Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture 0521871808, 9780521871808

Offenbach's operas were a significant force for cultural change, both in his own time and in the decades to follow.

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Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture
 0521871808, 9780521871808

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JACQUES OFFENBACH AND T H E M A K I N G O F M O D E R N C U LT U R E

Offenbach’s operas were a significant force for cultural change, both in his own time and in the decades to follow. In this book, Laurence Senelick demonstrates the ways in which this musical phenomenon took hold globally, with Offenbach’s work offering an alternative, irreverent, sexualized view of life which audiences found liberating, both personally and socially. In the theatre, the composer also inspired cutting-​edge innovations in stagecraft and design, and in this book he is recognized as a major cultural influence, with an extensive impact on the spheres of literature, art, film, and even politics. Senelick argues that Offenbach’s importance spread far beyond France, and that his provocative and entertaining works, often seen as being more style than substance, influenced numerous key artists, writers, and thinkers, and made a major contribution to the development of modern society. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His numerous books include the award-​winning Gordon Craig’s Moscow ‘Hamlet’ (1982), The Age and Stage of George L.  Fox (1988), The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre (2000), and The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance (2006).

Portrait of Offenbach surrounded by his creations, in honor of the re-​opening of the Bouffes-​Parisiens. Wood engraving by Gustave Doré; Le Monde illustré (14 Sep. 1867). Only Shakespeare and Dickens are more frequently depicted amidst their characters.

JACQUES OFFENBACH AND THE MAKING OF M O D E R N C U LT U R E L AU R E N C E S E N E L I C K Tufts University, Massachusetts

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 4843/​24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi –​110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06-​04/​06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521871808 DOI: 10.1017/​9781139029643 © Laurence Senelick 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Senelick, Laurence, author. Title: Jacques Offenbach and the making of modern culture / Laurence Senelick. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017032743 | ISBN 9780521871808 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Offenbach, Jacques, 1819–1880 – Appreciation. | Opera – 19th century. | Opera – 20th century. Classification: LCC ML410.O41 S38 2017 | DDC 782.1/2092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032743 ISBN 978-​0-​521-​87180-​8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To the memory of Virginia Scott, a lover of Paris who reveled in what it had to offer and a scholar of Paris who delved into what it concealed.

Contents

List of Illustrations Foreword and Acknowledgments

page viii xii

Introduction

1

1 The French Connection

28

2 Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Polemics of Opera

62

3 Tales from the Vienna Stage

84

4 Against the Victorian Grain

98

5 The Discovery of America

122

6 Caviar with the Champagne

143

7 Doing the Continental

164

8 South of the Equator, East of Suez

179

9 A Max Reinhardt Production

198

10

Red Stars

220

11

French without Tears

235

12 English As She Is Spoke

251

13 Rebirth from the Ruins

271

14 Conclusion: Taking Offenbach Seriously

285

Select Bibliography Index

303 332 vii

Illustrations

Unless otherwise indicated, all images come from the author’s collection. Frontispiece: Portrait of Offenbach surrounded by his creations, in honor of the re-​opening of the Bouffes-​Parisiens. Wood engraving by Gustave Doré; Le Monde illustré (14 Sep. 1867). Only Shakespeare and Dickens are more frequently depicted amidst their characters.

Introduction 1.

2. 3.

Gustave Doré’s sketch of the finale of Orphée aux enfers (1858), sometimes called “La bacchanale,” sometimes “Le galop infernale.” Doré designed the costumes for the original production. Ba-​ta-​clan. Caricature by Nadar, lithographed by Destouches, Paris. Published by Léon Escudier, Paris. Marie Aimée as Fiorella in Les brigands at the Théâtre des Variétés, Paris: Martinet, Lemercier & Cie.

page 2 13 22

1  The French Connection 1.1.

Jean François Berthelier as Giraffier and Étienne Pradeau as Patachon in Les deux aveugles. Note that they are framed by pantomime characters, band instruments, and the opening “Entrez, Messieurs,” in tune with Offenbach’s stated agenda. Lithograph by Loire, sheet music cover. Paris: Brandes Dufour. 1.2. Offenbach astride a fiddle, accompanied by his characters, including the dog from Barkouf. Caricature by André Gill, La Lune (4 Nov. 1866). viii

36 38

List of Illustrations 1.3.

La fille du tambour-​major: the army of liberation arrives in the last act. Lithographed trade card for Maison Wille-​ David, Ghent.

ix

59

2  Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Polemics of Opera 2.1. Bonnet as Wagner, appalling classical composers, in La symphonie de l’avenir. Caricature by Stop at the head of the sheet music, 1860. 2.2. “The semitical-​musical-​acrobatical gorilla (Simia Affenbach),” Leipzig Puck (1876). 2.3. L’Anti-​Wagner, “a Protest against the German Performance [of Lohengrin] at the Eden Theatre,” Paris, 1887. The conductor Lamoureux is shown presenting Wagner with French money.

65 69

82

3  Tales from the Vienna Stage 3.1. Johann Nestroy as Jupiter in Orpheus in der Unterwelt and Pan in Daphnis und Chloe. Photo: Hermann Klein, pub. L. T. Neumann, Vienna. 3.2. “The New Management at the Theater an der Wien and their drawing power”: Offenbach, Maximilian Steiner, and O. F. Berg on hobby-​horses before a statue of the diva Josefine Gallmeyer. Oscar Kramer, Vienna.

86

88

4  Against the Victorian Grain 4.1.

The Grand Duchess of Gérolstein, Act I, at the Royal Italian Opera House, Covent Garden, London, Illustrated London News (7 Dec. 1867). Julia Matthews as the Grand Duchess, William Harrison as Fritz. 4.2. The finale of Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Orpheus in the Underworld, His Majesty’s Theatre; sketch by Balliol Solomon (London Graphic, 30 Dec. 1911).

104 121

5  The Discovery of America 5.1.

Theodor L’Arronge as Jupiter and Hedwig Sury as Eurydice in Orpheus in der Unterwelt, Neues Stadttheater, New York (1867). Photo: K. W. Beniczsky, New York.

124

x

List of Illustrations

5.2. President Grant and Jim Fisk watch the Morlacchi ballet in La Périchole, Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York (18 Jan. 1869). Illustrated Police Gazette.

127

6  Caviar with the Champagne 6.1. Vera Lyadova as Yelena and Nikolay Sazonov as Paris in Prekrasnaya Yelena. Photo: Wesenberg, St Petersburg. 6.2. Orfey v adu at the Bouffe, St Petersburg. Sketch by Broning, Vsemirnaya Illyustratsiya 97 (1870).

145 147

7  Doing the Continental 7.1. Karl Johan Uddman as Calchas in Den sköna Helena, Stockholm. 7.2. Jindřich Mošna as Cabriolo in Trebizonská princezna, Provisional Theatre, Prague, 1871. 7.3. “Bufos Arderíus Fifth Theatrical Campaign.” The upper picture is labeled “Leaving a serious theatre” (the poster specifies the Teatro Real); the lower “On leaving a bufo theatre.” Circa 1871.

168 171

174

8  South of the Equator, East of Suez 8.1. Carnival of 1868: left, “Effects of love and champagne”; right, “Oh Congo! And they say that a Frenchman invented the cancan!” A vida flumineuse (Feb. 1868). Young Research Library, UCLA. 8.2. Ukiyo-​e triptych, showing (from right to left) male kabuki actors in a version of Bulwer-​Lytton’s Money and Western actors in The Grand Duchess, Shintomi-​za, Yokohama.

183 196

9  A Max Reinhardt Production 9.1. Olympus in the Max Reinhardt Orpheus, Munich Künstlertheater. Photo: Gebrüder Hirsch, Munich. 9.2. Die schöne Helena, Act II. Far right in the straw boater is Camilla Eibenschütz as Orestes. Photo: Jos. Paul Böhm, Munich, 1911.

204 208

List of Illustrations

xi

10 Red Stars 10.1. Act I of Prekrasnaya Yelena at the Free Theatre, Moscow, 1913. The design is to represent the frieze on a Grecian vase. 10.2. Act I of the Moscow Art Theatre Périchole, with Olga Baklanova as la Périchole and Yagodkin as Piquillo.

222 227

11  French without Tears 1 1.1. Mistinguett as Pauline in La vie parisienne. Photo: A. Berl. 11.2. Josephine Baker in La créole, Théâtre Marigny, Paris. 11.3. Yvonne Printemps as Hortense Schneider and Pierre Fresnay as Offenbach in Valse de Paris.

238 242 246

12  English As She Is Spoke 12.1. Joseph Urban’s sketch for the tavern scene in Hoffmann. Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass. 12.2. The finale of Reinhardt’s Helen: Evelyn Laye as Helen and George Robey as Menelaus return to Sparta. Photo: Stage Photo Co. 12.3. Helen the Glamour Girl of Troy, with Hamtree Harrington as Menelaus, Anna Wiggins Brown as Helen and Lawrence J. Whisonant as Agamemnon.

253 259 264

13  Rebirth from the Ruins 13.1. Ritter Blaubart: sets and costumes by Wilfred Werz. Clementine (Ruth Schob-​Wipka), King Bobèche (Werner Enders), Hermia (Ingrid Czerny), and Saphir (Manfred Hopp). 282

14  Conclusion: Taking Offenbach Seriously 14.1. Moira Shearer as Olympia and Léonide Massine as Spalanzani in the Powell-​Pressburger Tales of Hoffmann. 14.2. Alfred Radok’s Hoffmann designed by Josef Svoboda, Grand Opera of the Fifth of May, Prague, 1946. 14.3. The Antonia episode in the Laterna Magika production of Tales of Hoffmann, with Dr Mirakel’s face projected onto a screen. Photo: Bill Doll and Co., New York.

288 292 294

Foreword and Acknowledgments

Daudet declares that there’s a fine book to be written: The Century of Offenbach, asserting that this whole era is descended from him, his joking, his music … Edmond de Goncourt1

This book is an effort to realize Daudet’s suggestion. It seeks to trace the ways in which Offenbach’s operas influenced his age and those that followed on a worldwide scale. Despite his neglect or underestimation by historians both of music and of culture in general, he is, like Woody Allen’s Zelig, popping up wherever something of importance is happening in the realm of art from 1855 to our own times. Offenbach’s music delighted, influenced, stimulated Rossini, Nietzsche, Nestroy, Strindberg, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Thackeray, Gilbert and Sullivan, William Dean Howells, Eça de Queirós (otherwise Queiroz), Machado de Assis, Karl Kraus, Paul Klee, Richard Strauss, Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Cornell, and Hans Bellmer. He angered and upset Wagner, the Goncourt brothers, Émile Zola, and the Nazis, confounded the Frankfurt School, and was shunned by a host of conservatives and moralists. He can be shown to be, for two decades, the most produced composer in the world. Adventurous theatre practitioners from Max Reinhardt, Nemirovich-​ Danchenko, Sergei Eisenstein, Joseph Urban, Walter Felsenstein, and Josef Svoboda drew on him for their experiments. Offenbach’s operas provided opportunities for innovation in film and multi-​media, his tunes were adopted for the U.S. Marines Hymn and an anthem of the International Workers of the World. Offenbach’s comic operas were the first Western theatre pieces performed in Japan and Indo-​China, and the libretto for another was the first play published in Arabic. His music accompanied Edmond de Goncourt (5 Jan. 1887) Journal, ed. Robert Ricatte (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), III, 4.

1

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Foreword and Acknowledgments

xiii

the coronation of the King of the Belgians and the inauguration of the Austro-​Hungarian double monarchy. It was performed in frontier fit-​ups and concentration camps. This is not a book for musicologists, since Offenbach’s music is not subjected to close scrutiny. An extended study of Offenbach without such analysis is conceivable because he was the consummate homme de théâtre. Offenbach, unlike many other composers, lends himself to a metamusical approach. His operas were not composed in such close collaborations as those of Gilbert and Sullivan or Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito, in which a pre-​existing libretto is set to music. In those cases, alterations may occur over the course of composition and even after the premiere, but the work soon takes on a stable and canonical status. Offenbach was involved from the inception:  Throughout his career, he took a hand in ordering and revising his libretti, conducting, casting, staging, and even choreographing his works, managing his theatres, and devising their publicity. Different versions might be produced for different cities; Geneviève de Brabant underwent two distinct revisions. Two-​act operas were enlarged to four acts. Musical numbers were transferred from one work to another. He was an all-​round homme de théâtre, whose enormous success created an upheaval in the world of performance equal, in the words of his best-​ informed biographer, to those “of a Scribe, a Dumas, a Verdi or a Wagner.”2 The close-​knit nature of the music to the satiric shafts of the “books” and the innovations in the staging produced a powerful effect on the public. This is clear evidence that Offenbach, as he admitted, was not composing for posterity. He had a sharp sense of his public at any given moment, and, without pandering to it, gratified its tastes and captured its mood. Both the texts and the music are studded with topical jokes and tuneful parodies. This is also true of the Savoy Operas, but they had the protection of newly introduced international copyright and an institution, the D’Oyly Carte Company, which could preserve its traditions in aspic. The “downside” of this is that Gilbert and Sullivan remain primarily an English-​language phenomenon, despite the occasional German production. Offenbach, from the 1860s, was an international hit, produced all over the world (as this book hopes to demonstrate), saturating and nourishing the host cultures to an extent rarely seen.

Jean-​Claude Yon, Jacques Offenbach (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 417.

2

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Foreword and Acknowledgments

In writing about Offenbach, one runs up against the issue of nomenclature. He himself was very precise in the subtitles he chose, which range from operette or “musiquette” to opéra comique to opéra bouffe to opéra féerie to bouffonnerie musicale. The list of works he published in the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (1880) includes as well “foire musicale,” “vaudeville,” “chinoiserie,” and even “anthropophagie musicale.” An opéra comique or an opéra bouffe might be one act with three singers and a small orchestra or two or three acts with numerous soloists and a full orchestra. Or it might not. La vie parisienne is denominated a “play in 3 acts mixed with songs,” perhaps because the cast imposed on him at the Palais-​Royal had more actors than singers.3 A contemporary made an effort to clarify the distinctions by declaring that “Those only are genuine operas-​bouffes in which the characters are taken from mythology, history, and poetry, and are presented under ridiculous aspects” (i.e., Orphée, La belle Hélène, Geneviève de Brabant). Those in which the plot and characters are entirely imaginary should be classified as comic opera, with three subdivisions, pure Comic Opera (La Périchole), Farcical Opera (most Gilbert and Sullivan), and Opera-​Bouffe (Barbe-​bleue).4 The arbitrariness of these definitions is patent. In the face of these contradictions, I have played fast and loose in my narrative, using opera as shorthand with recourse to operetta, comic opera, or opéra bouffe, as the context suggests. Researching and writing about Offenbach is a pleasure in itself, but the pleasure is doubled by the ability to thank all those who aided my work and play in this regard. I received financial support from the Research Fund of the American Society for Theatre Research and was granted a research year at the Center for the Humanities, Tufts University. I  am indebted to numerous libraries and librarians: former curator Jeanne Newlin and former reference librarian Annette Fern of the Harvard Theatre Collection; Nora Probst of the Theatersammlung, Cologne; Mario Kramp, Curator of the Cologne Stadtmuseum; Gisela Fleckenheim, Cologne Stadtarchiv; Claudia Blank, Frau Angelaeas, and Frau Hauer, Munich Theatermuseum; Kate Dorney, former curator of the Theatre Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Scott Krafft, Special Collections Librarian, Deering Library, Northwestern University. The staffs of the Bibliothèque

Anton Henseler, “Chronologisches Verzeichnis der Werke,” in Jacques Offenbach. Musik-​Konzepte Heft 13. Ed. Heinz-​Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1980), 103–​10. 4 Henry Hersee, “Opéra-bouffe,” Theatre (London) (1 Nov. 1878), 281–84. 3

Foreword and Acknowledgments

xv

de l’Arsenal, the Bibliothèque de France, the Musée de l’Opéra, and the Musée Carnavalet, Paris, generously replied to my queries. Many individuals and organizations have allowed me to present my ideas in public lectures and conference presentations. These include Christopher Balme and Nic Leonhardt, Center for Advanced Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich; Peter Marx and Sascha Förster of the Department of Theatre, University of Cologne; Murray Frame, Department of History, University of Dundee; the program committee for the 1999 meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research; Jonathan Wilson, Center for the Humanities at Tufts; Martin Puchner and the Mellon School of Theatre and Performance Research, Harvard University; Claire Moran, French and Theatre Departments, Queen’s University, Belfast; Alessandra Campana and Jane Bernstein, Department of Music, Tufts University; the Opera Study Group, Harvard University; and Matthew W.  Smith, Department of German and Comparative Literature, Stanford University. Peter Fryer of the Stanislavski Centre welcomed my article on Offenbach on film for his anthology on composers in the movies, and Barbara Cavanagh of Motley Books was assiduous in locating rare programs and sheet music. Roger Gross located many photographs of Offenbach performers. An early version of the chapter on Offenbach and Chekhov appeared in Theatre Journal; an expanded version of the section on Jules Verne in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film; that on Wagner and Nietzsche in New Theatre Quarterly, and my translation of Bertall’s description of the opening night of Vert-​Vert in The Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter. I thank the editors, especially David Mayer, Robert Folstein, Maria Shevtsova, and Simon Trussler, for their encouragement. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. The late Aya Mihara provided translations from the Japanese. Milena Connolly did the same for Czech, Peter Bilton for Danish, and Calvin Champlin for Portuguese. meLê yamomo of the University of Amsterdam responded to my request for traces of Offenbach in the Pacific Rim. My research assistant Patrick King has been indefatigable and ingenious in procuring obscure articles and references; an aficionado of musical theatre, he has also added his own knowledge of cognate phenomena. So has Brian Valencia of Yale and Florida State Universities, who shared his research on early American musical comedy. Lloyd Schwartz, poet and critic, has for many decades been a fellow Offenbachophile; his profound musical knowledge and his unflagging enthusiasm have buoyed me up lo! these many years. Other friends and

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Foreword and Acknowledgments

colleagues who shared my interest in Offenbach have passed from the scene: David Cheshire, Virginia Scott, and Marian Hannah Winter. When Cambridge University Press first accepted this project, the editor was Vicki Cooper. She was supportive even when it ran roughshod over its deadline. My current editors Kate Brett and Sophie Taylor have carried on the tradition and deserve much thanks for putting up with habits both dilatory and expansive.

Introduction

In 1954, an American husband-​and-​wife team published a short biography of Jacques Offenbach entitled Cancan and barcarolle.1 That title summed up and continues to sum up the general impression of the composer. The cancan, made familiar by the ballet suite Gaïté parisienne and movie portrayals of the Moulin Rouge in the Belle Époque, is an outworn cliché, shorthand for French naughtiness and “ooh-​la-​la.” It pervades modern cinema. For some films, such as Jean Renoir’s French Cancan (the English title a deliberate indicator of its international usage), John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (both 1954), and Cole Porter’s Can-​ Can (1960), it serves as a kind of theme song. In the Mexican film Un Quijote sin mancha (1969), starring Cantinflas as a lawyer for the poor, performing the cancan so tars the reputation of a dancer that she is denied custody of her child. Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001) perversely cites it not as accompaniment to dance, but to a song describing a spectacular entertainment. What is usually referred to as le cancan is in fact le chahut, a high-​kicking frolic that originated in the peasant contredanse and was made popular in working-​class Parisian dance-​halls in the 1830s. A journalist of the period explained “Le cancan is the art of lifting one’s skirt, le chahut the art of lifting one’s leg.”2 Deliberately smutty and audacious, an attraction for slumming householders, le chahut was glorified by Offenbach, injecting native Rhenish wit into a proletarian Parisian gesture of defiance. The familiar music that concludes Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers (1858) is technically a galop, a lively dance of Hungarian origin. This galop infernal replaces, at Pluto’s command, a staid Olympian minuet, in other words, an exuberant bacchanal to mock the neoclassical traditions of French establishment Arthur Moss and Evalyn Marvel, Cancan and barcarolle. The life and times of Jacques Offenbach (New York: Exposition Press, 1954). 2 [A. Vermorel] Ces dames, 2nd edn. (Paris: Charles Noblet [1860]), 61. 1

1

2

Introduction

1.  Gustave Doré‘s sketch of the finale of Orphée aux enfers (1858), sometimes called “La bacchanale,” sometimes “Le galop infernale.” Doré designed the costumes for the original production.

culture. A genuine cancan first appears in Offenbach’s opera of modern life La vie parisienne and was later organized into the quadrille exhibited in the 1890s at the Moulin Rouge. As for the barcarolle, a gondolier’s song, it bookends the Venice act of Offenbach’s unfinished opera Les contes d’Hoffmann (1881). In context, its melodic dreaminess brackets a cynical intrigue of jealousy, betrayal, and murder. However, it has since been exploited as a lush and languorous background for romantic scenes in films and even commercials, the musical equivalent of melted chocolate. Roberto Benigni wallows in it in his fantasy of the death camps La vita è bella (1997); in Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret (2011), an emotionally separated mother and daughter (Renée Fleming and Susan Graham) are reconciled as they listen to it sung at the Met.3 The recycling of these hackneyed passages promotes the impression that Offenbach is all champagne and petits fours. Similar clichés circulated in his lifetime. Such neat encapsulations conceal the real importance of A full list of Offenbach music used in film scores can be found at www.imdb.com/​name/​nm0006220.

3

Introduction

3

Offenbach and his achievements. Despite attempts to pigeon-​hole him as a mere entertainer, an accidental survivor from the Second Empire, he persists and his reputation grows. What explains this persistence of Offenbach’s appeal? Whatever their qualities, his competitors, Hervé, Lecocq, even Chabrier, are the stuff of occasional antiquarian revivals. If we are to go beyond the easy stereotypes of high kicks and popping corks, we have to identify the elements in Offenbach that transcend national and temporal borders and the boundaries of genre. Comedy, notoriously, gets short shrift from aestheticians and critics. Solemnity is confused with profundity. The nature of history, including literary, musical, and dramatic history, is to gravitate to high seriousness and to grant more significance to the grave than to the gay. Il penseroso receives higher marks than l’allegro. So the pervasive influence of Offenbach’s comic operas has been overlooked or slighted. Yet, in the West (and even parts of the East), they have been as significant in shaping attitudes towards music in the theatre, sexual mores, and the classical legacy as any artwork created in the nineteenth century. Offenbach, a deflator of unexamined certainties and disseminator of tuneful exuberance, shrewdly undermined establishment values. Esprit (wit, verve) is considered, especially by the French, to be a fundamentally French characteristic, although it seems to belong more to the history of taste and fashion than to artistic categories. “Esprit … that clarity, that craft, that skill, and that frothy sparkle that delight the mind. In those aspects of our deepest being, I see the very soul of my country: clarity, light, gaiety, delicacy, and good taste”4 is a typical obiter dictum. Offenbach was in this respect granted honorary status as not only a Frenchman but a Parisian, in the sense of sophisticated, light-​minded, or racy. Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues defines the common view of him as “Very Parisian, good form [bien porté].”5 Offenbach shares with Heine the paradoxical position of an outsider who exemplifies Gallic wit. Heine, who translated his own poetry into French, was regarded by contemporary Parisians as a French writer.6 Offenbach, the cantor’s son from Cologne, the cello virtuoso with the choucroute-​flavored accent, outstripped even Heine in becoming identified with French esprit, at the same time that he J. Pradella in Le sémaphore (c. 1862, Marseilles), quoted in Hervé Lacombe, The keys to French opera in the nineteenth century, trans. Edward Schneider (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 283. 5 Gustave Flaubert, Œuvres, ed. A. Thibaudet and R. Dumesnil (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), II, 975. 6 He was the favorite poet of Offenbach’s librettist Ludovic Halévy. Daniel Halévy, “Une musique jaillit,” in Le siècle Offenbach. Cahiers de la compagnie Jean-​Louis Barrault–​Madeleine Renaud 24. Ed. Jean-​Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud (Paris: Julliard, 1958), 18. 4

4

Introduction

was mistrusted as a Jew and a German contributing to the subversion of traditional French values. Another limiting cliché about Offenbach designates him the musical spokesman for the Second Empire. This linkage of Offenbach to the mœurs of the society of Napoleon III began quite early: Jules Lemaître, writing of La belle Hélène, Offenbach’s Homeric parody of 1864, called it “one of the favorite diversions of an age which was, alas, very frivolous, but was also one of the most peaceful, lively, amusing and brilliant ages in our history.”7 Later commentators endorsed Lemaître’s first clause, but failed to quote his second. To this were added the inevitable sneers of anti-​Semites who despised Offenbach as the musical expression of the Second Empire’s get-​rich-​quick ethos. Léon Daudet dismissed him as a “Jewish composer … whose frenzy marvelously expresses the disarray and insanity of French society on the eve of 1870.”8 Offenbach’s music, for all its brilliance, had to share the opprobrium of meretricious superficiality imputed to his society. Joanna Richardson, in her book on the Second Empire, had no doubts about the direct connection between Offenbach’s operas and historical events. “La belle Hélène,” she wrote, “reflected the contemporary régime without mercy. In fact it was shown up so pitilessly that its early end appeared inevitable … [Offenbach] was perfectly in tune with imperial Paris, and, as long as the Empire lasted, his triumph was assured … when the Second Empire fell, his world really ended.”9 This tidy formulation conveniently ignores the fact that Offenbach continued to write a great many successful operas during the decade following the Franco-​Prussian war. The eternal recurrence of this cliché derives from a view of the reign of Napoleon III as crass, venal, immoral, its achievements spurious, its art crowd-​pleasing rather than path-​breaking. Frédéric Loliée, in his chronique scandaleuse, characterized the Second Empire as “a cosmopolitan carnival … a sort of masquerade in which all the follies of the senses and the mind Jules Lemaître, Impressions de théâtre, 1re série (Paris: Librairie H. Lecène et H. Oudin, 1888), 217 et seq. Francisque Sarcey seconded this opinion: “That famous quadrille in Orphée carried away our whole generation in its frantic vortex. At the first sounds of that rabid orchestra, didn’t it seem to you to see a whole society leaping up at a bound and stampeding to the dance? It would waken the dead, that music! How those rhythms, now skipping, now furious, seemed to be made to communicate both a moral and a physical trepidation to that whole out-​of-​tune audience for whom life was only a sort of dance of death.” Quarante ans de théâtre. Feuilletons dramatiques. La critique et les lois du théâtre. La Comédie-​Française (Paris: Bibliothèque des Annales politiques et littéraires, 1900), 191–​92. 8 Léon Daudet, Souvenirs et polémiques (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992), 295–​96. 9 Joanna Richardson, La vie parisienne 1852–​1870 (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 268–​69. Richardson also believed that opéra bouffe suited the Parisian indifference to good music, La vie parisienne, 263.

7

The Frankfurt Stand

5

were unleashed all at once in the full fling of a perpetual party.”10 For him, the rise of opéra bouffe was a sign of the times, a distracting passatempo in an age of heedless hedonism. Perhaps the most extreme statement of this belief is that of the novelist François Mauriac: “The laughter we hear in the music of Offenbach is the laughter of the Empress Eugénie, gone mad.”11 All this is reasoning a posteriori. So is the notion that the Second Empire’s levity and moral malaise were inexorably doomed to the debacle of Sedan. French intellectuals lamented that the defeat was due to what Flaubert called “the long falsehood in which we lived.”12 Some contemporary critics deplored the performances at Offenbach’s Bouffes-​Parisiens as skeptical contributions to the national downfall, working like opium on the soul. A newly united Germany, with Richard Wagner as its minstrel, saw France’s subjugation as a natural consequence of its superficiality. This outre-​Rhin hostility hovered in the background when the Frankfurt School of social theory turned its attention to the nineteenth century.

The Frankfurt Stand Fascinated by the Paris of Napoleon III, both Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin took an interest in Offenbach. Adorno believed that the Second Empire originated the capitalist culture industry, which substituted ersatz for quality and elevated kitsch as the norm. This stimulated Benjamin to a more comprehensive critique, Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts, and led him to suggest a closer consideration of the composer in light of his analysis of commodity fetishism: “an interpretation of Offenbach might just demonstrate in an extremely logical way this double meaning: namely that of the underworld and Arcadia –​both are explicit categories of Offenbach and can be pursued even in details of the orchestration.”13 Adorno was the first to publish such a study: his analysis of the demonic element in Les contes d’Hoffmann characterizes the opera as a materialistic waxworks, whose Biedermeier interiors are haunted by ghosts and automata.14 Benjamin shared Adorno’s negative view of bourgeois materialism and his concept of Hoffmann as a dying Fredéric Loliée, La fête impériale (Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1912), 154–​55. Quoted in Elliott Stein, “Offenbach, or a Parisian life,” Musical Times 102, 1420 (Jun. 1961): 350. 12 Flaubert to Maxime du Camp (Sep. 1870) in Correspondance (Paris: Librairie de France, 1926–​1954), VI, 161. 13 Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–​1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 527. 14 Theodor Adorno, “Hoffmanns Erzählungen in Offenbachs Motiven” (1932), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), IV, 42. 10

11

6

Introduction

man’s ode to death. He intended to explore this symbiosis in his grandiose Passagenwerk, known as the “arcades project” in English, on the social topography of the arcades of Paris. He was also inspired by Karl Kraus’s 1928 lecture on La vie parisienne, which pointed out that Offenbach’s alleged frivolity was a façade. “That is Offenbach’s secret,” Benjamin wrote. “How amidst the profound nonsense of public decency [Zucht] –​ whether that of the upper ten thousand, a dance-​floor or a military parade –​, the profound sense of private indecency [Unzucht] opens a visionary eye.”15 Benjamin perceived in Offenbach, beyond the superficial cynicism, a Utopian vision of paradise lost. Had he completed his study, Benjamin’s interpretation of Offenbach might have effaced the clichés. Far more influential, however, was the study of Offenbach produced by another fellow traveler of the Frankfurt School, Siegfried Kracauer. A refugee from the Nazis living in Paris, Kracauer had the ambition of creating a Gesellschaftsbiographie, a close study of an industrial society that, like the Weimar Republic, had fostered both genius and decadence, and then succumbed to a Prussian hegemony. In this exercise, Offenbach was situated as an emblematic figure of a Jewish intellectual movement, a tool to analyze the revolutionary power of humor and parody against the mechanisms of dictatorship. Kracauer’s dear friend Benjamin, already embarked on the arcades project, halted his own research, waiting to see what the younger man would achieve.16 (As it happens, both Benjamin and Adorno mocked what they regarded as their colleague’s sell-​ out to cheap popularity –​biography was infra dig.) Kracauer had no musical training or instinct, so that Offenbach’s scores receive scant discussion in his book; instead, a Marxist grid is laid over the relationship between the composer and his milieu. The œuvre is to be explained by its ambient conditions.17 Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus liest Offenbach,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), II, 356 (IV, 515). 16 Stefan Bub, “Jacques Offenbach bei Walter Benjamin und Siegfried Kracauer,” Euphorion 100 (2006): 117–​28; Norbert Nagler, “Jacques Offenbachs musikalische Utopie: die Sehnsucht nach der herrschaftsarmen Heimat. Reflexionen zu Siegfried Kracauers Gesellschaftsbiographie des Second Empire,” in Jacques Offenbach. Musik-​Konzepte Heft 13. Ed. Heinz-​Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1980), 87–​103. 17 Gertrud Koch, Siegfried Kracauer, an introduction, trans. Jeremy Gaines (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 65–​ 74. Also see Harald Reil, Siegfried Kracauers Jacques Offenbach. Biographie, Geschichte, Zeitgeschichte (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch considered Kracauer’s neglect of music to be tantamount to discussing Michelangelo with no mention of painting. Ernst Bloch, “Der eigentümliche Glücksfall über Jacques Offenbach,” in Siegfried Kracauer. TEXT+KRITIK Heft 68. Ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich:  edition text + kritik, 1980), 73–​75. 15

The Frankfurt Stand

7

The completed work, Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit, appeared in 1937 in German, and shortly thereafter in French and English. Kracauer too insisted on the close relationship between what he called the Offenbachiad and its period, but he tried to demonstrate the subversive quality of the operas. Nothing if not tendentious, the German-​Jewish biographer read the Second Empire by the glare of Fascist torch-​lit rallies. So Kracauer echoed all the standard references to the infernal galop that ends Orphée aux enfers, “though its glamorous frenzy served the ends of Imperial policy and suited the tastes of the generation, it also contained elements of danger. For it led straight to dionysiac orgies which could only end in self-​destruction. If the Marseillaise [quoted in Act II] was a direct attack on the dictatorship, this dance was an indirect attack.”18 Well-​intentioned though this teleology may be, the reasoning is faulty. It praises Offenbach for attacking a regime whose excesses he was simultaneously fueling. It perpetuates the image of Offenbach as imbedded in a disreputable past.19 It involuntarily supports the Nazi branding of Offenbach as “degenerate, racially inferior art.” Kracauer’s book is still in print as the most available book on Offenbach; an annotated German paperback came out in 2005, which suggests that it is now regarded as a classic. Much of the critical attitude that Offenbach’s music is a direct reflection of the ostensibly corrupt world of Napoleon III derives its intellectual respectability from Kracauer’s theses. The authors who succeeded Kracauer adopted this concept of Offenbach as a Rigoletto whose cap and bells concealed a disruptive intent, a resolute opponent of imperial power who pretended to serve the regime. They insisted on the political satire imbedded in his work. This, however, is both to over-​emphasize Offenbach’s interest in politics and to mistake the nature of opéra bouffe. Are the marital squabbles of Jupiter and Juno in Orphée aux enfers a veiled reflection of the domestic life of Louis-​Napoléon and Eugénie, or are they simply the farcical leveling of classical culture? Is this programmatic satire or wanton fooling? Is Offenbach a tool of the regime or its antagonist? If one had to decode the politics of the libretti the operas would never have had the international success this book seeks to record. Of Offenbach’s intimate circle, Ludovic Halévy was a skeptical Orléanist, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach und das Pariser seiner Zeit, ed. Karsten Witte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 182; the English translation Orpheus in Paris. Offenbach and the Paris of his time, trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938) was reissued in 2002 with a marxisant foreword by Gertrud Koch. 19 Gerd Gmünden, German Exile Cinema 1933–​1951 (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2014), 49, 73. 18

8

Introduction

Nadar and Victorien Sardou republicans. True, the composer frequented establishment salons and officials in hopes of promoting his theatrical interests. True, he was protected by Achille Fould, a minister who ran the Bureau des Théâtres, and by the Emperor’s half-​brother the Comte, later Duc, de Morny. The sovereign himself attended an Offenbach opera on four celebratory occasions.20 This hardly makes the composer either a courtier or a carbonaro in camouflage.

On the Fringes Classifying Offenbach as a specifically French phenomenon tied to a specific regime does him an injustice. However, in one respect the coup d’état of 1851 did provide Offenbach with an opportunity he would not have had in a more egalitarian society. The implementation of an order that maintained in power a social class accustomed to wealth and possessed of a weak conscience and a taste for diversion furnished him with the perfect audience for his theatre.21 Compared with Meyerbeer, who spent much of his life as Prussian court conductor, Offenbach’s sphere was not high society, but the boulevard, the non-​official press, the latest slang, the most up-​to-​date fashion. The satire in his libretti is social, partaking of Honoré Daumier and Henri Monnier, Eugène Labiche and Paul de Kock. His true subversion takes place in the realm of art, specifically music. Offenbach’s fellow expatriate Heine observed that it is excitement that draws the Frenchman to the theater, and the last thing he wants is calm. If the author leaves him a single moment for contemplation, he might be liable to summon Rover –​in other words, whistle. The important thing for the dramatic poet in France is to make sure that the audience neither becomes disengaged nor has time to breathe, that emotions come one after the other, that love, hatred, jealousy, ambition, pride, and honor –​all the passionate feelings already raging in the Frenchman’s real life –​explode on the boards with even greater intensity!22

The demand by an increasingly literate society for such stimuli produced a glut of what Saint-​Beuve in 1839 called “industrial literature.” Musical The emperor was said to have taken umbrage at the song of the obsequious courtiers when Barbe-​ bleue was performed at the Palais de Compiègne, but this had more to do with its impropriety on the occasion than with its political sentiments. 21 Raymond Lyon, “Parmi les heureuses circonstances …,” in La vie parisienne. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 206. Ed. Jean-​Claude Yon (Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 2002), 39–​44. 22 Heinrich Heine, De la France (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 309–​10. Originally published as Französische Zustände (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1833). 20

On the Fringes

9

farces, melodrama, serial novels and comic operas with almost interchangeable plots and characters were mass-​produced. French romantic drama had failed to produce masterpieces, in part because of this need to divert; its best plays are historic melodramas, packed with flamboyant crimes but slowed down by verse dialogue. Heine saw this as a natural outcome of the triumph of mediocrity, “the shrinking of all grandeur and this complete annihilation of heroism are above all the work of the middle class that attained power in France with the fall of the hereditary aristocracy and triumphantly imposed its rigid, cold shopkeeper’s ideas in every sphere of life.”23 This in turn resulted from a desire for order and a fear of anarchy; common sense and social regulation were opposed to “unwholesome” metaphysical and moral anxiety. “It is clear,” wrote Louis Roger in 1863, “that the present generation is descending toward materialism. Art is no major factor for it.”24 In his painting “Music in the Tuileries Gardens”(1862), Édouard Manet, dubbed by a recent exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay “the man who invented modernism,” depicted Baudelaire and Offenbach in symmetrical balance, leaning against tree trunks. The juxtaposition is apposite. Establishment art in the nineteenth century is typified by its gigantism: the three-​volume novel, the wall-​filling genre painting, the five-​act grand opera, the orchestral symphony, and the Gesamtkunstwerk, all earnest and encyclopedic in aim. Baudelaire contested the idea that this monumentality was the true representation of the modern era. For him, the genuine mark of modernity is a concern for triviality. Offenbach agreed. He dedicated an intricately composed song in Le pont des soupirs to an admiral’s spurs, another to a colonel’s jabot in the posthumous Belle Lurette, and, in La vie parisienne, he has a whole salon full of faux socialites sing a round about a coat split up the back. This reversal of values, the eternal replaced by the fugacious, the work of individual genius by the commercial manufacture, is summed up in a remark of Offenbach’s collaborator Ludovic Halévy:  “The most beautiful landscape is a wall covered with posters.”25 Like Baudelaire, Offenbach appreciated the ephemeral;26 what he found attractive about the theatre Heine, De la France, 312. Louis Roger, “Les Compositeurs de musique devant le public, l’état et les privilèges de théâtre,” L’univers musical (8 Oct. 1863): 323; also see Max D’Ollone, Le théâtre lyrique et le public (Paris and Geneva: La Palatine, 1955), 181. 25 Ludovic Halévy, Carnets, ed. Daniel Halévy (Paris:  Calmann-​Lévy, 1935), quoted in Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach, 268. 26 Daniel Halévy, “Une musique jaillit,” 16–​17. 23 24

10

Introduction

was that “the play a-​borning makes one forget the one dying. No comparisons, no connections, no analogies: a series of tableaux that evaporate like magic lantern slides, and, once vanished, the greatest success weighs no more on the public mind than the noisiest flop.”27 His scores offer a profound sense of the void, the evanescent, even the nihilistic. Peter Conrad has described Garnier’s sumptuous new house for the Paris Opéra as a coquettish building intended to accommodate a “luxurious and hedonistic inferno like that of Offenbach’s cancan girls,” an atmosphere the architect deemed féerique –​“the same word Offenbach used to classify the genre of Orphée aux enfers:  fantastical, phantasmal.”28 The interior of the Opéra building and the flurry in its public spaces may bear some likeness to Offenbach’s musical caracoles, but its grandiosity is inimical to his taste for the ephemeral and the transitory. The frequent appearance of the composer and his creations to be found in the realms of graphic illustration indicates that his style is as up-​to-​date and insouciant as they are. His penchant for satirizing the classics and neoclassics of the French stage finds its equivalent in Daumier, whose febrile draftsmanship might be compared with Offenbach’s nervous rhythms. In Judith Wechsler’s neat formulation, in Daumier’s theatrical sketches, “his rapidly drawn lines and repeated contours indicate the figure without fixing it, and this conveys a sense of movement.”29 Not only does this speed course through Offenbach’s own prolific compositions, but his personal appearance –​the emaciated body enswathed in a fur coat, the pince-​nez and side-​whiskers –​partners such indelible cartoon types as the hunchback Mayeux, the conman Robert Macaire, the pompous bourgeois Joseph Prud’homme and the monarchist bully Ratapoil.

Aux Bouffes on pouffe! The Larousse Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (Dictionary of the 19th Century), in its entry on opéra bouffe, insists on the relationship between Halévy, “Une musique jaillit,” 17, 19. Peter Conrad, A song of love and death. The meaning of opera (New  York:  Poseidon Press, 1987), 239–​40. The association of Garnier’s unfinished Opéra with the failings of the Second Empire led to a postwar debate over funding to complete it. See Michael Strasser, “The Société Nationale and its adversaries. The musical politics of l’invasion germanique in the 1870s,” 19th-​Century Music 24, 3 (Spring 2001): 234–​35. 29 Judith Wechsler, A human comedy:  physiognomy and caricature in 19th century Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 154–​55. Daumier was motivated to create his series of caricatures of neoclassic drama when Ponsard’s five-​act tragedy Ulysse was staged at the Comédie-​ Française on 19 June 1852. On that occasion, Offenbach was in the pit, conducting the incidental music by Charles Gounod. See Jean Cherpin, Daumier et le théâtre (Paris: L’Arche, 1958), 32. 27

28

Aux Bouffes on pouffe!

