This chapter offers a focussed look at the music of Johann Strauss (Son), Josef Strauss and Eduard Strauss composed in the 1860s, part of the Gründerzeit period. It deals with stylistic features of the waltz, polka, quadrille and march, performance venues and publication practices, together with their topicality – this including works that honour the Habsburg dynasty, celebrate the burgeoning world of commerce, industry and science, the liberalization of the press, images of old and new Vienna and of the surrounding countryside, physical well-being and the music of other composers.

After touching on his own experiences, Barrie Kosky points out that operetta lost the continuity of its tradition in World War II. He calls for a radical investigation into operetta performance practice. He describes operetta as a Jewish art form not only because most of the composers, librettists and performers were Jewish but also because operetta itself is about assimilation, irony and disconnectedness. This tradition was interrupted because many Jewish artists went into exile or died in the war. After the war, everything subversive, erotic, ironic and contemporary became harmless, nostalgic, and arianized. But over the last ten years, new understanding has grown, and a new young audience is discovering operetta. Kosky maintains an operetta needs a fabulous score and must work on different levels as a combination of ‘serious but ironic’. Operetta needs characters, scenes and situations that can reveal performers’ virtuosity in mixing singing, dancing, speaking and acting. Kosky sees subversiveness and campy queerness as inherent in operetta. It appears in Offenbach’s political awareness as well as in the new definition of gender in the Weimar operetta. Kosky says new operetta requires composers and librettists familiar with the tradition but who should avoid copying operetta of the past.

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.

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.