technology and modern mobilities.

In 1935, many Jews who self-identified as German found they were no longer classified as such under the Nuremberg Laws, which specified that all four grandparents must be Aryan and deprived Jews of the right to own wealth, to work in various professions, and to marry non-Jews. Kálmán, Straus, Gilbert, and Abraham all left Germany to avoid Nazi persecution. Others who faced no immediate threats were not unaffected by events: Künneke found that his wife was categorized as a ‘Mischling’ (a German-Jew hybrid in the Nazi pseudoscience of race) and was dismissed from his post for being unwilling to divorce her. Several well-known artists involved with operetta perished in concentration camps. Operettas of the Third Reich era did not travel to Britain and America the way they had done in the past.

The introduction makes the case for the study of operetta from the German stage in London and New York. It includes a summary of the book’s contents. Without deeper knowledge of these stage entertainments and their reception, we lack adequate understanding of the musical-theatrical mainstream in the early twentieth century. Operetta is part of a cultural middle ground that is often neglected in academic work, the focus of which so often falls on the predilections of a cultural elite, or on working-class leisure pursuits.

This chapter investigates the various ways in which operettas were changed as they transferred from one social-cultural context to another. It was never a case of merely translating the German book and lyrics; it was necessary to capture the cultural meanings and emotional nuances that resist direct translation, enabling them to be recognized in a new context. The remapping of a scene onto a locally known place that would conjure up similar associations to those that were culturally familiar to the former audience was part of transcreation. It was an important means of reproducing similar pleasure and understanding. Sometimes a new version departed radically from its German stage version, but the fact that such adaptations usually affected only the scenes and dialogue indicates the lack of any sense of perplexity about musical style. The chapter includes a comparative study of The Merry Widow and the French play of 1861 on which it was based, and the considers the notion of an English language operetta production ‘improving’ on a previous Continental European production.