11

a genre and the way it responds to the needs of an audience. “The opening of the Théâtre des Bouffes-​Parisiens and the success of Offenbach’s works prove that this genre responded to a real need.”30 Paris’s growing population was avid for amusement that could not be met by the high-​brow attractions of the Comédie-​Française, the Opéra, and other government-­ subsidized theatres. Legislation segregated popular playhouses to the fringes, especially the Boulevard du Temple, where the working class could enjoy melodrama, vaudevilles festooned with songs set to familiar tunes, pantomime indoors, and fairground attractions outdoors. To take advantage of an already existing clientele, entertainment moved farther to the outskirts. Leading this move was the café chantant, an open-​air music-​hall where the audience could order drink. Licensing laws restricted performers to one at a time on stage, without special costumes or props, but failed to curb their popularity. The songs sung at the suburban café-​chantant, with their catchphrases and nonsensical refrains, could be heard everywhere. The French were said “to like music only when it is allied with words.” Music had to be wed to a drama or a comedy, framed by attractive scenery. “Hence,” wrote Lucien Augé de Lassus, “the obsession with the theater haunts every one of us who thinks and lives amidst the song of notes and sounds. Material profit, resounding glory, popularity; for us, these do not reward the labors of the musician-​composer except when in league with the theater.”31 Saint-​Saëns later blamed it on the incompetence and narrow-​mindedness of music critics: “They do not tell musicians, ‘Be great, be powerful, be sublime!’, but ‘Be easy to understand; be accessible to the common people.’”32 The requirement that music be both readily comprehensible and allied to the theatre played to Offenbach’s strengths. When he was able to open his Théâtre des Bouffes-​Parisiens Offenbach had a ready-​made audience for the kind of entertainment he intended to purvey. The music in his later operas could become such earworms because the public was used to whistling and humming the hits of the earthy café diva Thérésa and her ilk. The opéra bouffe was born of a clever marriage between the formulas of salon opera and boulevard comedy; modeled on the minor theatres, and fed by the skeptical spirit of the boulevard. The “Opéra buffa ou Opéra-​bouffe,” Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, 15 vols. + 3 supplements (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire universel, 1879–​1890). Albert de Lassalle also wrote that operetta “is a genre unto itself, with its own definition, in that it responds to a need.” Histoire des Bouffes-​Parisiens (Paris: Librarie nouvelle Bourdilliat, 1860), 3. 31 Lucien Augé de Lassus, Saint-​Saëns (Paris: Delagrave, 1914), 132; quoted in Lacombe, The keys to French opera, 215, also see 105. 32 Saint-​Saëns, Harmonie et mélodie, 34; quoted in Lacombe, The keys to French opera, 292. 30

12

Introduction

audience of the Bouffes drew on the bourgeoisie and bohemia and all but annexed the elegant public of the St-​Honoré and St-​Germain faubourgs fond of theatrical slumming. This jarring, heterogeneous novelty ended by being imposed on the principal secondary stages, even eclipsing the vaudeville. The Goncourt brothers, ever the voice of entrenched conservatism, expressed their dismay at the promiscuous intermingling of high and low: [People are talking] about this great little theatre, the Figaro of theatres, the Bouffes:  […] A  chic place of ill repute of the short skirt, racy music and Désiré’s stunts (cascades), a candy-​box of choruses and catchphrases, at whose door one sees photographs of actresses in their low-​cut costumes, a theatre of private rooms and cramped boxes, a circus of dudes (gandins) … They are a miniature society […] speculating, selling a bit of everything, selling a bit of their wives, mixing them with actors and actresses … –​that whole younger generation –​that one would think came into the world by stepping out of a vaudeville, between two deals on the Stock Exchange and which, as a result, brought itself up to calculate solely what a ditty might rake in –​whatever is immoral in everything that arises, gets stirred up, talked about, excites the public, all the mud we churn up in our gossip one and all, makes us sad and fills our heart with disgust …33

Although Offenbach produced lyrical or “opéra-​comique”-​style one-​ acts, the most memorable items on his bill were the “bouffonneries,” outrageous assaults on cultural icons. Limited to four speaking characters and a handful of musicians, they exploited their outrageousness. The opening show at the Passage Choiseul branch of the Bouffes was the first collaboration of Meilhac and Halévy:34 Ba-​ta-​clan (1855), a “Chinoiserie” that would set the tone for the Offenbachiads to follow: an “irrational entertainment,” in which cartoon Chinese turn out to be French and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots is audaciously quoted. This spoof of grand opera and its prevailing Orientalism must have had much the same effect as the backcloth of a battleship coming down behind Azucena’s aria in the Marx Bros’s Night at the Opera. Next came Tromb-​al-​ca-​zar, ou les Criminels dramatiques (1856), which ridicules those minor houses where the actors have to play every genre; at one point a character exclaims, metatheatrically, “Do not Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (10 Oct. 1861), Journal, ed. Robert Ricatte (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), I, 737–​38. 34 The Meilhac-​Halévy collaboration was accidental, for the former was replacing a missing colleague of the latter. They worked together again in April 1861 and were partners on a regular basis from 1862. Halévy stuck with Meilhac, but Meilhac worked with plenty of others until 1881 as well as on his own until 1896. From 1860 to 1881 they wrote fifty pieces together. Jean-​Claude Yon, “Le théâtre de Meilhac et Halévy: satire et indulgence,” in Entre le théâtre et l’histoire. La famille Halévy, ed. Henri Loyrette (Paris: Anthème Fayard, 1996), 164–​65. 33

Aux Bouffes on pouffe!

13

2.  Ba-​ta-​clan. Caricature by Nadar, lithographed by Destouches, Paris. Published by Léon Escudier, Paris.

speak, messieurs! It is forbidden!” In Croquefer, ou Le dernier des paladins (Ironmuncher or the Last Paladin, 1857), a Monty Pythonesque lampoon of knighthood gone to seed, the licensed quartet is supplemented by a mute (his tongue had been cut out) who barks and unrolls banners inscribed with his responses. Offenbach had already spoofed tropical island romance such as Paul et Virginie in Oyaye, ou la Reine des Îles; now he translated the “bouffonnerie anthropophagique” to a South Sea isle in Vent du soir, ou L’horrible festin (Evening Breeze or The Horrible Banquet, 1857), a send-​up of Chateaubriand’s Atala in which the noble savages are cannibals. No wonder the Goncourts were outraged by the indecorum of the bouffe: “Heard at the Bouffes-​Parisiens Croquefer, an inconceivable piece of insanity, the most inept play I have yet seen, made up almost entirely of flummery [balançoires] by the actors that has absolutely no relationship to what they are performing. Never have I had a better gauge of the brains of the dudes [gandins] who fill the hall.”35 This minority report totally missed the point. Their outrage is directed at the lack of Cartesian rationality in Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (18 Feb. 1862), Journal, I, 772.

35

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Introduction

playwriting and performance, but the opéra bouffe deliberately challenged the logical progression of a comedy intrigue, the reasonable motivation of characters. In the realm of farce, the opéra bouffe is not a forebear of the clockwork precision of a Feydeau but rather of the surrealistic anarchy of a Boris Vian. Offenbach was not simply setting conventional vaudevilles to music; he was finding a musical equivalent for the inspired lunacy provided by his librettists (and often conceived by himself ). Bouffe comes from the Italian buffo, “funny,” a type of comedy in which the joke is everything. Bouffonnerie or low clowning has more to do with the Three Stooges than with the Three Graces. The French stage had previously seen such reveling in the absurd in Molière’s early farces, the Comédie-​Italienne, and the verbal and physical knockabout of the fairground showbooths. In play after play, Arlequin donned drag, gave birth, met his double, went to the moon, toasted a turd before the fire; the dialogue was couched in Franco-​Italian macaronics or an invented patois. There too, hamstrung by theatrical legislation, the players had invented new means of performing: forbidden to speak, they sang; forbidden to sing, they let down placards with verses and had the audience sing; tongue-​tied, they developed elaborate pantomime. By the end of the Napoleonic era, much of this had gravitated to the playhouses on the “Boulevard du Crime”: there such comics as Bobèche and Galimafré bantered on the platforms in front of the theatre. At the Funambules Deburau glorified Pierrot, the hero of innumerable slapstick pantomimes, whose fabric of reality was rewoven by romantic writers into the robes of poesy. The word invariably used to sum up the characteristic quality of Offenbach’s opéra bouffe is blague. The Larousse Grand Dictionnaire du XIXe siècle calls it a French, indeed Parisian, term par excellence which should have been invented by Villon or Rabelais. It has elements of hâblerie, boasting, but not charlatanerie, quackery, and contains so many nuances that there is no simple way to translate it. French dictionaries are not much help, although the more recent ones suggest the English “gag” as a synonym. French-​English dictionaries are scattershot, offering “joke, yarn, story, nonsense, guff, bosh, baloney, humbug, claptrap.” “Hoax” is too strong, “prank” somewhat closer, “bluff” possibly closest. Perhaps the Swiss clown Grock’s Englishing of “Sans blague!” as “No kidding!” hits the mark. Blague suggests raillery, pulling one’s leg rather than kicking one’s rear. Then too, it includes an element of exaggeration, the tall story, bluster. In the Anglophone world, Mark Twain, W. S. Gilbert, Saki, and Robert Benchley were all poker-​faced masters of blague.

A Genre of One’s Own

15

Commentators of Offenbach’s day were fond of claiming that theirs was the age of the blague. What past societies had taken seriously was no longer valued. The Goncourts deplored opéra bouffe’s reliance on blague not only because its subversive novelty challenged literary hierarchies, but also because its appeal to a new type of urban spectator heralded the dissolution of social castes. “What will kill the old society will be neither philosophy nor science. It will perish not by the great and noble attacks of thought, but plainly and simply by the lowly poison, the corrosive sublimate of French wit: la blague.”36 Even so, it seems to have been a local phenomenon. When the Bouffes-​Parisiens first toured to provincial capitals, audiences were baffled by the clowning and appreciated only those works that more closely resembled traditional comic opera. “Too Parisian” was the verdict passed on the more outlandish buffoonery.

A Genre of One’s Own The razing of the Boulevard du Temple in 1862 as a consequence of Baron Haussmann’s remodeling of Paris, along with the liberalization of the repertoires, resulting from the decree on the freedom of theatres of 1864, reinforced the intermingling of genres that had been artificially segregated by obsolete legislation. Offenbach was able to move to the larger, more established houses of the Variétés and the Palais Royale, adding pastoral themes, dear to a society shaken by an influx of actual countrymen and the inclusion of farm land within the conurbation of Paris. The freer licensing allowed the use of new music in vaudevilles instead of outdated tunes. Even the Opéra Comique, influenced by Offenbach despite its resistance to staging his work, rediscovered comedy with ariettas. Offenbach was everywhere. His Alsatian numbers began to be imitated in the café concert, where he complained of being regularly “executed.” “With Offenbach,” noted the Revue et Gazette musicale, “music gradually invades all our vaudeville scenes and the mixed genre, inaugurated by the Bouffes-​Parisiens, ends by dethroning La clé du caveau. From our point of view, this is no cause for complaint; the tol-​de-​rols of our fathers have had their day, and there can only be some degree of advantage in seeing them replaced by fresh and bright-​eyed refrains which have, at least, the charm of novelty.”37 Goncourts (30 Jun. 1868), Journal, II, 158–​59. La Revue et Gazette musicale (4 Nov. 1866), quoted in Philippe Luez, Jacques Offenbach (1819–​1880). Musicien européen (Paris: Séguier, 2001), 177. La clé du caveau was a collection of songs from various

36 37

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Introduction

At a time when the theatrical trend was towards a greater illusion of reality through scenery and costume, properties, dialogue, and conversational acting in drawing-​room plays, Offenbach and his librettists moved in the opposite direction towards something that might be classified, without too much exaggeration, as Brechtian “distancing” or even Absurdism. As the bouffe moved from the proletarian margins to the bourgeois center and from the one-​act to a full evening’s fare, the critical establishment sought to fit this new genre into its dramatic taxonomy. Nestor Roqueplan, confronted with La belle Hélène, astutely noted that the comedy resulted precisely from anachronistic disequilbrium.38 The libretto allowed opportunities for the actors, more than singers, to embroider it with their ad libs and topical asides, while the chorus was treated in a serious manner. This reliance on a kind of performance that regularly broke the fourth wall, winked at the house, and made no effort at verisimilitude bothered no less a connoisseur than Henry James. Observing the predominance of opéras bouffes on the Parisian stage, his complaint was not that they were vulgar or trivial or indecent, but simply that they are unhistrionic: They give up the stage to something which not only is not acting, but is a positive denial of acting. To act is to produce an illusion; to interpret Offenbach is to snap your fingers and thrust out your tongue at illusion –​to try and make it appear that a young woman in the audience, too frolicsome, really, to be suffered to go at large, has scrambled upon the stage and is using the footlights in the interest of her sentimental relations with a plurality of individuals in the house.39

The Goncourts would have described this as the prostitution of the theatre or, in modern terms, its commodification; for James, however, the attack on illusion is harmful because it destroys artistic idealism. In his obituary of Offenbach, Eduard Hanslick, the dean of Viennese music critics, credited him with adding a new genre, musical farce, to musical tragedy and musical high comedy.40 Offenbach’s teasing the totems of high culture affected the hierarchy of art. Just as the award of a royal pension to Molière promoted comedy to first place under the Sun King, so sources that any singer was free to use; first issued in 1811, it was much reprinted and enlarged throughout the century. 38 Nester Roqueplan, Le constitutionnel 36 (26 Dec. 1864). 39 Henry James, “The Parisian stage” (1875–​1876), in The scenic art:  notes on acting and the drama, 1872–​1901 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1946), 43–​44. It is worth noting that censorious commentators were always bothered by the photographs of actresses outside the auditorium. 40 Eduard Hanslick, “Jakob Offenbach,” Neue Freie Presse (1880), trans. in Dwight’s Journal of Music 40 (1880): 187–​89.

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Offenbach’s popularity raised the stock of opéra bouffe. When the Emperor of Russia attended the Exposition Universelle of 1867, he sent a telegram from Cologne to reserve a box at the Variétés to see La Grande-​Duchesse de Gérolstein the very day he arrived.41 That telegram consternated the public tastemakers. Traditionally, the Tsar would have gone to the Comédie-​ Française or the Opéra, institutions that housed official art. Instead, he chose the most novel, most unbridled of entertainments; and Bismarck followed suit.42 The modern was preferred to the classic, even by autocrats.

Modern Times For Baudelaire, the playwrights of the 1830 generation lacked appeal to their posterity because they were insufficiently modern. In 1860 he famously referred to Constantin Guys as an artist who “seeks something which we might be allowed to call modernity.”43 Modernity, in Baudelaire’s sense, involves the pleasurable sense of belonging to an era divorced from the past, in his case an era of celebrity prostitutes, dandies, and flâneurs, an ambitious middle class, daily life magically transformed by machinery, a consumerism catering to female desire, the poetry of the big city. Enjoying their new-​born status, the inhabitants of such an era needed playwrights to express it in an art meant for contemporaries and not for the judgment of posterity. All these elements circulate through Offenbach’s work, which responded precisely to that demand. If Wagner purported to write the music of the future, Offenbach was very much grounded in the present. In one of his few published comments on his contemporary, he wondered whether the younger generation might display more talent, were it not “paralyzed by that Medusa’s head that serves as their objective: Richard Wagner.”44 This aspect of Offenbach was XX, “La vie parisienne,” in La vie parisienne. Pièce en cinq actes. Musique de M. J. Offenbach, ed. Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy (Paris: Librairie illustrée, 1875), vi. 42 Since the opera did not open until April 12, this anecdote is untrustworthy. The Tsar did eventually visit the Variétés, in company with the Grand Duke Konstantin. Of other heads of states who visited the Grand Duchess, Yon lists Napoleon III, Thiers, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Edinburgh, Bismarck, the Duke of Saxe-​Coburg, the Kings of Sweden and Portugal, and the Khedive of Egypt. The Kings of Prussia, Portugal, Sweden, and Bavaria were also in Paris, as was the Sultan of Turkey, but that does not mean that all of them attended La Grande-​Duchesse. Yon, Jacques Offenbach, 347. Schneider was nicknamed “le Passage des Princes” by an envious colleague, because she showed up in a carriage at the Exposition entrance reserved for the Emperor and royalty, and, when challenged, declared “Open, for the Grand Duchess of Gérolstein!” 43 Charles Baudelaire, “La peintre de la vie moderne,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Y.-​G. Le Dantec, rev. edn. by Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), I, 1155–​62; Jean Duvignaud, “Le fantôme du théâtre bourgeois,” Le siècle d’Offenbach, 56–​57. 44 Reprinted in Le siècle d’Offenbach, 9–​11. 41

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Introduction

highlighted by the editor of his 1877 American travel diary: “His music is daemonic, like the century we live in –​it is the diabolic movement of our time.”45 It is his firm adhesion to his own times that suffuses it with a modernity that prefigures modernism. In December 1864 two striking phenomena made their appearance: La belle Hélène opened at the Variétés and Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical Syllabus Errorum of modern errors, which vehemently rejected anything smacking of liberalism. The journal La vie parisienne cleverly contrasted these two expressions of contemporary thought: La belle Hélène is the present, our society, it is us, our beliefs and our tastes and our gaiety and our spirit of analysis which knows not parents nor friends nor tradition … The Encyclical is the last echo of another age … a shadow, a ghost … Snatch away the veil woven of old scruples and hesitant respect … which is almost in tatters and look in reality at the totality of our poetic and religious beliefs, our ideal and artistic aspirations, you shall see the play at the Variétés, no more, no less.”46

Of course, works such as Orphée aux enfers and La belle Hélène belong to a long tradition of classical travesties. The burlesque Aeneids of the French seventeenth century were weapons in the culture war of the Ancients and the Moderns, but also covert political statements, the Fronde against the King. Their favorite devices of anachronism –​transposing today on to the ancient past –​and bathos –​leveling the sublime to the ridiculous –​were well-​worn tools of literary comedy. Offenbach and his librettists Crémieux, Meilhac, and Halévy deflate the pretensions of official culture while casting satirical aspersions on their own society. Offenbach’s satirical attacks on classical antiquity and medieval legend are Janus-​faced: while exploding the prestige of the past they ridicule the preoccupations of the present. He cannot take the ambitious claims of his contemporaries any more seriously than he can the sacred cows of establishment culture. As if in reply to Baudelaire’s call for the modern with all its frivolity, he hastens to put the topical on stage. Even here, however, he does not embrace the contemporary scene so much as wryly observe it with the eye of a bemused bystander. In works such as Orphée and Hélène, he does not pander to a taste for vulgarization; rather, he frees the public from the ponderous weight of tradition. Dumas père had already transferred the conventions of cape-​and-​sword romance to his own time in his Albert Wolff, preface to Jacques Offenbach, Offenbach en Amérique. Notes d’un musicien en voyage (Paris: Calmann-​Lévy, 1877), xxx. 46 “La belle Hélène and l’Encyclique,” La vie parisienne (7 Jan. 1865). 45

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play Antony and his novel Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo. Even more ruthlessly, Offenbach delivered French culture from the burden of “eternal themes.” Francisque Sarcey, the shrewdest dramatic critic of the Third Republic, cited Orphée as one of the three works that revolutionized modern theatre (the other two were Labiche’s vaudeville Le chapeau de paille d’Italie and Dumas fils’s drama La dame aux camélias, all French, naturally).47 The opera opens with these lines on the lips of an allegorical female figure: Qui je suis? Du théâtre antique J’ai perfectionné le chœur: Je suis l’Opinion publique Un personage symbolique Ce qu’on appelle un raisonneur.

Who am I? On the stage of ancient Greece I perfected the chorus. I am Public Opinion, A symbolic character Or what you’d call a raisonneur.48

These five lines, delivered not in song, but intoned to the accompaniment of a doleful threnody, pack a remarkable punch. “Public opinion,” growing with the spread of the popular press and the universal male suffrage of 1848 (honored more in the breach than in the observance), had played a major role in the landslide vote that elected Louis-​Napoléon President of France. A cynic might question the role public opinion played a few years later in the plebiscite called to confirm the coup d’état that made him Emperor. Offenbach is also modern in the sense of being up-​to-​date (itself a nineteenth-​century commercial coinage). The Exposition of 1855 brought him his first Parisian audience; the Exposition Universelle of 1867, the first major multicultural exhibition sponsored by a national government, introduced him to the world at large. It made Paris a Mecca of international tourism. Jules Verne was galvanized by its display of electricity and the nascent Impressionists were impressed by its show of Japanese prints, but most of the visitors thronging to Paris took home Offenbach’s operas as their lasting souvenir. La vie parisienne forecast, advertised, and sponsored this international interchange. Begun as a revue in 1864, it evolved into a five-​act opera, and met a rapturous reception when it opened at the Palais-​ Royal three years later. The butts of Offenbach’s satire no longer wear chitons or tabards; they are replications of the pleasure-​seekers in the stalls and boxes. The hub of hedonism is no longer disguised as Hades; it is unabashedly the capital of France, into whose joys the opera’s Swedish Baron Gondremarck intends Francisque Sarcey, “Évolutions et révolutions principales de l’art dramatique” (1891), repr. in Quarante ans du théâtre (Paris: Bibliothèque des annals, 1900), I, 191. 48 Hector Crémieux and anonymous (Ludovic Halévy), Orphée aux enfers (1858), Prologue. 47

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Introduction

to plunge “jusque-​là” (up to the neck). The soubrettes and Figaros of conventional comic opera are replaced by venal cocottes and waiters who prey on out-​of-​towners; the Bacchanalian revels of Orphée are now celebrated in a fashionable restaurant. “La vie parisienne” came to mean “fashionable life,” “the debauched existence of Parisians, or, more exactly, the kind of existence someone might lead had one the luck to live a day amidst Parisians.”49 The opera opens not in a picturesque marketplace or manor house, but in a railway station, the just-​built Gare de l’Ouest, whose form –​the newly devised coupling of plate glass and cast iron –​and whose content –​steam locomotives and their globe-​trotting passengers –​embody the latest technology, a defining feature of the urban landscape. Rail travel stimulated Offenbach’s imagination much as it did that of Dickens and Zola. A steam engine is evoked in the metamorphosis verses in Orphée; the charade in La belle Hélène spells “lo-​co-​mo-​tive.”50 The appeal lies in speed. “His music is,” declared the editor of the composer’s travel notes, “like the century which rushes on, full steam ahead:  it is the diabolic movement of our time.”51 Offenbach is said to have urged on the orchestra in rehearsals of La vie by shouting “Tchoo! Tchoo! Kvicker! Full shteam ahead!” Later in his career, Offenbach would base operas on Verne’s speculations about the future, the effects of oxygen, and space travel, but in La vie parisienne the realized improvements of the century take pride of place. The way we live now provides its own intense sensations.

The New Woman As the playwright Francis de Croisset points out, the standard opéra comique shares the same plot structure as a proverbe by Alfred de Musset. The two central characters are lovers, seconded by grotesque characters whose function is to make the audience laugh. There may be a third character, loving but unloved, whose hopes are dashed in the course of the narrative. So long as the romantic leads hold the stage, comedy stands aside and sentiment moves to the fore. Once they make their exit, the play recovers its verve. “As in the circus, when the equestrienne performs, the clowns fall silent.”52 The opéra bouffe was not so formulaic: its female leads could be Louis Chevalier, Les Parisiens (Paris: Hachette, 1967), 19–​20. Patrick Castan, Les liaisons ferroviaires entre Bordeaux et Toulouse (Maelstaing: CEREM, 2008), 19. 51 Albert Wolff, preface to Offenbach en Amérique, xxx. 52 Francis de Croisset, La vie parisienne au théâtre (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1929), 52–​53. 49 50

The New Woman

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lovers and spitfires, its male leads lovers and boobies. The comic vein ran throughout and could be tapped at any point. Of all composers of comic opera, Offenbach was the most successful in the co-​existence of the most unbridled raillery with deeply felt or elegiac tenderness, often cheek by jowl. “I know of no music in the world in which extremes collide so boldly,” wrote Verdi’s biographer Camille Bellaigue. “Between the sentimental Offenbach and the other it is impossible –​they cling so tightly to one another –​to choose or sometimes to know which is which.”53 The contrast between the romantic verses, often set in a minor key, and the uproarious and vulgar refrains, often in a major key, produces a shock. To achieve this, the composer has to change register without sharp transition and the audience has to give up typing actors as those who make them laugh and those who make them feel. Even as a society cellist, Offenbach had capitalized on this ambiguity, mixing formality with animal noises; in his earliest works for the stage, reminiscent of eighteenth-​century opéra comique, tender lyricism dominates. Robert Pourvoyeur has speculated that, had it not been for the wild success of the opéra bouffe, Offenbach might have shunned parody and irony for the emotional gamut found in Fantasio and Les contes d’Hoffmann.54 This “what if ” scenario is born of the persistent disdain for comedy in music. It is more likely that Offenbach’s native sense of the comic would have kept breaking through, whatever the circumstances. In Offenbach and the “funambulesque” operetta, the female lead, if a young girl, is rarely an ingénue, because she is not ingenuous. Rather, she has been genetically crossed with the soubrette: clever, witty, alert; a creature of common sense bordering on wisdom. Even when downcast, she consoles herself by singing. She is often from the proletariat –​a street-​ singer, a cowherd, a drum-​major’s presumptive daughter –​so she is not constrained by codes of etiquette. In the tradition of the market-​woman Madame Angot, she puts her hands on her hips, loses her temper, and speaks her mind in the plainest terms. Her anger is not, however, the smouldering rage of a Carmen; rather, it is an amused self-​indulgence that disarms rancor. She is the female personification of la blague. The boy she pairs off with is candid, pretty, and a bit of a simpleton. The audience is assured that they will make the perfect couple. In fact, Quoted in David Rissin, “La transfiguration du rire,” in La Périchole. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 66. Ed. Alain Duault (Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 1984), 86. 54 Robert Pourvoyeur, “L’opérette: rêve et parodie,” in La veuve joyeuse. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 45. Ed. Alain Duault (1982), 10–​11. 53

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Introduction

3.  Marie Aimée as Fiorella in Les brigands at the Théâtre des Variétés, Paris: Martinet, Lemercier & Cie.

Offenbach and his librettists advanced a new character, the comic lover who gets the girl. Figures like Pâris and Piquillo are the male equivalents of the dumb blonde, loved not only despite their mental deficiencies but because of them. An excellent example occurs in Les brigands:  Fiorella, daughter of the bandit chieftain Falsacappa, has the outspokenness of most young women in Offenbach and, like them, a taste for dim-​witted hunks. Such a one, the Prince, has strayed into the mountains and is about to be pillaged by the banditti; Fiorella decides to save him. Why? FIORELLA (looking the prince over). He seems a bit of a booby, but nice … THE PRINCE What did you say? FIORELLA I said you seem a bit of a booby, but you’re nice. THE PRINCE And so are you, I mean, no. You, you don’t seem a bit of a … But you’re pretty, remarkably pretty, and then to find you here … alone, in the midst of these boulders … with your little hat and your red feather … anyway, I, who am used to being adored, adore you …55

W. S.  Gilbert, who translated Les brigands, clearly found this comic inversion appealing; the Savoy operas teem with sharp-​ witted, plain-​ speaking young women and rather thick youths acutely aware of their own physical attractions. Les brigands, quoted in Croisset, La vie parisienne, 56–​57.

55

The New Woman

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If the girls resemble each other from operetta to operetta, the women are another story. Offenbach’s modernity can be glimpsed in a new race of heroines. His female protagonists are distinctly original in their desires; the interplay of text and music produces a three-​dimensional characterization new to comic opera. Whether married (Euridice, Hélène, Geneviève de Brabant) or single (La Grande-​Duchesse, Métella), they have complicated and mercurial temperaments. They are granted the right to be capricious, moody, flawed, insufferable, authoritarian, jealous, angry, selfish, mendacious, and desirable. Unlike the heroines of traditional French drama, they do not live on their feelings or ideas so much as on their nerves. A neurotic Helen of Troy is definitely a nineteenth-​century phenomenon. Most of all, however, they are endowed with libidos that find fulfillment. In good society female sexuality was to be guarded against, except when it contributed to male pleasure. French plays of the 1860s and 1870s, the works of Dumas fils, Augier, and even Meilhac and Halévy, pullulate with fallen women, adulterous wives, adventuresses, courtesans who insinuate themselves into respectable families, destroy marriages, contaminate everything they touch. Almost all of them come to bad ends. Offenbach’s heroines stand in opposition to these stalking horses. Women with needs and appetites that they satisfy, they are the agents of their own destiny. The occasional twinge of conscience is salved by the balm of pleasure. Euridice is a wayward wife who runs off with another man; she is portrayed as neither a coquette nor a shrew, but a woman with a low boredom threshold who knows her own mind. Once in Hell, tired of being a bird in a gilded cage, she lets herself be seduced again, this time by Jupiter. Orphée appeared the year after Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary was tried for obscenity. Jane Fulcher suggests Euridice may be a comic Emma Bovary, bored and pining for romantic adventure; if so, the comparison points up Offenbach’s rejection of conventional morality. Mme Bovary, encumbered by debts, rejection, guilt, let down by her romantic fancies, ends up a suicide. Euridice ends up a votary of Dionysus, making a religious vocation of guilt-​free pleasure. Fulcher is acute in pointing out that Euridice is upwardly mobile: passing from music-​teacher husband to shepherd lover to King of the Underworld to King of the Gods, her last avatar is as high priestess of Bacchus, commère of carnival.56 At no point in the opera is her behavior censured, except by meddling Public Jane Fulcher, The nation’s image:  French grand opera as politics and politicized art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 188–​89.

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Introduction

Opinion; the other characters see her pursuit of happiness as normal and permissible, since they share it. La belle Hélène offers a more complicated code of ethics. The character of Helen of Troy comes encumbered by centuries of disapproval. She had already appeared in Gounod’s ballet as a personification of lust. Offenbach and his librettists ignore the traditions: for them Helen is a conscientious, well-​meaning spouse, whose good intentions are constantly thwarted by Fate and by her heredity (her parents were Leda and the Swan, a bird-​fancier and a feathered lecher). All her attempts to keep her libido in check are foiled by forces beyond her control. Her aria “Invocation à Vénus” laments her dilemma: Nous naissons toutes soucieuses De garder l’honneur de l’époux Mais des circonstances fâcheuses Nous font mal tourner malgré nous … Témoin exemple de ma mère! Quand elle vit le cygne altier Qui, chacun le sait, fut mon père, Pouvait-​elle se méfier? Dis-​moi, Vénus, quel plaisir trouves-​tu A faire ainsi cascader ma vertu?

T’wards husband’s honor we’re well-​meaning And seek to guard it at all cost, But unt’ward circumstances intervening, Despite ourselves our honor’s lost … Take the example of my mother! When the great swan was drawing near (Who, as you know, became my father), What should she think she had to fear? Venus, pray tell, why does it divert you To find such devices to topple my virtue?

Ah! malheureuse que nous sommes! … Beauté, fatal présent des cieux! Il faut lutter contre les hommes Il faut lutter contre les dieux! … Avec vaillance, moi, je lutte Je lutte et ça ne sert à rien … Car si l’Olympe veut ma chute Un jour ou l’autre il faudra bien … Dis moi, &c.

Ah! wretched queen for all our beauty! ... That gift from heaven’s heavy odds! To fight off men is still my duty, And now I have to fight off gods! ... I fight on bravely to confound all Temptations, but to no avail … For if Olympus wills my downfall Sooner or later I shall fail. Venus, pray tell, &c.57

The comic sting in the aria’s tail is the verb cascader. Cascade is French for waterfall, but in nineteenth-​century theatre argot it took on a new meaning, to describe slapstick in the newfangled pantomimes of Deburau, “a romantic form, a great schism with the classic school.” Cascades were “kicks, slaps, and cudgelings,”58 the physical comedy of a clown routine. The safeguarded virtue of Offenbach’s Hélène is not ravished or violated or even surrendered; it takes a tumble, suffers a pratfall. No real harm done, except to her husband’s dignity. This marvelously captures First and third verses, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, La belle Hélène (1864); my translation. Champfleury, “Trucs et cascades,” Souvenirs des funambules (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1859), 5–​6.

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Hélène’s insouciant eroticism tinged with impudence. Repeated from verse to verse, its image of physical imbalance works as a metaphor for the imminent loss of moral equipoise. This is the key episode in La belle Hélène, for the aria, like the best of its kind in opera, expresses not so much external events as what is transpiring in the mind of the character. When she finally decides to kick over the traces, the action can (and must, if it is to have any resonance) symbolize liberation not only from sexual mores, but from all socially ordained strictures. Offenbach’s originality comes in his depiction of the conflict from the woman’s point of view.59 This adds a dimension of humanity to what might otherwise seem too coldly mocking, as often happens in Gilbert and Sullivan. “Paris may be a dumb blond and Menelaus an old fogy, but Helen is a free woman who knows how to live according to her heart. Everywhere is manifested what Lemaître called a ‘gift for sympathy and pity,’ everywhere wisdom wins over morality.”60 The year before Hélène opened, Baudelaire had written that the modern woman “even fulfills a kind of duty, if she takes pains to appear enchanting and supernatural; it is necessary for her to astonish, to bewitch; she must begild herself, in order to be deified.”61 If Euridice is Madame Bovary with vine leaves in her hair, then Helen is a comical Hedda Gabler, with appetites whose unnatural repression may erupt into bad behavior. She refuses to accept the hypocrisy of social convention, and the fatality she invokes gets internalized. Helen has been called “the first liberated woman in French drama,” as well as the earliest musical incarnation of the femme fatale, eleven years before Carmen.62 The work conveys extraordinary sensuality for the era with a realism that shocked even Zola. The realistic premises of the action are, in Offenbach, always belied by comic inversion. When Helen finally gives in to Paris, it is no sordid adultery but a consummation devoutly to be wished, taking place in a supposed dream. Brander Matthews, a late Victorian scholar (but one married to a former chorus girl) gets it right: “What a living, loving bit of flesh and blood this fair Helen is! –​Greek to the back-​bone, but a Greek who had read the dramas of M. Victor Hugo. With her ‘fatality’ she is a true heroine of the Romanticists.”63 Rissin, Offenbach, 52, 162. Yon, “Le théâtre de Meilhac et Halévy,” in Loyrette, Entre le théâtre et l’histoire, 164–​65. 61 Baudelaire “Le peintre de la vie moderne. XI. Éloge du maquillage,” in Œuvres complètes, 1184–​85. 62 Yon, “Meilhac et Halévy,” 169–​70. 63 Brander Matthews, French dramatists of the 19th century, new edn., rev. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 253. 59

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Introduction

This confident understanding of “what women want” lets Offenbach characterize his heroines with a sexual candor that was precisely the element that Gilbert and Sullivan set out to eliminate from comic opera. He provides his multifaceted heroines with music that exfoliates their intricate psychologies. The Grand Duchess of Gérolstein, with her penchant for promoting handsome privates to official bedroom duties, might have come off as a Messalina or a Catherine the Great (allegedly the model); instead, she is munificent, magnanimous, bubbling over with joie de vivre. Her authority also derives from wielding the phallic “sabre de mon père.” Halfway through the opera, an aria allows her to express her need, as an isolated head of state, for a reciprocated love relationship. The potentially scabrous situations in Offenbach are made palatable by the atmosphere of nonsense that envelops them. The censorship passed them, mistakenly assuming that laughter and music neutralized and attenuated what in fact they were reinforcing. In La Grande-​Duchesse, they supposed, as one censor’s report put it, that “the grotesque costumes of this imaginary duchy, the caricatured acting of the performers, the musical buffoonery, transported the public to so excellent a world that they would remain outside reality.”64 In La Périchole, based on a Mérimée play set in colonial Peru, the title character (whose Spanish name la perichola means “the bitch”) is a street-​singer who abandons her partner Piquillo to become mistress of the Viceroy, leaving her lover to attempt suicide. This might suggest a Latin-​ American Carmen or Manon, but tragedy is averted by ludicrous situations and the heroine’s psychology. Potential catastrophe is defused by the Offenbachian couple of the quick-​witted woman and a boyfriend too dense to realize what is going on. La Périchole suffers pangs of conscience. Her taste for luxury is balanced by her true devotion to Piquillo, and over the course of the opera each stage in her sentimental journey is marked by an appropriate musical number. In an Act One aria, she writes him a “Dear John” letter in which she explores her warring feelings; its dreamy waltz tempo and emphasis on material need keeps it from being maudlin. The first two verses are “réaliste” in their emphasis on hunger as a motive as powerful as amorous transport: O mon cher amant, je te jure Que je t’aime de tout mon cœur; Mais la misère est trop dure, Et nous avons trop de malheur!

Oh my darling, I love you, I swear, Not to have you around makes me sad; But to be poor and broke’s hard to bear, And all the luck we have is bad!

Censor’s report (5 Apr. 1867), Archives nationales, quoted in Yon, Jacques Offenbach, 34.

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Tu dois le comprendre toi-​même, You’ve noticed –​and it’s no mistake –​ Que cela ne saurait durer, That things can’t go on at this rate, Et qu’il vaut mieux … (Dieu! que je t’aime!) And it’s better –​(God! my heart will break!) Et qu’il vaut mieux nous séparer! That we part and start with a clean slate! Crois-​tu qui’on puisse être bien tendre Alors que l’on manque de pain? A quels transports peut-​on s’attendre, En s’aimant quand on meurt de faim? Je suis faible, car je suis femme, Et j’aurais rendu, quelque jour, Le dernier soupir, ma chère âme, Croyant en pousser un d’amour …

How can you expect to be tender When you haven’t a crust of dry bread? What raptures can lovers engender When starving and soon to be dead? I’m a woman, and therefore I’m frail, And life would soon slip from my grasp, My breathing, dear heart, would then fail Though I’d think it was passion’s last gasp …

The equation of death with la petite mort is a typically bold expression, underscored by the music’s dying fall. In Act III, La Périchole saves Piquillo from prison while singing an aria that is both a clear-​eyed inventory of his deficiencies and an effusion of her irrational infatuation. Tu n’est pas beau, tu n’es pas riche, You’ve got no looks, you’ve got no dough, Tu manques tout à fait d’esprit, You haven’t got the slightest claim to wit, Tes gestes sont ceux d’un godiche Your clownish moves are crude and slow, D’un saltimbanque dont on rit. So laughable one’s sides would split. Le talent, c’est une autre affaire, Your talent, if you call it that, Tu n’en as guère de talent … Is nothing that will bring you fame … De ce qu’on doit avoir pour plaire Your charms would barely lure a cat, Tu n’as presque rien, et pourtant … A zero’s what you are, yet all the same … Et pourtant … Yet all the same … Je t’adore, brigand, j’ai honte à l’avouer: I adore you, you brute, though it shames me to say. Je t’adore et ne puis vivre t’adorer.65 I adore you and will until my dying day.

The musical rest just before “Et pourtant” is a stroke of psychological genius, a prelude to the transition from the comic litany of faults to the languid submission to desire. Alternately level-​headed and melting, this aria is a direct ancestor of Mistinguett’s “Mon homme,” “He’s just my Bill” in Jerome Kern’s Showboat, and a myriad of torch songs.66

Meilhac and Halévy, La Périchole. Opéra bouffe in four acts. The only correct version (New York: F. Rullman, 1886), Act III, sc. 1, 34. Verse one of two. My translation. 66 An excellent analysis of how Offenbach’s music dramatizes lyrics is René Leibowitz, “Jacques Offenbach oder die Verkleidungen der Großen Oper,” in Jacques Offenbach. Musik-​Konzepte Heft 13. Ed. Heinz-​Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1980), 5–​16. 65

Ch apter 1

The French Connection

The Outsider The central paradox of Offenbach’s influence is that his music has become an indelible emblem of French culture, especially of joie de vivre. Yet his own “Frenchness” was hard won and might more accurately be called “Parisianness.” (Rossini restricted his locality even more in styling him “The little Mozart of the Champs-​Élysées.”) The controversial director Jérôme Savary speaks to Offenbach’s slippery identity in his remark that “Offenbach is neither German nor French. He is above all a Parisian, like Picasso, like Chagall, like Giacometti.”1 In this regard, for an artist to be Parisian is to be a citizen of the world. By birth a Prussian citizen, by religion a Jew, by language a German-​ speaker, Offenbach had more than a few handicaps in becoming assimilated to a society that was not so much exclusive as intricate. Paris, of course, was more welcoming to foreigners than were the provinces, especially if the outsider displayed wit, talent, beauty, or financial acumen. Nevertheless, as Balzac’s novels demonstrate again and again, le moyen de parvenir was a rocky one, fraught with all kinds of pitfalls. Offenbach eventually managed to negotiate this treacherous ascent to end up located “at the confluence of the Cologne Carnival and the slope of La Courtille.”2 Jakob Offenbach was born in the city of Köln (Cologne) on 20 June 1819, the seventh child (of eight) and second son of Isaac Juda Eberst, music teacher, and his wife Marianne, daughter of the money-​changer Moses Rindskopf. On legal compulsion, the father, who had originated in the town of Offenbach am Main, elevated his local nickname “der Offenbacher” to his surname. Isaac defies classification as much as Jérôme Savary, “Offenbach, l’humour, la folie, la tolérance,” program note for La vie parisienne (Paris Opéra-​Comique, 2001), 9. 2 Armand Lanoux, “Offenbach ou la tulipe orageuse,” in Le siècle d’Offenbach. Cahiers Barrault-​ Renaud 24, 33. 1

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his son: before he was cantor at the Cologne synagogue and creator of a custom-​made Haggadah for his household Seder, he composed an operetta, Der Schreiner in seiner Werkstatt (The Cabinet-​maker in his Workshop, 1811). From earliest childhood, Jakob, taught by his father, showed a singular aptitude for the violin, then, under his own tutelage, the cello, while dabbling in musical composition and playing at dances and religious services.3 Jakob’s birthplace was itself a schizoid locality. A  German-​speaking Catholic cathedral city, Cologne had been annexed by the French Republic in 1801 and was governed by the Napoleonic Code until the twentieth century. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna awarded the city to the Protestant Kingdom of Prussia. Prussian militarism was out of keeping with Rhenish laissez-​aller, and an accommodation had to be found. The famous Cologne carnival, which was revived in 1821, found ways of getting around government censorship by masking social comment in nonsensical disguise. Some of its promoters looked forward to the day when it might overcome its enforced triviality and become a field for the artist, a Gesamtkunstwerk before the fact.4 The Jews had been segregated to the hamlet of Deutz across the Rhine from 1492; liberated under Napoleon, they remained a distrusted minority. A recent biographer has described Deutz somewhat hyperbolically as the “Las Vegas of Cologne.”5 Staid citizens crossed the river to enjoy amusements organized by the Jewish community, which traveled in the opposite direction to worship in the urban synagogue. Straddling these two worlds, Offenbach, later a naturalized Frenchman and baptized Christian6 who never lost his thick Teutonic accent, infused his work with this dual consciousness. According to the grandson of one of his librettists, “the secret of the unheard-​of strength of the ‘Offenbachiad’ is an always implied The fullest biography is the magisterial tome by Jean-​Claude Yon; also see Robert Pourvoyeur, Offenbach (Paris: Seuil, 1994) and Philippe Luez, Jacques Offenbach (1819–​1980). Musicien européen (Paris:  Séguier, 2001). In English, the standard biographies, all of which appeared in 1980, tend to the anecdotal:  Alexander Faris, Jacques Offenbach (London:  Faber and Faber), James Harding, Jacques Offenbach. A  biography (London:  John Calder), and Peter Gammond, Offenbach, his life and times (Speldhurst:  Omnibus Books). For all its tendentiousness, Siegfried Kracauer’s Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit remains invaluable and should be consulted as edited by Karsten Witte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976); the English translation by Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher, first published as Orpheus in Paris. Offenbach and the Paris of his time (New York: Alfred A.  Knopf, 1938)  has been reissued as Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). 4 Christian Samuel Schier in Kölnisches Karnevals-​Almanach for 1824; quoted in Ralf Bernd Assenmacher, Michael Euler-​Schmidt, and Werner Schäfke, 175 Jahre … und immer wieder Karneval (Cologne: Festkomitee des Kölner Karnevals von 1823 e.V., 1997), 11. 5 Nicolas D’Estienne D’Orves, Jacques Offenbach (Paris: Actes Sud/​Classica, 2010), 19. 6 Not until 1844, and then to facilitate his marriage. 3

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The French Connection

dissonance.”7 The outsider takes on the protective coloration of his surroundings, but is never fully integrated into them. The Paris to which fourteen-​ year-​ old Offenbach was brought by his father in November 1833 was an open field for social climbers, from shady financiers and low-​born courtesans to ingenious inventors and artists, with a hyperactive press and innovative theatre. It had been a haven for Offenbach’s fellow-​countrymen for some time. Heinrich Heine, who had arrived two years earlier, was so well-​installed that, read in his own French translations, he was assumed to be French. The incendiary Kölner Jakob Venedey, who had taken part in the Frankfurt uprising of 1832 in hopes of fomenting a German revolution, found refuge in Paris the following year.8 There was a firmly established Jewish community, led by the lawyer Adolphe Crémieux, whose kinsman Hector would become one of Offenbach’s most congenial collaborators. Fromenthal Halévy, whose opera La juive would become a fixture of the repertoire, had a nephew who would also serve as an invaluable member of the Offenbach creative team. Although its director Luigi Cherubini was an Italian, the Paris Conservatoire was closed to foreigners, but, after an audition, Offenbach was allowed into the violoncello class. After a year of academic exercises, he became a freelance, supporting himself by playing the cello at the Opéra-​ Comique, becoming familiar with the works of Hérold, Adam, and Auber with his back to the stage. The Parisian stage was a hierarchy, legislated by the decree of 25 April 1807: there were five subsidized stages and eight secondary ones. Of the lyric theatres, the Opéra housed only plays in French entirely set to music, including the new genre of grand opera, and ballets of “a noble and gracious kind.” The Opéra-​Comique performed all sorts of comedies and dramas, mixed with verse, ariettes, and ensemble numbers; the music had to be broken up by spoken dialogue. The Théâtre-​Italien was restricted to works, chiefly musical, in Italian. Of the secondary theatres, the Théàtre du Vaudeville was allowed to perform mixed plays interspersed with well-​known verses or tunes (vaudevilles); the Variétés spicy or rustic plays; the Porte-​St-​Martin melodrama; and the Gaîeté pantomime.9 For much of his Parisian career, whatever his success, the Opéra-​ Comique remained Offenbach’s unholy grail, but the few occasions on

Daniel Halévy, “Une musique jaillit,” Le siècle d’Offenbach, 17. Mario Kramp, Heinrich Heines Kölner Dom. Die “armen Schelme vom Domverein” im Pariser Exil 1842–​1848 (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2002), 9ff. 9 A.-​F.-​A. Vivien de Goubert and Edmond Blanc, Traité de la législation des théâtres (Paris: Brissot-​ Thivars, 1830), 363. 7 8

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which he managed to get an opera accepted there, the results were disappointing. Un alcôve (1847), in which the heroine hidden behind bed-​ curtains shows only her hand in the course of the action, was played not on the main stage, but in a hall at a singing school. Barkouf (1860), with a libretto by Scribe about a dog appointed Governor of Lahore, was a resounding flop that achieved only seven performances. It was shredded by the critics, headed by Berlioz, who was smarting from Les Troyens being held back at the Opéra. Audiences of Barkouf misbehaved the way their posterity would at the premiere of Le sacre du printemps. Offenbach’s response is worth quoting at length: Some people don’t like my music and that’s their right. There are others who don’t care for my name, repeated too often for their liking on the bills, and their bad temper is also a right which they use and abuse. They are perfectly willing to put up with my scores at the Bouffes-​Parisiens, but if I leave the Passage Choiseul, if I set foot in the Opéra or the Opéra-​Comique, it’s a sacrilege … [When the critics complained that the Opéra Comique was no longer funny but was putting on bastard grand opera] in view of that, glad to take advantage of this criticism, when the manager of the Opéra Comique wanted to ask me for a work in three acts, I declared I would write a bouffe score: which I did. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I don’t defend my music which I hear, obviously, with indulgence. I defend the genre to which I have remained faithful. I’ll add that if I had abandoned it and tried to inflate my Pan-​pipes, the same persons who complain of gaiety would have said: “Fine, now he’s strayed into lyricism … ah! how successful he would have been if he’d stuck to his modest style!”10

Of Offenbach’s other ventures at the Opéra-​Comique, Robinson Crusoé (1867) received a polite but lukewarm reception; Vert-​Vert (1869) and Fantasio (1876) met with general indifference. The triumph of Les contes d’Hoffmann (800 performances by 1950) was posthumous. Leaving the Conservatoire with no prizes (as a foreigner he was ineligible), quitting the Opéra-​Comique after two years, Offenbach set out on a dual career, as a dazzling virtuoso and a marginal composer. No work came amiss. Dance halls had been made popular on the model of English pleasure gardens. Offenbach conducted there and gained a reputation as an inventor of waltzes. He frequented salons, composing pieces for benefit performances and charity concerts; these led him to be sponsored by the high society of the July Monarchy. He then toured the concert halls of Letter to the journalist Hippolyte de Villemessant, Le Figaro (30 Dec. 1860), quoted in Jacques Brindejont-​Offenbach, Offenbach, mon grand-​père (Paris: Plon, 1940), 186–​88.

10

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The French Connection

Europe with his cello; he would precede the musical portion of the evening with a charming causerie, imitating castanets and bagpipes to the guests’ delight. This presentation of music as light entertainment foretold not only his more ambitious efforts, but also such comical soloists as Victor Borge. The few comic works that saw the footlights were one-​offs with no follow-​ up. Premonitions of the hijinks of opéra bouffe do appear in Citrouillard au désert (1846), a parodic forerunner to the North African episodes in Peer Gynt, and the aforementioned Alcôve (1847). However, Offenbach also pleased his drawing-​room audiences with sentimental romances: an “Overture for full orchestra” (1843), first played in Cologne, has an allegro section in F minor that has been called a masterpiece of German romanticism in its blend of melancholy, urgency, and whimsicality with an heroic coda. The Offenbachian duality persisted. The French intellectual and film-​maker Yann Moix, himself of Jewish-​Catalan background, has compared him to Frank Zappa, in that they could have been serious, but chose not to be. If Offenbach’s music is merely heard as background noise, one misses its intelligent, virtuosic, lyric, and melancholic qualities, “often as perfect as Beethoven.”11 Offenbach had a talent for skirting political controversy. While the Revolution of 1848 was raging, he returned, with his wife and daughter, to Cologne and traveled in Germany and Belgium for a full year. As soon as Louis-​Napoléon had been elected president of the Second Republic, Offenbach returned to Paris. During this period “there could be no popularity for a composer outside the theatre,”12 but he lacked the influence to be welcomed in the existing playhouses. His friendship with Arsène Houssaye secured him a post as a conductor of incidental music at the Comédie-​Française; although he kept the job for five years and wrote “sound-​tracks” for Mürger, Dumas, and Musset, he was “impatient at writing nothing but symphonies stifled by the arrival of spectators at the end of the intermissions or some little verse barely slipped in here and there in a modern play.”13 Unfortunately, the political unrest caused by the coup d’état of December 1851 and then the economic crisis precipitated by the Crimean War made for unpropitious conditions in which to get his own work mounted. Yann Moix, Le blog d’Olivier Bellamy, 25 May 2015 (http://​blog.radioclassique.fr/​olivierbellamy/​). Louis de Romain, Essais de critique musicale (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1890), 56. 13 Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse (Paris:  Administration du Grand Dictionnaire universel, 1879–​1890), XI, 1270–​71, 1366. All that survives is a chanson from Musset’s Le chandelier, “the most exquisite song of the era,” which he published in a collection entitled Les voix mystérieuses in 1852 and then inserted into Le chanson de Fortunio in 1860. 11 12

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By 1852 there were twenty-​one theatres in Paris, with the Gymnase, the Palais-​Royal, and the Théâtre-​Lyrique among the newer arrivals. It was the last that cracked the strict mould of the Parisian operatic world by ignoring the principle that institution and genre were joined at the hip. A decree of 9 May 1851 allowed it to stage new works in one or more acts in verse or prose, with new music of all sorts, translations no more than two years old, and revivals only a decade after their debut. It became the place to try out novelties. Offenbach’s application for a theatre carefully stressed popular forms, to avoid offering competition to the “legitimate” houses, but with deftly planted remarks about cultural uplift and French taste. My intention would be to present harlequinades, pantomimes in one or more acts, I am especially aiming to introduce Paris to the genre of Italian fantoccini [marionettes], modified to suit French taste, and to offer entirely new and original amusements of a kind to please those of cultivated intelligence and the general public. In addition, I would put on tableaux vivants, reproducing the most beautiful subjects of history painting, and finally, sketches for two or three characters with new music which would appear on the same bill as the pantomimes, harlequinades and fantoccini. The practice of this sort of musical presentation composed with skill and care would not only result in giving an unusual prominence to a particular kind of popular show, but would also offer a fairly wide opening to any young composers who might come along to test their strength and present whatever sort of talent they have.

Offenbach concluded by pointing out the value of entertaining prospective foreign visitors with “shows in good taste” instead of “more or less coarse sideshows.”14 Jane Fulcher sees this as a canny tactic in “relating his goals to those of traditional as well as contemporary popular art”: manipulating official rhetoric in a pretense of offering comic diversions that would be “practical and safe.”15 Although the request is couched diplomatically, I do not see it as “an appeal to the Empire’s cultural plan.” Beyond insisting on the primacy of French art, Napoleon III was content to have the traditional artistic hierarchies upheld. Offenbach, aware of the bar to his performance of “good music” in an inappropriate venue, looked to fill the vacuum in popular entertainment caused by the razing of the theatres on the Boulevard

Letter to Minister of State Fould (24 Feb. 1855), quoted in Yon, Jacques Offenbach, 130–​31. Jane Fulcher, The nation’s image:  French grand opera as politics and politicized art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 186.

14

15

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The French Connection

du Temple. Shortly after opening the Bouffes Offenbach offered Arlequin Barbier, Pierrot le clown, and Polichinelle, the sort of thing Deburau had starred in at the now-​defunct Théâtre des Funambules. Offenbach’s own Rhenish taste for carnival may have played a part, but it is unlikely that he intended either to expedite a governmental arts policy or to undermine it. He was not, in fact, interested in attracting the proletarian habitués of the Funambules, or the demi-​mondaines and raffish loungers at the cafés chantants who nauseated the Goncourts. Offenbach was hoping for a segment of well-​heeled society with a taste for good music. Allowed to perform his work elsewhere than the Comédie, in 1853 Offenbach staged Le trésor à Mathurin at the Salle Herz and Pépito at the Variétés; these enabled him to be accepted into the prestigious Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques. After his rival Hervé had been awarded the Folies-​Nouvelles, Offenbach produced there on 26 June 1855 an opéra bouffe titled Oyaye, ou la Reine des Îles, “a musical anthropophagy.” Continuous pressure on his numerous connections in politics, society, and show business enabled him, on July 5, to open his own theatre on the Champs-​Élysées, the diminutive Bouffes-​Parisiens in the pavilion of the bankrupt prestidigitator Lacaze. Open country, it had nevertheless been a fashionable rendezvous from the 1840s, with five cafés, open-​air music halls, and restaurants, the Bal Mabille, the Panorama, and the Cirque d’Été. In short, it was a recreational area, soon to be the epicenter of “new Paris,” for Lacaze’s pavilion stood practically on the threshold of the Exposition of 1855. Colorful legends that it was a ramshackle funnel that sucked in wind and rain aside, the pavilion was a genuine playhouse with 300 seats. True, these were mere benches, and the boxes were so cramped that one had to open the door to remove one’s coat. However, its elegant fittings distinguished it from the fairground diversions that surrounded it, and high ticket prices guaranteed an audience willing to pay for quality. The minuscule stage and government regulations limited Offenbach’s dancers to five, his singing actors to three, and his chorus to none: this determined the kind of opera he would write. The opening program began with an ingratiating prologue, “Entrez Messieurs, Mesdames,” with a text by Ludovic Halévy, son of a dramatist and nephew of the composer of La juive. The mixed bill ended with the two-​character one-​act “bouffonnerie musicale” Les deux aveugles. It had fallen flat at the dress rehearsal, but turned out to be a dazzling triumph on the night and attracted a wide gamut of society to this remote house. The cynical beggars Patachon and Giraffier entered urban folklore, their artful dodges a distorting mirror in which fashionable society might admire itself. The Marquise de Las

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Marismas accepted the dedication in the score and the President, now emperor, was so amused that he ordered a command performance at the Peace Conference at the Tuileries before the ambassadors. A successful balance of musical impudence and traditional forms allowed Offenbach, for the winter months, to take over the Salle Comte in the Passage Choiseul near the Boulevards for five years, with permission to give “comic and musical plays in one act with four characters at most. Among the pieces played each night on this stage, two at least must be by composers other than M. Offenbach.” The orchestra swelled from sixteen to thirty musicians. This allowed him to put on “not saynètes [comic skits] but acts.” The bipartite Bouffes was accepted as a bona fide theatre, not a mere conversation piece, and was under the supervision no longer of the police but of the Ministry of State. Over the course of his management of the Bouffes, Offenbach composed nearly a score of operas, five a year, more than one every four months. His ideal prima donna, Hortense Schneider, mistress of the actor who played one of the fake blind men, made her debut there as the chaste Breton Reinette in Le violoneux. Hector Crémieux, a stage-​struck Jewish ministry clerk, Henri Meilhac, master of fantasy and the bizarre, and the aforementioned Halévy, an attaché to the Minister of the Interior, supplied many of the libretti. The Passage Choiseul also saw the premiere of Monsieur Choufleuri restera chez lui le …, in which Halévy shared the honor of collaborating with the emperor’s half-​brother the Comte de Morny. It poked fun at a social climber’s eagerness to rise by annexing fashionable Italian opera to his ambitions. Offenbach was the heart and soul of the enterprise, both Pooh-​bah and Admirable Crichton: house composer, business manager, conductor, stage director, and recruiter of others’ music. He had ambitions to work with larger orchestras and offered to revive the mélodrame of Rousseau and the comic operas of Pergolesi; permission was withheld, but he did manage to put on Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario), with a new libretto by Halévy, and Rossini’s Il signor Bruschino. Those who fancied themselves guardians of high culture had disdained the Bouffes, but these novelties brought connoisseurs and aristocratic dilettantes to visit its out-​ of-​the-​way precincts. As a challenge to the musical gate-​keepers, he advertised in the newly founded Le Figaro (15 July 1856) a contest in which no member of the Opéra or the Opéra Comique was eligible to compete. His appeal, which constitutes a manifesto no less potent than Hugo’s Preface to Cromwell for its succinctness, shrewdly referred to the native French comic tradition and implied his own ingenuity in making a virtue of necessity.

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1.1.  Jean François Berthelier as Giraffier and Étienne Pradeau as Patachon in Les deux aveugles. Note that they are framed by pantomime characters, band instruments, and the opening “Entrez, Messieurs,” in tune with Offenbach’s stated agenda. Lithograph by Loire, sheet music cover. Paris: Brandes Dufour.

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The Théâtre des Bouffes-​Parisiens wants to try and resuscitate the original and genuine genre. […] It is the renewed musical sketches of the old comic opera, in the farce that produced Cimarosa’s theatre […] that it not only means to perpetuate, but it wants to tap this inexhaustible vein of old French merriment. […] In an opera that runs barely three quarters of an hour, which can put on stage only four characters, and which uses an orchestra of only thirty musicians at most, one must have ideas and melody as ready money. Do note that with such a tiny orchestra, which was, however, enough for Mozart and Cimarosa, it is very difficult to conceal faults and inexperience which can be hidden by an orchestra of eighty musicians.16

The winners were the eighteen-​year-​old Georges Bizet and the twenty-​five-​ year-​old Charles Lecocq. Having been limited to simple vocal numbers that served the action, Offenbach was able to demonstrate his virtuosity with a revision of an earlier work, Le mariage aux lanternes (1857), a pocket opéra comique with choruses and finales; the singers did not simply line up, motionless, on the stage apron, producing sound like gramophones avant la lettre. The characters in this exquisite miniature fully played out a Mozartian intrigue. The popularity of the Bouffes was such that it did not need to advertise. News of its activities appeared regularly in the columns of the boulevard press. It became a gathering place for bohemian artists, among them Gustave Doré, Léo Délibes, and Nadar, whose debts were paid by Offenbach. “Nadar originated the use, revolutionary at the time, of photography in the promotion of shows, first step towards the use of photolithography, which appeared for the first time on the covers of the Bouffes scores.”17 Parallels were drawn between the flourishing art of caricature and opéra bouffe, with Offenbach “the Gavarni of music.” The Bouffes was touted to foreigners as a “must-​see.” After viewing Le financier et le savetier, William Makepeace Thackeray, a seasoned flâneur, is said to have asserted “This young musician has decided humour and peculiar talent, if he works hard, he can not [sic] fail to be soon and widely known.”18 This popularity opened the doors of the major theatres to Offenbach, but the closure of his ballet Le papillon at the Opéra19 and the resounding Quoted in Yon, Jacques Offenbach, 179–​80. This announcement was printed in the newly founded Le Figaro (15 Jul. 1856), La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (26 Jul. 1856), and Le Ménestral (27 Jul. 1856). 17 Arthur Meyer, Les Gaulois (20 Dec. 1910); Luez, Jacques Offenbach, 101. 18 “Talented naughtiness on the stage. From the German,” The Aldine 4, 1 (Jan. 1871): 13–​14; G. A. Sala, Things I have seen and people I have known (London: Cassell, 1894), 131–​32. 19 Le papillon had a decent run of forty-​seven performances, but was taken off after its star Emma Livry burned to death when her tutu caught fire from the footlights. Later, Gustave Flaubert would 16

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1.2.  Offenbach astride a fiddle, accompanied by his characters, including the dog from Barkouf. Caricature by André Gill, La Lune (4 Nov. 1866).

flop of Barkouf at the Opéra-​Comique sent him back to the Bouffes with whetted ambition. Thackeray would be proved right.

Orpheus Unbound Francisque Sarcey’s verdict that Orphée aux enfers is one of the three masterpieces that revolutionized nineteenth-​ century (French) drama has been cited in the Introduction. However, the opera provoked no battle of Hernani, because it was in tune with its times and the opposing camp was already demoralized. The version which opened on 21 October 1858 was in two acts and four scenes. The size was important to the creation of what might be thought operetta’s first real libretto and score; but its high spirits were directly derivative of the ludicrous one-​acts. (The libretto say “Love is like the Opéra, one is bored there, yet one returns when Le papillon, music by Jacques Offenbach, is played.”

Orpheus Unbound

39

was by Crémieux, Meilhac, and Halévy, but, because the last had been appointed secretary general of Algeria and preferred not to be associated with an incendiary plot, he used a pseudonym.) There was nothing new in poking fun at the Greek pantheon; Aristophanes had set the style. The Orpheus legend as a matter for comic opera appears as early as the seventeenth century with Stefano Landi’s La morte d’Orfeo. The battle of the ancients and modern under Louis XIV had seen Perrault’s L’Énéide burlesque (c. 1646), Scarron’s Virgile travesti (1648), and L’enfer burlesque (1649); booksellers urged authors to put “burlesque” in their titles. By deriding the sacrosanct heroes of antiquity, these otherwise anodyne screeds served as war machines directed at Jesuit education and evidence of independence of mind. The anachronisms and wild fancies took on a political coloration, a demystification of pagan culture.20 Antecedents can be found closer to home. The carnival elements in Offenbach derive directly from his Cologne background and Karl Cramer’s scenario travesty of mythology.21 He died before Offenbach set a note, but his licensed but surreptitiously subversive script provides the structure for a charivari, an organized if noisy expression of community will. Le Charivari was in fact the title one of the many caricature-​packed humor journals that braved censorship under both Louis Philippe and Louis-​Napoléon. Daumier’s pencil had already twitted the neoclassic heroes of Racine, and the minor theatres teemed with such burlesques as Les petites Danaïdes. This lampoon features the restaurateur Sournois as father of the Danaides, cloud cars driven by Amor and Hymen, a bedroom with fifty beds, and a comic Hell populated with devils and furies.22 The novelty of Offenbach’s Orphée is that the comedy inheres in the music, inexhaustible in its melodies, electrifying in its vivacity. Offenbach’s genius at parody hones the razor’s-​edge of ridicule. The musical quotation of the famous aria in Gluck’s Orphée, “J’ai perdu mon Euridice,” is not an arcane musicological reference. The opera had recently been revived with great success by the mezzo-​soprano Pauline Viardot-​Garcia under the baton of Hector Berlioz. Throughout his work, Offenbach assailed grand opera for its hollow magniloquence and upholding of outworn values. The prominence of Meyerbeer gave piquancy to the ridicule in musical

Marc Soriano, Les contes de Perrault. Culture savante et traditions populaires. Revised and corrected edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 245–​46. 21 Grete Wehmeyer, Höllengalopp und Götterdämmerung. Lachkultur bei Jacques Offenbach und Richard Wagner (Cologne: Dittrich, 1997), 48–​49. 22 Paul Wiegler, “Das Theater Offenbachs,” Blätter des Deutschen Theaters 8, 9 (1922): 68–​70. 20

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expressions of patriotism that culminate in revolt. When the gods in Orphée rise up against Jupiter (one recent translation goes “No one could be stupider/​Than Jupiter himself ”), the audience hear not only phrases from “La Marseillaise,” but familiar strains from La muette de Portici, Le prophète, and Les Huguenots. Parody and incongruous quotation help to level the playing field of French musical hegemony. And yet, in the midst of the jollification, Euridice’s song to death strikes the mournful note that so often lurks beneath Offenbach’s hijinks. Opening the opera with Public Opinion is more than a gesture to the topical; she also claims to be a perfected chorus because she not only reacts but directs action. The function of the Greek chorus, ordinary citizens responding to the extraordinary sufferings of the tragic protagonists, is here invested in Mrs Grundy. This censorious vox populi identifies herself as the raisonneur. In European drama, the raisonneur is literally the voice of reason, transmitter of the playwright’s message, signpost to the road or attitude to be taken, but one who stands apart from the action. In Orphée, Public Opinion is a busybody, meddling in private lives, precipitating the crisis. The small-​town music teacher Orphée and his wife Euridice are quite happy to part: he’s fed up with her flirting with Aristée the shepherd next door (who is Pluton in disguise) and she can’t stand his screeching violin and adoring pupils. She goes to hell, literally, and Orphée shrugs “Good riddance.” It is Public Opinion who compels the reluctant musician to lodge a complaint against Euridice’s abduction with the Greek pantheon. In Wagner’s Rheingold, the deities solemnly enter their villa Walhalla, built by the firm of Fafner and Fasolt Construction, with all the pomp of suburban home-​owners who have paid off their mortgage. Offenbach’s divinities are only too eager to leave boring old Olympus and make an excursion to the underworld, pictured as a lawless resort devoted to wine, women, and song. What happens in Hades stays in Hades. For all its irreverence, many observed that Orphée was Greek in spirit, its fun issuing from mental, not physical, incongruity. It was jubilantly welcomed by a public which had forgotten most of its classical education and was not affronted by the ridicule of the venerable ancients. It was the press that fomented a scandal. Although Berlioz was the music critic of the Débats, its review was written by Jules Janin, who castigated what he called a sacrilege. The abuse heaped on Orphée boomeranged on its detractors. Crémieux pointed out that one of the silliest passages in the opera was a direct quotation from one of Janin’s columns, and Offenbach replied in Le Figaro with “Bravo Janin! Thanks Janin, good old Janin, excellent Janin,

Interval

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the best of friends, Janin, the greatest of critics! Let us sing the praises of Janin! Hurray, Janin! Hosanna to Janin! Here’s to Janin! Lebe hoch! Janin forever.”23 The opera enjoyed 228 performances, closing at the Italiens on 17 April 1860 before Napoleon III in person. The composer received a bronze statuette with a grateful inscription from the Emperor, who also enabled him to be naturalized; the following year Offenbach received the Legion of Honor –​which infuriated the Goncourts.

Interval Between Orphée and La belle Hélène, Offenbach enjoyed twenty-​three successes. These include Geneviève de Brabant (1859), a kind of expansion of Croquefer, with its send-​up of the Middle Ages, Charles Martel, and Saladin. Its cowardly Two Men-​at-​arms became proverbial, but it also featured a plaintive spinning-​wheel song said to rival Mendelssohn’s. Permission was obtained to post two civil guards on horseback outside the Bouffes every night to channel the crowd of pedestrians and carriages. It became a necessary practice so long as the theatre was in operation. With the Bouffes the most fashionable theatre in Paris, evening dress became de rigueur as it was at the Opéra. Meyerbeer declared that he wished he had written La chanson de Fortunio (1860) with its catchy, German-​inspired title song. Le pont des soupirs (1861), subtitled “opéra comique,” was set in Venice and parodied Victor Hugo’s romantic drama Angelo, tyran de Padoue, replete with the Gothic apparatus of the terrifying Council of Ten, the somber Leads prisons, the squads of spadassins and assassins, against a carnival background. The delightful Monsieur Choufleuri restera chez lui le … (1861) was first performed at the mansion of the Presidency of the Corps Legislatif, with Count Richard von Metternich in the audience. Its irresistible bolero and parody of grand opera make it Offenbach’s most revived one-​act; it has become a fixture in the German repertoire as Salon Pritzelberger. In 1862 Offenbach decided to give up the management of the Bouffes, resigning it to Alphonse Varney, although he continued to present his work there under contract. In the newly renovated interior he staged the Alsatian divertissement Lischen et Fritzchen (1863); its triple-​time waltz became a craze. It also saw the debut of Zulma Bouffar, who would become one of Offenbach’s most fetching leading ladies. Les Géorgiennes Le Figaro (24 Feb. 1859).

23

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(1864) introduced the chorus line of pretty archers in tights, led by a drum majorette; it also boasted a cardboard elephant. This series was succeeded in 1864 by an ambitious project, a full-​scale opera: Les fées du Rhin (1864), with a fairy-​tale libretto by Charles Nuitter, which was translated into German by Alfred von Wolzogen as Die Rheinnixen. Unwilling to test it on the hypercritical Parisians, Offenbach opened it at the Vienna Hofoper, where it was received respectfully but without enthusiasm. Ever pragmatic, Offenbach put it back in his desk, recycling some of its music for Les contes d’Hoffmann. Die Rheinnixen would not see a stage again until 2005.

Annus Mirabilis 1864 is Offenbach’s annus mirabilis for reasons other than five of the new operas being staged before December. In January 1863 the theatres of Paris were granted commercial freedom and the leading vaudeville houses added opéra bouffe to their bills. Eager to break his contract with the Bouffes, Offenbach moved to the Variétés, where his first major piece was La belle Hélène, opening on 17 December 1863 and featuring Hortense Schneider. Years later Saint-​ Saëns affirmed that Offenbach’s transference to the Variétés initiated “the vertigo for operetta (and the debacle of taste). When La belle Hélène appeared, Paris got drunk and all heads were turned.”24 The location of this highly spiced musical comedy in a major playhouse enabled it to become an event of European significance. Certainly, the change of star signaled a move from audacity to impudence. As Euridice, Lise Tautin, a sentimental soubrette from Brussels, had charmed with her winks and her swinging hips (she would die forgotten at the age of thirty in Bologna). Zulma Bouffar, who bore Offenbach two children, excelled at saucy breeches roles. Hortense Schneider, with her regal profile and the pinchbeck brilliance of a cocotte, had just left the Palais Royal under scandalous circumstances and was about to go into exile in Bordeaux when Offenbach and Halévy offered her the role of Hélène. It was a brilliant piece of casting, the gamin impudence of Tautin and the androgyny of Bouffar supplanted by Schneider’s full-​blown voluptuousness. Her skill at innuendo was unsurpassed. When she sang “Send burning love into our hearts,” a shudder would run through the enraptured stalls.25

Camille Saint-​Saëns, Harmonie et mélodie (Paris: Calmann-​Lévy, 1885), 217–​24. Wiegler, “Das Theater Offenbachs,” 68–​70.

24 25

Annus Mirabilis

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Musical theatre in the Second Empire had an obligation to amuse, which explains the spectacular elements of grand opera and the effervescence of opéra comique. Le Figaro at this time explained Offenbach’s intuitive understanding of his “clientele:” Offenbach has a wonderful knowledge of the public he is dealing with; it is by the musical bark and not the thought that one gets through to this restless, noisy, and superficial audience; it has to be pleased with no hope of holding its attention; one must double the dizziness of its passions with that of the music … It is intelligent, it picks up the slightest hint, but it is in a hurry to be amused. It pays attention only to the gaiety that smites it like a lightning-​bolt …26

There was something anachronistic about classicism in the 1860s. Hélène’s original title, La prise de Troie, was a gage flung at Berlioz whose Les Troyens had been revered for a decade, but was now disdained as “not being entertaining.”27 However, as they worked on Hélène the satire of Meilhac and Halévy had a scatter-​gun quality. Rejected ideas included a parody of Tannhäuser (which Johann Nestroy had already mocked in Vienna) and making Homer a reporter for the Times of London. What constitutes the unifying element in Hélène is the timely theme of mendacity, from the contrived oracles of Calchas to Pâris’s disguises as shepherd and Grand Augur to the cuckolding of Ménélas to Hélène’s self-​deception. As before, the upholders of traditional cultural values waxed indignant. Théophile Gautier denounced it as sacrilege: “La belle Hélène bruises our artistic admiration and belief … to try and ridicule the heroes of Homer is almost blasphemy.”28 Another journalist, Léo Lespès, wrote that, outraged, he had walked out to hurry home and reread his old copy of Homer in Greek.29 The next day it was reported that he did not own a copy of the Iliad, because he did not know a word of Greek. Théodore de Banville, who had imbibed his love of the classics at his mother’s knee, detested “wretched” Offenbach’s “Judaic hatred for the Greece of marble temples

B. Jouvin, “Les théâtres,” Le Figaro 500 (1 Dec. 1859). Gaston de Saint-​Valry, “Revue dramatique,” Le Pays (9 Nov. 1863), quoted in Hervé Lacombe, The keys to French opera in the nineteenth century, trans. Edward Schneider (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2001), 144, 253. Also see Ulrich Dibelius, “‘La Prise de Troie’ –​doppelt bis dreifach,” in Jacques Offenbach. Musik-​Konzepte 13. Ed. Heinz-​Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1980), 17–​36. 28 Théophile Gautier, “Revue des théâtres,” Le Moniteur universel (26 Dec. 1864). 29 “Timothée Trimm,” “La belle Hélène,” Le Petit Journal 688 (19 Dec. 1864). This was the first penny newspaper in Paris. 26 27

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and rose-​tinged laurels.” The “Évohés” of the chorus sounded to him like insults to the gods.30 This was by then a rearguard action. Even Janin had come round. The first reviews, which paid more attention to the text than to the music, interpreted this “blasphemy” as progress, a rejuvenation of dramatic form through fantasy and the unfamiliar, suitable to the era: “Meilhac modernizes Marivaux.”31 The French tendency to assign genres was confounded by this “ingenious delirium, a spiritual fury which radiates joy and success.”32 It went far beyond standard opéra comique in its demented (insensé) extremes: “compare the final ‘Pars pour la Crète’ with the ‘buona sera’ quintet in Barber of Seville: it’s the same situation: everyone is trying to get rid of an intruder,” but in Offenbach it becomes a riotous contagion. It was “musical slang: it’s danced more than it’s sung and cancanned more than it’s danced: a few grotesque effects of rhythm, of sonority, and sometimes the interest on stage, excuse enormous defects.”33 There was general agreement on the originality and freshness of the comedy, the lack of longueurs, the keenness of the burlesque contrasts. The best numbers were thought to be “Pars pour la Crète” and the second-​act love duet, “a masterpiece of erotic delicacy.”34 Offenbach had had this effect in mind; he would later write to his librettists that the second act was successful “because all the pieces are in their proper place and are effective [his emphasis]… Without a situation, music becomes absurd and tiresome to the audience. I require situations to put to music and not verses upon verses …”35 In a forecast of Sarcey’s extolling of Orphée as a path-​breaking masterpiece, in 1866 Jules Lemaître wrote “La belle Hélène already offers an historic interest, a documentary interest. It is, with La Grande-​Duchesse and Orphée aux enfers, the most brilliant example of the only relatively new dramatic genre produced by the second half of this century, the first half having invented the romantic drama.”36 Once again, Offenbach had captured the tone of his milieu, “the spirit of the boulevard,” irreverent rather than Martine Kahane, Théodore de Banville et le théâtre (Paris: Somogy, 2006), 10. Paul Saint-​Victor, La Presse (26 Dec. 1864). For a full conspectus of press opinions, see Philippe Goninet, “La belle Hélène au miroir de la critique,” in La belle Hélène. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 125. Ed. Michel Pazdro (Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 1989), 90–​94. 32 Nestor Roqueplan, Le Constitutionnel 36 (26 Dec. 1864). 33 Alexis Azevedo, L’Opinion nationale 556 (27 Dec. 1864). 34 B. Jouvin, Le Figaro (25 Dec. 1864). 35 Letter to Ludovic Halévy, late August 1869; in Jacques Offenbach, Lettres à Henri Meilhac et Ludovic Halévy, ed. Philippe Goninet (Paris: Séguier, 1994), 159–​60. 36 Quoted in Francis de Croisset, La vie parisienne au théâtre (Paris: Grasset, 1929), 42. 30

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No, No, Nana

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ironic, cheeky rather than confrontational, racy rather than wanton. Virus-​ like, Hélène entered the bloodstream of French culture: episodes became popular themes for tableaux vivants, sending noblewomen to museums to study classical drapery. Worth launched Belle Hélène gowns, a fashion the Empress, a devotee of crinolines, eschewed. This did not prevent some from later saying of her “She was la belle Hélène and she unleashed her war.”37 The opera is memorialized in phenomena as disparate as Escoffier’s Poire Belle Hélène, a poached pear with lashings of chocolate, to Marcel Duchamp’s punning “La belle haleine,” label for a mouthwash.

No, No, Nana In his biography of his father Pierre Renoir, Jean Renoir tells an anecdote which se non è vero è ben trovato indeed. During an artists’ gathering, his uncle Edmond and Émile Zola were discussing theories of painting while Hortense Schneider yawned with boredom. “All right,” said Edmond. “Let’s talk about something serious. How’s your bosom?” With a laugh the diva opened her bodice and exposed her firm breasts. “My father, my brother, and Offenbach burst out laughing. Zola turned ‘red as a beet,’ murmured something unintelligible, and took off at full speed.” What a provincial, was the verdict of the Parisian sophisticates.38 Certainly, the most obsessional attack on La belle Hélène is that of Zola, who cannibalizes it for his own purposes in his novel Nana (1880). More than any other installment in the Rougon-​Macquart saga, it dwells on the world of theatre. Like so many French authors, Zola longed to be a successful dramatist, who could implant his ideas in the playgoers on the spot while raking in lavish royalties. Theatrical fame and fortune eluded him, however, since his comedies were dismissed as wooden. Consequently, while admitting Offenbach’s musical talent, Zola compulsively attacked him in review after review (e.g., “I bark as soon as I hear M. Offenbach’s tart (aigrelette) music”).39 What he chiefly hated the composer for was his willingness to please the public and the public’s reciprocal willingness to be pleased. This animus went beyond jealousy. Zola himself explained that he did not hate opéra bouffe “as a moralist, but as an indignant artist.”40 It diverted Fernand Bac, Intimités du Second Empire. Les femmes et la comédie (Paris: Hachette, 1931), II, 222–​23. Jean Renoir, Pierre-​Auguste Renoir, mon père (Paris: Gallimard “Folio,” 1981). 39 “Chronique,” L’Événement illustré (6 Jun. 1868) in Zola, Écrits sur la musique, ed. Olivier Sauvage (Paris: Éditions du Sandre, 2013), 43. 40 “Lettre de Paris, IX. La scène dramatique en France,” Le Messager de l’Europe (Dec. 1875) in Écrits sur la musique, 40. 37 38

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the audience from serious matters to a futile and stupefying pleasure in the worst of taste (the same objection St Augustine had to love scenes on stage). Zola was among those who conflated Offenbach with the Second Empire, which he detested. Ten years earlier, when Jean-​Baptiste Carpeaux’s group of naked bacchantes “La Danse” was erected over the portal of the new Opéra, Zola had interpreted it as an overheated figuration of a corrupt imperial regime: M. Carpeaux’s group is the empire: it is the violent satire of the contemporary dance, his furious dance of the millions, for women for sale and men who have sold out. […] M. Carpeaux, naively thinking that he was sculpting a completely innocent group, carved the hostile allegory that posterity will no doubt call: the pleasures of the Second Empire.41

(Actually, Napoleon III was about to remove the group in response to public objections, when the Franco-​Prussian war diverted his attention.) Zola’s notebooks condemn the promiscuous mingling in audiences of “princes, stage managers, actors, cocottes, etc.” A certain kind of theatre has an acidic effect on a society that takes moral comfort in its performances. Hence the brutal twenty pages in Nana consecrated to her debut in La blonde Vénus at the Variétés in the presence of government ministers, officialdom, leaders of society and kept women –​the monde où l’on s’ennuie and the demi-​monde cheek by jowl, publicly communing with the obscenity on stage. This carnival of gods, Olympus dragged through the mire, a whole religion, a whole world of poetry confounded, came across as an exquisite tonic. The fever of irreverence won over the literate world from the earliest performances; they were trampling on legend, shattering age-​old images … Royalty became a farce, and the army a laughing-​stock … People snatched up allusions, people added obscenities, inoffensive words were twisted in their meaning to the acclamation of the orchestra-​seats. It had been a long time since a theatre audience had wallowed in the most irreverent nonsense. It came as a relaxation.42

It was Offenbach’s music that served as the solvent that allowed corruption to penetrate the social fabric so easily, “the quick little notes, a waltz whose low-​class rhythm had the mirth of a dirty joke.” In his eagerness to excoriate the Second Empire, Zola turns a light-​hearted operetta into an apocalypse and Offenbach into the fifth Horseman. Zola, “Une allegorie,” La Cloche (2 Apr. 1870), in Œuvres complètes, XIII, 278–​80. Zola, Nana, Ch. 1, in Les Rougon-​Macquart, ed. Armand Lanoux and Henri Mitterand (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), II. For a blow-​by-​blow comparison of The Blonde Venus with Hélène see Wiegler, “Das Theater Offenbachs,” 68–​70.

41 42

No, No, Nana

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Zola was not much bothered to camouflage his Offenbachian sources, borrowing the Olympians from Orphée and plot and even lines in La belle Hélène.43 La Schneider, a genuine talent as well as a courtesan, is devalued by equating her with Nana, “a mediocre artist” who “hasn’t two-​ pennyworth of talent.” The lack of charm in her “vinegary voice … off-​key, employed without technique” is offset by appeals to the “madness of her sex.” Zola compulsively inventories her physical charms, not omitting the “golden hair of her armpits.” Nana appeared the year Offenbach died. Five years earlier Zola had published a more direct attack in a series of articles on the state of the French theatre for Le Messager de l’Europe. In his idiosyncratic survey of French drama, he turned his attention to “opérette,” a maleficent beast that deserves to be strangled in front of the prompter’s box. Its popularity and the ubiquity of its tunes drive him wild. Its sexual provocation –​what he calls its “nervous erethism” –​must debilitate the younger generation. While granting that Offenbach’s music is “vivacious, lively, gifted with genuine charm,” Zola names him as the chief culprit in inflating musical comedy from a one-​act diversion to a grandiose extravaganza; it has become the vehicle of celebrity for “actresses whose talent consists of displaying their bosom and hips.”44 Ten years later he noted, with a quantum of Schadenfreude, that fashion has now passed Offenbach by. Whereas he and his creations were ubiquitous during the Exposition of 1867, the Bouffes is closed during the current Exposition and audiences flock to the opéras comiques of his rivals. The moral Zola draws is that popular success is contemptible; only the solitary toiler whose works might put off his contemporaries but will eventually be applauded deserves immortality.45 He would have been an even more “indignant artist” if he had known that a production of Offenbach’s drag one-​act Mesdames de la Halle, produced by the Lyon Théâtre de la Croix-​Rouge in 2015, opened with a prologue drawn from Zola’s novel of the markets Le ventre de Paris.

Nana, 1704. See M. Descotes “Les comédiens dans les Rougon-​Macquart,” Revue d’histoire du théâtre (1958) and Jean-​François Labie, “Blonde Vénus, belle Hélène,” in La belle Hélène. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 125. Ed. Michel Pazdro (Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 1989), 84–​85. Some suggested that Nana was based on the courtesan Valtesse de la Bigne (Louise-​Émilie Delabigne), who was reputed to be Offenbach’s mistress. Cora Pearl definitely makes an appearance as Lucy Stewart. 44 “Lettres de Paris, IX. La scène dramatique en France,” Le Messager de l’Europe (Dec. 1875); “Causerie,” La Tribune (6 Dec. 1868), in Écrits sur la musique, 139–​41, 61–​62. 45 “Revue dramatique et littéraire,” Le Voltaire (13 Aug. 1878), in Écrits sur la musique, 191–​92. 43

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The Exposition Tetralogy While rehearsing Hélène Offenbach typically juggled several other projects. Les bergers (1865) was a tour de force, the same scenario as it might be performed in antiquity, the eighteenth century of Watteau and the nineteenth century of Courbet (although the women were dressed). This would become a stock device for cabaret theatre of the Russian Silver Age, but Offenbach’s contemporaries were indifferent to it, despite an exquisite score. However, his next three operas were recognized as outstanding works. Barbe-​bleue, performed at the Variétés, turned a fairy tale from Perrault into a satiric fable, mingling the barnyard antics made popular by Thérésa with a cynical portrait of power, both personal and state. This Bluebeard is a Don Giovanni who marries his conquests and then kills them, or so he thinks (his Leporello, the alchemist Popolani, keeps them in a state of suspended animation). Observing a tightly knit plot, a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, and dialogue devoid of up-​to-​date slang, the critics were benign. The music was also more durchkomponiert than Hélène, with big ensembles and greater coherence. Barbe-​bleue opened in February 1866, one of the few bright spots in a dismal year. The harvest had failed, there was terrible flooding, a cholera epidemic and financial disasters. On the political front, the calamity of the Mexican adventure and the Prussian defeat of the Austrians at the battle of Sadová thwarted French imperial ambitions. Parisian wags watched the palace of the Exposition Universelle being built on the Champs de Mars and shrugged it off as “a magnificent beer-​garden [guingette].”46 Although Hélène was still playing to packed houses, Schneider and the Oreste Léa Silly were embroiled in a silly feud. The fashionable English tart Cora Pearl was hissed when she tried to play Cupidon in Orphée. In October La vie parisienne opened at the Palais Royal as an advertisement for the Exposition. Meilhac and Halévy had in mind Labiche’s vaudeville Le chapeau de paille d’Italie (another of Sarcey’s dramatic landmarks), a clockwork farce in which a wedding party is trotted all over Paris under false pretenses. However, the structure of the opera is relaxed, miles away from tightly wound-​up well-​made plays, and bears some resemblance to an end-​of-​year revue. Labiche himself remarked “This is insane, it’s the madhouse [Charenton] genre; it has no shape as a play; but it is amusing, grotesque, hilarious, and witty. It’s bound to run for three months.”47 Veuillot, quoted in X.X., “La vie à Paris au temps du premier triomphe de la ‘Vie parisienne’ d’Offenbach,” Chanteclair. Revue artistique & littéraire 28, 280 (Jul.–​Aug. 1931): 140–​41. 47 Eugène Labiche to Leveaux, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Club de l’honnête homme, 1968), VIII, 376. 46

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When complaints were made that Bouffar was the only member of the cast who could sing, Offenbach replied “It would bother me if they sang. This isn’t the Opéra-​Comique! let them be funny and that’s enough for me.”48 La vie, we have seen, incorporates tokens of modernism (the railway, tourism, crinolines, and cocottes, restaurants featuring chambres separées), but, for all its high spirits, it is shot through with a melancholy, a sense of the ephemerality of pleasure that reflects the somber mood of the moment. Without necessarily prefiguring the debacle of 1870, La vie records a decline. André Frank has linked it with Beaumarchais’s Mariage de Figaro, a comedy that announces a revolution, while Métella’s letter aria has been compared favorably to that of the Countess in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. A courtesan’s unsentimental inventory of her lovers is a plaint for the transience of love affairs. These three works are similar in presenting pleasures hastily snatched, a sense of hard times on the morrow, a linguistic vivacity, and attitudes that undermine social roles, revealing them as carnival disguises.49 The action in each takes place over the course of a “one mad day,” presenting a frivolous chiaroscuro of the soul and culminating in nocturnal sensuality and intoxication. “Pleasure which is not happiness, and desire which is not love.”50 The playwright Paul Foucher, Victor Hugo’s brother-​in-​law, looked back in wonder mixed with regret: It is a fact that no one would have expected, ten years ago, that people would unanimously applaud a five-​act play in which one would see almost without diversion:  1.  two imbeciles contesting the continuation of the favors of a shady lady and reconciled by a third scoundrel who has made off with her; 2. a young man hoping to seduce a foreign noblewoman and, to achieve this, personally sponsoring her husband in a company of ill repute […] 3. the ex-​lover of a harlot drawing a letter of exchange on behalf of a successor […] 4. the woman reaching the point where she can no longer remember the name of her … male friends; 5. a scene in a bedroom, where a female Hercules, after having threatened the modesty or rather the inadequacy of a somewhat undersized fop, trembles in turn before the audacity of his disproportionate courage […]; 6 and finally –​which is the worst of all –​a head waiter of a café-​restaurant recommending his fellows to be Reported by G. Davin de Champclos (10 Apr. 1911), in La vie parisienne. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 206. Ed. Jean-​Claude Yon (Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 2002), 38. 49 André Frank, “Un second mariage,” in La vie parisienne. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 206. Ed. Jean-​ Claude Yon (Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 2002), 70–​72. Sacheverell Sitwell penned an evocative description of Métella’s aria in La vie parisienne. A tribute to Offenbach (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), 46–​50. 50 Fernand Ochsé, “La poésie dans l’opérette,” Conférencia (15 Jul. 1938): 25. 48

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The French Connection discreet and keep their gaze downcast –​at the moment when nothing but the doors to the private rooms offers any further resistance.51

If La vie parisienne is an advertisement for the Exposition and its entrée to pleasures of the flesh, La Grande-​Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) is the Exposition itself in its fascination with the private life of monarchs, its mock militarism, and burlesque diplomacy. Alfred de Vigny had once said that “it remains to do to the army what Molière did to doctors”; La Grande-​Duchesse accomplishes that.52 Although the name Gérolstein comes from Sue’s Mystères de Paris, the tale of a regnant female with a taste for soldiers alludes to Catherine the Great. Bismarck remarked of the fictional German principality “They’re absolutely like that,”53 and acclaimed the opera’s success in discrediting the minor states Prussia hoped to dominate. However scabrous the script, the music could not be faulted: “Ah, que j’aime les militaires,” the Duchess’s frank declaration of her obsession with uniformed male bodies, is “rhythmically exactly identical with the finale of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.”54 During the six months the Exposition was open, the theatres of Paris took in almost seven million francs. The official closing took place on July 1, but tourism continued. A bourgeois and provincial crowd on vacation followed the foreigners; parties of 100 and 150 persons came to admire Paris and Parisian ways, with Offenbach a main attraction.55 At La vie parisienne they could laugh at themselves on stage; at La Grande-​Duchesse they could revel in the follies of their betters. Paris had been a lodestone for pleasure-​seekers since the time of Napoleon Bonaparte’s first exile, but the Exposition of 1867 confirmed its reputation as the world capital of sensuality, in no small part because of the pull of the opéra bouffe. Halévy, one of the engineers of this attraction, bemused by the sensational response, wrote: What a funny era ours is; funny and yet not funny when you think about it. There is a demoralization to it, which is fully complete, fully open and fully naive. People want to have fun, they try to have fun; that’s the reason for it. […] I profit too much by it to get indignant, but after all it is incontestably a characteristic sign of the times.56 Paul Foucher, Entre cour et jardin, études et souvenirs du théâtre (Paris: Amyot, 1867), 423–​24. Servitude et grandeur militaires, quoted in Grande encyclopédie du XIXe siècle, XI, 1366. 53 Octave Aubry, Le Second Empire (Paris: Anthème Fayard, 1938). 54 Gabriel Groviez, “Jacques Offenbach: a centennial sketch,” Musical Quarterly 5, 3 (Jul. 1919): 337. The music critic Camille Bellaigue considered Offenbach’s symphonic sense, with its well-​ordered frolicking, akin to that of Beethoven. 55 X.X., “La vie parisienne,” in Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, La vie parisienne. Pièce en cinq actes. Musique de M. J. Offenbach (Paris: Librairie illustrée, 1875), vi. 56 Halévy, letter to Mme d’Attainville (2 Sep. 1867), quoted in Yon in Loyrette, 168. 51 52

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In the aftermath of the Exposition, Offenbach’s creative energies seemed unflagging. His popularity enabled him to put on Robinson Crusoé at the Opéra-​Comique, but revivals of an enlarged and enhanced version of Geneviève de Brabant and Le pont des soupirs suggest a reculer pour mieux sauter. L’Île de Tulipatan, in which hero and heroine discover their true genders in the course of the action, is a happy return to the absurdity of the Bouffes. However, the climax of this spurt of creativity is La Périchole (1868). Loosely based on Mérimée’s Le carrosse de Saint-​Sacrament, the opera characteristically parodies Donizetti’s La favorita and teases the Empress’s Spanish origin. Offenbach packed the score with Latin-​flavored dances and melodies; as we have seen, the central character is three-​dimensional, with a gamut of emotions to run through. The Peruvian milieu might seem exotic, but at this time the critics had long been complaining “Asia and America have great appeal, but through overuse they have been stripped of poetry.”57 Ominous signs that the public mood was changing were noticeable on the opening night at the Variétés when Schneider was hissed for going too far in her audacities.58 The doors to the Opéra-​Comique then opened to Vert-​Vert on 10 March 1869, but it proved a disappointment. A dead parrot joke long before Monty Python, it begins with the funeral of a pet bird at a girl’s boarding school. Many believed that Offenbach had been domesticated and denatured, partly by his pre-​existing models59 and partly by the more formal environment of the Opéra-​Comique. The replacement of Halévy by Charles Nuitter as Meilhac’s collaborator was taken by many to be a miscalculation, though the press approved of the score.60 Vert-​Vert had a reasonable success and ran for thirty-​six performances, revived in the same year for another eighteen, the longest run Offenbach had ever had at the Salle Favart. An alteration in public mood was also palpable at La diva, played at the Bouffes the same month that Vert-​Vert opened. It had been tailored Johannès Weber, “Critique musicale,” Le Temps (6 Oct. 1863), quoted in Lacombe, The keys to French opera, 146. 58 New York Clipper (7 Nov. 1868): 247. 59 An eighteenth-​century poetic satire by Gresset, it had already been dramatized by Leuven and Pittaud de Forges in 1832 as a vehicle for the cross-​dressing actress Virginie Déjazet. 60 Bertall (Charles-​Albert d’Arnoux), “La première de Vert-​Vert,” La vie parisienne (20 Mar. 1869), reprinted, with minor changes, in La comédie de notre temps (Paris: Plon, 1874). A translation appears in Laurence Senelick, “The opening night of Vert-​Vert,” Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter. This was Meilhac’s penultimate collaboration with Offenbach, although he contributed anonymously to Madame l’Archiduc (1874) with Albert Millaud; Meilhac and Halévy came together one last time for La boulangère a des écus (1875). 57

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to Schneider’s talents, but her antics were beginning to pall. Barbey d’Aurevilly complained of “the same old low-​class grace, the same teasing coquetry of the shoe-​stitchers of the Bal Bullier [Schneider’s father had been a German shoemaker] […], it’s the same old way of cancanning to eye-​level, winking and shimmying her shoulders! […] Even beneath her makeup her complexion betrays disturbing red blotches, no longer those of dawn nor of modesty nor even of pleasure, but the tomato hue of our damned modern cooking!”61 La Princesse de Trébizonde (June 1869) and Les brigands (December 1869) benefited from the contrast, already seen in La Périchole, between a colorful, lower-​class milieu (a circus, a robber camp) and court politics, but also represented a marriage of opéra bouffe and opéra comique with the bandit chieftain Falsacappa, a Hernani fallen on hard times. In retrospect, some would interpret this tale of romantic outlawry on the skids as a grotesque prediction of the Second Empire’s just deserts. The plot’s financial wheeling and dealing evoked the Swiss banker Jecker whose demand that his bonds be redeemed had led to the disastrous military intervention in Mexico. The “boots, boots, boots” chorus sounded like the Prussian army on the march, and the Carabinieri who always “arrive too late” foretold the defeated French.

Latter Days In February 1870 the troupe of the Variétés was invited to the carnival in Nice to perform La belle Hélène; Offenbach came along to conduct. Observers described him variously as a haunted figure like Paganini, a skeletal hallucination, a grotesque carnival mask, and a caricature out of Hoffmann. His frail frame disappeared into his fur coat.62 Given his prolific activity in the previous five years (eighteen new operas and three heavily revised revivals), his refraining from new compositions during the Franco-​Prussian War speaks volumes not only for his physical debility, but also regarding his enigmatic position as a patriot. Some French distrusted him as a German, while the Germans accused him of being a turncoat to his native land. (See Chapter 3.) Events had made the joke about Teutonic dukedoms in La Grande-​Duchesse seem unpatriotic by not taking

Le nain jaune (1868), reprinted in Barbey d’Aurevilly, Le théâtre contemporain (Paris:  Maison Quantin, 1888), II. 62 Bac, Intimités du Second Empire, 225. 61

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Germans seriously. This untenable position drove Offenbach to write to the newspapers: Villa Orphée Étretat, 16 August 1870 My dear friend, Certain German journalists are pushing calumny as far as printing that I  composed several songs against Germany. The most despicable insults accompanied these assertions. I have family in Germany and friends who are dear to me; it is for their sake that I ask you to print this: From the age of fourteen I have lived in France; I have received letters of full naturalization; I have been named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor; I owe everything to France and would not think myself worthy of the title of Frenchman which I have achieved by my work and my good name, if I were to be guilty of cowardice towards my original fatherland. What would make me love France the more, if it were possible, it is that no Frenchman take it into his head to suggest that I  commit an action which, in the eyes of the decent people of all nations, would be an infamy. All the best. JACQUES OFFENBACH63

The imperial connection made for difficulties after the war, so, during the civil insurrections and rise of the Commune, Offenbach led a nomadic existence in Italy, Spain, and Austria. The Third Republic instilled a more sober and yet less refined mood. It took Offenbach a while to find a voice that was both his own and of appeal to a traumatized public eager for consolation. In the next decade he would write only one more opera with the congenial Meilhac and Halévy as a team (La boulangère a des écus, 1874). So long as they had furnished his libretti, an artistic restraint shaped the material. His later collaborators were less adept, less in tune with his needs; their products wavered between insipidity and vulgarity. Nor was Offenbach fully at home back at the Bouffes. His first venture there at the very end of 1871 was Boule de neige, a revision of the unfortunate Barkouf. His creations in 1872 show him veering from genre to genre and playhouse to playhouse. La Roi Carotte, staged in splendor at the Gaîté, was a sumptuous féerie extravaganza, confected by the upcoming playwright Victorien Sardou and starring the raucous music-​hall favorite Thérésa. Fantasio,

This letter was published in several periodicals, including Le Ménestral 2145 (21 Aug. 1870). Yon, Jacques Offenbach, 399.

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drawn from Alfred de Musset, was sufficiently refined to be accepted by the Opéra-​Comique. The next operas, Fleurette, oder Trompeter und Näherin and Der schwarze Korsar, both classified as “opéras comiques,” had their premieres in Vienna at the Carl-​Theater and the Theater an der Wien. As the sentimental stencil of operetta became more permanently in favor from year to year, so did the recourse to spectacle. 1873 saw a revised Vie parisienne; 1874 an augmented Périchole and Whittington, a pantomime for the London Alhambra (performed at the Châtelet as Le chat au diable); 1875 a second revision of Geneviève de Brabant, again with the brassy Thérésa in the lead. “Production values” tended to overwhelm wit, whether verbal or musical. An English magazine suggested that Any English stage-​manager of the provinces who wants ideas for his next pantomime should come to Paris and see “Geneviève de Brabant” at the Gaïté; it is no longer an operetta, but a grand opera-​féerie or pantomime, in five acts, with a procession, two ballets and a transformation scene. […] If any one had said to the three authors that one day they would introduce a ballet of nurses and babies into their work, they would very likely have agreed to the possibility; but if they had been told that they would introduce a procession in which every means of locomotion would be represented in miniature, all means of travelling by land and sea, imagined since the creation, beginning with a bark canoe and ending with a velocipede, including horseback and ostrich back, Greek chariots, Chinese palanquins, vinaigrettes, coaches, railways, and balloons, they would have been not a little astonished […]64

This trend reached its apogee in 1878 with the hyperthyroid enlargement of Orphée from two to four acts, with Offenbach at the conductor’s desk and his rival composer Hervé as Jupiter. It was noted that the verve now seemed forced, and the recovery from the intoxication more rapid.

Lost in Space Still, it would be a mistake to characterize Offenbach’s later productions as simply debile or repetitive. His taste for the modern recurs in his attraction to Jules Verne.65 A reciprocal influence runs between the two. Besides a mutual passion for Mozart and puns, they shared a basic belief in the ultimate futility of human endeavor. Verne’s protagonists, like those in so Figaro-​Programme (13 Mar. 1875): 6. For a fuller discussion, see Laurence Senelick, “Outer space, inner rhythms: the concurrences of Jules Verne and Jacques Offenbach,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 30/​31 (Summer 2003): 1–​10.

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many Offenbach operas, are goal-​oriented over-​achievers with a will to power and knowledge. Yet their fantastic voyages are hopelessly hubristic; when the goals resist annexation, the apocalyptic situations that ensue offer no true revelation. Verne’s vaunted optimism is often specious and his doubts echo Offenbach’s fatalistic cynicism and flippancy about heroic motivations. Verne moved in Offenbach’s world. His first regular employment was at the Théâtre Lyrique, where he served as a Jack of all trades; he had a hand in some forty-​nine productions, worked on thirty libretti and co-​wrote a Watteau-​inspired fantasia, Le colin-​maillard (Blind-​man’s Buff).66 The first personal connection between the two came in February 1858 when Offenbach conducted a one-​act opera by Verne and Aristide Hignard, Monsieur de Chimpanzé, at the Bouffes. Offenbach first ventured his own scientific joke at Bad Ems in 1867: La leçon de chant électromagnetique is a comic anecdote of a galvanic Svengali who claims he can turn a clodhopper into a vocal virtuoso by means of an electric dynamo.67 Offenbach clambered onto Verne’s bandwagon of popular science and zetetic fiction with his opéra féerie Le voyage dans la lune (1875). Verne’s novel had appeared ten years earlier, and the idea to turn it into a comic opera came from the manager of the Gaîté, Albert Vizentini. In the operetta-​making process, Verne’s corrosive anti-​militarist satire of the mid 1860s became less focussed, weakened in part by the censorship. In the wake of the Commune, the transitional period between empire and a constitutional republic, diversion and uplift were preferred to Aristophanic raillery. Even though the plots of the two works have little in common, Verne’s popular science underpins Offenbach’s enterprise. From the gigantic and astronomically accurate moon spotlighted on the façade of the Gaîté to the finale, a “Clair de Terre,” reversing the usual moonlight, the audience was beguiled by attractions made more attractive by a veneer of progressive positivism. Scene two was set in the cupola of the Paris Observatory, faithfully reproduced, although the designer had been denied permission to make sketches on the spot. The forging of the giant cannon in scene three was copied from an illustration in Verne’s novel, with a chorus of blacksmiths: Verdi’s gypsies and Wagner’s dwarves are supplanted by the up-​to-​date taste for factories and laboratories. Robert Pourvoyeur, “Le ‘Théâtre Lyrique’ au temps de Jules Verne (1852–​55),” Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne 31 (1974): 157–​63; “Théâtre et musique dans l’œuvre de Jules Verne,” Dossiers du CACEF (Namur) 57 (Apr. 1978): 17–​23. 67 “Courrier d’Ems,” Le Figaro (29 Jul. 1867). 66

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Like Verne, Offenbach and his librettists had brainstorms that ran far ahead of practical realization. Long before cinematic stop-​action, tobacco plants and apple trees bloomed in seconds; the walls of the palace of King Cosmos were constructed of glass without iron supports, an advance on the famous rebuilding of the Halles Centrales in 1866 and a prediction of the Samaritaine department store. The original libretto had called for a phosphorescent ballet to be performed by black-​clad ballerinas studded with electric jewels and little “Rühmkorff induction coils.” The idea was abandoned, but preceded by ten years Gilbert and Sullivan’s use of electric light in the fairy costumes of Iolanthe. The reviewers, noting favorably that the authors had not depended on the outworn fairy-​tale apparatus of pantomime, were quick to stress the opera’s scientific infrastructure. “This is a new kind of féerie, removed from the enchantments of genies and talismans,” wrote Moréno in the middle-​ brow music journal Le Ménestral: … it has cast off all its old trappings to enter resolutely a new path, the semi-​scientific path: I mean an attractive science, an amazing geography, a physics of the kind you see in Robert-​Houdin’s magic shows. Ah! if science were always presented under such attractive auspices, in short skirts, and the brain infiltrated with fantasy by some catchy tune of Maestro Offenbach, our young degree candidates would not be so sluggish at their labors.68

Le voyage dans la lune was a palpable hit, running for 185 performances, and then adapted and staged all over the Western hemisphere (young Anton Chekhov was flabbergasted by the Moscow production in 1883). When Georges Méliès produced his hand-​colored silent film of a moon landing in 1902, it was Offenbach’s féerie he copied, not its source in Verne.69 In 1877, Offenbach produced the opéra bouffe Docteur Ox, based on Verne’s short story Une fantaisie du Docteur Ox, published five years earlier. Verne specialists have read into it its author’s growing doubts about Quoted in Frédéric Robert, “1875. Voyage dans la lune avec Jacques Offenbach,” Journal Musical Français (Apr. 1970): 33. One noteworthy revival which took advantage of public interest in the moon shot was that by Sarah Caldwell to launch the Opera Company of Boston in 1958. A shortened version was produced at the White House in March 1967 just before President Lyndon Johnson sent off Apollo 8. Sarah Caldwell with Rebecca Matlock. Challenges. A memoir of my life in opera (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 6–​15. 69 The scenario and frames from the film are reproduced in Maurice Bessy and Lo Duca, Georges Méliès mage et “Mes mémoires” par Méliès (Paris: Prisma, 1945), 80–​88. For a scene by scene comparison of the operetta and the film, see Thierry Lefebvre, “A Trip to the Moon. A composite film,” in Fantastic voyages of the cinematic imagination. Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon (New York: SUNY Press, 2011), 51–​63. Lefebvre reproduces stereographic images of the opera. 68

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the benefits of scientific progress, along with his abhorrence of war and growing misanthropy, attitudes congenial to Offenbach.70 Like Dionysus come to disrupt Thebes, Dr Ox and his assistant Ygène arrive in the sleepy Flemish town of Quinquendone. Deprecating the torpid citizens as sponge-​like creatures, they saturate the public buildings and private dwellings with pure oxygen, speeding up the lethargic metabolism of the townsfolk. The black humor of Verne’s treatment contains a sadistic streak reminiscent of Poe and Villiers de l’Isle-​Adam, as well as an uncharacteristic eroticism in the depiction of a courting couple whose inertia suddenly turns tumescent. At the story’s climax, when the over-​stimulated citizens declare war on their neighbors with the cry “À Virgamen!” the comedy savages the French who howled “À Berlin!” before the defeat at Sedan.71 Verne’s story alludes to “one of those rapid two-​fours which have made the fame of Offenbach, whenever he sets conspirators to dancing.”72 Offenbach’s musical genius lies precisely in that swinging two-​quarter time rhythm; transmitted from the stage it infects the hearer with a sense of wit, audacity, and elation. In the opera, just such a two-​quarter time is used to score a patter duet for the key-​code that controls Ox’s machine, the word “Thesaurochrysonichochrysides.” This in turn precipitates the explosion which, like the eruption in Trip to the Moon, ends matters without resolving them. In this comic opera the music is dictated in some degree by the pulse rate of its characters. Gas rather than wine provides the high spirits –​a symptom of the mood swing from the Second Empire to the Third Republic. The libretto of Gille and Mortier preserved and even amplified Verne’s sardonic satire, as in Ox’s final line, “Good thing though it be to enlighten the masses, one must never lose the key to the dimmer-​switch.”73 Taken off after a mere thirty-​nine performances, Docteur Ox did not enjoy the success of Voyage dans la lune. Still, the fable proved attractive to composers. An adaptation of Offenbach by Robert Reece and H. B. Farnie, Oxygen; or, Gas in Burlesque Metre, was seen at London’s Folly Theatre in 1877 and then toured the world with Lydia Thompson and her British Herbert R.  Lottman, Jules Verne:  an explanatory biography (New  York:  St Martin’s Press, 1996), 161–​62; Olivier Dumas, Jules Verne (Paris: La Manufacture, 1988), 86; O. Dumas, “Le Docteur Ox, censuré pour Heltzel,” Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne 71 (1984): 98–​103. 71 Pierre-​André Touttain, “Une cruelle fantaisie ‘Le Docteur Ox,’” Revue des lettres modernes (Apr.–​Jun. 1978): 155, 161. 72 Jules Verne, Dr Ox’s Experiment and other stories, trans. from the French (Boston: James S. Osgood, 1875), 52. 73 Quoted in Robert Pourvoyeur, “Verne et Offenbach,” Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne 20 (1971): 96. 70

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Blondes (is it a coincidence that oxygenée can be translated as “peroxided” or “bottle blonde”?).74 A number of Offenbach’s efforts in the 1870s failed to satisfy the new taste for comic opera: La jolie parfumeuse (1873), Madame l’Archiduc (1874), La créole (1875), La foire Saint-​Laurent (1877), and La marocaine (1879) were respectfully received but had disappointingly short runs. The exception was Madame Favart (1878), set in the now-​fashionable eighteenth century, exceptionally chaste and tasteful, with the just punishment of a would-​ be seducer. Meanwhile, Offenbach’s younger competitors were chalking up record numbers of performances with La fille de Madame Angot, Les cloches de Corneville, and La mascotte. Then came a penultimate triumph which burst like a firecracker in their midst. La fille du tambour-​major (Folies-​Dramatique, 1879), set during Napoleon’s Italian campaign, was accused of copying Donizetti’s still popular Fille du régiment. Nevertheless, with its drum-​beats and bugle songs and its obligatory “Song of Setting Out” it brought Offenbach back to first place. The French deliverance of Milan from the Austrians served as a wish-​fulfillment for expelling the Prussians from Alsace-​Lorraine. It held the stage for months, replenishing Offenbach’s bank account. During productions in Milan, the actors playing Austrian soldiers were hissed; in the last act, which represents the liberation of Lombardy by the Grande Armée, the acclamations became delirious. As the performers sang the Marseillaise, the audience joined in and showered them with roses.75

The Last Act Romantic dramatic criticism chose to regard Shakespeare’s Tempest as a valedictory to the stage, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Romantic music criticism did the same with Les contes d’Hoffmann: Offenbach sees the folly of his ways in devoting his life to comedy and returns to the authentic Muse of opera. A handsome trumpet in this swansong is that he dies in the process, providing an ironic pendant to the legend of Mozart and his Requiem. The Frankfurt School went so far as to consider the opera an ode to death. Given the pragmatic turn of Offenbach’s mind, Later oxen to be yoked to an opera score include Il Dottor Oss by Annibale Bizzelli (1936) and Dr Ox’s Experiment by Gavin Bryars (1998). Andrew Porter, “With a movement so slow,” Times Literary Supplement (26 Jun. 1998): 22. 75 Comœdia (13 Jun. 1909), quoted in Denis Saillard, “Le théâtre français à Milan à la Belle Époque,” in Le théâtre français à l’étranger au XIXe. Histoire d’une suprématie culturelle, ed. Jean-​Claude Yon (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2008), 115. 74

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1.3.  La fille du tambour-​major: the army of liberation arrives in the last act. Lithographed trade card for Maison Wille-​David, Ghent.

and the increasing popularity of such rivals as Lecocq and Planquette, it is more than likely that Hoffmann is an attempt to display his virtuosity, to consummate a work beyond their ambitions. Despite five years of debilitating illness, he worked on it assiduously, to keep his fame intact.76 The flashback structure of Hoffmann, framing the episodes in the protagonist’s narrative, is a sign of Offenbach’s unflagging originality; the move from present to past explains the improbabilities and extremes of the three central acts as distortions of Hoffmann’s recollections. By paralleling the narrative with Stella’s simultaneous performance, Offenbach and his librettists created what Hervé Lacombe calls a mise en abîme.77 Not that Offenbach abandons comedy. The opera makes facetious commentary on Don Giovanni, performed in the opera house next to Luther’s tavern:  the Don’s paean to wine is brought down to earth by the sudsy anacreontic of the tosspots who surround Hoffmann. The poet is just as inept as Giovanni in achieving an on-​stage conquest, and his Leporello Nicklausse has no catalogue to exhibit. Olympia’s coloratura pyrotechnics suggest that the operatic soprano’s favorite means of display is a mechanical exercise. Antonia’s death by music is another sardonic comment on For a moving account of those years, see Albert Wolff, La gloire à Paris. Mémoires d’un parisien (Paris: Victor-​Havard, 1886), 115–​40. 77 Lacombe, The keys to French opera, 122. 76

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diva worship and the transcendental power attributed to song by highfalutin critics. As Peter Conrad says, “she dies of a high note and expires on a trill.”78 The very choice of a German subject with its chorus of beer-​sodden students hints that Offenbach was also aiming at his enemies beyond the Rhine. The dreamy German mind, with its predilection for Gothic nightmares and abstract visions, is personified in the vacillating Hoffmann. The evil genius who projects his will on his subjects is both a literary trope and a dominant exponent of music-​drama (a prefiguration of the Dr Caligari Kracauer posited as the spectre that haunts German cinema of the Weimar period?). Perhaps in the process Offenbach is glancing ironically at the German in himself, the teetering between sarcasm and sentiment, parody and idyll, Teutonic Schwärmerei and Rhenish sensuality lurking beneath the blasé Parisian. It is this compound of elements held in suspension that makes up the idiosyncratic personality of Offenbach’s music. In the past, moralizing critics and historians deemed such music frivolous and pointless. Offenbach seemed to discredit feelings and devalue the sublime. The constant recourse to frivolity appeared to dispense with ethics and artistic balance. Worse: as Karl Kraus would point out, Offenbach revels in chaos, a world without justice, poetic or other, its values turned inside out. His penchant for the ephemeral indicates “a profound sense of the void, the fleeting, a distant echo of Ecclesiastes, even nihilism.”79 Musically, this surfaces in the recurrent rallentendos:  Fortunio’s song, Métella’s letter and the hymn to night in La vie parisienne, La Périchole’s missives, the Évohé in Orphée, any number of disturbing rhythmic breaks in the horseplay of La belle Helene and Barbe-​bleue. Were these strains descended from the cantorial chants he had heard growing up?

The Revolutionary Offenbach died on 5 October 1880, four months before Hoffmann had a triumphant premiere at the Opéra-​Comique. Score and libretto had been left in an incomplete state, and, beyond a few rehearsals and auditions, he had never heard it performed. All Paris attended his funeral at the Montmartre cemetery, with soldiers in serried ranks and the erection of a marble bust. Amid the garlands thrown upon his grave and the brickbats flung from newspaper columns there were a few eccentric tributes to Conrad, A song of love and death, 26. Halévy, “Un musique jaillit,” Le siècle d’Offenbach, 17.

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his role as revolutionary. Jules Vallès said straight out that “this German [is] the most redoubtable revolutionary France has produced between 2 December 1851 and whatever day in 1865 when, in the name of the Internationale, a Committee of working-​men’s overalls was formed … He was unaware of it, and was only a jumping-​jack of rebellion like the singers of his buffo music; but this dwarfish Punchinello had a hand in the tempest of civil wars.”80 For Jean Richepin, Offenbach “whether he meant it or not was a revolutionary … All this, by reason or by blague, is war on the old world: and in the buffo fry-​up that resembled the finishing touch, one must not forget that it was Offenbach who cooked up operetta that held the handle of the frying-​pan.”81 Vallès, an exiled Communard who had received a pardon only a few months before Offenbach’s death, viewed him through a radical political lens:  his Offenbach was an involuntary agent of the overthrow of hierarchies and hegemonies. He may not have subscribed to any doctrine, but his operas still managed to undermine the Bonapartist monarchy and the bourgeois establishment, his Jacquerie an opera chorus. Many later writers echoed this opinion. Richepin, a poet and playwright whose only run-​in with the law had been an “outrage aux mœurs,” was closer to the mark in seeing Offenbach’s raillery as subversive beyond national concerns. His cynical reappraisal of accepted values, his penchant for alogical nonsense and buffoonery, his paeans to the life-​force, executed with the most exquisite musicianship, liberated spirits wherever his work was performed. Under his baton, sacred cows gamboled their way to the slaughterhouse.

Jules Vallès [Jacques Vintras], “Notes et souvenirs,” La Vie moderne 45 (6 Nov. 1880). Jean Richepin, “Chronique d’automne,” La Vie moderne 42 (16 Oct. 1880).

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The Roots of Undying Hatred Jacques Offenbach’s posthumous opera Les contes d’Hoffmann had its gala Viennese premiere on 7 December 1881, at the Komische Oper, elegantly refurbished and renamed the Ringtheater. The next day a sold-​out house expectantly waited for the curtain to rise on what promised to be the hit of the season. Before it did, the curtain caught fire and the audience panicked. A series of gas explosions left the house in darkness and the doors could not be opened. Early reports estimated the dead at nine hundred; eventually, the number was determined to be three hundred and eighty-​four, chiefly from the upper galleries where the cheaper seats were located.1 When Cosima Wagner read the news to her illustrious husband over the breakfast table, his response was unruffled: “When people are buried in coal-​mines, I feel indignation at a community that obtains its heating by such means, but when such-​and-​such a number of members of this community die while watching an Offenbach operetta, an activity that contains no trace of moral superiority, it leaves me quite indifferent.”2 The casual cruelty of the remark would be stupefying, were it not seen as the culmination of two decades of his resentment of the French composer. Throughout Cosima’s diaries for the years leading up to the Ringtheater conflagration, Offenbach recurs as a sporadic irritant, like a seasonal rash. In 1870, during the Prussian invasion of France, Wagner expresses disappointment that the German public cannot free itself from Verdi and

Elmar Buck, Thalia in Flammen. Theaterbrände in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Erlensee and Cologne: EFB, 2000), 165–​83. 2 Cosima Wagner, 16 Dec. 1881, Die Tagebücher, ed. Martin Gregor-​Dellin and Dietrich Mark, 2 vols. (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1976–​1977), II, 770. Note also his later “joke” to Cosima that “all Jews should be burned at a performance of Nathan [the Wise].” Tagebücher, II, 852. 1

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Offenbach; the next year, he assumes that the students in Zurich failed to invite him to a peace celebration owing to his status as a mere opera composer “perhaps a shade ahead of Offenbach.” A walk in a Dresden park in 1873 is spoiled because the military band is playing Offenbach, who is deplored the following year as one of “today’s monarchs.” In 1875 Wagner becomes very cross when a costumier conveys Princess Hohenlohe’s message “inquiring whether Venus’s costume” in Tannhäuser “should be à la Offenbach”(i.e., sexily revealing) and in 1879 he undergoes a sleepless night in Bayreuth because the clucking in the poultry yard reminds him of the laughing chorus in Orphée aux enfers, heard in Mainz twenty years earlier. His pleasure, in 1880, in reading the African travels of the German diamond-​hunter Ernst von Weber is marred by the frequent mention of Offenbach quadrilles. Only the fellow composer’s death the following year gives him some surcease. The animosity to Offenbach and the French culture he represented was slow in coming. When the young Wagner served his apprenticeship in Würzburg, Magdeburg, and Riga between 1833 and 1839, he delighted in the comic operas of Boieldieu and Auber, taking a “childlike pleasure” in “the craft and insolence of their orchestral effects.”3 He long regarded Paris as “the well-​spring” of opera: “Other cities are only ‘étapes’ [stepping-​ stones]. Paris is the heart of modern civilization.”4 When he returned there in September 1859, leading the most exiguous existence while he promoted the premiere of Tannhäuser, he found that Offenbach was the rage of the city. According to their mutual Paris acquaintance Charles Nuitter, French translator of Tannhäuser, Wagner, “on the advice of my good friends,” worked on operettas that were never accepted. Indeed, he would have liked the income obtained from waltzes and comic operas, and, for that matter, the popularity as a conductor that Offenbach enjoyed.5 Meanwhile, Orphée aux enfers attained its 228th consecutive performance. At the behest of Napoleon III, a celebratory gala was planned at the Théâtre des Italiens, its centerpiece a musical satire. Le carnaval des revues, which opened on 10 February 1860, featured “The Symphony of the Future,” a farce with words by Eugène Grangé and Philippe Gille and “Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde (1851),” in Richard Wagners Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Julius Kapp [henceforth RWGS]. 14 vols. (Leipzig: Hesse & Becker, 1914), I, 101. English translation, “A communication to my friends” in Richard Wagner’s prose works [henceforth RWPW], I. 4 Wagner, letter to Ludwig II, July 1867, quoted in Jean-​Claude Yon, Jacques Offenbach (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 21. 5 In fact, at this time Offenbach had just suffered the failure of the first version of Geneviève de Brabant and his theatre, the Bouffes-​Parisiens, was in financial difficulties. 3

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music by Offenbach. After a prologue, the stage discloses Grétry, Mozart, Gluck, and Weber playing dominos in Elysium, awaiting the royalties from their frequent revivals. To while away the time, they interview representatives of new music, including Meyerbeer and the unnamed “composer of the future” (played by the comic actor Hippolyte Bonnet). He promotes a “strange, unheard-​of, indefinable, indescribable” music and conducts a deafening “Wedding March,” which parodies the bridal chorus in Lohengrin (interwoven with a banal tune “Les bottes de Bastien”). Its motifs simulate the weeping of the bride and her mother, the wedding banquet, and a donnybrook; Bonnet then sings a “Tyrolienne de l’avenir” (“The Yodel of the Future”), including a sneeze, before the four classical composers kick him offstage.6 Shortly before Le carnaval opened, Offenbach had been naturalized, so that it was his first produced work as a French citizen. Wagner consequently saw him as a renegade who had sold his birthright for a mess of potage. For his part, Offenbach, despite his working relationship with the translator Alfred von Wolzogen, an opponent of Music of the Future, had no particular animus against Wagner. Nor were the French literati hostile to Germans during this period; they popularly characterized them as phlegmatic beer-​drinkers and dreamy metaphysicians. Revues typically parodied current fads and fashions. This sort of teasing was common in Parisian artistic circles. Offenbach, as a foreigner and a Jew, had had to acclimatize himself to it early. His own spirit of mischief, perhaps steeped in Rhineland traditions of Roman holiday and commedia dell’arte, reveled in it. Meyerbeer never took offense at Offenbach’s frequent pokes at “grand opera.”7 Wagner, less secure in his career, was thin-​skinned, however. The three concerts he had managed to conduct in Paris had been attacked in print by Berlioz just prior to Le carnaval, which made its ridicule all the more stinging. The debacle of Tannhäuser at the Paris Opéra on 13

Yon, Offenbach, 227–​29; Maria Haffner, “Offenbach und Wagner,” Der Auftakt 10 (1930/​31): 203; Antoine Golea, “Il fallait vivre …,” in Le siècle d’Offenbach. Cahiers Barrault-​Renaud 24, 94. The revue ran for forty-​six performances and the “Tyrolienne de l’avenir” was issued as separate sheet music, with a caricature of Bonnet as Wagner on the cover. See Jean-​Claude Yon and Laurent Fraison, with Dominique Ghesquière, Offenbach. Les Dossiers du Musée d’Orsay 58 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1996), 101. It is recorded on Anna Sofie von Otter Sings Offenbach (DGG 289 471 501-​2). 7 Offenbach always remained on good terms with Meyerbeer and in 1864 wrote an obituary, in which he stated “He never spoke ill of anyone, discerning and admiring beautiful things wherever he found them, profoundly despising exclusive systems …” –​another dig at Wagner. Haffner, “Offenbach und Wagner,” 205. 6

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2.1.  Bonnet as Wagner, appalling classical composers, in La symphonie de l’avenir. Caricature by Stop at the head of the sheet music, 1860.

March 1861 (with Offenbach, Berlioz, and Gounod in the audience),8 and the ensuing bad reviews, mockery in the press, and a deficit that threatened debtor’s prison, convinced Wagner that Offenbach was his enemy, first, because he actively propagandized against him, and then, because Offenbach’s own success spoiled the taste of the age for Wagnerian music. The French, he would decide, preferred dance tunes to harmonics, virtuosity to true worth. As a result, Wagner temporarily channeled his ambition to be a pan-​ European genius to the narrower goal of writing music to express the German spirit. He allied himself more closely with the chauvinistic ideals To add insult to injury, Offenbach’s ballet Le papillon was warmly received on the same stage both before and after the Tannhäuser fiasco. Wagner’s famous account of the debacle is “Bericht über die Aufführung des ‘Tannhäuser’ in Paris (1861),” in RWGS, II, 110–​21; English translation, RWPW, III, 351–​58. Also see Oscar Comettant and Paul Scudo, “Debacle at the Paris Opéra: Tannhäuser and the French critics 1861,” in Richard Wagner and his world, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 347–​71.

8

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of the aging Vormärz movement which held both the French and the Jews in contempt and promoted a nebulous Germanic freedom. At the very time when its sympathizers were campaigning for a purified Teutonic culture to be secured by national unity, Offenbach’s operas were packing German theatres. This raised the hackles of the radical patriots even as it scandalized the artistic conservatives. The eminent tragic actor Eduard Devrient read the libretto of La chanson de Fortunio and parsed its moral as follows: “I’m wanton [liederlich], you’re wanton, he was wanton, we will be wanton.” “What a situation for taste nowadays!”9

Across the Rhine In view of later political events, it is ironic that Berlin, capital of Prussia, still a small garrison town of half a million inhabitants, offered Offenbach his first German successes. After his one-​acts had appeared at the Kroll Theater, F. W. Deichmann, manager of the Friedrich-​Wilhelm Theater, sensing a winner, offered him a contract even for the operas he had not yet written. Between 1860 and 1872, fourteen of his works appeared there in German translation, the innuendo pointedly projected across the footlights by sultry Marie Geistinger.10 During this run of Offenbachian hits, Wagner, after fifteen years of non-​performance, enjoyed only two premieres (Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger), both in the Bavarian capital of Munich. Munich, conservative and Catholic, had inveighed against Offenbach. When La belle Hélène and Barbe-​bleue appeared there, the newspapers waxed indignant. The Volkstheater production of the former was condemned as The most hideous monster of our time, made 99 per cent of muck and one percent of wit … A play which endeavors to stimulate the grossest sensuality … which finds its audience only thanks to the smuttiness and indecency of its contents … It is a curse laid upon the French literature of adultery, Eduard Devrient, 6 Aug. 1861, Aus seinen Tagebüchern. Karlsruhe 1852–​1870, ed. Rolf Kabel (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1964), 384. Wagner himself considered Devrient untalented: RWGS, XII, 147–​50; XIII, 86–​98. 10 Hans-​Jochen Irmer, “Jacques Offenbachs Werke in Wien und Berlin. Zum 150. Geburtstag des Komponisten am 20. Juni 1969,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-​Universität zu Berlin, 18, 1 (1969): 127–​28; Otto Schneidereit, Berlin wie es weint und lacht. Spaziergänge durch Berlins Operettengeschichte (Berlin (East): VEB Lied der Zeit, 1968), 36–​38; Gerhard Wahnrau, Berlin. Stadt der Theater, 415. The German title of La belle Hélène –​Die schöne Helene –​was so familiar that the cartoonist Wilhelm Busch could be sure his readers would catch the allusion in his graphic verse-​ novel Die fromme Helene (1872). In the “what goes around comes around” cycle, Busch’s work was made into a comic opera by Dagny Gioulami and Edward Rushton (State Opera of Hanover, 2007). 9

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that it must perforce produce a Belle Hélène, in which adultery is depicted ad oculos on stage.11

A police report explained that “owing to the primitive and brutal sensuality of the Munich public, the indecent innuendo produces a greater and more dangerous impression that it would among blasé people, such as the Parisians and the Viennese.”12 In Vienna, a more sophisticated center of German-​ speaking art, Offenbach’s pieces were all but naturalized, thanks to the brilliant adaptations of Johann Nestroy and the saucy renditions of Josefine Gallmeyer.13 For Wagner, however, the Austrian capital, where his music-​dramas were reputed to be unplayable, was beneath contempt: home of his harshest critic, Eduard Hanslick, it so swarmed with Jews that Wagner dubbed the city “half Asian.” In an essay of 1863 he rebuked the Wiener Hofoper for wasting cultured German musicians on vapid operas. The following year Matteo Salvi, the Hofoper’s manager, postponed the Austrian premiere of Tristan und Isolde to bring forward that of Offenbach’s new German fairy opera Die Rheinnixen. Wagner was infuriated, not only because of the delay, but because he had a draft of his own treatment of Rhine maidens in his desk drawer.14 Nothing in Offenbach’s piece takes place under water, but there is a last-​act flooding of the Rhine engineered by elves and naiads to distract the pursuing soldiery from the fugitive lovers. A finale in which the Rhine overflows its banks? Did Wagner feel pre-​empted or was he influenced despite himself? In the face of these affronts, like Dickens’s Mr Podsnap, he dismissed the Austro-​Hungarian capital with a wave of his arm, and wrote to his eight-​year-​old son, in a regally Victorian tone, “Wir sind gar nicht zufrieden mit Wien, and gedenken sehr bald abzureisen [We are in no way pleased with Vienna and intend to leave it very soon].”15 For Wagner, the new German spirit, permeated as it was by Prussian militarism, was to be “Spartan,” a culture of stalwart ephebes and sagacious elders, chaste, idealistic, and Apollonian. As Joachim Köhler has Neueste Nachrichten (Munich, 4 Sep. 1867), quoted in M. Jahrmärker, “Vom Sittenverderber zum ewig klassischen Komponisten: Offenbach-​Rezeption und theatergeschichtliche Entwicklungen in München der 1860er bis 1880er Jahre,” in Offenbach und die Schauplätze seines Musiktheaters. Thurnauer Schriften zum Musiktheater 17. Ed Rainer Franke (Laaber: Laaber, 1999), 278. 12 Ibid., 269. 13 Blanka Glossy and Gisela Berger, Josefine Gallmeyer. Wiens größte Volksschauspielerin (Vienna: Waldheim-​Eberle, n.d.), 62–​66 et seq. 14 “Bericht an den deutschen Wagner-​Verein,” in RWGW, II, 241. Marcel Prawy, Die Wiener Oper, Geschichte und Geschichten (Vienna, Munich, and Zurich: Fritz Molden, 1969), 35. 15 Quoted in “An English Officer” [pseudonym of George Greville Moore], Society recollections in Paris and Vienna 1879–​1904 (New York: D. Appleton, 1908), 255. 11

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pointed out, this rose-​colored, rather pederastic vision has a long tradition in Germany, stretching from Winckelmann to Platen; in the 1860s, many besides Wagner and Nietzsche subscribed to it. “Whereas the love between man and woman is by its nature self-​centered and hedonistic,” Wagner wrote, “that between men represents an affection of a far higher order.”16 The epitome of heterosexual sensuality, animalistic, licentious, and materialistic, was the Jew, the antithesis to the New Man.

Jews in Music In his essay of 1865, “What Is German?,” Wagner attributed the decline of German culture to the Jews and sought salvation in the values of the “characteristic German psyche.”17 In line with his political stance, he reissued his obscure 1850 pamphlet “Jewishness in music” in an expanded form in 1869, the year that Die Meistersinger and Offenbach’s Les brigands both had their premieres. Whereas the earlier version had attacked chiefly the “serious musicians” Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, the new recension put forth Offenbach and the popularity of his frivolous operas as prime example. Even his well-​known mispronunciation of French is implied. The Jews may well master the language of a country in which they lived from one generation to another, but they will always speak it like a foreigner, like a language they have acquired, not been born with … The Jews are capable only of confused and empty imitation … never of true poetic language or true works of art.18

Offenbach had already suffered a few anti-​Semitic slurs in his adopted country. The music critic Paul Scudo, an equal-​opportunity castigator, mounted attacks on Berlioz, Wagner, Verdi, Liszt, and Gounod; but in dismissing Offenbach he invoked the “fatal brand” of the Semitic race which debarred the composer from beauty and feeling. However, the many French caricatures, without sparing Offenbach’s nutcracker profile and lanky physique, invariably show him triumphant, crowned, bemedaled, Quoted in Joachim Köhler, Nietzsche and Wagner: a lesson in subjugation, trans. Ronald Taylor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 84–​87. 17 Köhler, Nietzsche and Wagner, 106. 18 “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” in RWGW, XIII, 7–​29; in English in RWPW, III, 79–​122; it was supplemented by a letter to Marie Muchanoff, “Aufklärungen über das Judenthum in der Musik,” in RWGW, XIII, 29–​51. Nietzsche parroted this belief in his projected but unsent letter to David Friedrich Strauss, author of a controversial life of Jesus: “Someone has told me that you are a Jew, and as such have an imperfect command of the German language.” Quoted in Köhler, Nietzsche and Wagner, 95. 16

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2.2.  “The semitical-​musical-​acrobatical gorilla (Simia Affenbach),” Leipzig Puck (1876).

applauded by disembodied hands (“l’opinion publique enthousiasmé”). German caricatures emphasize his “Semitic features” and make no reference to his talent. A typical cartoon in the Leipzig Puck (1876) shows him as “Der semitisch-​musikalisch-​akrobatische Gorilla (Simia Affenbach?)” [a pun on the German “Affe,” ape], grinning through the bars of the Friedrich-​Wilhelm Theater.19 The envy of Offenbach that fueled Wagner’s Judophobia in his notorious essay is even more to the fore in a Posse or farce he wrote in November 1870 while victory in the Franco-​Prussian War was still being contested.20 The first draft was entitled The Capitulation. A Comedy by Aristo. Phanes: in it the Prussians surrender to Offenbach, the “international negotiator.” Wagner tried to persuade his protégé Hans Richter to write music for it in the style of Offenbach, insisting that this “uncommonly appealing” skit “belongs to the real folk theatre.” Wagner’s stooping from high culture to popular burlesque implies a desire to vie with Offenbach on his own terms, in Thomas Grey’s words, “‘consuming’ him, cannibalizing an alien musical-​theatrical genre in a gesture of covert cultural imperialism.”21 After Paul Scudo, “Revue musicale,” La Revue des Deux Mondes (15 Dec. 1860): 1029. Eduard Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur. Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte (Munich: Albert Langen, 1921), 166, 268. 20 See Thomas S. Grey, “Eine Kapitulation: Aristophanic operetta as cultural warfare,” in Richard Wagner and his world, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 87–​122. 21 Grey, “Eine Kapitulation,” 97. Grey points out how some of the devices in Wagner’s lyrics are ponderous attempts to imitate similar effects in Offenbachian operetta. 19

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sketching a handful of numbers, Richter declined to follow through.22 When the singer Hans Betz begged off submitting it to a suburban Berlin theatre (too expensive to produce, he claimed), Wagner retitled it A Capitulation. A Comedy in the Manner of Antiquity. Once the French had surrendered at Sedan in January 1871 and Ludwig II of Bavaria asked the King of Prussia to accept the imperial crown, Wagner laid the playlet aside, but included it in his collected works two years later. His preface justified this as an attempt to reform German popular taste away from French models. Although the preface characterizes the skit as “harmless and jolly,” Wagner’s attribution of it to a dead Greek and then to “E. Schlossenbach,” along with his own reluctance to write its music, indicates a tacit awareness that it may go too far. Set during the Siege of Paris, it caricatures the leading French statesmen, along with Victor Hugo, who emerges from the prompter’s box and brags that he has navigated the sewers à la Jean Valjean to secure provisions. France is to be saved by finding suitable ballerinas for a newly opened Opéra. While Gambetta flies off in a balloon in search of them, the National Guard repels an infestation of rats that turns into a corps de ballet (a pun on rat de l’opéra, slang for a ballet girl –​Wagner may have been avenging the Parisian imperative that he provide a ballet for Tannhäuser). An invasion of German impresarios needs to be repelled, so Offenbach is invited to lead a quadrille. The prologue declares, sarcastically, “everything requires true genius and a natural gift, both of which we gladly conceded to Herr Offenbach in his departure.” In the play’s finale, he is introduced, cornet in hand, as “the most international individual in the world, who ensures us the intervention of all Europe! Whoever has him within his walls goes eternally undefeated and has the whole world for a friend! –​Do you know him, the miracle man, Orpheus emerged from the Underworld, the venerated pied piper of Hamelin?” (The reference to Offenbach’s “internationalism” foreshadows the anti-​Semitic charge of “rootless cosmopolitanism” during the Dreyfus affair, in Nazi propaganda, and in Stalin’s “doctors’ plot.”) The chorus then intones, Krak! krak! krakerakrak! Behold Jack von Offenback! Let the cannon fire be disrupted, So the tunes won’t be interrupted! … Oh! how pleasant, oh! how sweet, Wagner, letter to Hans Richter, 28 Nov. 1870. Selected letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stephen Spencer and Barry Millington (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 777–​78.

22

The Matter of Internationalism

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And downright easy on the feet! Krak! krak! krakerack! O splendid Jack von Offenback.23

This lampoon glanced off its target and boomeranged, severely harming Wagner in French musical circles for some years. So did his reminiscences of Auber, written at this time, in which the French composer was ironically praised for “the pseudo-​classical polish through whose glamour none but the sympathetic Parisian initiate can penetrate to the substratum that alone interests him in the long run,” i.e., obscenity. It was for Auber’s heir Offenbach to glorify “the warmth of the dunghill wherein wallow all the swine in Europe.”24 “Filth” (Schmutz) became Wagner’s shorthand for Offenbach. Just as the expanded essay “Jewishness in music” of 1869 had shocked Hans von Bülow, Franz Liszt, and music-​lovers in Paris and Vienna, so now devoted French Wagnerians washed their hands of their idol. An organized demonstration followed an 1876 performance of the music from Götterdämmerung in one of Jules Pasdeloup’s Concerts populaires and Pasdeloup swore off Wagner for a couple of years.

The Matter of Internationalism Offenbach’s alleged “internationalism” did him no good either. For the duration of the war there had been a boycott of his music in the major cities of Germany, where rumors ran that he was maligning his homeland. In August 1870, he had to write to the Berlin publisher Albert Hofmann “It is a lie that I wrote a song against Germany … I would take it as an infamy to write a mere note against my first fatherland, the land where I was born, the land where I have so many close relatives and very good friends.”25 Yet in Paris, he was considered a turncoat. Four years before the Franco-​ Prussian war, his immensely popular La Grande-​Duchesse de Gérolstein had been co-​opted by Bismarck in his campaign to unite Germany under Prussia. After the victory over the Austrians at Sadová, when the Prussians

Wagner, Eine Kapitulation, in RWGW, VI, 285ff. “Jack,” pronounced German-​style, is reminiscent of “Jock” or “Jocko,” the Brazilian ape of popular pantomime, another celebrated Affe. A French translation of Wagner’s skit appeared in 1875 and an English translation by William Acton Ellis in RWPW, V, 3–​33. See Hervé Lacombe, Les voies de l’opéra français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 364, n. 47; Dietrich Fischer-​Dieskau, Wagner and Nietzsche, trans. Joachim Neugroschl (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), p. 54; and Steven Huebner, French opera at the fin de siècle. Wagnerism, nationalism and style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 13. 24 “Erinnerungen an Auber” (1871), in RWGW, VIII, 139; in English, RWPW, V, 51. 25 Quoted in Schneidereit, Berlin wie es weint und lacht, 39–​40. 23

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were annexing or mediatizing petty German states, the jubilant Iron Chancellor had crowed (from Paris, no less) “We are getting rid of the Gérolsteins, there will soon be none left. I am indebted to your Parisian artistes for showing the world how ridiculous they were.”26 This sardonic acknowledgement that La Grande-​Duchesse had abetted the establishment of the new German Empire appalled Offenbach. A letter of March 1871 protests “I hope that this Wilhelm Krupp and his dreadful Bismarck will pay for it all. Ah! –​awful people, these Prussians! … I will never visit that damned country again.”27 The Prussians returned the compliment. The Friedrich-​Wilhelm Theater, for over a decade the home of Offenbach’s operas in Berlin, produced nothing from his hand in the 1870s and 1880s.28 When a hit Viennese production of La belle Hélène visited the German capital in 1875, the Preußische Zeitung condemned it as “this Jewish speculation on the spirit of modern society [which] caricatures whatever is regarded as sublime and sacred in family life.”29 As the Prussian actor Friedrich Haase put it, in the postwar period a Chinese Wall of mutual hostility was erected between French and German culture.30 The polarity that Wagner attempted to establish between himself and Offenbach –​the principled standard-​bearer of a modern, purified ideal of Tonkunst versus the cynical, opportunistic purveyor of meretricious melodies –​did not convince the best-​informed onlookers. To begin with, there was the striking discrepancy between the nature of their compositions and their domestic arrangements. Eduard Hanslick, who visited Offenbach in 1868, was impressed that his household was staid and middle-​class, and the man himself quiet and industrious.31 In contrast, Karl Marx, who had shared Wagner’s political ideas in his youth, now wrote to his daughter that the private life of “this New-​German-​Prussian Imperial musician” seemed apt for comic-​opera treatment.

Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, Paris and her people under the Third Republic (London: Chatto & Windus, 1919), 35–​36. 27 Quoted in Schneidereit, loc. cit. During his American tour of 1876, Offenbach was shocked by the triumphalist war paintings in the German pavilion at the Universal Exposition and bemused that Wagner had been paid $5,000 for the “grand march” that opened the exposition. 28 Wahnrau, Berlin. Stadt der Theater, 416–​17. The Viktoria-​Theater, which opened in September 1871, tried to pick up the slack with Offenbach’s later operas, but had no success, despite strong casts. 29 Quoted in Kurt Gänzl, The encyclopedia of the musical theatre (New York: Schirmer Books, 1994), I, 101. 30 Friedrich Haase, Was ich erlebte 1846–​1896 (Berlin: R. Bong, 1896), 124. 31 Eduard Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben (Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein für Deutsche Literatur, 1894), II, 81–​83. 26

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He together with a wife (who had separated from von Bülow), with the cuckold von Bülow, with their common father-​in-​law Liszt keep house all four together in Bayreuth, hug, kiss and adore each other and let them enjoy each other. Keep in mind as well that Liszt is a Catholic monk and Madame Wagner (Cosima her Christian name) is his “natural” daughter acquired from Madame d’Agoult (Daniel Stern) –​one can hardly come up with a better opera libretto for Offenbach than the family group with their patriarchal relations.32

Some conservatives preferred to call down “a plague on both your houses.” An anonymous pamphlet that appeared in 1871, Richard Wagner und Jacob Offenbach. Ein Wort im Harnisch [A Word in Wrath], declared that when it comes to harmonic principles they are alike as two eggs. Wagner’s “hatred for musical Jewry is an idle affectation,” an aping of Schumann’s hostility to Mendelssohn; in fact Wagner and Offenbach are “true co-​religionists” in their disregard for and mockery of harmony and the rules of taste. If anything, Offenbach goes farther than Wagner in innovative instrumentation, using the bass viol, oboe, and cello to introduce a diabolical element; his are operas for the demi-​monde, churning up the scum and filth from the cloacae of Parisian life. The music is composed to express immorality and sensuality. So far the anonymous author echoes Wagner’s diatribes. But if the German public is so debased that it welcomes such vulgarity, it cannot turn to Wagner for a remedy. He is his own Beckmesser, his “unending melodies” bogged down in the elementary lessons of composition manuals. But in the glorious splendor of a newly risen German empire we want a pure and rational conception at least to prepare a music of the future and opera of the future other than this gross self-​over-​estimation and the obsolete, unsavoury deviations of the ponderous Wagnerian music of the future!33

If Wagner was aware of this attack (and Cosima did assiduously track bad reviews), it must have galled him to be yoked with his bête noire and classified as the greater of the two evils. The anonymous pamphleteer had seen beyond superficial differences to a more elemental similarity:  both composers undermined the musical establishment by their innovations.

Quoted in Grete Wehmeyer, Höllengalopp und Götterdämmerung. Lachkultur bei Jacques Offenbach und Richard Wagner (Cologne: Dittrich, 1997), 114. 33 Wagner und Offenbach, 47. Hans von Bülow also considered Offenbach to be an “involuntary collaborator of Richard Wagner” in the dismantling of Meyerbeer’s operatic edifice. Haffner, “Offenbach und Wagner,” 205. 32

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Had he known of the characterization of Offenbach as a “minor Mozart,” Wagner might have baulked at being cast as the little Salieri. In the face of all this abuse, how had Offenbach responded? He was not a polemicist by nature and, although the occasional private remark has been recorded as hearsay –​“Wagner is Berlioz, minus the melody”34 –​ he saved his aggression for rehearsals and litigation over copyright. His ripostes tend to be imbedded in his comedy. As Max Nordau pointed out, Offenbach can be credited with introducing “polemics into the field of music. He is the creator of satirical music … in a struggle against authority and tradition.”35 When he was working on La belle Hélène in 1864, he intended to incorporate a parody of the song-​contest from Tannhäuser in the second act, but his librettists talked him out of it, replacing it with a game of snakes-​and-​ladders.36

A Pin to Puncture a Balloon A subtler form of satire is imbedded in Offenbach’s treatment of mythology. The Venusberg setting of Wagner’s first act is meant to display a kind of love that would be later contrasted, to its discredit, with a more spiritual love; the text of 1844/​45 refers to Venus’s “sinful desires” and “hellish lust.” His Venus is demonic, a Circean sorceress exploiting voluptuous pleasures to insulate his hero from human feeling and divine salvation. In her grotto (which Wagner originally called “The Mount of Venus,” until he was warned that it would provoke the ribaldry of medical students37) Tannhäuser is literally enthralled, as if drugged, and, later, when he attempts to describe this sybaritic sojourn, Wolfram retorts “Disgusting fellow! Profane not my ears!” Wagner had been willing to amplify the first-​ act ballet to offer the Paris audience a simulation of vice in action, but was told that he had to remove it to the second act, since many of the Opéra’s regulars were late-​comers, for whom the dancers were the chief Letter of Bertrand Jouvin to J.-​L. Heugel, Le Ménestrel 885 (13 Sep. 1863). Max Nordau, Aus dem wahren Milliardenlande: Pariser Studien und Bilder, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1878), quoted in Grey, “Eine Kapitulation,” 93. 36 Offenbach to Ludovic Halévy (2 Jul. 1864): “Two or three characters will try (two or four verses each) to sing. Then Pâris will come out and speak his tune. Something like a parody of Tannhäuser is what’s called for –​it can be funny and that’s what we’re missing even in the finale.” Lettres à Henri Meilhac et Ludovic Halévy, ed. Philippe Goninet (Paris: Séguier, 1994), 66. Johann Nestroy had already produced a successful three-​act parody of Wagner’s opera in 1857. His Venus wonders whether she’s “losing her touch.” 37 Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the erotic impulse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 78, citing Mein Leben. 34 35

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attraction.38 Wagner’s simulation paled in the face of the actual sexual commerce between the stage and the stalls. Thirteen years later, Offenbach created the first version of Orphée aux enfers, whose climactic orgy seems to say to Wagner “You called that a bacchanal? This is what a bacchanal should be!” Wagner’s inhibition in portraying unbridled sensuality was also noted by Charles Baudelaire, who, in a review of Lohengrin, complained that, although Wagner loved feudal pomp, enthusiastic crowds and “human electricity,” he “has not represented here the turbulence that in a case like this would be manifested by a plebeian [roturière] mob. Even the apex of his most violent tumult expresses nothing but the delirium of people who are used to the rules of etiquette … Its liveliest intoxication still maintains the rhythm of decency.”39 The taunt is even more patent in La belle Hélène. Venus may remain offstage, but she is the motive force of everything that happens, first by coupling Léda and the swan to produce Hélène, next by promising Pâris the most beautiful woman in the world, and then by stimulating Hélène’s libido. The goddess’s machinations go unchallenged by any equal force, and illicit love, indeed adultery, triumphs. This Venus resembles a fairy godmother, bestowing boons and benisons on lovers who belong together. Wagner’s Venus and what she stands for seem frumpy in comparison. If we turn to Tristan und Isolde, which opened during the same season as La belle Hélène, the protracted Liebestod comes across as perverse in its solemnity when set against Pâris and Hélène sailing off into the Aegean sunset. Similarly, seen as a variant of the idiotic cuckold Ménélas, King Marke loses a good deal of his dignity. Offenbach’s organic reaction to the “grand style” had always been mockery, whether its exponent was Bellini, Meyerbeer, or Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. For him, it was the big lie whose pretensions had to be exposed. And, as Matthew Smith neatly puts it, “Laughter was always the enemy of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the pin that punctured the over-​inflated balloon … Of all the exclusions of the Wagnerian stage, laughter is perhaps the most completely barred, and would be the most corrosive if it were admitted.”40 “Bericht über die Aufführung des ‘Tannhäuser’ in Paris” (1861), loc. cit.; in English RWPW, III, 351–​52. In 1874 Wagner cut off reading Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to his wife because “there is too much licentiousness of which women can have no part.” Cosima Wagner, Tagebücher (28 Jan. 1874). 39 Charles Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris” (1861), Œuvres completes, 1229–​30. 40 Matthew Wilson Smith, The total work of art. From Bayreuth to cyberspace (London: Routledge, 2007), 115. Balloons, of course, float, and their buoyancy and lightness would more accurately characterize Offenbach, whereas the swollen nature of Wagner’s pretensions suggests a bladder. 38

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Smith’s remark had been foreshadowed by Debussy who wrote in 1903 that Offenbach’s talent for irony enabled him to “make use of the false, puffed-​ up quality of the music…to discover the hidden element of farce concealed in it and capitalize on it.”41 Anyone whose ears ring to the opening strains of the Mount Olympus scene in Orphée aux enfers, with the Greek gods prostrate with boredom, has a hard time keeping a straight face when Wagner’s Nordic deities strut into Valhalla. However, as Debussy pointed out, since the grand style is accepted as high art, attacks on it are misunderstood as coming from a position of inferiority or envy. Offenbach’s ability to elevate comedy to heights of musical inspiration was thus underappreciated.

Nietzsche Takes Up the Challenge Except by Friedrich Nietzsche. By the time the first Festival strains were heard in Bayreuth, Nietzsche had abjured his early association with and promotion of Wagner. His acquaintance with Offenbach’s work –​a Leipzig performance of La belle Hélène in 1867 –​predated his first meeting with Wagner; he had planned an essay on the French composer and quotes lines from the comic operas in his letters.42 In his mind, Offenbach was identified with Paris, “the highest school of existence,” which he had hoped to visit “to see the cancan.” “As an artist, one has no home in Europe, except Paris,” he would later write in Ecce Homo; and at the very end of his life he was to assert that “For our bodies and our souls … a little poisoning à la parisienne is a wonderful ‘redemption’ –​we become ourselves, we stop being horned Germans.”43 So when he describes Offenbach as “so marvelously Parisian” he is tendering the highest praise possible.

Quoted in Alexander Faris, Jacques Offenbach (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 28. Ernst Bloch believed that Wagner contained elements of Offenbach within him, and consequently much of his work resembles parody. The salvation of Wagner is to embrace his kitsch as colportage, that is, pulp fiction. Ernst Bloch, “Rescuing Wagner through surrealistic colportage,” in Heritage of our times (1935), trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 338–​45. 42 Letters to Erwin Rohde (3 Nov. 1867, 1–​3 Feb. 1868), Friedrich Nietzsche, Briefwechsel: kritische Gesamtausgabe [henceforth BKG], ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1975–​1993), I, 2, 232, 235, 247. 43 BKG, II, 1, 205, 212, 254, 264, 274, 276; “Warum ich so klug bin,” §5 Ecce Homo, in Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe [henceforth WKG], ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–​2003), III, 1, 286–​97; letter to Heinrich Köselitz [Peter Gast] (18 Nov. 1888), BKG, III, 5, 478–​79; Georges Liébert, Nietzsche and music, trans. David Pellauer and Graham Parkes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 269, note 111. Köselitz was unconvinced and recommended The Mikado for its lack of vulgarity. 16 Nov. 1888, Die Briefe Peter Gasts an Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Arthur Mendt, 2 vols. (Munich: Nietzsche-​Gesellschaft, 1924), II, 166–​7. 41

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This early enthusiasm was eclipsed by his pursuit of the German “genius” that Wagner incarnated for Nietzsche at the time of the Franco-​ Prussian War. He was even willing to dilute his concept of the Dionysian in The birth of tragedy to align it with the cult of Wagner. No more. The “freier Geist,” “the free spirit,” could no longer be contained by Wagnerian formulations: “he who will be free must seek freedom in himself, for no one receives it as a miraculous gift.”44 When he attended the Bayreuth Festival performance of the Ring in 1876, he could not conceal his disgust. Hucksterism had eclipsed idealism. Wagner was an impostor, peddling his musical nostrums to a gullible German public, pandering to their spiritual indolence and cultural smugness. Nietzsche became even more alarmed two years later with what he heard from Wagner of the nascent Parsifal and its etiolated Christianity. The completed text, sent to him by the composer, struck him, in its praise of celibacy, as a denial of the life-​force. The disillusionment was traumatic. As he cast round for an antidote to grandiose ideals and messianic aspirations, Nietzsche recovered his taste for “simple foods,” musically embodied by Mozart’s Requiem. His new touchstones were clarity and psychological analysis, qualities he found more readily in French than in German thought. At the same time, he became cognizant of the undeniable popularity of comic opera all over Europe. Throughout the late 1870s and early 1880s, the French opéra comique and Viennese operetta were gaining ground internationally; Gilbert and Sullivan were being pirated throughout the English-​speaking world; the Spanish zarzuela flourished. “What is the dominant melody in Europe today, the musical obsession?” Nietzsche asked, and answered himself thus: “An operetta tune (except of course for the deaf and Wagner).”45 After promoting Bizet’s Carmen, as part of his call to “méditerraniser la musique,” he nominated his old favorite Offenbach, the puncturer of mendacious megalomania, as the salutary anti-​Wagner. His praise of Bizet’s music as light, graceful, stylish, and, above all, loveable, is just as applicable to Offenbach. To sharpen the contrast, he praised Offenbach as a Jew, since Jews “have touched on the highest form of spirituality in modern Europe: this is brilliant buffoonery.”46 Nietzsche’s own anti-​Semitism had always been Nietzsche, WKG, VII, 34. Nietzsche’s major statements on Wagner have been conveniently collected as Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. Der Fall Wagner. Nietzsche contra Wagner (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1969). 45 From the Nachlaß, quoted in Yon, Jacques Offenbach, 93. 46 These remarks first became known in the compendium of his Nachgelassene Fragmente made by his sister and entitled Der Wille zur Macht. Since modern editions of the Nachlaß differ in their 44

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half-​hearted, a tribute to Wagner’s influence; it was shed as soon as he had observed its blatant display in Bayreuth. In his notebooks of the 1880s Nietzsche proposed an exemplum of Jewish genius, epitomized in Heine and Offenbach, meant to attack Wagner on his own ground. Offenbach’s “witty and exuberant satire” “is a real redemption from the sentimental and basically degenerate musicians of German Romanticism.”47 “Degenerate” or “decadent” [entartete] had been Nietzsche’s catch-​ all pejorative for weakness and mediocrity; now he used it to mean excess sophistication, the over-​refinement of modern life, “hypertrophy of values and subtlety.”48 Rebutting those who characterized Offenbach’s music as depraved and meretricious, Nietzsche lauded him as “ingenuous to the point of banality (–​he does not wear makeup –​),” unlike the cosmetically sensual Viennese school or the crypto-​homosexual Wagner.49 If one understands genius in an artist to be the highest freedom under the law, divine lightness, frivolity in the most serious things, then Offenbach has far more right to the name “Genius” than Wagner. Wagner is difficult, ponderous; nothing is more alien to him than those moments of high-​spirited perfection such as this Harlequin Offenbach achieves five, six times in each of his buffooneries.50

Nietzsche’s suspicion that “Musikdrama” discounted Dionysian lyricism for dramatic illustration led him to the conclusion that Wagner’s equalizing of music and drama was wrong-​headed: one or the other had to dominate. In Wagner, drama came first, the music composed to fit it; whereas in Offenbach the words were inhabited and heightened by the music. This conviction was affirmed two years later when Nietzsche attended revivals of La Périchole, La fille du tambour-​major, and La Grande-​Duchesse de Gérolstein. contents and numbering, for the sake of clarity I cite the widely available if discredited Wille zur Macht as The will to power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. T. Hollingshead (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), §832, 439. The word I have translated as spirituality, Geistigkeit, denotes intellect and vivacity. Nietzsche also praised the Jews, a race perfected by evolution through numerous phases, for being inoculated against the nationalism that tainted much European art. 47 1886, KSA, XII, 361; The will to power, §833, 439. In 1932, just before Hitler’s ascent to power, Heinrich Berl proclaimed Nietzsche to be nothing less than “the prophet of the Jewish spirit.” Berl, Das Judentum in der Musik (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag-​Anstalt, 1924), 92. 48 W. D. Williams, Nietzsche and the French. A study of the influence of Nietzsche’s French reading on his thought and writing (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), 153–​54. 49 Der Wille zur Macht in KSA, XII, 344. The reference to makeup is part of Nietzsche’s vilification of Wagner as an “actor.” In 1888 Nietzsche declared the times to be the golden age for the actor, because they discounted and disparaged authenticity and preferred image-​making and simulation. 50 1884. Ibid. Will to power, §834, 439. Also see Wolf Lepenies, Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 76. Harlequin is my translation of “Hanswurst,” a term of praise in Nietzsche’s last books.

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They confirmed his enthusiasm for Offenbach’s classical taste and shrewd choice of librettists. “Offenbach’s libretti have something enchanting about them and are truly the only ones in opera so far that have worked to the benefit of poetry.”51 This is another backhanded slap at Wagner, always his own Dichter. Wagner’s self-​sufficiency works against him.

Earnest Intensity vs. the Pleasure Principle Eduard Hanslick had already pointed out that Wagner was the only composer who could be compared to Offenbach as an homme de théâtre, “an eminent theatrical intelligence and brilliant director”; however, unchallenged at his own privately subsidized playhouse, Wagner had lost his sense of proportion and insisted on the immutability of his creations. Offenbach, with a keener sense of theatre and the incalculable benefit of working in collaboration, continually refined his work throughout rehearsals in dialogue with his librettists.52 Wagner’s music, errors and all, was graven in stone like the tablets of Mt Sinai; Offenbach’s was fluid, mutable, and open to refinement, sensitive to the responses of the audience. This led Arthur Kahane, Max Reinhardt’s dramaturge, to turn the tables when he declared, in 1922, “‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ is the preferred term in a profoundly programmatic Germany. It has been achieved only [in Offenbach’s compositions].”53 For Nietzsche, Wagner was not so much an all-​round man of the theatre as a Schauspieler, a ham actor and, indeed, “a mimomaniac.”54 In 1888 Nietzsche published The case of Wagner (Der Fall Wagner), a full-​ throated polemic that again pitted the pleasure principle of Offenbach against Wagner’s earnest intensity. The charge of decadence is deflected from French opéra bouffe to the German composer’s morbid aestheticism, obsessed with the problems of a hysteric and galvanized by the stimulant of mindless brutality. He ventriloquizes Wagner: Sursoum! Boumboum! […] Virtue is always right, even against counter-​ point […] We will never allow that music should “serve as relaxation,” that Letter to Heinrich Köselitz (21 Mar. 1888), BKG, III, 5, 275. Meilhac and Halévy were also praised in his notebooks as “the best poets to whom my taste promises immortality” (Oct. 1888, KSA, XIII, 619). 52 Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben, II, 82–​86. Hanslick wrote that “Certain very virtuous and very classical German critics, who, smug in their disdain for Offenbach, speak of his operettas as if anybody could do as much, may perhaps condescend to admit that, to write the score of Contes d’Hoffmann, you need to be more than a ‘street singer’ or ‘a composer of the French cancan.’” 53 Arthur Kahane, “Phantasie über Offenbach als Vorwort,” in Orpheus in der Unterwelt von Offenbach. With color illustrations by Max Rée (Berlin: F. Fontane, 1922), unpag. 54 Nietzsche contra Wagner. Aktenstücke eines Psychologen (1889), 132. 51

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These passages are craftily interwoven with Offenbachian allusion. Wagner’s anti-​hedonist stance is heralded by the braggart General Boum from La Grande-​Duchesse and, after a bypath into Klingsor’s garden, we are despatched with the first-​act finale of La belle Hélène, not sailing to Cythaera, but to Crete, envisaged as the soul-​destroying bull-​pen of Bayreuth reached by special excursion trains. Nietzsche was so proud of his pastiche that, boasting of it in a letter, he referred to this exercise in philippic parody as “Operettenmusik.”56 Devoted Wagnerians have tried to explain away Nietzsche’s intemperate diatribe by attributing it to the philosopher’s growing dementia. Naming it “that lamentable squib,” Wagner’s Victorian translator William Ashton Ellis stated outright that its author must have been insane.57 This belief that Nietzsche’s predilection for light opera was a pathological symptom has been dismissed by Frederick R. Love as a “crude oversimplification,” given Nietzsche’s youthful enthusiasm for the genre and his long-​held belief in the spontaneous and voluntary aspect of music.58 Nietzsche’s newfound faith in the holiness of laughter and parody as an ideal type of literature would naturally embrace Mozartian virtuosity as a kindred form. When he declares in a letter that “the most strict structural principles and gaiety in music belong together,”59 what is more natural than to praise Offenbach as the epitome of this union? Arthur Kahane went so far as to suggest that “Offenbach is a wish-​fulfillment dream of Der Fall Wagner. Ein Musikanten-​Problem [1888], WKG, VI, 3, 20, 37–​38. To Adolf Ruthardt (7 Aug. 1888), WKG, III, 5, 382; to Heinrich Köselitz (24 Aug. 1888), III, 5, 398. 57 RWPW, V, xiv. One of Nietzsche’s earliest American commentators granted that The case of Wagner was “offensive” but needed to be seen in context. William Mackintire Salter, Nietzsche the thinker. A study (New York: Henry Holt, 1917), 89. 58 Frederick R. Love, “Nietzsche, music and madness,” Music and Letters LX, 2 (Apr. 1979): 186–​203. 59 To Ruthardt, loc. cit. 55 56

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Nietzsche’s. Offenbach is Nietzsche set to the fiddle and laughter, or the birth of impudence from the spirit of music.”60

Mistaking Sunrise for High Noon When Nietzsche’s attacks on Wagner appeared, Offenbach was no longer alive; but, had he been, it is unlikely that he would have commented. During his lifetime, Offenbach refrained from public statements about his contemporaries.61 His only extended remarks on Wagner appear in an out-​of-​the-​way journal in 1879, the single issue Paris-​Murcie, sold to aid those who had lost their homes in the floods of the river Murcie. He began with a disclaimer that, since most musicians have delicate nerves, harsh criticism should be avoided. Still, he wondered if the younger generation might display more talent, were it not paralyzed by that Medusa’s head that serves as their objective: Richard Wagner. They take this powerful individual as the leader of a school. The methods born with him will die with him. He proceeds from no one, no one will be born of him. A marvelous example of spontaneous generation … An aurora borealis mistaken for the sun.62

Where are the progeny spawned by Wagner’s operas which offer influence but not inspiration (a nice distinction)? Musicians have to please their contemporaries, not posterity, Offenbach opines, hence “music of the future” is an oxymoron. When Offenbach wrote this, not long before his death, his own fame and popularity were on the wane. In the Third Republic, the unprincipled exuberance of the Second Empire was mistrusted as a prelude to defeat; Garnier’s unfinished Opéra house was so identified with the sins of the past that funding for its completion raised questions in the Chamber of Deputies.63 Chastened, sedate audiences required more sentiment, more sententiousness, more spectacle.

Arthur Kahane, Blätter des Deutschen Theaters (1922), quoted in Paul Walter Jacob, Jacques Offenbach in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969), 166. 61 In 1972 the artist Marcel Broodthaers invented a fictional letter of Offenbach to Wagner; this was a weapon in his feud against what he saw as the megalomania of Joseph Beuys in which he cast himself as Offenbach and Beuys as Wagner. See Stefan Germer, “Haacke, Broodthaers, Beuys,” October 45 (Summer 1988): 63–​75. 62 Reprinted in Le siècle d’Offenbach. Cahiers Renaud-​Barrault 24, 9–​11. 63 See Michael Strasser, “The Société Nationale and its adversaries: the musical politics of l’invasion germanique in the 1870s,” 19th-​Century Music 24, 3 (Spring 2001): 234–​35. 60

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2.3.  L’Anti-​Wagner, “a Protest against the German Performance [of Lohengrin] at the Eden Theatre,” Paris, 1887. The conductor Lamoureux is shown presenting Wagner with French money.

Offenbach obliged, his opéras bouffes diversifying into opéras comiques, operettes, féeries, pièces à grand spectacle, even as he was beginning to be eclipsed by younger French composers as well as by the Viennese school of Strauss and von Suppé. Even in his adopted country, his German antagonist was gaining ground. Stéphane Mallarmé worshipped at the altar of “the god Richard Wagner,” dismissing the recent French school as a wilderness overgrown with weeds of Meyerbeerian opera and “decadent” operetta.

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In Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (1918), Robert de Saint-​Loup despises his father for having “yawned at Wagner and gone crazy over Offenbach.”64 Wagner, comfortably ensconced in Bayreuth, secure in wealth and fame, could observe his influence spreading far and wide. Yet, as Cosima’s diary attests, the specter of Offenbach haunted him. When his great rival died in 1880, Wagner could not help but moderate his prejudices. On the principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum, he repeated his earliest estimation: “Look at Offenbach. He writes like the divine Mozart. It is a fact that the French possess the secret of these things.”65 Germans, however, must perforce move in another direction, pursuing their Sonderweg to a different kind of divinity.

“Saint-​Loup was not intelligent enough to understand that intellectual quality has nothing to do with adherence to a specific aesthetic formula.” Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré (Paris: La Pléïade, 1954), I, 733. 65 Quoted in Wehmeyer, Höllengalopp und Götterdämmerung, 197. 64

Ch apter 3

Tales from the Vienna Stage

Of all cities after Paris, Offenbach found himself most at home in Vienna. Throughout his career he shuttled between the two, often finding the Austrian capital more open to particular projects or innovations. This hospitality anchored Offenbach firmly in German-​speaking culture, even when he was rejected by Prussia and Bavaria. The Viennese turn from folk comedy and magical farce to operetta mirrored the development from a domestically minded, stable populace, heavily policed under Prince Metternich, to a fully mercantile bourgeoisie willing to compete with Prussia for commercial and cultural sovereignty. The three suburban playhouses –​the Theater in der Leopoldstadt, the Theater an der Wien, and the Theater in der Josefstadt –​had been parochial in outlook, with glimmers of free thought quickly suppressed. “Folk” drama presented a reassuring vista of a comfortably ordered world. The European economic crisis of 1847 led to revolt; Metternich had to flee to England in women’s clothes, an operettic conclusion to thirty years of iron rule. The multicultural aspect of the Austro-​Hungarian empire lent it an urbanity absent in its cousin to the north. The new theatres offered more cosmopolitan fare, although a mixed bill composed of short, varied pieces was preferred to a full evening of a single play. A consanguinity arose between Paris and Vienna owing to similar political situations. The 1848 revolution had hoisted Louis-​Napoléon via a presidential election to the eventual re-​establishment of a hereditary monarchy. The downfall of Metternich had bolstered the Hapsburg dominance via the dual monarchy of Austria-​Hungary. For Paris, Napoleon III’s emergent empire meant the new urban landscape of Baron Haussmann, for Vienna the double empire meant the monumental eclecticism of the Ringstrasse, both crowned by the building of an ornate new opera house. At first, Offenbach was considered a luxury import from Paris. The Bouffes-​Parisiens had been invited to perform at the Theater an der Wien in 1857, but the Austrian censorship, having read the submitted libretti, 84

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forbade French dramatic troupes from performing in that country.1 This led Offenbach to extend his visit to the Kroll Theatre in Berlin for another week. Another consequence was that Offenbach was first heard in German in Vienna or, to put it another way, was first heard in Vienna in German. On 16 October 1858 Le mariage aux lanternes opened at the Carl-​Theater, nearly a year after its Paris premiere.2 The manager was the popular comic actor and playwright Johann Nestroy, but he assigned the unauthorized adaptation Die Hochzeit bei Laternenschein to Carl Treumann. Nestroy may have been inspired by the aborted tour of the Bouffes, which had been organized by his rival Alois Pokorny; he may also have visited the Bouffes in Paris in spring 1857. Treumann bought a piano reduction of the score from a bookseller, which Carl Binder, the theatre’s conductor, reorchestrated, with no knowledge of the original scoring. This cavalier practice was common in nineteenth-​century theatres, since composers had no legal recourse across borders. The opera was surprisingly well received, especially the drinking song: Against all expectation, the project of staging a comic opera, with an orchestra, a conductor and a company which seemed to be ill-​prepared for it, has entirely succeeded. Already, the intention to depart from the all-​too-​ familiar crude farces of Nestroy or the little trifles of Treumann to offer the audience something new, deserves to be welcomed, and the choice of Offenbach’s little operetta has been the happiest.3

The success encouraged Nestroy to pirate more Offenbach operas for the Carl-​Theater, heavily adapting them both in text and in music. (Offenbach once made a pun at the expense of the theatre’s conductor Johann Brandl, prolific in making interpolations or Einlage, “Whenever I put my boots There may have been a political reason: Orsini’s attempt to assassinate Napoleon III had led to tension between France and Piedmont. Franz Hadamowski and Heinz Otte, Die Wiener Operette. Ihre Theater-​ und Wirkungsgeschichte (Vienna: Bellaria, 1947), 41. 2 Walter Obermaier, “Offenbach in Wien,” in Offenbach und die Schauplätze seines Musiktheaters. Thurnauer Schriften zum Musiktheater 17. Ed. Rainer Franke (Laaber:  Laaber, 1999), 203–​14. Also see Erwin Rieger, Offenbach und seine Wiener Schule (Vienna and Berlin: Wiener literarische Anstalt, 1920); Walter König, Jacques Offenbach in Wien. Seine Werke und sein Wirken an der Wiener Bühne (diss. Universität Wien, 1996); Hans-​Jochen Irmer, “Jacques Offenbachs Werke in Wien und Berlin. Zum 150. Geburtstag des Komponisten am 20. Juni 1969,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-​Universität zu Berlin 18, 1 (1969): 125–​45; Johann Hüttner, “Die verteilte Offenbachpflege im Theater an der Wien. Zur frühen Offenbachrezeption,” Austriaca 46 (1998): 25–​51. 3 Monatsschrift für Theater und Musik (Oct. 1858), quoted in Walter Obermaier, “Der Einfluß des französischen Theaters auf den Spielplan der Wiener Vorstadtbühnen in den 50er Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts, insbesondere die Offenbachrezeption Nestroys,” in Das Österreichische Volkstheater im europäischen Zusammenhang (1830–​1880), ed. Jean-​Marie Valentin (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1988), 145. 1

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3.1.  Johann Nestroy as Jupiter in Orpheus in der Unterwelt and Pan in Daphnis und Chloe. Photo: Hermann Klein, pub. L. T. Neumann, Vienna.

outside the door at night at the Hotel Lamm, the next day I’m bound to find Brandl’s arch-​supports [Einlage] in them.”4) Les deux aveugles was relocated to Vienna, with Patachon and Giraffier now Kümmelberger and Jerzabek, the latter from Prague and speaking in a Bohemian accent. In March 1860 the public made the acquaintance of Orpheus in der Unterwelt, with Nestroy as Jupiter. This was the first time a single operetta had filled a whole evening’s bill. The vulgarization of Greek mythology produced a lesser shock effect in the Austrian capital than in Paris, since the popular Singspiele and Zauberpossen had been mocking the ancients since the eighteenth century.5 Nevertheless, it effected an even greater revolution in the Viennese theatre than it had in Paris, since it invigorated the banter of local farce with sophisticated music. As the French press reported, “Vienna

Blanka Glossy and Gisela Berger, Josefine Gallmeyer, Wiens größte Volksschauspielerin (Vienna: Waldheim-​Eberle, n.d.), 65–​66. 5 Mathias Spohr, “Inwieweit haben Offenbachs Operetten die Wiener Operette aus der Taufe gehoben?,” in Franke, Offenbach und die Schauplätze, 11–​30. 4

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is as seriously, and more seriously than Paris, smitten with this charming music. Germany [sic] has good taste.”6 Spurred by this popularity, the manager of the Theater an der Wien ordered his conductor Franz von Suppé to create a work in Offenbachian spirit and style; the result was Das Pensionnat, a bowdlerized version of François Devienne’s Les visitandines (1825). Premiered on 24 November 1860, this may be considered the first true Viennese operetta. It not only owes its existence to Offenbach, but refers to him in the first act. The heroine, the schoolgirl Sophie, has learned that an improper hit at the Carl-​Theater included a new dance, the “cancan,” probably imported from Africa; she and her schoolmates proceed to learn it or, rather, von Suppé’s watered-​down copy. Offenbach’s own orchestration was first heard in 1861 when Treumann founded the Theater am Franz-​Josefs-​Kai and invited the composer to conduct in person a few performances of Mariage aux lanternes and Le violoneux from the original scores and with members of his Parisian troupe. (When this house opened, Nestroy made a conspicuous move to it from the Carl-​Theater, and ended the first evening’s bill with Offenbach’s Ba-​ta-​ clan, renamed Tschin-​Tschin). This initiated regular visits of Offenbach to Vienna, culminating in 1865 with the premiere of Die schöne Helene, and ending in 1879, two years before his death. Austrian music was less categorical than the French, so that Offenbach was never relegated to a minor genre; moreover, any Germanic strains that critics noted in his scores were warmly greeted. He had been championed by the influential music critic Eduard Hanslick, and in 1863 the management of the Hofoper paid him a high fee for Die Rheinnixen7 and two other works. Die Rheinnixen caused little stir, lasting only eight performances despite a revival ordered by the Emperor. Viennese audiences continued to appreciate the opéras bouffes, often staged only a few weeks after they had opened in Paris and tricked out with new overtures or arias. Offenbach’s works were so popular with the public that one journalist called Vienna “Offenbach’s piggy-​bank.”8 After La France musicale (16 Jun. 1861). The libretto was, in fact, a translation into German by Baron Albert von Wolzogen directly from Scribe’s Le lac des fées, rather than from Charles Nuitter’s adaptation. The opera’s tepid reception may have been due to the conflation of Acts II and III into one act during rehearsals, fracturing the dramatic coherence. 8 Quoted in Walter Obermaier, “Johann Nestroys ‘Häuptling Abendwind’ –​Offenbachrezeption und satirisches Element,” Nestroyana 5 (1983/​84): 24. Also see Marion Lindhardt, “Offenbach und die französische Operette im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Wiener Presse,” in Franke, Offenbach und die Schauplätze, 69–​84. 6 7

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3.2.  “The New Management at the Theater an der Wien and their drawing power”: Offenbach, Maximilian Steiner, and O. F. Berg on hobby-​horses before a statue of the diva Josefine Gallmeyer. Oscar Kramer, Vienna.

Treumann’s short-​lived theatre had burned down in 1863, the Carl-​Theater and the Theater an der Wien vied for the latest scores. A new contract with the latter with an annual guarantee of 6,000 francs enabled Offenbach to reign supreme in the two leading suburban musical theatres. A mania for opéra bouffe raged in February and March 1864, prior to the success of La belle Hélène in Paris. The Menelaus, Karl Blasel, recalled of its Viennese premiere, on 17 March 1865, Offenbach conducted for three evenings in a row and the Imperial capital became so dear to him that he returned to Vienna for almost all the premieres of his operettas. Offenbach was of a rare modesty and amiability, and if one of us had a good idea, he was glad to adopt it.9

In July 1867 Offenbach was so much in fashion that a gala performance of that opera in Hungarian marked the coronation of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth and the union of the two empires.10 Quoted in Otto Keller, Die Operette in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung. Musik, Libretto, Darstellung (Leipzig: Stein, 1926), 133. For Vienna, the Act II music cut in Paris was restored, a different Act III finale was provided, along with a new aria for Helena, and the patriotic trio and all political allusions were suppressed. 10 Jean-​Claude Yon, Jacques Offenbach (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 418. Yon points out that he has found no solid evidence for this assertion in German publications. 9

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According to Nestroy The Viennese had no difficulty seeing themselves in Offenbach’s mirror, for Nestroy, as early as the 1840s, had blazed the trail with his realistic topical comedies, biting satires, and parodies. Nestroy’s first performance in an Offenbach piece in its original form was as Herr von Storch in Schuhflicker und Millionär (Le financier et le savetier) at the Carl-​Theater in 1859, though his real success in Offenbach came as Jupiter in Orpheus in der Unterwelt. The libretto for the Viennese premiere was the Breslau translation of 1859 by the Jewish humorist Ludwig Kalisch. Arming it with satirical shafts alluding to Viennese life, Nestroy revised the dialogue to such an extent that the theatre historian Otto Rommel, on examining the manuscript, declared “Nestroy’s revisions to the prose dialogue made so strong an impression on me that I would edit an edition of it, if the publisher would allow the space.”11 Nestroy followed this with a somewhat heavy-​handed appearance as the God Pan in Daphnis und Chloe in March 1862. “One cannot imagine,” opined the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung, “anything funnier, more ludicrous than Nestroy with goat’s horns and hooves, as the god Pan, first as a statue, then in reality. The audience’s laughter often drowned out the music and the singing.”12 Nestroy’s method of adaptation is clearest in his work on the one-​act Vent du soir, ou L’horrible festin, which had been performed at the Bouffes-​ Parisiens in May 1857 and toured to Vienna in summer 1862. The manager, Louis Grois, sent the French script to Nestroy, along with Dragonette, which had accompanied it on a double bill. The latter work is one of the numerous epigones of Donizetti’s Fille du régiment, with Dragonette (Little Dragoon) a sutler in soldier’s drag. Nestroy declined it, saying “I basically consider the military element to be a problem in the farce. (‘Girls in Uniform’ is an exception, because there’s no military man in it, just the caricature of a military idea.)”13 He similarly refused to make a German adaptation of Mesdames de la halle, another cross-​dressed comedy with male actors playing female market women. “The play, such as it is, can never be made German. There are not only the French puns which cannot be translated, but also the plot which cannot be adapted in German.”14 Quoted in Anton Henseler, Jakob Offenbach (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1930), 473. Quoted in Henseler, Jakob Offenbach, 216. 13 Letter to Louis Grois (15 May 1861), in Johann Nestroy, Briefe, ed. Walter Obermaier (Vienna and Munich: Jugend und Volk, 1977), 221–​22. 14 Quoted in Henseler, Jakob Offenbach, 216. 11 12

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(He had no objection to performing in drag in his own comedies.) Nestroy retired from the stage in a public performance on 31 October 1860, at which time he played fragments from his six most popular roles, including Jupiter. Nestroy’s work on Vent du soir deserves attention for the light it casts on his own satiric bent and the alterations and dilutions needed to adapt Offenbach both to Viennese taste and to the decorum of its theatre. The remake, entitled Häuptling Abendwind, oder Das greuliche Festmahl (Chief Evening-​Breeze, or The Gruesome Banquet), was Nestroy’s last comedy to be performed before his death; it was played before the Emperor at the Theater am Franz-​Josefs-​Kai on 1 February 1862. Vent du soir is no masterpiece; it lacks the wit and satire, political allusions, and irony that constitute the charm of Nestroy’s adaptation. The music is taken over almost unchanged, but the text is converted into a Faschingsburleske (carnival burlesque) and doubled in size. Where the original dialogue by Philippe Gille consists of a few lines, Nestroy adds new jokes and plot complications. Characters constrained to be mute by French legislation, such as the cook and the Papa-​Toutous braves, now have lines. An element of alienation is achieved by having Polynesian natives speaking Viennese dialect, mispronouncing French, and spouting anachronisms, including a reference to the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre.15 Battening on such archetypes of the noble savage as Kotzebue’s Die Indianer in England, Nestroy can make sardonic comments on European claims of civilizing the new world. “The spreaders of civilization are coming from all directions, they are arriving lickety-​split with their culture,” says Abendwind. “A people that talks high-​falutin and is eddicated to stand at the peak of civilization, they’ve discovered diplomacy too.” The scenes between the contending chieftains parody diplomatic transactions, so that the two negotiators can state, “Now the civilized should listen to us. Ain’t this a kulchured discurse!? Ah, we savages have our kulchah too.” All these references need to be read against Austria’s position in the unsettled European political landscape:  the Italian Risorgimento against Austrian hegemony, the Crimean War with Austria isolated from both sides, the French breaking off relations with Austria over Savoy, the ensuing defeats at Magenta and Solferino, and the bullying prominence of Prussia. Loyal to the monarchy, Nestroy regarded Napoleon III as a rascal (Lump) and a Peter Branscombe, “Die Frühe Offenbach-​Rezeption in Wien und Nestroys Anteil daran,” Austriaca 46 (1998):  44; Gustav Pichler, “Nestroy und Offenbach,” Die Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 30 (Dec. 1975): 237.

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revolutionary scoundrel (Schuft). When Franz Joseph signed a peace treaty with the French emperor, the playwright hoped his monarch was nurturing a plan of revenge beneath the diplomatic blather. (He also deplored Hungarian claims to independence.) Hence the sarcasm in Abendwind, though it went unremarked by spectators and journalists at the time. The reviews were bad and the audience, including the Emperor, disappointed. However, what they saw as weakness was due to the censorship of the performance text. Some scenes were altered so radically that they are unrecognizable. Words such as “political,” “kingdom,” “diplomacy,” “king,” “conference,” and “the business of government” are regularly stricken out. The most mordant comments are made toothless.16 It was not until the original manuscript was published in 1912 that the bite of Nestroy’s satire became apparent. In 1926 the Nestroy scholar Leopold Liegler pointed out that “the play has more satiric power today than at the time of its origin … For the first time since the outbreak or, more accurately, the unmasking of the world war as the bloody balance sheet between two hostile financial and industrial mammoth corporations, only since that time has the cheeky carnival joke of 1862 had the appropriate background for the metaphoric to become symbolic.”17

Passing on the Torch Vienna became a haven for Offenbach after the debacle of Sedan, and he usually would spend two months a year in the winter to attend; he conducted the premiere of the well-​received Prinzessin von Trapezunt in March 1871. It played until June, eclipsing the younger Johann Strauss’s first operetta, Indigo and the Forty Thieves, which had been produced at the Theater an der Wien the previous month.18 “Vienna loves me,” Offenbach would later write, “and spoils me to the nth degree, I’m proud of it and say so. Every time I come to this town, my numerous fans throw me a party and I have willy-​nilly to swallow all the pleasures of this town which is the town of pleasures.”19 Parallel passages are provided in Obermaier, “Johann Nestroys ‘Häuptling Abendwind,’” 55–​57. A complete analysis can be found in Johann Nestroy, Häuptling Abendwind. Faksimile-​Druck nach dem Originalmanuskript, ed. Gustav Pichler (Vienna: Bergland, 1962). 17 Leopold Liegler, “Nachwort zu Johann Nestroys ‘Häuptling Abendwind,’” Der Pflug (Sep. 1926): 39–​40. 18 Offenbach and Strauss first met in 1864 when they engaged in a friendly competition conducting waltzes at a ball organized by the journalists’ union. An unconfirmed anecdote has the older man advising the younger to write operettas. 19 Jacques Offenbach, “Histoire d’une valse [de Rodolphe Zimmer],” semi-​autobiographical pamphlet (Paris: no publ., c. 1872–​1878), quoted in Philippe Luez, Jacques Offenbach (1819–​1880). Musicien européen (Paris: Séguier, 2001), 231. 16

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The evolving school of Viennese operetta, personified by Franz von Suppé, Karl Millöcker, and Johann Strauss was in no way prejudicial to Offenbach’s popularity. However, by the end of the century the homespun jocularity of Nestroy’s Offenbach had, padded out by the sentimentality of the domestic brand, become obesely gemütlich. Operetta needed to be pared down to its satiric core, a task assiduously carried out by Karl Kraus. Kraus, the sharpest critic of his age and a powerful poet in his own right, used his magazine Die Fackel (The Torch) to subject militarism, bureaucracy, and, above all, the debasement of the German language to merciless mockery. The intensity of his prose, his poetic élan, and his dedication to the structure of thought made him an idol of intellectual youth.20 Kraus was stage-​struck from his childhood, not surprising in a Vienna that prided itself on its Theaterkultur. As early as 1909 in his essay “Ironic reflections on culture and theatre,” he sought to prove that Offenbach was doubly a genius, both in music and in drama. He had been perfectly served by his librettists, whose seemingly harmless words, under scrutiny, revealed a sophisticated irony, a parody not just of heroics but of life itself. The harmonic resonance of music and words together achieved an artistic whole that offered a witty reflection of a world of error and stupidity. Kraus offered Offenbach’s self-​conscious recourse to absurdity as the antithesis to Wagnerian solemnity: “The devotional exercises of a Wagner opera are theatrical nonsense.” Offenbach’s operettas, by their subtle blend of drama and music, are the true Gesamtkunstwerke.21 So far as Kraus was concerned, the theatre developed by way of parody and satire: Nestroy to Offenbach to Frank Wedekind.22 Between 1917 and 1929 German-​language stages saw innumerable pastiches, patchworks, and pantomimes exploiting Offenbach’s scores; and 1930 alone saw a jazzed-​up Vie parisienne, a denatured Barbe-​bleue, and a Robinson Crusoé with a totally rewritten libretto. Kraus’s own Vienna Kraus’s work on Offenbach has been well covered, by, among others, Georg Knepler, Karl Kraus liest Offenbach. Erinnerungen –​Kommentare –​Dokumentation (Vienna: Löcker, 1984) and Susanne Rode-​Breymann, “‘Gegen die Operettenschande der Gegenwart’: Anmerkungen zu den Offenbach-​ Vorlesungen von Karl Kraus,” in Franke, ed., Offenbach und die Schauplätze, 855–​94. Three of his translations, with all his program notes and other writings on Offenbach, have been collected in Theater der Dichtung. Jacques Offenbach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). 21 “Grimassen über Kultur und Bühne,” Die Fackel 270–​271 (19 Jan. 1909): 8. He restated this contrast in 1927, paradoxically praising the triviality of Offenbach libretti as superior to Wagnerian grandiosity when it came to the interplay of text and music. “Offenbach-​Renaissance. Zum Vortrag von Pariser Leben,” Die Fackel 757–​758 (Apr. 1927): 40–​44. Also see Edward Timms, “Karl Kraus’s adaptations of Offenbach: the quest for authenticity,” Austrian Studies 13 (2005): 91–​108; and Lotte Sternbach-​Gärtner, “Karl Kraus und Offenbach,” Der Monat (Berlin) 96, 8 (Sep. 1956): 56. 22 “Nestroy und die Nachwelt,” Die Fackel 349–​350 (13 May 1912): 22. 20

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endured an idiotic Offenbach potpourri by Karl Pauspertl and Wilhelm Sterk entitled Der König ihres Herzens, which featured a yodeling journalist named Cervantes; the score was a veritable anthology of snippets from nearly ten Offenbach operas.23 It made, Kraus complained, the “Kálmán world” of vulgar modern operetta intrude into the magical kingdom of Offenbach.24 Faced with such unbridled pilfering, Kraus saw his mission as the preservation of the true Offenbach from his professed admirers. In the 1920s Kraus created a Theater der Dichtung (Poets’ Theatre) to disseminate social criticism through readings of Nestroy. After 1925, this platform performance became a sort of refuge for Kraus and his coterie, to preserve the heritage of the “word” and the theatrical enchantments he had experienced in his youth. From literature, he moved to the operas of Offenbach, which he had earlier characterized as Bühnendrama (stage plays). The libretti were presented both in his own translations and in the traditional ones by the comic actor Carl Treumann, accompanied by a piano. Kraus, in evening dress, would sit at a lectern revealing only his large, bespectacled head, long arms, and withered torso. His delivery was devoid of “virtuosity,” content to underline the ambivalence and double entendre of the words and rendering the songs as recitative (Sprechgesang). This style was described by his bibliographer, Otto Kerry, as “rather emotional” (ziemlich pathetisch), and surviving recordings do reveal a far from dispassionate performance. Kraus had loved Offenbach from his childhood, and in 1923 wrote a poem in praise of the sensual enchantment of the world of operetta. Five years later, he admitted that Offenbach meant to him “compensation for everything more than any other work of the intellect (Geisteswerk).”25 His first attempt to perform Offenbach came in February 1926 with his own recension of the translation of Barbe-​bleue by Julius Hopp. Working from the published text and the 1866 promptbook and director’s copy of the Theater an der Wien, he offered this “crowning glory of the comic stage” as a direct rejection of the “unworthy” production at the Carl-​Theater in 1924. In his opinion, it had completely missed the music’s magic and the farce’s absurdity. “Here as elsewhere the satire of the follies of state and of mankind, which of course cannot be divorced from the brilliant music,

Otto Erich Deutsch, “Offenbach, Kraus und die Anderen,” Österreichische Muzikzeitschrift 18 (1963): 410–​11. 24 Sternbach-​Gärtner, “Karl Kraus und Offenbach,” 60. 25 Die Fackel 781–​786 (Jun. 1928): 28ff. 23

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proved of continued significance, applicable well beyond the caricature of Napoleon III.”26 From this point until his death, Kraus presented 124 lectures on Offenbach, chiefly in Vienna, but also in Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, and Munich, covering fourteen of the operas (oddly enough, omitting Orphée aux enfers and La belle Hélène). He spent much time and brain power on adapting eleven Offenbach libretti, in addition to providing fresh adaptations of Vert-​Vert, Madame l’Archiduc and La Périchole, published as his own creations. He recorded many of his performances, and between 1930 and 1932 directed his texts as an “Offenbach cycle” on Berlin radio.27 These broadcasts had a considerable influence in renewing interest in Offenbach. One of their greatest admirers was the modernist composer Ernst Křenek, who praised Kraus’s musical sensitivity above that of German dictatorial conductors who curtailed repetition to serve modern tempi.28 The platform treatment of each opera was spread over the course of several nights. Kraus’s commentary between the songs often directed satiric shafts at contemporary abuses or individuals with whom he had quarreled (such as the German dramatic critic Alfred Kerr, who, he claimed, had denounced him in 1916 to the military authorities as a treacherous defeatist). Although he deplored the practice by others, Kraus added topical verses of his own into his renderings of Les brigands and La vie parisienne and underlined elements of the original that spoke to present abuses. To Kraus’s chagrin, the new popularity he won for Offenbach often translated into second-​rate productions, even when based on his texts. When Peter Scher produced a version of La vie parisienne as Pariser Luft in Munich in 1929, Kraus hit out in all directions, slamming Scher for Bavarian tastelessness, the publishers for mishandling the rights, and the music critics for ignorance and superficiality when they blamed Offenbach and not Scher for boring them.29 He attributed this contemporary style to the commercial Zeitgeist. His bête noire was Max Reinhardt, whose successful stagings of Orpheus and Helen he deemed “violations” (Schändungen). He blamed him for encouraging “this association of window-​dressers” to Die Fackel 717 (20 Feb. 1923): 99. Kari Grimstad, Masks of the prophet. The theatrical world of Karl Kraus (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 1982), 150, 160–​61, 170–​71; Peter Hawig, “‘Die Zeit ist eine Operette’:  Jacques Offenbach und Karl Kraus,” in Jacques Offenbach:  Facetten zu Leben und Werk (Cologne:  Dohr, 1999), 235–​55. Peter Lorre frequently took part in the broadcasts. 28 Ernst Křenek, “Karl Kraus und Offenbach,” Der Auftakt (Prague) 10 (1930):  212–​13. Kraus had defended Křenek’s jazz opera Jonny spielt auf against Nazi disruptions at the Vienna Opera production in 1927/​28, comparing them to Aryan attacks on Offenbach. 29 “Die Schändung von ‘Pariser Leben,’” Die Fackel 827–​828 (Feb. 1930): 66. 26 27

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make Offenbach “approximate the taste of a gang of jazz bandits by laying waste the music, trivializing the dialogue, and adding a hundred pretty little legs.”30 In protest, he withdrew his adaptations from circulation. It is alleged that Kraus could not read music,31 and his translated lines often clash with the musical notes. Nevertheless, he regarded his adaptations as linguistic achievements, whereby he inhabited the originals to such an extent that they became his creations. The Theater der Dichtung was meant not as a surrogate but as an innovative art form. While Kraus admitted that operetta libretti should not be judged as literature, he also insisted that text and music were an indivisible unity, and even suggested that the mediocrity of the original dialogue was what inspired the greatness of the music. When criticized for sidelining the musical aspect, he would quote a letter from Offenbach’s grandson, Jacque Brindejont-​Offenbach:  “You have known, in fact, how to give this music its true meaning by revealing its classical inspiration, by expressing its true rhythm, by disengaging his farcicality as well as its melancholy … I believe I fully understand this rhythm, and many times you have enlightened, surprised, enthralled, enraptured me.”32 In grand opera, claimed Kraus, the “psychologized” motivations of the characters are incomprehensible and ripe for parody. Operetta, on the other hand, is a “no-​man’s-​land which is fantastical, but never topical, and which has its own immutable norms and forms which banal common sense cannot shake loose.”33 Its art, like dreams or “chaos without causality,” need not conform to the laws of reality or verisimilitude. It is a form of intellectual abstraction and self-​evident fancy akin to Märchen (folk or fairy tales). Kraus’s prime example is the opening of La vie parisienne: the ultra-​modern material phenomenon of an urban railway station is, by means of music, turned into a forecourt to paradise. The magic of Offenbach’s melodies has an ability to telescope time and space and provide “a logical conclusion in the irrational.”34 At the end, “Causality is abolished and everybody lives happily under the laws of chaos.”35 One subscriber to this line of Kraus’s thought was Bertolt Brecht. Brecht preferred the term “opera” to “operetta” to describe his own song-​studded “Offenbach-​Renaissance,” Die Fackel 757–​758 (Apr. 1927): 38–​48; “Offenbach-​Schändungen,” Die Fackel 868–​877 (Mar. 1932): 6–​18. The former was reprinted in the Offenbach issue of Der Auftakt (Prague) 10 (1930): 197–​203. 31 Deutsch, “Offenbach, Kraus und die Anderen,” 406. 32 Quoted in French in “Offenbach und die Zeit,” Die Fackel 909–​911 (May 1935): 26–​27. 33 Die Fackel 885–​887 (Dec. 1932): 41. 34 Kraus, “Offenbach-​Renaissance,” Die Fackel 757–​758 (Apr. 1927): 40. 35 Kraus, “Operette,”Die Fackel 838–​844 (Sep. 1930): 1. 30

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plays. In defining opera for the Epic Theatre, he announced that his Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny “would do deliberate justice to the irrationality of the operatic genre […] The more obscure and unreal reality is rendered through the music […], the more enjoyable will be the total event: the degree of enjoyment depends directly on the degree of unreality.”36 This is precisely Kraus’s point about Offenbach. Kraus organized an “Offenbach Cycle” in Hamburg from 18 to 22 March 1929, and then another in Vienna, enriching the usual choices with La chanson de Fortunio and L’Île de Tulipatan. For the fiftieth anniversary of Offenbach’s death the following year he adapted Les bavards; this was followed by a production of his version of La Périchole in Berlin (1931) and a radio cycle of his adaptations. Kraus’s absorption in literary activity in the 1930s signals a retreat into nostalgia. After 1932 he avoided the more satirical operas, which might have addressed current events, and chose to translate those operas which were more exotic, magical, or carnivalesque (La créole, Le voyage dans la lune, La Princesse de Trébizonde). By neglecting the topical elements in the original productions, Kraus was conjuring up a mythical Paris and Vienna in which to escape from the menacing political realities of his own time. Even so, reality had a tactless way of breaking in. His audiences readily applied the financial juggling in Les brigands and the “Society of Permanent Conspiracy” in Madame L’Archiduc to present circumstances. He found himself defending Josephine Baker’s Parisian success in La créole against racist “troglodytes” who denounced her as the decline of the West made flesh.37 After his readings had been disrupted by supporters of the Social Democrats, because he took a stand in favor of their opponent Dollfuss, Kraus restricted admission to his performances. Most of his Vienna lectures had taken place in a hall with only 270 seats, and from November 1933 to 2 April 1936 (his last and 700th lecture), tickets had to be procured in advance. Offenbach’s Jewishness had become an issue, and Kraus himself could not avoid anti-​Semitic innuendo. Viktor Junk, one of his piano accompanists, disloyally proclaimed that “Kraus’s intellectual position” was “informed by the basic principles of Jewish ambition that were directed towards undermining the foundations of state authority, morality and law.”38 Bertolt Brecht, “‘Mahagonny’-​Anmerkungen,” Versuche (1930), reprinted in Schriften zum Theater (Berlin and Weimar: Suhrkamp, 1964), II, 120ff. 37 Die Fackel 916 (Nov. 1935): 86–​89. 38 Quoted in Leo A. Lensing, “A paper hat,” Times Literary Supplement (9 Oct. 2009): 23. 36

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A few months before his death in 1935, Kraus announced in his last lecture that “Offenbach today is unperformable.” This renunciation was an acknowledgment that language and music were powerless in a world that tolerated a Hitler: Once Hitler exists, Offenbach … cannot, because what is happening under that man’s dominion … throttles laughter, just as it chokes off our breathing … Were [Offenbach’s music] possible without the framework and transitions provided by dialogue … it might be advisable –​for all the theatrical mastery of this dialogue –​to isolate the music at such a time …39

Not all Viennese thought so. Veterans of the cabaret Die Liebe Augustin who had emigrated to Palestine put on a program on 7 September 1940 in Tel Aviv. Among the old favorites and current hits, there was a nostalgic “Kleine Chansonnette,” sung in a macaronic of Viennese slang and broken Hebrew. A refugee’s plaint about having to learn a new language and a new way of life, with a refrain of “Rak ivrit!” (Learn Hebrew!), it was set to the tune of Pâris’s Mount Ida aria in La belle Hélène.40

“Offenbach und die Zeit,” Die Fackel, 909–​911 (May 1935): 25–​26. Henriette Mandl, Cabaret und Courage. Stella Kadmon –​eine Biographie (Vienna:  Wiener Universitätsverlag, 1993), 129–​30.

39

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Ch apter 4

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From the Restoration onward, the English stage had looked to France for inspiration. Adaptations abounded in the playhouses, and what had been commonplace became endemic in the nineteenth century. New popular genres such as melodrama, burletta, and comic opera, a burgeoning audience of variable literacy, and the proliferation of minor theatres to accommodate them meant that the French repertoire was plundered mercilessly, a practice abetted by absence of international copyright. However, since French drama was considerably freer in its treatment of human behavior and sex in particular than the English, which was muzzled by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, adaptations were thoroughly laundered before being submitted to the public. As late as the 1880s, when even expurgated translations of Zola’s novels were threatened with prosecution, the reviewer of a dramatization of Nana began his review “That the instincts of the French nation have a natural tendency to the coarse and the obscene is so well-​ recognised a fact, that it requires either in a literary work or in a dramatic representation some very startling flight of fancy or unprecedented exhibition before even a feeling of passing surprise is excited.”1 Serious musical tastes, endorsed by Queen Victoria and her consort Albert of Saxe-​Coburg and Gotha, were dominated by Mendelssohn and a religious tradition of oratorio and choral singing. Opera was still considered exotic, a pastime for the upper ranks. The musical curtain-​raisers and afterpieces that filled out an evening’s program at a dramatic theatre owed more to the ballad-​opera tradition than to Grétry or Auber. Consequently, Offenbach’s arrival and success in London lagged behind what he had encountered in Vienna. He himself had visited the British capital in June 1844 as a guest artist performing his own cello compositions; during Ascot week he played before the Queen and Prince Albert, the Tsar of Russia, “‘Nana,’” The Theatre (1 Mar. 1881): 140.

1

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and the King of Saxony, and won their favor. The first opportunity for Londoners to see an Offenbach operetta was on 27 June 1856, when Les deux aveugles was performed as part of a Concert Bouffe at the Hanover Square Rooms. The following year productions of Aveugles and Ba-​ta-​clan, played by members of the Bouffes troupe with new scenery, were part of a French evening at St James’s Theatre, conducted by Offenbach’s brother Jules. The press found the humor to be “purely local” and the clever music “is not of a kind that appeals strongly to English sympathies.”2 Offenbach was, nevertheless, confident enough of his success to request the Bureau des théâtres to delay re-​opening the Parisian house while he extended the tour by a fortnight. The score of Le mariage aux lanternes was then pillaged by the prolific James Robinson Planché for his Love and Fortune. In January 1862, another English version called Love by Lantern Light by Benjamin Barnett appeared at the New Royalty and managed to achieve a run of sixty-​six nights.3 From this point on, one or two of Offenbach’s major works, in English adaptation, abridged and expurgated, might appear as a regular part of an evening’s entertainment. Thomas German Reed’s Gallery of Illustration, a semi-​professional organization that purposely avoided the term theatre lest it offend respectable families, offered Too Many Cooks, an adaptation of La rose de Saint-​Flour, in September 1864 and two more miniatures in August and November 1865 respectively:  Ching-​Chow-​Hi, or A  Piece of Cracked China, based on Ba-​ta-​clan, and A Happy Result, drawn from Lischen et Fritzchen.4 The immense success of Orphée aux enfers in Paris could not be ignored by managers looking for a sure hit, especially since there was a long tradition on the English stage of classical parody. Orpheus had appeared in eighteenth-​century pantomime, Planché had travestied the Greek pantheon in Olympian Devils. The Oxford Music Hall presented a selection The Times (13 Jul. 1857), quoted in Andrew Lamb, “Offenbach in London,” in Offenbach und die Schauplätze seines Musiktheaters. Thurnauer Schriften zum Musiktheater 17. Ed Rainer Franke (Laaber:  Laaber, 1999), 186. For this and future events, see Lamb, 183–​94; and Scott Goddard, “Offenbach und England,” Die Auftakt 10, 9–​10 (Sep.–​Oct. 1930): 207–​208. 3 For a chronological list of London productions, see George Hauger, “Offenbach in English: a checklist,” Theatre Notebook 34, 1 (1980): 5–​14, with addenda by J. D. Alsop in 35, 2 (1981): 87–​88; and Lamb, “Offenbach in London: Chronologie der Aufführungen seit 1857,” in Franke, Offenbach und die Schauplätze, 195–​202. A more detailed account of the earliest adaptations is Richard Northcott, Jacques Offenbach. A sketch of his life and a record of his operas (London: Press Printers, 1917). 4 The Gallery of Illustration later produced versions of Croquefer (The Last of the Paladins, 1868) and Les deux aveugles (Beggar Your Neighbour, 1870). Too Many Cooks was played, off and on, in various theatres and music halls for years, albeit with a frequent change of titles: Pot Luck, Spoiling the Broth, The Rose of the Auvergne. 2

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of numbers from Orphée in October 1864, without a linking narrative and in no particular order. It opened with a rousing chorus and ended with the encored hit “The Laughing Couplets,” sung in an unauthorized duet by Miss FitzHenry (whom we shall later encounter as Emily Soldene) as Venus. The tune was then borrowed by the “laughing comic” Jolly John Nash for “The Merry Toper”; it became so popular that, when Orphée aux enfers finally appeared in London, many believed Offenbach had pirated Nash.5 The importance of the Oxford event was, first, that Offenbach was now regarded by English managers as a source of whistleable melody, and, next, that music-​hall performers, rather than opera singers, might serve as his best interpreters.6 The comedian John Baldwin Buckstone, who managed the Haymarket Theatre, was looking for a piece for the debut of Louise Keeley, daughter of a popular acting couple; he turned to Planché to adapt Hector Crémieux’s libretto. The Haymarket had no vocalists in its company, so Buckstone offered to hire outsiders capable of operatic vocalizing, but failed to do so. Clearly, the musical side of Orphée was considered its least important feature. Planché was put off by the “inartistic mode in which [the opera] was carried out, the unmeaning buffoonery forced upon it.”7 He expunged what he considered mere “fooling” and “preposterous absurdities” that would put off the Haymarket audience, and reset the dialogue as rhymed couplets, thus “elevating the tone and imparting to the Drama generally a more definite purpose than the author appeared to have thought it worth his while to have done …” Buckstone changed the title to Orpheus in the Haymarket and cast the well-​known and stentorian William Farren as Jupiter. It “was not Offenbach’s opera, but the piece went merrily with the audience.” It opened on Boxing Day, 1865, and ran until 26 March 1866. In his disdain for the original, Planché gave himself carte blanche. In this version, Orpheus writes for music halls and Eurydice is planning a divorce that will allow her to marry Aristaeus. John Styx becomes Cerberus with all three heads and the fly episode is deleted. Planché larded the text with topical references: Lord Dundreary, the drawling toff in Our American Cousin; secession in the United States; sensation drama; and gaslight. Aristaeus is made a dealer in honey to enable weak jokes about honeymoons, and Kurt Gänzl, Emily Soldene. In search of a singer (Wellington, N.Z.: Steele Roberts, 2007), I, 196–​98; II, 495. 6 The Oxford Music Hall continued to draw on Offenbach over the next couple of years, with selections from Tromb-​al-​ca-​zar and Monsieur et Madame Denis. Gänzl, Emily Soldene, I, 209–​10. 7 J. R. Planché, Orpheus in the Haymarket, in The extravaganzas of J. R. Planché, Esq., (Somerset Herald) 1825–​1871, ed. T. F. Dillon Croker and Stephen Tucker (London: Samuel French, 1879), V, 231–​35. 5

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there is a quotation from the music-​hall ditty “Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green.” Like Offenbach himself, Planché rather fancied jokes about cannibalism, including one mentioning a venison pie made out of Actaeon. The dialogue is studded with the groan-​worthy puns so beloved by Victorian audiences: Eurydice Ask Aristotle. Orpheus Why, the man’s not born! Eury Well, ask him when he is then. I should scorn Such mean evasions. Orph She is quite demented! And the hexameters that I’ve invented! Eury Six feet of stuff! That’s just two yards of fustian.8

In the finale, Eurydice is made an Offenbach-​ante. And Planché’s renderings of the songs are among the worst ever perpetrated: the refrain of the Laughing song becomes “We know you better, Mr Ju!” Still, even though it had been re-​orchestrated, most of the score remained intact. Planché’s wrenching of Offenbach into something resembling a Christmas panto was irresistible to other adapters. June 1866 saw two of these hybrids: a one-​act Bluebeard Re-​paired, a Worn-​out Subject Done Up Anew at the Olympic, with a comic Irishman in the lead, a breeches-​role prince, and an interpolated song by the conductor; and Helen, or Taken from the Greek at the Adelphi. Although the latter adaptation was by the Punch humorist F. C. Burnand, an old hand at classical parody, the score was chopped, changed, and amplified, with Paris sung by a middle-​aged soprano. Despite the critical verdict of “Utter incompetency,” this farrago held the boards for 123 performances and then toured the provinces. Offenbach was present in London at the time, but he was not asked his advice on the staging of these works. No one considered them to be any more distinguished than the ruck of opéra bouffe imported to the English stage under the denomination “burlesque.” Visitors to Paris brought back tales of that “baggage” Hortense Schneider and her double entendres; the “frightfully wicked” Grande-​Duchesse was a topic of polite conversation. The interpolated cancan in the second act was considered unfit for “the young person”; a view of it might deprave her for life. A suitable substitute for an expensive trip to Paris and its naughty Jardin Mabille was to attend an Offenbach opera in London.9 (One theatrical journal did defend the Planché, Orpheus, V, 242. George Bernard Shaw (26 Jul. 1893), Music in London 1890–​94 (New York: Vienna House, 1973), III, 36. The diarist Arthur Munby, a fancier of undraped female performers, saw the “notorious cancan”

8

9

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cancan, pointing out that no one expected it to be danced in a drawing-​ room and that its contagiousness was natural.10) In the preface to his 1874 English version of La jolie parfumeuse, H. J. Byron wrote “The original libretto is remarkably clever, but is altogether unsuitable in an English theatre.” Byron’s dialogue merely retained “a fair notion of the original whilst avoiding anything that could give the slightest offence.”11 Opéra bouffe, critics agreed, had to be fumigated before it could appear on the English stage. Yet, when it was, they complained that the result was “washed-​out and colourless.”12 “Were an English author to set to work at a book for a comic operetta,” one commentator opined, “he would produce a result, not one half as witty as the works of Offenbach’s collaborateurs, but twice as acceptable to an English audience.”13 The composer and conductor Arthur Sullivan was in the majority in condemning Burnand’s Helen as “the most miserable rubbish in the way of words served to the jingling notes of second-​rate dance music. A few singers formed the company and were supported by a chorus which formed no integral part of the production, and the little humour the libretto possessed was often of a most questionable kind.”14 There is therefore some irony in the fact that it was Offenbach who diverted Sullivan on to the path to comic opera. According to Burnand, he and Sullivan attended a private performance of Les deux aveugles performed by the cartoonist George Du Maurier and Harold Power, son of the actor Tyrone Power, at a gathering of bohemian amateurs, the Moray Minstrels, at the home of a wealthy silk merchant. Hoping to do something similar for one of his own supper parties, Burnand suggested that Sullivan turn J. Maddison Morton’s perennial farce Box and Cox into an opera. Like Offenbach’s works at the Bouffes-​ Parisiens, it was short and had only three characters. Because it was a stag evening, the landlady was regendered into a basso landlord, Col. Bouncer. at the Salle Valentino at Easter 1861 and was unshocked. The high kick, “though startling could hardly be called indecent.” Parisian immorality was “concentrated in a few foul spots, and those for the most part kept out of sight.” Derek Hudson, Munby, man of two worlds. The life and diaries of Arthur J. Munby 1828–​1910 (London: John Murray, 1972), 92. 10 “The antiquity of the cancan,” The Mask (1868): 40–​41. Also see T. McDonald Rendle, Swings and roundabouts: a yokel in London (London: Chapman & Hall, 1919), 112–​13. 11 Quoted in Northcott, Jacques Offenbach. 12 The Tomahawk (24 Aug. 1867): 174. 13 The Tomahawk, 175. The same writer also declared that English performers were not as intelligent or skilled as their French counterparts, so allowances should be made in the adaptations, especially in terms of music. 14 Walter J. Wells, Souvenir of Sir Arthur Sullivan Mus. Doc M.V.O. A brief sketch of his life and works (London: George Newnes, 1901), 14.

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The result, Cox and Box (1866), had a life beyond that of a society soirée.15 A production at the Gallery of Illustration in 1870, without orchestra, ran for 264 performances. The next collaboration of Burnand and Sullivan, The Contrabandista (1867), played at St George’s Opera House on the same bill as Ching-​Chow-​Hi (i.e., Ba-​ta-​clan) and Puss in Petticoats (i.e., La chatte metamorphosée en femme). Between 1865 and 1874, more than sixty productions of Offenbach’s works were produced in London and the provinces, both short pieces and full-​scale operas. The first full-​length Offenbach opéra bouffe to be introduced to a London audience, complete and in English, was The Grand Duchess. The translation by the journalist Charles Lamb Kenney was offered as a holiday entertainment at Covent Garden on 18 November 1867. For those who considered Offenbach the last word in lewdness, that he should be staged at Covent Garden was bad enough, since it was considered “no theatre for comedy of any kind.” The experiment was judged “ill-​advised,” “so rare a piece of folly.”16 In the title role of what was billed as an “operatic extravaganza,” Julia Matthews was dismissed as a music-​hall serio-​comic, with neither “the taste to dress the part nor sentiment necessary to some of the music.”17 The comedians gagged outrageously. “The production is great fun,” admitted the Illustrated London News, “but overproduced, its style too magnificent for light burlesque. It lasts from 8.00 p.m. to 12.30! an inordinate length but […] the applause was unflagging.” This reviewer sounds a note that will recur in British attitudes towards Offenbach; like Lady Bracknell, he is displeased to see signs of triviality. “… Offenbach has gained a reputation far beyond his deserts. He has a lively style and there’s a vein of agreeable melody but there’s a flippancy in his manner which is anything but pleasing to persons accustomed to the music of a superior class. The drama is mere farce.”18 Damned with faint praise, the show was edged out after twenty-​six performances by a traditional pantomime, The Babes in the Wood, transferred to the smaller Standard Theatre, and then toured in a format both reduced and more manic in its dancing. Nevertheless, this Grand Duchess was taken by its contemporaries to signal the firm implantation of opéra bouffe in England.19 When it was F. C. Burnand in The Spectator, quoted in Wells, Souvenir of Sir Arthur Sullivan, 31–​32. The matter is dealt with exhaustively in The Chieftain: a centenary review of Sullivan’s partnership with F. C. Burnand, ed. David Eden (Coventry: The Sir Arthur Sullivan Society, 1994). 16 The Tomahawk, loc. cit. 17 “Offenbach the favourite,” The Mask (1868): 31. 18 The Illustrated London News (7 Dec. 1867). 19 Henry Hersee, “Opéra-​bouffe,” The Theatre (1 Nov. 1878): 282–​83. 15

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4.1.  The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, Act I, at the Royal Italian Opera House, Covent Garden, London, Illustrated London News (7 Dec. 1867). Julia Matthews as the Grand Duchess, William Harrison as Fritz.

announced that the following June Hortense Schneider would present the original Grande-​Duchesse at St James’s Theatre, the manager of the Olympic, figuring that the large public ignorant of French would appreciate a cheaper English recension, brought back the now trimmed-​down Covent Garden version featuring Mrs Howard Paul, known primarily for her Protean entertainments. She proved to be an excellent ersatz, even copying the dresses of the original; but she eschewed the cancan, which was danced by a substitute. Critics judged her the better singer, Schneider the better purveyor of innuendo; but it was telling that “the embroidery on the white satin petticoat in the second dress is not to be compared with the  elaborate luxury of the Parisian artiste.” Mrs Paul was a respectable married lady, dependent on the short commons of a London minor theatre; Schneider not only enjoyed an exorbitant salary (£80 a night), but also benefited from the perquisites of a kept woman.20 “International compliments,” The Mask (1868):  176; The Times (24 Jun. 1868), quoted in Lamb, “Offenbach in London,” 187. Schneider herself received a tumultuous reception, less for her vocal exertions than for her pointed acting.

20

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With panto preferred to the alien genre of opéra bouffe, it was perhaps natural that an enterprising manager would conceive of setting one to an Offenbach score. The music publishers Wood & Co. offered the composer a libretto by the much-​employed play carpenter H. B. Farnie for Dick Whittington and His Cat. The fee was tempting: £1,000 (in today’s purchasing power, somewhat under £57,000) for each of the three acts, on delivery of the score to the copyist. During this particular period, Offenbach was not in need of money. Even though the opening productions of his expensively leased and redecorated Théâtre de la Gaîté had been insufficiently attended to meet expenses, the lavish reworking of Orphée had taken in over two million francs. Spectacle, Offenbach reasoned, was to the taste of the public, and, with this in mind, he set about expanding La Périchole and arranging Whittington. The latter score is strewn with elaborate dances and an allegorical finale of the Lord Mayor’s show. These extravagances were what the management of the Alhambra had in mind, and they invested a good deal of money in the physical trappings, with a huge chorus and corps de ballet. The most popular number turned out to be “The Haunted Kikaboo,” about a man with a musical snuff-​box who is eaten by a cannibal (again!); wherever the native goes, his digestive system plays “Home Sweet Home” and “Then, You’ll Remember Me!” (The number was omitted from the later French version.)21 Coverage of this hybrid of pantomime and opéra bouffe was extensive but unfavorable. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News devoted two lengthy articles to its dissection, plus an afterword the following year, when it deplored the English production of Madame l’Archiduc (“almost beneath notice”). “From a musical point of view [Whittington is a] conspicuous failure –​a flat, stale and uninteresting assemblage of vapid commonplaces … a dreary waste, uncheered by a ray of inspiration.” What had begun as a novelty was now hackneyed, even though managers thought the name Offenbach to be a lodestone for audiences. “The British public are no longer to be lured to any opera which bears his name unless the press give good accounts of it.”22 A glut of Offenbach led a columnist to declare that his music was going out of fashion and that Julia Matthews, star of Whittington, would do better to hitch her wagon to “less burlesque pieces that were coming over from France, like La fille de Madame Angot.”23 See L. A. Perdoni, “Jacques Offenbach’s Whittington –​London 1875,” The Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 37 (Sep. 2006): 13–​21. 22 “Madame l’Archiduc. Opera Comique Theatre,” Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (22 Jan. 1876). Also see “Offenbach’s Whittington (second notice),” Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (9 Jan. 1875). 23 The Saturday Programme, quoted in Perdoni, “Jacques Offenbach’s Whittington,” 19. 21

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This preference for the more sentimental style of opéra comique was clearly linked with considerations of morality. “It is possible to make opéra bouffe pleasant, artistic, and satisfactory” granted one censorious journalist, citing Burnand’s Kissi-​Kissi and Little Tom Tug at the Opera Comique as “perfectly inoffensive; but at some other houses it is very different, and managers absolutely go out of their way to pander to the most vitiated taste.”24 Even though the English versions of opéra bouffe were sedulously scrubbed of sexual allusion, objections were still made to its interpreters. An anonymous reviewer of Whittington believed that all they needed were good legs, not good voices. In contrast to comic opera, opéra bouffe “builds its success on plots and situations openly or suggestively indecent, on cancan dances and buffoonery, and on the opportunities it affords to women, who have no shadow of claim to rank among artists, for the display of shameless immodesty in costume and gesture.”25 An 1871 one-​act abridgement of The Grand Duchess in Islington provoked one reviewer to complain: I thought that, with the Alhambra affair, London saw the last of the Can-​ can and its indecencies, but the disgraceful dance breaks out again in the Grand Duchess, the notorious Colonna troupe being the performers. […] what can Mr. Morton [the manager] be about? Does he expect to do any good in pious Islington with such elements? I was quite grieved to see so admirable a piece as the Philharmonic Grand Duchess utterly blemished by four brazen women vulgarly kicking up their heels in it.26

Titivating Offenbach with female pulchritude was such standard practice that when Vert-​Vert came to the St James’s in May 1874 the leading tenor role, in which Victor Capoul had broken hearts in Paris, was bestowed on a mezzo-​soprano, and the dragoons and two of the three officers played en travesti (which makes a hash of the plot, since the heroine disguises herself as a dragoon in Act Two).27 The over-​abundance of poorly rehearsed tarts deployed as extras displaying their venal charms outraged both critics and public. The editor of “Notes on popular actresses, part one,” London Society (Jan. 1874): 39–​40. “Whittington at the Alhambra,” Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (2 Jan. 1875). Also see “Offenbach’s Whittington (second notice).” 26 The Hornet (15 Mar. 1871): 304, column a. The Alhambra affair refers to a cancan performed by the Colonna troupe at the Alhambra music hall in 1870 which led the Middlesex magistrates not to renew the theatre’s dancing license. See Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as working women (London: Routledge, 1991), 116–​17. It is significant here, as in the earlier Grand Duchess, that the cancan was interpolated, as if Offenbach were the natural setting for such an exercise. 27 An assortment of reviews of Vert-​Vert, which run from tepid to condescending, is given in L. A. Perdoni, “Vert-​Vert in London in 1874,” Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 50 (Dec. 2009): 7–​13. 24 25

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Vanity Fair suggested that the four athletic young women who danced the “Riparelle” in the Islington Vert-​Vert were being kept by the men about town who occupied the boxes and stalls, choosing to patronize “the worst orchestra, some of the flattest singing, and one of the most indecent dances in London.” The Lord Chamberlain attended a performance, found the dance “purposely indecent,” and ordered the dresses of the dancers to be lengthened to 31½ inches on pain of the theatre losing its license. He then had to appear as a witness in a libel suit against the paper’s critic and publisher, while the manager advertised “costumes designed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office.”28 The attack on the opéra bouffe and its inevitable display of limbs contributed to the ongoing debate on the “Girl of the period” (1868). In a series of articles in The Saturday Review, Mrs Elizabeth Lynn Linton had characterized this social menace as “a creature who dyes her hair and paints her face […] –​a creature whose sole idea of life is fun, whose sole aim is unbounded luxury.”29 The product of parental indulgence and a fashion-​ worshipping society, this girl’s material tastes lead to the use of slang and “general fastness,” love of money and neglect of duty, boredom with marriage and routine, and a quest for sensation. In other words, she is treading perilously close to the demi-​monde. There was already a concern, much discussed in novels and the press, over the growing conspicuousness of kept women and courtesans in good society. The porousness of social boundaries was exemplified, for moralists, by the proliferation of cheap photographic images of actresses and demi-​mondaines (the distinction was blurry) on display in shop windows and even drawing-​room albums.30 The candor of the girl of the period was read as brazenness, and the chorines in opéra bouffe and burlesque were deplored as extreme models for such behavior.

G & S Educated Englishmen could easily have seen the authentic Offenbach during their visits to Paris. One of them, William Schwenck Gilbert, even “Decency on the stage,” The Spectator, 47 (12 Dec. 1874): 1559–​60; Report from Committees. Session 8 February–​14 August 1877 (London, 1877), XIV, 188–​89; Patrick O’Connor, “Offenbach, the Opéra-​ Comique and Vert-​Vert,” in booklet, Opera Rara ORC 41, 2 CDs (2010): 30–​34. 29 Elizabeth Lynn Linton, “The girl of the period,” Saturday Review (14 Mar. 1868), 2; reprinted in Essays upon social subjects (London: Richard Bentley & Sons, 1883). Also see Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens: the origin and development of Victorian sexual attitudes (London: Heinemann, 1976). 30 See Laurence Senelick, “Eroticism in early theatrical photography,” Theatre History Studies 11 (1991): 1–​47. 28

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reported on his attendance under the pseudonym “Theatrical Lounger” in The Illustrated Times. After visiting Robinson Crusoé at the Opéra-​Comique, he reported that it was less successful than La Grande-​Duchesse and “wildly improbable without being at all funny” (15 February 1868).31 This did not prevent him, a few days later, from setting a number in his latest burlesque to an air from Crusoé. Gilbert had no compunction as a playwright about pillaging the French authors he disparaged as a critic. Gilbert’s colleague on the comic journal Fun, Harry Leigh, began adapting the libretto of Les brigands in 1871; Gilbert embarked on the same project in order to secure the copyright for the music publishers Boosey & Co. Leigh’s Falsacappa opened at the Globe Theatre on 22 April 1871, but, poorly sung, it made the audience restless. Leigh took gross liberties with the original, omitting Fiorella’s solo and turning the rural guard into Royal Horse Marines commanded by Marshal Murphy. The banditti were named Jacksheppardo, Dickturpino and Clauduvallo.32 Gilbert’s more faithful translation was published and announced for a production at the Gaiety, but never opened.33 When it was eventually produced at the Avenue Theatre on 16 September 1889, George Bernard Shaw considered Gilbert’s book nearer in spirit to the original, although Leigh’s lyrics flowed more smoothly.34 Here too the satiric edge of the French original was blunted. The audience reception was tepid. Gilbert made no effort to promote his adaptation, though the chorus of tardy carabiniere would re-​emerge in The Pirates of Penzance as the pusillanimous police. In 1873 he and Frederic Clay had launched an unsuccessful imitation of opéra bouffe, based on an interpolated tale in The Pickwick Papers which, in true Gilbertian fashion, involved an exchange of bodies. The Gentleman in Black was greeted with indifference at the Charing Cross Theatre. By this time the name Offenbach had become familiar enough to The Illustrated Times (15 Feb. 1868): 103. Geoffrey Wilson, “W. S.  Gilbert and Les brigands,” Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 33 (Sep. 2005): 10. The princess of Grenada was played by a “regular royal queen,” Princess Emma Matchinsky. Rendle, Swings and roundabouts, 111. 33 Jane Stedman, W. S. Gilbert. A classic Victorian and his theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 56, 87. An unauthorized production was mounted at the Casino Theatre in New York in 1889; annoyed at the interpolation of songs by other hands, Gilbert sued the managers. See “Our play-​box,” The Theatre (1 Oct. 1889): 208–​209. 34 Entry dated 20 Sep. 1889, reprinted in G. B. Shaw, London music in 1888–​89 as heard by Corno di Bassetto (New York: Vienna House, 1973), 227–​30. Shaw later complained that libretti to French operas “fell into the hands of a tribe of hack adaptors congenitally deficient in metrical sense, who substituted for the graceful French lyrics abhorrent jingles equally devoid of metre and meaning.” Letter to William Archer (7 Jul. 1906), in G.  B. Shaw, Collected letters 1898–​1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1972): 634. 31

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guarantee theatre-​goers an entertaining evening. One periodical could not refrain from the obvious pun: If Offenbach still pleases     More than fugues of Bach, We shall not hear Bach often    But often Offenbach.35

In January 1875 Selina Dolaro, more a seconda than a prima donna, took a lease on the small Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, intending to open it with La Périchole. The press remarked that the choice “would require careful handling,” and, indeed, the libretto was heavily bowdlerized, with Piquillo as the street singer’s husband.36 The prison scene was suppressed as improper and was not played in English until Emily Soldene’s company staged it in Melbourne in 1878.37 The physical mounting of the opera was praised, even as the reviewers wrung their hands over the plot and the heroine’s second-​act tipsiness, at a time when the stage was professing to cleanse itself.38 Dolaro’s manager, Richard D’Oyly Carte, decided that the piece was not drawing sufficiently, and suggested that his friend Sullivan collaborate with Gilbert on a curtain-​raiser. The two had already produced a failed burlesque, Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old, in which the superannuated deities hire itinerant actors to take on their duties. There were obvious borrowings from Orphée and Hélène: a second act set on Olympus, and a multi-​verse song in which each actor introduces the god he impersonates. Gilbert’s suggestion to Carte of a half-​hour operetta set in a law court resulted in Trial by Jury on 25 March. It proved to be a great hit, eclipsing the Offenbach opera it preceded as well as Madame l’Archiduc at another theatre. Exotic Lima and Ruritanian cross-​dressing proved to be less to the public taste than the Old Bailey. The press applauded the partners’ patriotic triumph over Gallic licentiousness.39 When Dolaro toured Périchole to Manchester, the local press scolded her for bringing such an obscenity to so moral a city.40 She attempted a revival at the Folly Theatre in 1879 and it failed. The Music Halls’ Gazette (15 Aug. 1868): 148, column 3. “I prefer Offenbach to Bach often” has been attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham. 36 Figaro-​Programme (23 Jan. 1875): 13. 37 Emily Soldene, “‘La Périchole’: a memory,” The Sketch (27 Oct. 1897): 24. 38 Figaro-​Programme (6 Feb. 1875): 12. In Geneviève de Brabant, Dolaro paced up and down the stage with a rose in her teeth years before Carmen was written. Penny Illustrated Paper (2 Oct. 1872): 234. 39 See, e.g., “Our captious critic,” Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (24 Apr. 1875). 40 Saturday-​Programme (3 Jun. 1875): 12. This London reporter considered the outrage to be “humbug,” coming as it did from audiences that enjoyed Wilkie Collins’s New Magdalen and the unbowdlerized plays of Shakespeare and Sheridan. 35

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Trial by Jury resembles in many respects the kind of musical farce that Offenbach had staged at the Bouffes:  it is witty, original, and rife with melody. Indeed, Shaw later claimed it held no novelty for him, because he had cut his musical teeth on Offenbach.41 However, it had the benefit of a full cast and chorus and is devoid of sexual innuendo (even though the defendant Edwin is a serial wooer). Offenbach intended to pique the bourgeoisie, while the “good, clean fun” of Gilbert and Sullivan entertained without raising a blush. For all of Gilbert’s satire of establishment conventions and Sullivan’s teasing of musical traditions, they are hardly subversive. Compare the two Arcadian shepherds, Pâris in La Belle Hélène and Strephon in Iolanthe. The disguised prince of Troy passes himself off as a vision in order to sleep with Helen (and succeeds). Strephon is a fairy “from the waist down,” a joke that Meilhac and Halévy would have exploited for all it is worth, but which Gilbert renders innocuous. One of D’Oyly Carte’s motivations in installing Gilbert and Sullivan as an annual event at the Opera Comique was the fact that the playhouse was tainted by its association with French immorality. To ensure a steady stream of respectable playgoers, Carte needed to rebrand it as the home of a more indigenous, more rational, less objectionable form of entertainment. He advertised the national flavor of Sullivan’s music and Gilbert’s cerebral style of wit, along with the impeccable propriety of the entertainment. He also stressed the respectability of the troupe and the decorum that reigned backstage. A leaflet promoting H.M.S. Pinafore contained his manifesto: About ten years ago the Entertainment known as “Opera Bouffe” was imported from France to England and made a considerable stir here. The pieces produced, however, only suited a limited section of the public. They were adaptations of French pieces of more or less questionable character, and it was found by the adaptors most difficult to make them satisfactory for England.42

Even after success had enabled Carte to move Gilbert and Sullivan into the newly built Savoy Theatre, immaculate in every respect, he continued to contrast the refined Englishness of his enterprise with French depravity. For a while, the French and English styles co-​existed. Sullivan’s one-​ act “musical absurdity” The Zoo shared the bill with Les Géorgiennes at the Entry dated 13 Dec. 1890, in G. B. Shaw, Music in London 1890–​94 (New York: Vienna House, 1973), I, 283. 42 October–​November 1879. Quoted in Regina B.  Oost, Gilbert and Sullivan. Class and the Savoy tradition, 1875–​1896 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), 49. 41

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St James’s Theatre in June 1875. H.M.S Pinafore enjoyed a revival not long before Madame Favart made her bow at the Strand Theatre on 12 April 1879, again in a Farnie version; Florence St John, who made her London debut in the title role, became a star, beloved for her rendition of the “Convent Song.”43 Favart broke records, running for 502 performances, its only rivals Les cloches de Corneville and Pinafore. In 1880 The Pirates of Penzance opened the same week as a well-​received La fille du tambour-​major at the Alhambra; Pirates, however, played for a year before going on tour. Gradually the domestic product edged out the French import, especially after the widely toured success of Pinafore. In April 1881 Farnie’s version of La boulangère at the Globe Theatre competed with Patience at the Opera Comique. The former, in which the future tragedian Richard Mansfield made his London debut, was adjudged of little interest and quickly closed, while the latter chalked up 578 performances over twenty months. Once Gilbert and Sullivan had become an accepted team, housed at the Savoy, they instituted reforms meant to eradicate the vulgarities of the Offenbach school. Male romantic leads would not be played by toothsome young women in tights (although male-​to-​female transvestitism was allowed in Princess Ida, perhaps in homage to Rossini’s Le Comte Ory). Some saw this as a natural evolution: farce was supplanted by burlesque, which in turn was eclipsed by opéra bouffe, which lost out to comic opera.44 However, the familiarity of Gilbert and Sullivan with their Parisian predecessor could not help but infuse their operas with reminiscences of his work, particularly Les brigands. The bandit leader Falsacappa’s protest that “one must steal according to the position one occupies in society” has a Gilbertian ring to it.45 Falsacappa exclaims “Marry my daughter to an honest man! Never!”, echoed by the Pirate King’s objection to having a Major-general as a father-in-law. At the time, critics noticed the kinship of the policemen to the carabineers who always arrive too late.46 Sullivan seems to have recalled the opening chorus “Deux par deux ou bien par trois” when he set “Carefully on tiptoe stealing” in Pinafore, and the second-​act comic number “Nous avons, ce matin, tous deux” for “When I first put this uniform on” in Patience. Fiorella’s solo was later adapted by Gilbert for a quartet in his operetta Princess Toto, set Charles Eyre Pascoe, Dramatic notes. An illustrated handbook of the London theatres, 1879 (London: David Bogue, 1879), 52. 44 “Dramatic notes,” The Westminster Papers 11 (1 Feb. 1879): 226. 45 See the program note to the Opéra-​Bastille production of Les brigands, 1993. Curiously, the line echoes that of Gogol’s Mayor in The Inspector General, who warns a policeman “Don’t take bribes above your rank.” 46 Gilbert also had recourse to the kidnap plot in The Brigands for his non-​Sullivan operetta The Mountebanks. 43

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to music by Frederick Clay. Nanki-​Poo’s attempted suicide in The Mikado seems a pale imitation of Piquillo’s failed hanging from a balcony in La Périchole. Perhaps the most repeated borrowing from Offenbach was the comic lover –​good-​looking but rather dim –​who gets the girl in the end. Gilbert has occasionally been deemed “the English Aristophanes.”47 Given the Greek’s unbridled jokes about sex and his all-​out assault on human nature, Gilbert’s satiric shafts seem tipped. What they have in common is the introduction of fantastic or supernatural elements into the normal course of Athenian or English life. (Offenbach and his collaborators hardly ever have recourse to magical devices, but prefer modern science to provide an extra-​natural frisson.) Gilbert may seem superior to Offenbach’s librettists in the tightness of his plots and the ingenuity of his rhymes, but his characters are invariably driven by financial, logical, or cerebral motives. Passion, particularly female passion, exemplified by Helen and La Périchole, and libidinous curiosity, exemplified by Jupiter and the Baron de Gondremarck, are alien to Gilbert. His lovers never lose their heads; they exchange partners not out of promiscuity but as a result of the expediency dictated by events.48 Adultery is out of the question, since the few married couples in Gilbert are either grotesque, like Sir Despard and Mad Margaret in Ruddigore, or elderly, like the Duke and Duchess of Plaza-​ Toro in The Gondoliers. A comparison of La Périchole and The Gondoliers may be instructive, since the plots bear a close resemblance to one another. In the former, the title character and her lover are married by stratagem and then ennobled so that she may become the mistress of the Viceroy of Peru. In the latter, Luigi and Guiseppe marry their sweethearts, and are then immediately separated from them to become the Kings of Barataria. Despite some satiric thrusts at Spanish pride, the motor of La Périchole is sexual attraction and the heroine is given three arias which brilliantly express her mixed feelings on abandoning Piquillo, her tipsy exuberance at court life, and her adoration of her lover for all his faults. There are no love songs per se in The Gondoliers, nor any that explore the characters’ inner feelings. Shaw was perhaps Gilbert’s harshest critic in this respect. He much preferred the characters of Meilhac and Halévy, “persons of engaging culture, reasonableness, amiability and address” “made irresistibly ridiculous By, e.g., Walter Sichel, “The English Aristophanes,” The Fortnightly Review 96 (1911) and Edith Hamilton, “W. S. Gilbert: a mid-​Victorian Aristophanes,” Theatre Arts Monthly 11 (1927): 781–​90. 48 See George McElroy, “Meilhac and Halévy –​and Gilbert: comic converses,” in Gilbert and Sullivan. Papers presented at the International Conference held at the University of Kansas in May 1970, ed. James Helyar (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Libraries, 1971), 91–​105. 47

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by an exquisite folly,” “at once miracles of wit and sensibility and monsters of moral obtuseness” to what he saw as Gilbert’s brutalized, embittered, middle-​class, mechanical puppets.49 An equally inappropriate sobriquet, “The English Offenbach,” was frequently applied to Sullivan, who bridled at it. He wrote to his biographer B. W. Findon “This epithet of ‘the English Offenbach’ was given me in a burst of ill-​natured spleen by G. A. Macfaren, and he used it in his article on Music in the Encyclopædia Britannica. It was never used as a compliment.”50 Somehow Eduard Hanslick in Vienna came across it and repeated it as a compliment in his review of The Mikado. For him, Sullivan’s terse forms, well-​chosen rhythms, fitness for the voice and judiciously arranged orchestration were all lessons learnt at Offenbach’s knee. Nevertheless, Sullivan rarely if ever attains Dionysian ebullience (compare “Take a pair of sparkling eyes” or “La cacucha” in The Gondoliers with “Soupons, soupons, c’est le moment” in La vie parisienne); when he attempts deep emotion in his more serious pieces, it is tainted by sentimentality and religiosity. The melting poignancy of La Périchole’s letter aria or the Antonia act of Les contes d’Hoffmann was beyond him. It is typical of both Gilbert and Sullivan that one of their most lyrical numbers, “The Moon and I” in The Mikado, is a paean to narcissism.

Divas on the Road The perpetuation of Offenbach, during the imperial progress of the Savoy operas, was due in large part to enterprising managers, who carefully gauged the taste of their audience and the capacities of their companies. John Hollingshead at the Gaiety had introduced Rose of Auvergne into his Christmas bill for 1869, and followed it with The Princess of Trebizonde as the Easter novelty of 1870 because he had no problem casting it with his existing troupe. Offenbach watched the opening night from a box at the Gaiety. In traditional manner, the comedian J. L. Toole as Cabriolo was allowed to “work up” his part, making considerable additions to the words of Charles Lamb Kenney. Hollingshead claimed that his chorus girls were better looking and better dressed than their Parisian equivalents. He also Entry dated 20 Sep. 1889, in Shaw, London music in 1888–​89, 227–​30. Quoted in Carl Van Vechten, “Sir Arthur Sullivan” (5 Jan. 1919), in In the garret (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), 178–​79. The letter of 16 August 1899 is quoted with somewhat different wording in Catalogue 137 of Gary Combs Autographs (New York, 2015), 141–​42.

49 50

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put on Barbe-​bleue in four days, with Julia Matthews as Boulotte and a single orchestra run-​through.51 Matthews and other touring divas were a significant factor in keeping Offenbach on English stages, for they could shine more brightly in star roles created for Lise Tautin, Hortense Schneider, and Zulma Bouffar than in the ensembles of Gilbert and Sullivan. One of these divas was Emily Soldene. She was not a beauty, and when she sang the generosity of her mouth became very apparent. A Chicago critic claimed her mouth was so big it would take two men to kiss her.52 However, she had sharp wit, good legs, and a voice that ranged from mezzo to lyric soprano.53 Soldene’s earliest experience of Offenbach had come in the music-​ halls as Miss FitzHenry singing tabloid versions of Orphée and Les 66; she then did a stint as Julia Matthews’s understudy in La Grande-​Duchesse54 and Boulotte in Barbe-​bleue (1869) (she had led the cast in the potted Grand Duchess that created a scandal in Islington in 1870). Her biggest personal hit was in a breeches role, the pastry-​cook Drogan in the vastly popular Geneviève de Brabant, which opened at the Philharmonic Theatre, Islington, on 11 November 1871. Its popularity may owe something to the refashioning of the work: The original plot was so distorted as to become incomprehensible, the weak dialogue was spiced with vulgar, well-​worn jokes and clap-​trap “topical” allusions; the music was similarly ill-​treated. Solos and trios were turned into choruses in order that the stage might be filled with young girls, dressed in silk fleshings, and little else; a “Kiss Song,” and other compositions not even selected from Offenbach’s works, were interpolated, and art was thrust into the background in order that dissolute young “gents” and battered old rakes be attracted.55

Pictures of Soldene in her beret and apron were ubiquitous: they appeared on posters, sauce bottles, and all manner of advertisements.56 It was this John Hollingshead, Gaiety Chronicles (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1898), 104, 122–​25, 151, 183. Also see “Offenbach at the Gaiety,” Penny Illustrated Paper (23 Apr. 1870): 266. 52 Edward B.  Marks, They all had glamour, from the Swedish Nightingale to the Naked Lady (New York: Julian Messner, 1944), 49. In Manchester, a Lancashire lad in the pit exclaimed “Say, Bill, Manchester ship canal is open at last.” Russell Craufurd, The ramblings of an old mummer (London: Greening & Co., 1909), 110–​11. 53 Emily Soldene, My theatrical and musical recollections (London: Downey & Co., 1897). She is also the subject of a garrulous two-​volume biography by Kurt Gänzl. 54 She reports that Matthews would eat fish and chips in her second-​act military costume, leaving large grease spots. 55 Henry Hersee, “Opéra-​bouffe,” The Theatre (1 Nov. 1878): 283–​84. 56 Penny Illustrated Paper (12 Oct. 1872): 234. 51

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production that introduced audiences to the Gendarmes’ duet in Farnie’s version, with its chorus of “We run ’em in, we run ’em in, because we’re the bold gendarmes.” After seventeen encores on the opening night, it became a perennial standard of male duets. After a stint as the Grand Duchess at the Lyceum, Soldene went into management. The Soldene Opéra-​ Bouffe Company took its repertoire of Offenbach, Lecocq, and Hervé to America, and in 1877 to Australia and New Zealand, where she was welcomed rapturously. Well into the 1890s, with a much expanded waist, she was performing Drogan, the Grand Duchess, Boulotte, Marietta, and La Périchole in both hemispheres. She was last seen as Drogan in Australia in 1892, at the age of fifty-​four, after which she turned to journalism and died in London in 1912. Soldene’s globe-​trotting broadcast Offenbachian comic opera throughout the English-​speaking world, often in locales where French-​language companies were unknown. She maintained a high level of quality and made sure that the female chorus was composed of talents that were appealing both vocally and physically. She might also be seen as a prototype of the musical-​comedy star whose public expects to see her in the same role for decades. This had been common in the dramatic theatre, when a tragedian might play a Shakespeare role or Joseph Jefferson might enact Rip Van Winkle throughout his lifetime. New methods of transport and publicity now extended this privilege to the musical comedy stage. Drogan and the Grand Duchess became for Emily Soldene what Dolly Levi would later be for Carol Channing. The prominence of attractive leading ladies as the cynosure of these productions contributed to the popular image of Offenbach as a showcase for feminine attractions. When an English version of Ambroise Thomas’s Le caïd was introduced by the Carl Rosa Company in Manchester in 1881, The Theatre thought it unlikely to attract the British public, in part because its chorus was wholly masculine. Offenbach and Sullivan had accustomed it to “plenty of the female element, either among the principals or in the chorus.”57

Refinements Andrew Lamb is blunt: “the importance of Offenbach’s work in London in the 1880s sank as rapidly as it had risen in the late 1860s.”58 A survey of the W. Davenport Adams, “Our musical-​box,” The Theatre (1 Feb. 1881): 119. Lamb, “Offenbach in London,” 191.

57 58

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English obituaries of Offenbach that appeared in 1880 reveals a consensus of low opinion. There was grudging admiration for his musical skills, but a disdain for the frivolity and indecency of his libretti. No one expected his works to survive, although “his name will be remembered as a curious phenomenon in the history of art and civilization.”59 A  reviewer of the Alhambra Fille du tambour-​major, still running, shrugged, “Serious criticism of this class of music is obviously out of place,” and lamented that Sullivan had turned to comic opera.60 The Spectator editorialized thus: “A man of distinct though thin genius, with the sensuousness of the true Jew character, the author of La Grande-​Duchesse passed his life in demoralizing music. So far as the feat is possible, he made indecency harmonious.”61 The 1880 edition of George Groves’s A Dictionary of Music and Musicians handed down the official verdict more in sorrow than in anger: “It is melancholy to predict that of all these musical bouffonneries, little or nothing will remain; since in order to live, a work of art must possess either style or passion, while these too often display merely a vulgar skepticism, and a determination to be funny even at the cost of propriety and taste.”62 In fact, the overwhelming fad for Gilbert and Sullivan and their epigones, paralleled by the popularity of opéras comiques with a romantic love interest, effectively shunted Offenbach on to a siding. William Archer could crow, in 1883, that “the general public seems, for the moment at any rate, to have turned its back upon the flesh pots of Egypt … owing to powerful native competition in the shape of those most popular entertainments of the day, the Gilbert-​Sullivan operettas … The victory of Gilbertian extravaganza over opera-​bouffe as adapted for the London market, is the victory of literary and musical grace and humour over rampant vulgarity and meretricious jingle.”63 Only those of Offenbach’s late works that downplayed sexuality and absurdity and pointed up sentimental relations enjoyed some favor. Even so prudish a chaperone as Lewis Carroll, outraged by children saying “Damme!” in the juvenile Pinafore, felt free to take four little girls and a boy to Madame Favart on two separate occasions, noting “the children enjoyed it thoroughly.”64 Offenbach’s transition from paragon of Obituary of Offenbach, The Times (6 Oct. 1880). The Times (20 Apr. 1880), quoted in George Hauger, “Offenbach: English obituaries and realities,” Musical Times 12, 1652 (1980): 620. 61 The Spectator (9 Oct. 1880): 1271. 62 Quoted in Lamb, “Offenbach in London,” 193. 63 William Archer, About the theatre. Essays and studies (London: T. F. Unwin, 1886), 20–​21. 64 Letters dated 4 Oct. and 20 Dec. 1879. The letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. Morton N.  Cohen and Roger Lancelyn Green (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), I, 357. Carroll attended the show 59

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prurience to a good outing for the kiddies speaks volumes for the shift in public taste. Shaw noted of an 1893 revival of Madame Favart in Farnie’s outdated recension that it was “quite mild and domestic … Of the true Offenbachianismus –​the restless movement, the witty abandonment, the swift, light, wicked touch, the inimitable sly élan stealing into concerted pieces as light as puff paste –​there is not a trace left.”65 This innocuousness enabled a series of Offenbach revivals in London in the 1880s and 1890s, with many of the operas of the 1860s and 1870s appearing as novelties. La vie parisienne was burlesqued at the Avenue Theatre in 1883, billed simply as La vie: the action was relocated to England, all scabrous incidents were suppressed, and the Baron’s wife was metamorphosed into his daughter, allowing a wedding at the final curtain.66 An adaptation of La belle Lurette at the same theatre the same year with Florence St John in the lead was praised for being free of the traditional embarrassment of Anglicized French comic opera: “feeble, clumsy, and frequently ungrammatical libretti […], last but not least, a disagreeable flavour of vulgarity.” The production was described as “pretty and taking,” “blithesomely unintellectual” (a swipe at Gilbert), even though Offenbach was accused of plagiarizing Johann Strauss.67 When La Périchole showed up at the Royalty in 1887, Mme Humberta was praised for her refinement and grace, and her “scrupulously genteel intoxication.”68 Delicacy and fine feeling were cited as qualities of Mary Albert’s Grand Duchess at the Royalty in 1888, and such terms as “exquisite” and “artistic” appeared in the reviews.69 D’Oyly Carte had overreached himself in thinking that the British public would welcome a theatre devoted exclusively to English grand opera. As his magnificent Royal Opera House was failing in 1892, Gilbert recommended that good new productions of four Offenbach operas in repertory might play there for a year.70 Instead, Carte sold the freehold, but found that even the Gilbert and Sullivan standbys were beginning to show their age. “Is the Savoy Opera played out?” was the title of an article by Ernest Kube that appeared in 1896. When La Périchole in a version by H. T. Brickwell and starring the inevitable Florence St John opened at the four times and greatly admired Florence St John. Also see Richard Foulkes, Lewis Carroll and the Victorian stage: theatricals in a quiet life (London: Ashgate, 2005), 182. 65 Entry dated 26 Jul. 1893, in G. B. Shaw, Music in London 1890–​94, III, 94–​97. 66 “Our play-​box,” The Theatre (1 Nov. 1883): 259–​60. 67 “Our play-​box,” The Theatre (1 May 1883): 296. 68 “French plays at the Royalty,” Era (10 Dec. 1887). 69 “Our omnibus-​box,” The Theatre (1 Feb. 1888): 111. 70 Letter to Helen D’Oyly Carte, 17 Jun. 1892, quoted in Stedman, W. S. Gilbert, 287.

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Garrick on 14 September 1897, The Theatre declared “Offenbach has been neglected too long.” He could now be appreciated as a classic. The Times, which, at the time of his death, had relegated him to oblivion, now lauded his “fresh charm” and chided those who thought his work “drivel.”71 Carte finally took the hint and brought out La Grande-​Duchesse at the hitherto untainted Savoy. This was welcomed as a “return to a form of entertainment which is by no means an unwelcome substitute for the ‘musical piece’ more or less void of form which dispossessed comic opera in the favour of the public.”72 This was a backhanded slap at the revue-​style musical comedy, in which a loosely knit fabric of song, dance, and comic routines was hung on a skeletal plot. Many reviewers hoped that the traditional comic opera would compel performers to follow a script that had not been tailored to their personalities. Shaw, in his role as music critic, welcomed the return of the “inimitable effervescence of Offenbach.”73 “I delight in Offenbach,” he wrote to the actress Viola Tree.74 When his colleague William Archer published an article on the revival of Gilbert and Sullivan, Shaw was not being contrarian when he riposted “I don’t think it can be honestly said that any Gilbert-​Sullivan opera touched La Grande Duchesse or Fra Diavolo; in my opinion a revival of Savoy opera would be resurrection pie with a good deal of ptomaine in it.”75 He was convinced that new English libretti and recasting of the transvestite roles would work wonders for an Offenbach revival. So he may have been bemused when the Times reviewer of Caesar and Cleopatra thought it would be improved by a score by Offenbach. Shaw’s remark to Viola Tree had been prompted by the news that her father, the celebrated actor-​manager Herbert Beerbohm-​Tree, was about to stage the first important resuscitation of an Offenbach opéra bouffe in the new century. Orpheus in the Underground, opening at His Majesty’s Theatre on 20 December 1911, was greeted as a welcome, long-​absent friend. “All Offenbach is good, but some kinds of Offenbach are better than others,” opined The Times.76 The appearance of an opéra bouffe at this haven of

See Hauger, “Obituaries,” 620–​21. “The Garrick Theatre,” London Daily News (15 Sep. 1897). 73 Shaw (8 Jul. 1891), Music in London 1890–​94, I, 240. 74 Letter dated 17 Dec. 1911, in G.  B. Shaw, Collected letters 1911–​ 1925, ed. Dan H.  Laurence (New York: Viking, 1985), 65. 75 Letter to William Archer (7 Jul. 1906); Shaw, Collected letters 1898–​1910, 634. 76 The Times (21 Dec. 1911). Other reviews of that date drawn on for this description are “Orpheus up to date,” Evening Standard and St James’ Gazette; “Orpheus in the Underground. Spectacle, pretty music and mild fun,” Daily News; “Orpheus at His Majesty’s. Triumph of Offenbach. Melody 71 72

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poetic drama was not unlike Richard Eyre’s production of Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre in 1982, and caused a not dissimilar reaction. The book by Alfred Noyes and Tree himself was considered the weakest link. Too loose and incoherent, striving to be clever, allusive, and topical, it displayed a good deal of self-​consciousness. What Tree had advertised as “an intellectual romp” was too often heavy-​handed, its sense of humor “too English.” Public Opinion was rethought as an early Victorian Mrs Grundy, alias Phyllis Tine, in a poke bonnet, flounced hoop skirt, buttoned green gloves, a green hair-​ribbon, and a diminutive green parasol. She spoke in the rhymed couplets of burlesque: Gods will be gods, but, oh, the cursed spite That I should have mythology to write.

Referring to the benighted prudishness of the audience’s grandparents, she assured it in the Prologue that British proprieties would not be outraged: But I am here, the dual Censor’s chance To make quite English what proceeds from France.

In line with this, the production trod lightly, striving for elegance and innocence. The scene in Hades was pocked with cuts, and, as the Times teased, “The sofa that fills the foreground has lost its significance; it is no longer Crébillon’s but Cowper’s.” To compensate for the muted licentiousness, the text and the staging were packed with the kind of topical allusions common to Christmas pantomime and up-​to-​date revue. Orpheus was portrayed as a “post-​impressionist” musician and, in the finale, Pluto appeared as Svengali, an in-​joke about Tree’s famous performance as the hypnotic musician. A  balloon took visitors to Olympus and a lift brought them to Hades. Cupid used the telephone and Venus called for a taxi. The music was praised: “the ear [was] entranced with the unceasing melody” (Evening Standard); “a kind of virus that gets into the blood” (Times); the music “goes to the head. It goes to the feet” (Westminster Gazette). The score, however, was tampered with; Frederick Norton, composer of Pinky and the Fairies and, five years later, the long-​running Chu Chin Chow, musical-​ comedized it. Orpheus was given a song about how the waltz came into being, and the tightrope song from La Princesse de Trébizonde was inserted for Cupid. and splendor,” The Standard; “Offenbach back again,” The Era; and “‘Orpheus’ at His Majesty’s,” Westminster Gazette.

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The most successful aspect of this revival was the scenery and costumes by Percy Anderson, which represented a fresh school of stage design, “the ‘new art’ idealized and beautified” (Evening Standard). Act One, a Watteau glade, was praised as a vision of charm. In the second act, retitled “In the Clouds,” Olympus was a glorified valentine, a thing of rotund cupids and garlands of highly decorative flowers, peopled by Louis Quinze divinities. Act Three, “In the Shades,” suggested the art of Gordon Craig “in its simplicity and effectiveness: the revelers in the richest of red costumes were brilliantly picked out against a background of ink-​black drapery.” And why should Beerbohm Tree, the foremost producer of Shakespeare and high-​class melodrama in London, have embarked on such a venture? 1911 had seen the visits of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and Max Reinhardt’s Orientalist pantomime Sumurûn, with their barbaric color and sensual movement; Viennese operetta, exemplified by The Count of Luxembourg, and indigenous musical comedy, headed by The Arcadians and La Mousmé, played to full houses for months. Tree was eager to get on the bandwagon, but without opening himself to accusations of vulgarity or selling-​out. What better as a vehicle for musical extravaganza than Offenbach, for Offenbach was now a classic? Nevertheless, Offenbach had such a longstanding reputation as a composer of racy operettas that few could take him seriously as an opera composer. Reporting on the French premiere of Les contes d’Hoffmann, The Theatre was unimpressed and wondered whether it would find favor in English dress. “I should say the British public would regard the ‘Contes’ rather as ‘Contes à dormer debout.’”77 One touring actor saw a production at Marseilles and recommended it to the play-​doctor H. B. Farnie, who claimed he knew the work well, but “it would be very difficult to cast it with English artists.”78 He may have been right, since English critics regularly complained of the poor quality of the musical interpretation of comic opera. Writing in 1930, Scott Goddard could claim that Hoffmann had still not been heard in England.79 He probably meant as sung in French or English, since a German production had played it in London in 1907. Shaw was in the audience at the Adelphi and found it “quite worth hearing.”80 He was one of the few. Its impresario, Hans Gregor, lost £8,000 in six weeks. The opera would not receive an English production until 1910. “Our omnibus-​box,” The Theatre (1 Mar. 1881): 186. Russell Craufurd, Ramblings of an old mummer (London: Greening, 1909), 132. 79 Scott Goddard, “Offenbach und England,” Der Auftakt 10, 9–​10 (Sep.–​Oct. 1930): 209. 80 Letter to Harley Granville-​Barker (24 May 1907), Shaw, Collected letters 1898–​1910, 689–​90. 77 78

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4.2.  The finale of Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Orpheus in the Underworld, His Majesty’s Theatre; sketch by Balliol Solomon (London Graphic, 30 Dec. 1911).

Ch apter 5

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A Welcome Immigrant The French press never tired of mocking the prudishness of North Americans. In 1883, the Courrier des États-​Unis reveled in news of a recent Canadian trial. Maurice Grau’s English-​language opera company had brought La Périchole to Montreal, and one night a student named Vaillancourt objected so vociferously that he was removed to a police station. When the case came before the recorder the next morning, the defense attorney argued that his client deserved public gratitude for setting a moral example by hissing such an immoral piece. The magistrate fully concurred, adding that, had he been present, he too would have hissed non-​stop. Enthusiastically acquitting the rowdy student, he told the lessee of the Academy of Music that he would be in contempt of the law if he allowed similar pieces to be performed in his theatre.1 Ultra-​Catholic Montreal was notorious for its philistinism; archbishops and parish priests inveighed from the pulpit against Offenbach’s alleged obscenity, from Les deux aveugles in 1859 to La Princesse de Trébizonde in 1874. Samuel Butler’s 1878 “Psalm of Montreal” with its chorus of “O God, O Montreal!” had been occasioned by the removal of a nude statue of the Discobolus to an attic. English Canada was not so priggish. When Julia Matthews visited Toronto in 1876 with La Grande-​Duchesse de Gérolstein, she was gratified with crowded houses and invitations to come back soon.2 And by the end of the century the newly founded lyric theatre the Opéra français de Montréal had made Offenbach a fixture in its repertoire, opening in 1893 with La fille du tambour-​major.3

“Our omnibus-​box,” The Theatre (1 Aug. 1883): 89. The Era (27 Feb. 1876): 5b. 3 Louis Bilodeau, “Offenbach à Montréal avant 1914,” in Le théâtre français à l’étranger au XIXe siècle. Histoire d’une suprématie culturelle (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2008), 90–​106. 1 2

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The United States was itself Offenbach-​mad throughout the late 1860s and 1870s, although there too the enthusiasm was tempered by moral reprobation. This push-​me-​pull-​you tension was the result of severe upheavals in American society. Offenbach was introduced early, because most major centers had sizeable French and German communities; their love of the stage was patent and they were more than willing to make allowances for racy material. Les deux aveugles (1858), La chatte metamorphosée en femme (1859), La rose de Saint-​Flour (1863), Tromb-​al-​ca-​zar, La mariage aux lanternes, Le violoneux and Ba-​ta-​clan (all 1864), performed in French, were warmly welcomed in New York.4 Le mariage aux lanternes, as Die Verlobung beim Laternenscheine, enjoyed a strong performance with Zélie de Lussan; Orpheus in der Unterwelt was first sung in New York in German in 1861, whereas the French original was not heard for another six years. For all his European fame, Offenbach’s obscurity even with American-​ born connoisseurs can be gauged from an entry in the diary of George Templeton Strong. Strong, a prominent abolitionist lawyer in New York and a well-​informed amateur singer, recorded of the German Orpheus that … we went downtown to the plebeian Stadt Theatre [sic] in the Bowery, where we saw Orpheus in der Unterwelt, a funny extravaganza that has had a great run in Paris. Music by the celebrated Offenbach, whoever he is, rather piquant and Frenchy. It includes one or two appropriations from Haydn, scraps of Volkslied […] and lovely larcenies from the Zauberflöte.5

That the musically well-​informed Strong had never heard of Offenbach was telling, as is his assumption that the composer is simply a magpie building a nest of pilfered melodies. Offenbach rapidly moved into the limelight after the Civil War. The actor-​manager H. L. Bateman, having seen La Grande-​Duchesse in Paris, obtained the rights and brought a French company, headed by Lucille Tostée, to the Théâtre Français on Fourteenth Street, New York, barely five months after the French premiere. The success was phenomenal; the sporting and theatrical journal The Spirit of the Times reported that “It sparkles from beginning to end, bubbles over with merriment, carries the audience away by its exhilarating effects and arouses them to enthusiasm.”6 At a time An English version of Les deux aveugles called Going It Blind had made an appearance at Wallack’s Theatre in New York in 1859. James Oliver Morgan, French comic opera in New York, 1855–​1890 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1959), 36–​47, 51–​52. 5 Entry dated 12 Mar. 1861, in The diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New  York:  Macmillan, 1952), III, 109. The nine successive performances of the Stadttheater stock company had a great success. 6 The Spirit of the Times (5 Oct. 1867). 4

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5.1.  Theodor L’Arronge as Jupiter and Hedwig Sury as Eurydice in Orpheus in der Unterwelt, Neues Stadttheater, New York (1867). Photo: K. W. Beniczsky, New York.

when the standard run was thirty performances, The Grand Duchess ran for 156, from 24 September 1867 to 21 March 1868, while Max Maretzek’s well-​ established opera company played to empty houses. Piano reductions were hammered out in every drawing-​room, and barrel-​organs ground out the tunes on street corners, especially “Le sabre de mon père,” “Dites-​lui,” and “Pif, paf, pouf.” Waltzes and polkas were carved out of the score, and the label “Grand Duchess” was applied to groceries and garments. Burlesques flourished. Not even Sunday schools were immune, for the show’s hit tune was wrought into Take now this Bible –​    This Bible, this Bible –​ Take now this Bible …    The Bible of your sires.7

Not until H.M.S. Pinafore twelve years later would an operetta so thoroughly enter the New York bloodstream. Templeton Strong attended and found it “lively nonsense, admirably well brought out, with the most delightful caricatures of the manners and Quoted in Deane L. Root, American popular music 1860–​1880 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1977), 117. The script for Lotta Crabtree’s popular adaptation of The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Nell and the Marchioness (1866–​1867), provides for eight encores, the final one a tune from The Grand Duchess.

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costumes of court and camp a hundred and fifty years ago.” This time he judged Offenbach’s music to be “very pretty and not at all profound, but considerably better than that of most ‘grand’ operas of the Verdi school.”8 He would take his dinner guests to see it, and over time his opinion of Offenbach improved. A month later, with General Adam Badeau of Grant’s staff in tow, he judged it “exceedingly fresh, pretty, and sparkling”; when he considered drafting Grant as a presidential candidate, he alluded to the opera’s plot: “[Grant] is in the position of Fritz with the ‘Grande Duchesse’ making love to him. Acceptance involves the sacrifice of ‘Wanda,’ that is, his office of general-​in-​chief for life.”9 Early the next year he noted: A very spirited performance. The music grows on one. The melodies are saucy, piquant, and pretty, and some of them are rather more than that. […] A more reckless, abandoned piece of extravagant fun and nonsense was surely never put on stage. Some people call it immoral, but I don’t. One cannot predicate morality or immorality of an extravaganza, like Bombastes Furioso or Tom Thumb. Vulgar it may be, but not in a way to hurt anybody.10

Strong was a devout Episcopalian, but sufficiently urbane to understand that moral objections were misplaced. Besides, a performance in French necessarily limited any damage to those patricians best capable of understanding it. Bateman followed La Duchesse with La belle Hélêne, which, opening on 16 March 1868, attained 156 performances. The audience was described as “remarkable in point of intelligence, brilliancy, and number.” Tostée was irresistible in her grace, dignity, and “abandon,” singing a passionate “Amour divin.” In her duet with Pâris, she was said to demonstrate “an art devoid of all suspicion of indecency” which redeemed ostensibly obscene dialogue and incident from “all taint of offensiveness.”11 Nevertheless, Hélène was the first of Offenbach’s operas to be attacked in New York for indecency. The Tribune regretted that seduction and passion should be made respectable: “the language is gross … filled with indecent innuendoes … the action in places is vile”; Dwight’s Journal of Music in Boston fulminated that, had the dialogue been in English, “no modest woman would go a second time.”12 Strong, Diary (9 Mar. 1867), IV, 152–​53. Strong, Diary (6 Nov. 1867), IV, 163; (5 Dec. 1867), IV, 172. The whole New York press was remarkably indulgent; see excerpts in Morgan, French comic opera, 68–​81. 10 Strong, Diary (24 Feb. 1868), IV, 191. 11 “French theatre,” unidentified clipping, Harvard Theatre Collection. Also see Root, American Popular Stage Music, Ch. 4. 12 Quoted in Morgan, French comic opera, 85–​91. For Dwight’s Journal of Music’s war on Offenbach, see Harold C. Schonberg, “Music view,” New York Times (8 May 1977): 61. 8

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None of this prevented Bateman from launching a touring company headed by Irma Marié (sister of the operatic divas Célestine Galli-​Marié and Paola Marié), and then moved his French Theatre troupe to Pike’s Opera House. This massive playhouse held 1,800 spectators, but accommodated considerable overflow when a hit was on. The first season had opened on 9 January 1868 with La traviata, but Bateman replaced it with La Grande-​Duchesse. In November, he merged both his troupes so that he could mount six more Offenbach operas in four months: La belle Hélène, Barbe-​bleue, Lischen et Fritzchen, Les bavards, Le chanson de Fortunio, and La Périchole.13 On the opening night of the U.S. premiere of La Périchole in January 1869, President Grant was in a box opposite Josie Mansfield, mistress of the flamboyant stock-​jobber “Colonel” Jim Fisk. On the ninth of that month, Bateman sold his interest in the theatre to Fisk, who renamed it the Grand Opera House. He moved Adolphe Birgfeld’s company from the Fifth Avenue Theatre, and added a few more Offenbachs (Les deux aveugles; Orphée aux enfers), but La vie parisienne, perhaps because it told a contemporary story, evoked less interest than its precursors.14 Unlike the English, who viewed the capital across the Channel as both a sink of corruption and a garden of temptation, most Americans were too unfamiliar with Paris to make sense of the opera’s données. When Les brigands was staged in 1871, journalists could not resist comparing the jolly gang of banditti on stage with Fisk the robber baron, listlessly looking on from his box.15 The Franco-​Prussian war prevented imports from Paris, so Fisk squandered cash to have lavish scenery and costumes run up in New York, in order to accouter an under-​rehearsed troupe of untalented singers. Despite the lack of artistic finish, audiences flocked to this amateur endeavor. Bateman had turned the Théâtre Français over to Jacob Grau, who moved in yet another set of French comic-​opera singers. Although its Grande-​Duchesse was considered inferior to the earlier avatars, Geneviève de Brabant made a great hit, accumulating a hundred performances before embarking on a nationwide tour, despite the fact that some editorialists considered it “infamous,” “the most revolting mass of filth that was ever shown on the boards of a respectable place of amusement in this city,” T. Allston Brown, A history of the New  York stage from the first performance in 1732 to 1901 (New  York:  Dodd, Mead, 1903), II, 451, 599; G.  C. D.  Odell, Annals of the New  York stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), VIII, 341, 454–​56. 14 The Offenbach glut at the Grand Opera House petered out in 1871 with the U.S. premiere of Les Géorgiennes and an “operatic carnival” of four operas, four prima donnas, and four tenors. Allston Brown, A history of the New York stage, II, 599. 15 “Town-​talk. Opera bouffe and its manager,” Every Saturday (4 Feb. 1871): 114. 13

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5.2.  President Grant and Jim Fisk watch the Morlacchi ballet in La Périchole, Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York (18 Jan. 1869). Illustrated Police Gazette.

“even the motif of which is unspeakable to modest ears.”16 Between 1868 and 1870 there were five comic-​opera companies performing Offenbach in The New York Tribune, quoted in Gänzl, Emily Soldene, I, 416.

16

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New York, and for the next twenty years his operas were the staple of the German-​language repertoires. A  French troupe toured to New Orleans, featuring the manager’s wife Aline Lambelle. Another touring company, headed by Léa Silly, went west, where, allegedly, she visited Brigham Young in Salt Lake City and sang him Alsatian yodeling songs, claiming they were by Mozart and Schumann.17 Tostée took Chicago by storm in 1868. She repeated this victory in San Francisco in 1871, the Bulletin reporting that “Offenbach warbles to crowded houses, when Bellini cannot get a hearing.”18 The next year the Aimée Opera Company introduced La Périchole to the city by the sea. Colorado saw the Howson Company’s Grand Duchess in 1869. The female stars of these enterprises earned unheard-​of salaries: Tostée, a better actress than singer, and Rose Bell made $1,000 a month, Irma Marié $1,200 monthly, all paid in gold and no greenbacks. This was at a time when the leading actresses in the best dramatic theatres were paid about fifty dollars a week.19 Tempted by reports of these rewards, boatloads of French performers landed on American shores, sure of winning popularity in Offenbach, Hervé, and Lecocq. Between 1866 and 1873 there were twenty-​ three productions of Offenbach and various burlesques on nine New York stages, accounting for thirty percent of urban performances.20 Adaptations, parodies, burlesques, and blatant piracies proliferated. Minstrel shows throughout the Republic made an Offenbachian take-​off the feature of their second half (Barber Blue, La Bell L.N., The Grand Dutch S, Gin-​nieve de Graw). Kelly & Leon’s Minstrels staged an acclaimed travesty of Orpheus, with its popular female impersonator Francis Leon as Eurydice (1868).21 Paris and Helen, or The Grecian Elopement, an imitation by Molyneux St. John (1867), was run up for the Worrell sisters, shapely song-​and-​dance artistes who assumed the Frédéric Loliée, La fête impériale (Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1912), 159–​61. George Cukor’s film Heller in Pink Tights (1960), based on a novel by Louis de l’Amour, shows a small troupe touring Mazeppa (with Sophia Loren strapped to the horse) and La belle Hélène through the Wild West. In Cheyenne they are banned from performing the latter because of its relaxed attitude to adultery. 18 San Francisco Bulletin (20 Jul. 1869), quoted in Ettore Rella, The history of burlesque. San Francisco Theatre Research, Vol. 14 (San Francisco:  Work Projects Administration, 1940), 112. Also see Edmond Gagey, The San Francisco stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950). 19 George Ellington, The women of New York, or Social life in the great city (New York: New York Book Co., 1870), 525. 20 Peter G. Buckley, “The culture of ‘leg-​work’: the transformation of burlesque after the Civil War,” in The myth-​making frame of mind. Social imagination and American culture, ed. James Gilbert, Amy Gilman, Donald M. Scott, and Joan W. Scott (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1993), 122. Offenbach performances in New York of this period have been tabulated in D. J. Kaiser, The evolution of Broadway musical entertainment 1830–​2009:  interlingual and intermedial influence (Ph.D. dissertation, Washington University, 2013). 21 “Orphee aux enfers,” New York Clipper (14 Nov. 1868): 254; (21 Nov. 1868): 262. 17

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roles of Helen, Paris, and Orestes, the first as an imitation of Tostée, the latter two in costumes half-​male, half-​female. It purported to be a burlesque of the original, but lifted all the music and most of the plot from La belle Hélène, larding it with local allusion and slapstick. The reviewers were not indulgent: “Piquancy is made vulgar … Indelicacy of subject remains while the brilliancy of treatment is wanting … Legs are conspicuous in the performance … Ladies who personate male parts, however, seldom can resist the temptation to show off their form.” It was condemned as “the first burlesque on the subject of adultery ever seen on the New York stage, and we hope it is the last one.”22 One of the oddest manifestations of the American craze for Offenbach was the assimilation of Ba-​ta-​clan (1855) to the realities of immigration. The original is a trifling piece of chinoisierie, in which the “Celestials” discover they are French, launch into Les Huguenots in cod Italian, and sail to France. As Ching Chow Hi it played in London and New York in 1865, with the characters’ nationality altered to suit the venue. Three years later events made it current. The emollient diplomat Anson Burlingame had been sent by Lincoln as emissary to Qing Dynasty China, where his cooperative trade policies made him appreciated. He returned home in 1868 as the Emperor’s “envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary,” and in that role negotiated “most favored nation” status for China and permission for its subjects to win American citizenship.23 This enabled Chinese coolies to work on the Western railways, but raised the ire of anti-​immigration forces pushing for exclusion. With the “Celestials” dominating the news, Ching Chow Hi, renamed a “musical Chinese extravaganza,” was revived with the touring English comedian Horace Lingard.24 Carncross and Dixey’s minstrel troupe in Philadelphia offered Ching-​Chung-​Hi, or Burlingame’s Teacaddy, transforming Offenbach’s jeu d’esprit into a comment on contemporary events. In New York, Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels climbed on the bandwagon with their own revival of Ching Chow Hi, with sumptuous scenery and costumes “among the Unidentified clipping, Harvard Theatre Collection. Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface. Creating the Chinese in American popular music and performance 1850s–​ 1870s (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 25. For Burlingame, see Frederick Wells Williams, Anson Burlingame and the first Chinese mission to foreign powers (New York: Scribner’s, 1912); John Schrecker, “‘For the equality of men –​for the equality of nations’; Anson Burlingame and China’s first embassy to the United States, 1868,” Journal of American-​East Asian Relations 17, 1 (2010): 9–​34; and Edlie L. Wong, “In a future tense: immigration law, counterfactual history, and Chinese invasion fiction,” American Literary History (2014): 1–​25. 24 “Musical and dramatic,” Watson’s Art Journal (21 Nov. 1868):  60; “Theatrical record,” New  York Clipper (28 Nov. 1868): 270. 22 23

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richest ever seen in a minstrel hall.”25 The piece was updated regularly, and, still on tour in 1900, bore the subtitle “or, the Boxer’s Bride” with a nod to the recent attacks on the foreign legations in Peking.

The Pan of Pruriency What accounts for this rash of Offenbach in so many different guises? John Dizikes, in his history of opera in America, attributes it in part to the catharsis that followed the hecatomb of the Civil War and the conspicuous consumption of the Gilded Age. The escape into sensuality was a kind of denial of death and sacrifice.26 At the time, however, the music critic Richard Grant White viewed it as a rejection of romantic sentiment, a new “critical temper of caricature.” With weak nervous systems incapable of confronting grandiosity, “we … seek refuge in scorn and ridicule.”27 The full-​blown sentimentality and high-​minded transcendentalism of the pre-​ war period were supplanted by a case-​hardened materialism. Audiences now sought not mental diversion, but sensual gratification. If White’s diagnosis was correct, a contributory factor to the predominance of opéra bouffe and burlesque was the postwar rise of male sporting culture, born of an urban society of bachelor clerks, stock brokers, and the like, freed from military service and unencumbered by domestic responsibility. They made up the habitués of gaming houses, blood sports, saloons, brothels, and theatres, throwing about their money with abandon. They comprised the audience for sexualized performance, whether in concert saloons, burlesques, or musical comedies. Women, in their value system, were instruments of their pleasure, prostitutes and houris rather than wives and mothers.28 As always in the United States, any prevailing secularism is countered by a pietistic reaction. For moralists, this “vernacular sexuality,” as Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz names it, posed a threat to the family and religion. The National Reform Movement had been created during the Civil War, and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) immediately thereafter. “Theatrical record,” New York Clipper (28 May 1870): 63; (14 Nov. 1874): 263; (18 Nov. 1878): 270. Also see “The stage,” Sporting Times and Theatrical News (25 Sep.  1869):  7; “Dramatic doings,” New York Dramatic News and Society Journal (4 Nov. 1876): 2. 26 John Dizikes, Opera in America: a cultural history (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 191–​92. 27 Richard Grant White, “The age of burlesque,” The Galaxy (Aug. 1869): 266. 28 Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros. New York City, prostitution, and the commercialization of sex, 1790–​ 1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), Ch. 5 traces the culture of sporting men to the 1830s and states that “the most conspicuous ethic of this subculture was its defense of prostitution.” 25

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The YMCA then founded the Society for the Suppression of Vice. In 1873 the Congress passed the federal act for the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles for Immoral Use,” the so-​called Comstock Law. A national culture war was fought between the expression of unbridled masculine sexuality and its repression. As evangelical Christians lost ground in the worlds of industry and politics, they gained it in the public spheres of literature, the press, and the persecution of “impurity.”29 In his dissertation on French comic opera in New  York, John Oliver Morgan quotes a score of press attacks on Offenbach and his school of immortality. He is berated as “the half-​bestial Pan of Pruriency” and “the purveyor of bold, bald contamination.” “Profligacy,” “indecency,” “contamination,” “grossness,” “moral filth,” “effeminate,” “unfit for the stage,” and “vile” are standard epithets. The Homeric Greeks are said to be inadequate camouflage for “seduction and passion.”30 The press harped on the offense to the female playgoer. A  Boston appearance of Emily Soldene prompted the response “how any man who respects a woman can take her to witness one of these performances surpasses understanding; how any woman can sit through it without a feeling of shame and mortification for herself and resentment against the man who subjects her to such a humiliation, is a still more perplexing reflection.”31 Templeton Strong, on first coming in contact with Offenbach, had characterized his music as “Frenchy.” Presumably, this meant high-​spirited and effervescent. “French,” however, was quick to take on the connotation of dissolute, indeed smutty. “France,” fulminated Henry Ward Beecher, “where religion long ago went out smothered in licentiousness, has flooded the world with a species of literature redolent of depravity.”32 In commercial publicity, a reference to France or Paris or a French word was enough to suggest depravity. Surreptitiously sold condoms were known as “French letters” and “French protectors”; “French postcards,” “French playing cards,” and “gay French photographs” depicted female nudes and risqué poses. In New York City, the French Ball, sponsored by the Cercle Français Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading sex. Battles over sexual knowledge and suppression in nineteenth-​ century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), esp. 13–​15, 127, 206, 440. Although she does not deal with theatrical performance, Horowitz provides an excellent account of the moral climate in the Gilded Age. 30 Morgan, French comic opera in New York, 85–​91. 31 Boston Globe, quoted in Edward Marks, They all had glamour, from the Swedish Nightingale to the Naked Lady (New York: Julian Messner, 1944), 53–​54. 32 Henry Ward Beecher, Lectures to young men on various important subjects (New  York:  M.  H. Newman, 1850), 140. 29

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de l’Harmonie, and held at the Academy of Music from 1866 to 1887, was reputed to be “an annual erotically charged masquerade,” in which respectable members of society mingled with the demi-​monde in a reckless spirit of abandon.33 A  decade later, a teacher of French at prominent schools, among them a seminary, was accused of luring boys near the YMCA and the Cooper Union with pornographic books and pictures “brought from France.”34 Like “French,” “Offenbach” could be applied as shorthand for a range of eroticized performance. “The leg show,” inaugurated by The Black Crook in 1866, was a hodge-​podge of French féeries (its successor The White Fawn was adapted from La biche au bois), Italian ballet, and English pantomimes and burlesques, performed by largely female troupes. The content was often “nothing more than free handled Offenbach.”35 The repertoire of Lydia Thompson and her peroxided British Blondes featured travesties (in every sense) of Robinson Crusoé and Le Docteur Ox, which were performed around the world for years. In time, the spectacular element, with its exhibitions of massed pulchritude, overwhelmed the musical and satirical aspects, until, eventually, burlesque came to mean undraped female shapeliness showcased in a shapeless entertainment. When Richard Grant White published a full-​ scale attack on the “leg show,” in which he included The Grand Duchess and Geneviève de Brabant, his chief target was the dancing, which, unlike the static voluptuousness of Gérôme’s painting L’Almée, currently on exhibition to the New York public, was “vulgar and gross –​being made so by the lack of element of beauty in form or spirit.”36 What the Boston Globe referred to as “the vicious gymnastics of the can-​can”37 was the chief offender. The book and the music were more inoffensive than the physical maneuvers that put them across. An important difference between the opéra bouffe and the leg show is the primacy of musical composition and witty dialogue in the former. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 232–​34. A caption to an illustration of the unbridled ball that appeared in the National Police Gazette mentions that “Free champagne and Offenbachian music puts life and mettle in feminine heels, that gyrate in air with wonderful dexterity.” Edward Van Every, Sins of New York as “exposed” by the Police Gazette (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1930), 197. 34 [Anthony Comstock], New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Third Annual Report (1877), 8; quoted in Horowitz, Rereading sex, 398. 35 Rella, History of burlesque, 146. An 1871 revival of The Black Crook included a demon ballet set to Offenbach’s music. A song in The White Fawn, “I Love the Military” was obviously pilfered from The Grand Duchess. Root, American popular stage music, 95, 99. 36 Grant White, “The age of burlesque,” 81. 37 Quoted in Marks, They all had glamour, 54. 33

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The primary function of the latter was to show off the female form in as undraped a manner as possible; the scripts were skeletal and the musical accompaniment patched together from a rag-​bag of composers and lyricists, old ballads and operatic melodies, with Verdi, Auber, Rossini, and Weber as standbys. Throughout its long stage career, The Black Crook had a score made up of old songs by many hands inserted and deleted as necessary, a practice repeated by its epigones. Lydia Thompson’s most popular offerings rarely if ever offered original numbers; nonce lyrics were fitted by the play carpenter to borrowed melodies. The result was eclectic, tailored to the performer. By the late 1860s, the role of the theatre arranger was sufficiently specialized to provide skilled musical olios for orchestras. In time this professionalism would aspire to sound like Offenbach, Sullivan, and Strauss, but it was slow in coming.38 Exquisite scores were not the only differential between Offenbach’s operas and burlesque. The women in his works were not mere objects of lust, but were themselves possessed of erotic agency. They had needs and found ways to satisfy them. As we have seen, so long as the dialogue was in French, the libretti were tolerated. Well-​traveled observers noted that imported French actresses “throw off all restraint, as a rule, as soon as they leave Paris … and become odiously coarse and vulgar.” Disdain for spectators less discriminating than those of the French capital led them to overdo the salacious elements.39 Francophone companies could sail close to the wind because the majority of spectators had to rely on plot summaries, loosely translated libretti, and the physical innuendo of the performers. When Tostée, described as “the most risqué of all the comic opera bouffe singers from Paris,” appeared in Chicago, by no means a genteel community, it was reported that she “dressed alluringly, glittered with jewels, contorted vulgarly, sang as raucously as a raven, and skated over very thin ice.”40 Aimée in Helen’s bedchamber scene was said to surpass “in daring indecorum and positive viciousness anything that can be remembered. [She] is literally half nude, two of her limbs are wholly uncovered, while the others are but imperfectly draped … The dialogue is shamelessly

I am indebted to the researches of Brian Valencia of Yale and Florida State Universities for these observations. 39 William F. Apthorp, “Jacques Offenbach,” International Review 10 (1881): 290. 40 George Upton, Musical memories (1908), quoted in Ronald L. Davis, Opera in the American West (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-​Hall, 1965), 39. Jenny Kimball, performing the role in English, was congratulated for avoiding “coarseness of which Tostée appeared to be so fond.” New  York Clipper (1 May 1869): 31. 38

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coarse, and no gesture or grimace that can add to the effect of a singularly disgusting and repulsive scene is spared.”41 The least censorious analyst of these phenomena was the eminent novelist William Dean Howells. Reviewing the Boston season of 1868/​69, when all seven of its theatres had played to full houses, he was curious about the fact, rather than the effects, of the taste for comic opera. “No one can lay his hand on his heart, and declare that he is the worse for having seen La Belle Hélène, for example, or say more than that it is a thing which ought not to be seen by anyone else; yet I suppose there is no one ready to deny that La Belle Hélène was the motive of those performances that most pleased most people during the past winter.”42 For all the competition of legitimate stars and grand opera both foreign and English, a month of opéra bouffe produced overflow audiences. Even the Italian tragedienne Ristori failed to evoke so warm a welcome as Tostée. Howells attributed Tostée’s popularity to the fact that, despite her feeble singing and unmemorable looks, she embodied the spirit of Offenbach: the “movement, the swing, the wriggle,” in other words, the metamusical, extra-​literary elements noted above, “full of subtle surprises, and with an audacious appearance of unconsciousness”; “in tones, in gestures, in attitudes, she is to the libretto just as the music is, now making it appear insolently and unjustly coarse, now feebly inadequate in its explicit immodesty.”43 Howells himself savored the archness of La Grande-​Duchesse and the wit of Hélène, even granting a “strain of real poetry” to the vision scene; but he suspected that the general public did not enjoy the ingenuity so much as the coarseness. Since the characters were fabulous, their misbehavior was of no more consequence than “the murders in a pantomime.” He also excused French comic opera for engendering English burlesque, a “flimsy raveling of parodied myth,” providing opportunities for specific performers, whose charms, natural or simulated, provided all the attraction of the entertainment. Ultimately, Howells underlined the foreignness of both Offenbach and burlesque. “This does not interfere with the enjoyment of either as it appears; and as long as we are free to believe that their success here is due to our cosmopolitan spirit in receiving and making experiment of every sort of pleasure, we may feel rather proud of it than otherwise.”44 “‘La Belle Hélène’ at the Olympic [New York],” unidentified clipping, Harvard Theatre Collection. William Dean Howells, “The new taste in theatricals,” Atlantic Monthly (May 1869): 636a, b. 43 Howells, “New taste in theatricals,” 637a. 44 Howells, “New taste in theatricals,” 637b, 640b, 644b. In his study of American burlesque, Robert C. Allen psychoanalyzes the essay to a fare-​thee-​well, attributing Howells’s description of the “horrible prettiness” of burlesque to a morbid fear of sex. Nowhere in this study of “feminized theatre” on 41 42

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In other words, an appreciation of Offenbach revealed an openness to alien attitudes that supplanted Yankee provincialism and boded well for the maturity of the nation. As for the lamented obscenity, it was unlikely to go any farther lest it run up against legal prosecution. By 1871 the Offenbach craze had subsided, certainly in New  York. “Opera Bouffe may well be said to have seen its palmiest days,” declared the New  York Herald. Proclaiming the victory of “taste” in the wake of Sedan, it went on, “Manifestly the product of the lower empire and its loose ways, this deification of the demi-​monde has almost passed with the other false gods of Napoleonism.”45 Such triumphalism would soon fade before the unbroken progress of Lydia Thompson and her epigones. The Depression of 1873 closed many theatres. After February 1875 New  York state law banned suggestive dancing, including the cancan, in venues without formal stages, and the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents turned its attention to concert saloons.46 In this climate of moral reform, just as variety shows were gentrified into “polite vaudeville,” so leg shows began to modulate into musical entertainments suitable for family audiences. E. E. Rice advertised his Evangeline (1874) as a “REFINED EXTRAVAGANZA embracing all the beauties of Opera Bouffe and Burlesque, without the objectionable features of the English and French productions.”47 Gentility began to prevail over the rough-​and-​ ready in the world of entertainment.

A Personal Appearance Throughout the century, whenever a French performer or musician needed a boost in reputation and exchequer, a tour to Russia was the approved solution, but, after the Gold Rush of 1848, the New World also proved alluring as a welcoming source of untapped lucre. Therefore, when Offenbach’s managerial venture at the Théâtre de la Gaîté failed financially in 1876, he set off on a tour of North America, inspired by the success of French comic-​opera companies. This episode provides a colorful chapter in his biographies, usually based on Offenbach’s own memoirs, modestly entitled the nineteenth-​century American stage does Allen mention Offenbach. Robert C. Allen, Horrible prettiness. Burlesque and American culture (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 132–​33. 45 New York Herald (12 Sep. 1871) on the failure of The Princess of Trebizonde. 46 Meanwhile, a Mexican Juvenile Opera Co. toured the Grand-​Duchesse and Robinson Crusoé to New York and Philadelphia in early 1875, with an eight-​year-​old Duchess. 47 Quoted in Root, American popular stage music, 151–​52.

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Notes d’un musicien en voyage.48 The point to be made here is the composer’s warm welcome and vociferous popularity. As his ship pulled into New York harbor, a boat full of musicians drew near playing his music, and a sixty-​piece orchestra serenaded him at his hotel. In some respects the society of the young republic, just about to celebrate its centenary, resembled the Second Empire: the unabashed and unscrupulous scramble for money, the corrupt political scene, the disintegration of traditional social castes and values, the unbridled pursuit of pleasure. Such a society, which, for Mark Twain and his collaborator Charles Dudley Warner, characterized the “Gilded Age,” ought to have been as receptive to Offenbach as his own had been. Lured by golden promises from the manager Maurice Grau and the band leader Patrick S. Gilmore, he fully expected to “make a killing.” What he had not factored in was the rival attraction of the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, to which he had not been officially invited, but for which Wagner had been commissioned to write a pompous “Festmarsch.” Although Offenbach was personally lionized, his debut suggested that his commercial expectations might be dashed. The opening-​night concert at the enclosed Gilmore’s Garden on 12 May 1876, drilled by the young John Philip Sousa, was played to an audience of about 5,000 who had paid double the usual admission price (the house could contain 8,000). But the standing ovation that greeted Offenbach when he took up the baton was countered by a third of the concertgoers leaving after the first number, with barely half left at the conclusion of the performance. The bill of uninterrupted orchestral pieces, with no vocalists and Offenbach conducting only four out of twelve numbers, has been blamed. Alterations were made, prices lowered, an “American Eagle Waltz” introduced, and business picked up, so that the run of thirty performances ended on a high note. To capitalize on this success, Offenbach and Marie Aimée, who had accompanied him on the crossing, were announced to appear in the pit and on the stage in La vie parisienne and La jolie parfumeuse. The immense success showed that Americans preferred their Offenbach as staged pieces with appealing actresses, not as purely orchestral offerings; the week of operetta garnered more than $20,000, justifying Offenbach’s venture. The rest of

The standard edition is Offenbach en Amérique. Notes d’un musicien en voyage (Paris:  Calmann-​ Lévy, 1877). An American edition, Offenbach in America, translated from the proof sheets, appeared simultaneously, while a different version, America and the Americans, was published in England. An annotated English translation by Alexander McClintock was issued as Orpheus in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957).

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his time in America was spent in conducting concerts at the World’s Fair in Philadelphia, with a repeat of the Aimée tandem, a quick trip to Niagara Falls, and a benefit performance in New York on behalf of the National Association of Musicians. He departed with good feelings on both sides. The only unpleasant incidents during Offenbach’s stay were a botched performance of Parfumeuse in the Middle West, forced upon him by Aimée, and an intended slight by the conductor Theodore Thomas who declined to “degrade himself ” by presenting the Frenchman’s music. Although Offenbach shrugged it off with a joke at Thomas’s expense, the attitude is telling; it foreshadows the rising dominance of German music in the American concert hall. When Offenbach performed a well-​received piano entertainment at the exclusive Lotos Club in New York, a subsequent dispute among the music critics in the membership “led to dissension and the secession on the part of the members.”49 Many commentators on Offenbach’s visit seemed to bask in the glow of past operettic glories; the works he would write in the last four years of his life would not settle in for some time. From this point to the end of the century, revivals of variable buoyancy would just manage to keep his reputation afloat. When Maurice Grau made an effort to put on a “completely mounted” production of Tales of Hoffmann at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1882, “it almost cost him if not his shirt, at least his shirt-​tails.”50 Yet that same year a Yiddish Bluebeard was mounted in New York. The year 1884 saw a burlesque of Orphée aux enfers which proved to have some shelf-​life; in a production by the Bijou Opera Company. Max Freeman, who had written a new book for what was now called Orpheus and Eurydice, “was not overnice in his rendering to make it decent and presentable,”51 but the audience didn’t mind. Its popularity in New York owed more to its spectacle than to the quality of its musical interpretation or the merit of its libretto. “There is scarcely a number in the entire score which appeals in any marked degree to even an ordinary musical taste, or that leaves any lasting impressions.”52 Digby Bell as Jupiter strung out his “encore verses” ad nauseam. “There must have been an exquisite absurdity in the sight, the first time that thunderous Jupiter stalked down upon the stage and executed a motto-​ song and a breakdown, and Venus, Juno & Co. went through a plantation

John Elderkin, A brief history of the Lotos Club (New York: Club House, 1895), 14. Edward Marks, They all had glamour, from the Swedish Nightingale to the Naked Lady (New York: Julian Messner, 1944), 48. 51 Boston Daily Evening Traveller (22 Apr. 1884). 52 Boston Journal (22 Apr. 1884). 49 50

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walk-​around. But to this generation, they are simply cheap material for burlesque.”53 The most memorable feature was the diminutive Ida Mülle as Cupid, one of the first performers on the American stage to dispense with tights; photographs of her in wings and little else became ubiquitous. Frenchness was provided by Mlle Vanoni, a café chantant singer, who as Eurydice interpolated the popular song “Pretty as a Picture.” This misbegotten production disintegrated in San Francisco when the leading players seceded for non-​payment of salaries. Offenbach was no longer considered a serious musician, but rather an outdated stockpile of musical numbers, to be pillaged at will. Another San Francisco travesty of Offenbach came three years later when A Trip to the Moon appeared at the Tivoli after Christmas 1887. “Almost all the songs were omitted in deference to a tone-​deaf cast, and a snowstorm transformation scene constituted the feature of the piece.”54 Writing of La belle Hélène in 1888, one critic decided that “Offenbach is a stranger to our stage to-​day. Probably he will remain so. This is the time of Sousa … the decline of Offenbach’s vogue here is so natural that any expectation of its renewal seems out of the question.”55 Nevertheless, when Emily Soldene repeated her Drogan for the nth time while touring Geneviève de Brabant in 1890, with the usual topical interpolations, the San Francisco Chronicle praised the authenticity of her performance: “Those educated in German opera and Gilbert and Sullivan will like to hear the composer whose works outdid all others in popularity and success in their time. One cannot get away, after all, from the ‘champagne’ music of Offenbach.”56

An American Beauty The limited rehabilitation of Offenbach’s reputation in the 1890s has to be attributed to a female star. Lillian Russell had been trained as an operatic soprano, but was dissuaded by Nellie Melba from following a career in classical music; instead, she made her name in a wide range of operetta, especially Gilbert and Sullivan and their epigones. She first appeared in Offenbach when, in late spring 1883, she joined John McCaull’s opera company, and appeared at Rudolph Aronson’s new uptown Casino Theatre. In repertory with The Sorcerer, she played the breeches role of Prince Raphael San Francisco Argonaut (19 Jul. 1884). Rella, op. cit., 221–​22. 55 “Of actresses who sing,” 8 Feb. 1888. Unidentified clipping, Harvard Theatre Collection. 56 Quoted in Kurt Gänzl, Emily Soldene, II, 251–​57. 53 54

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in The Princess of Trebizonde. After three weeks, Russell walked out, a move typical of her cavalier attitude towards contracts. Amid musical comedies run up to showcase her looks and limited abilities, Russell was seen in Gilbert’s version of The Brigands, scoring a tremendous personal success as Fiorella.57 A step up to Offenbach required more skilled musicianship and an ability to project eroticism. These were not her strong points. Russell tended to overawe her audiences with her statuesque deportment, porcelain complexion, and the demeanor of a gracious hostess. By the 1890s she was considered the nec plus ultra of American beauty, stately rather than piquant, condescending rather than endearing, a dreadnought gliding unperturbed through the minefield of musical-​comedy plots. To capitalize on his star’s popularity, Aronson decided to revive The Grand Duchess, a role beyond Russell’s vocal capacity. To prepare she studied with a Signora Louisa Cappiani, while her producer spared no expense to provide his solitaire a sumptuous setting. He conceived a “smashing entrance” in which, swathed in ermine, she drove on stage in a sleigh in a blinding snowstorm of paper pellets. It was granted that all of her French forerunners surpassed her in the “naughtiness and chic that the role really requires,” but not one of them “ever sang as well or looked as handsome as our own Lillian.”58 The scandal sheet Town Topics waxed poetic: “she fills the eye like the splurge of roses, and amazes the ear with an abundance of melody equal to a virgin wood at a summer sunrise …”59 All through winter 1890 and spring 1891 the opera played to packed houses and ran 145 times before going on tour. Russell had never been so lionized. She was the first private individual to use the new long-​distance telephone, singing the “Sabre song” on 8 May 1890, for President Benjamin Harrison in Washington. In 1895, Russell repeated the experiment with La Périchole, opening in Chicago in February. “The dainty Offenbachian airs may seem archaic in the modern sense of music,” wrote a local critic, “but they still have a charm that age cannot blight nor fashion dull for tuneful ears.”60 New York was more discriminating; to those who recalled the French divas, “Lillian Russell was hardly satisfactory. She acted with vim, with a laissez-​aller quite

Quoted in Parker Morrell, Lillian Russell, the era of plush (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing Co., 1940), 89. 58 Quoted in Morrell, Lillian Russell, 96–​97. 59 Quoted in Morrell, Lillian Russell, 96–​97. 60 “Chicago Opera House,” Chicago Interocean (22 Feb. 1895). 57

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unusual for one so stolid … but the note sincerity was not in her gamut … always a grande dame and never the street singer. She was so well-​fed in appearance that the tales of her want, her hunger seemed so ludicrous that the audience took the story’s fact for a huge joke.”61 Some of the reviews pointed out that nowadays no one thinks seriously enough of an operetta to quarrel with its morals, so one might give oneself wholeheartedly to enjoyment. Even in censorious Boston, where the level of music criticism was the highest in the country, Offenbach was welcomed more warmly than Russell. The Herald expressed “a genuine relief to listen again to the bright, piquant and, though undoubtedly, light, musicianly score of La Périchole after three weeks of the amateur musical twaddle of [Reginald] De Koven.” A libretto with a beginning, middle, and end, properly adapted to musical treatment, was also a treat “after having been surfeited with the confused, confusing and hit-​or-​ miss-​as-​luck-​would-​have-​it aberrations of Mr [Harry B.] Smith in the shape of opera books”;62 “a welcome relief from the puerilities of ‘La Tzigane’ and like pieces.”63 The magisterial Philip Hale pronounced it “always a pleasure to hear an operetta of Offenbach” which did not require gorgeous scenery or Amazonian marches. The “simple haunting pathos” of the letter song “might have been signed proudly by Mozart,” though Russell’s performance of it was marred by affectation and liberties taken in the tempo. The topical gags relating to poker and street cleaning were pardonable.64 The connoisseurship of the Boston critics represents the high-​water mark of the appreciation of Offenbach in fin de siècle North America as well as of Russell’s reign as prima donna. By 1896 she had ceased to be a drawing-​card, her ample proportions less appreciated than the lithe and dainty charms of an Edna Wallace Hopper. When Russell took on La belle Hélène in 1899, adapted by Louis Harrison with additional music by Ludwig Englander (and with Hopper herself as Orestes), the reaction was decidedly negative. “You know what ‘adapting’ an opera means,” commented the waspish journalist Alan Dale. “It means stuffing it with vulgar gags, and asking a lot of presumably intelligent people, anxious to escape from the jargon of the day, to laugh at rollicking jests about supplementary

“Miss Russell in ‘La Périchole,’” New York Herald (30 Apr. 1895); “Offenbach to the front,” New York World (30 Apr. 1895); New York Advertiser (30 Apr. 1895). 62 “Tremont Theatre –​La Perichole,” Boston Herald (24 Sep. 1895). 63 “Tremont Theatre ‘La Perichole,’” Boston Transcript (27 Sep. 1895). 64 Philip Hale, “La Perichole,” Boston Journal (24 Sep. 1895). 61

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proceedings, and jack-​pots, and alimony, and gay ha-​ha’s, and soft-​boiled eggs, and other little pleasantries to which you can listen in a bar-​room, thereby saving our good cash.”65 There was no controversy over the pointlessness of this Offenbach: the reviews were studded with such remarks as “hopelessly out of mode,” “snap and sparkle dead and buried,” a “dead audience,” a “frigid” Russell, small beer instead of champagne, a hackneyed libretto packed with “Tenderloin” gags and scandals in private life. Offenbach’s operas were written off as being “as foreign to our taste as the drama of Racine.”66 In Philadelphia, Russell, who “moved her grand-​opera amplitude with the soft heaviness of a nice white elephant,”67 was heckled by students and abruptly left the show, provoking a breach-​of-​contract suit. As the century turned, this dismissal of Offenbach prevailed. In 1900 the eminent classical scholar of Columbia University Harry Thurston Peck criticized the “moral and social decadence” of the operettas and “wondered whether some kind of a censorship could not be established in this country; for there is no country in the world which needs a censorship so much.”68 Ten years later Peck was charged with breach of promise in a scandalous lawsuit and dismissed from his academic post. Offenbach’s view of human nature proved the more accurate.

A Martial Coda One of the least likely after-​effects of Offenbach on American culture is that someone, sometime in the late nineteenth century, lifted the tune of the “Couplets des deux hommes d’armes” from the 1867 revision of Geneviève de Brabant and used it to score the anthem of the U.S. Marines. Offenbach’s men at arms, it will be remembered, are two rascally poltroons who botch the job of assassinating the heroine (they greatly resemble the robbers in the British pantomime Babes in the Wood). The H. B. Farnie version, which, broadcast and recorded by the team of Flotsam and Jetsam (Malcolm McEachern and B. C. Hilliam) in 1933, became almost a folk song in Great Britain and its dominions, begins:

Quoted in Boston Sunday Herald (19 Oct. 1919): 4. Edward A. Dittmar, “La Belle Helene,” New York Times (15 Jan. 1899); “La Belle Helene Rialtoized,” and other unidentified clippings, Harvard Theatre Collection. 67 Morrell, Lillian Russell, 185. 68 Quoted in Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/​Lowbrow. The emergence of cultural hierarchy in American culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 217. 65 66

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The Discovery of America We’re public guardians bold yet wary, And of ourselves we take good care. To risk our precious lives we’re chary, When danger looms we’re never there, But when we meet a helpless woman, Or little boys that do no harm, Chorus: We run them in, we run them in, We run them in, we run them in, We show them we’re the bold gendarmes.

In 1878 Col. A. S. McLemore attested that it had been heard by a U.S. military man in Paris and brought to America.69 John Philip Sousa, who had been Offenbach’s bandmaster in 1876, seconded this opinion, although he himself has been put forward as the guilty party. Whoever the agent of transmission may have been, the U.S. Marine Corps copyrighted the “hymn” on 18 August 1919; originally its first verse goes: From the Halls of Montezuma To the shores of Tripoli; We fight our country’s battles In the air, on land, and sea; Admiration of the nation, We’re the finest ever seen, And we glory in the title Of United States Marines.

In such a way did the ballad of a couple of corrupt and cowardly constables become the theme song of one of the toughest branches of the U.S. armed forces.

Marian Stuckey, Warrior culture of the U.S. Marines (Plum Beach, S.C.:  Heritage Press International, 2001).

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Franco-​Russian Relations David Rissin has described Offenbach as a “mixture of scepticism and compassion for humanity … Nothing escapes his irony, particularly not what he loves.” “He … nuances the feelings of his characters so well,” he continues, “that each becomes a reduced model of humanity, rather than a stereotype.”1 These remarks would apply as aptly to Anton Chekhov. In his lifetime, Chekhov’s reputation suffered from his refusal to subscribe to factions, political or literary. Well into the twentieth century critics pontificated that his irrepressible facetiousness, his dramatic irony, and his penchant for “small forms” would relegate him forever to the limbo of minor talents. In this respect Chekhov has much in common with Offenbach, whose talents were not always taken seriously because they served the cause of comedy, raillery, and sex. The similarities of approach between the composer and the Russian writer are not entirely coincidental, for, from an early age, Chekhov imbibed Offenbachian champagne, diluted by Russian kvass. It served as an abiding influence on his artistic development. Offenbach first arrived in Russia in 1859 with a touring company of the Comédie-​Française; the Mikhailovsky Theatre (Théâtre Michel) in St Petersburg, an imperial playhouse which catered French and German performances to the upper classes, hoped to capitalize on the Parisian success of Orphée aux enfers. Staged as a benefit for the actor Berton, it failed badly, not so much because there were few in the troupe who could sing than because the Crimean War was still vivid in public memory. The defeat by a French-​led alliance was still resented. Half-​a-​dozen years later a more welcoming climate prevailed. The new tsar Alexander II had initiated reforms throughout society, ranging from emancipating the serfs to freeing theatrical reviewing from preliminary David Rissin, Offenbach ou le rire en musique (Paris: Fayard, 1980), 84, 87.

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censorship. The first St Petersburg performance of La belle Hélène by the resident French company at the Mikhailovsky in April 1866 was a sensation. It starred the French singer Dévéria who portrayed an openly seductive Hélène, flirting with the guardsmen in the parterre. Stripped of the opera’s political allusions by the censor (reform went only so far), the production put heavy emphasis on eroticism. On Dévéria’s lips “Venus, pray tell, what do you find so diverting in making my virtue take a tumble” became a pressing invitation, far more sensual and yielding than Hortense Schneider’s interpretation.2 When Paris entered lovely Helen’s boudoir, when they came to declare their love, when Mlle Dévéria … with a smooth, impetuous gesture cast off her upper garments and revealed her shoulders and arms in all their loveliness, when her mouth half opened and the muscles at the corners of her mouth tightened voluptuously, when her eyes gleamed with pleasure, when her waist, of its own accord, began to advance in submission and her whole body stiffened and quivered in Paris’s embraces, then … then, so I’m told, many young disciples of Bellona were unable to contain themselves and, fleeing the theatre, flung themselves into cabs and dashed rapturously away into the distance, pursued by charming visions … I  extol Mlle Dévéria, even though she expresses only one emotion, and that not so much an emotion as a sensation.3

The press claimed that the Russian nobility turned out only to watch the love scenes and sarcastically described Dévéria as “the greatest actress of our time. It is true that the sphere of her talent is not very extensive, it is limited to cancans, to the sentiments of the ‘boudoir,’ but in that sphere she has no equal.” “Dévéria” became a synonym for a loose woman and the actress herself was deported for immorality.4 However, it was not until Hélène was revived in Viktor Krylov’s Russian adaptation Prekrasnaya Yelena at the imperial Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in October 1868 that Offenbach caught on beyond the haut ton. It ran for forty-​two performances over four months and launched an Offenbach fad throughout the Empire that did not begin to fade until 1874. The Russian performers were unable to imitate Parisian élan; they

M. Yankovskiy, Operetta. Voznikovenie i razvitie zhanra na zapade i v SSSR (Leningrad and Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1937), 221–​22. I use a reader-​friendly transcription of Cyrillic in the text (and in the Select Bibliography), and a somewhat more technical form in the notes. 3 Quoted in Yankovskiy, Operetta, 223. Also see N. Vil’de, “Bez godu sto let (Offenbakh i russkaya operetta),” Teatr 7 (1918):  4; and Nikolay Mikhailovskiy, “Darvinizm i operetki Offenbakha,” Otechestvennaya zapiski 10 (Oct. 1871): 229–​56, repr. in Polnoe sobranie sochineniy (St Petersburg: A. F. Marks, 1911), I, 396. 4 Sankt-​Peterburgskie vedomosti 102 (1866): 2; and Mikhailovskiy, 235. 2

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6.1.  Vera Lyadova as Yelena and Nikolay Sazonov as Paris in Prekrasnaya Yelena. Photo: Wesenberg, St Petersburg.

were said to be “heavy, tedious” with no voices, plasticity, or humour, “but the public was happy.” V. A. Lyadova as Helen copied Dévéria only within bounds; she was no “depraved wench” but “a deeply religious Spartan queen,” decorous enough to appear before schoolchildren. However, in photographs, she gave herself over to poses with Paris that she did not repeat on stage.5 The significance of these performances and those in provincial playhouses lies in their introduction of sensuality, even in moderated form, to the Russian public theatre. Offenbach’s exhilarating music and the unbridled gaiety of his plots acted as a stimulant, almost an aphrodisiac. Russian audiences, unlike the French, had no interest in parody of the classics; they were attracted by the claim to personal joie de vivre. Russian drama tended to be moralistic and tendentious, even in its satire. La belle Hélène’s paean to the senses had an irresistible appeal to a straitjacketed society. A survey of the repertory lists of the Imperial theatres in St Petersburg for the period between La belle Hélène’s French premiere there in 1859 and the ending of the Imperial dramatic monopoly in the capitals in 1881 reveals that it P. P. Gnedich, Kniga zhizni. Vospominaniya 1855–​1918 (Moscow: Agraf, 2000), 44–​45. One of these cartes-​de-​visite was withdrawn because her cleavage was too conspicuous. Lyadova’s modesty was also cited by Sergey Khudakov and Aleksey Suvorin. The veteran stage director Gnedich recalled that in Moscow “even old Sadovskiy did the cancan in operetta,” whereas in Petersburg, certain stars refused to take part, even audaciously declining to appear at the chief director’s benefit.

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achieved a remarkable one hundred and thirty-​two performances. This statistic beats Gogol’s Inspector General and Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, the two most popular Russian comedies to that time; even Hamlet was later to be presented less frequently than La Périchole and Orphée aux enfers.6 These successes were repeated in Moscow, occasioning a rhyme: Any time La belle Hélène Appears, at any season … All else is sidelined, that is plain: Katkov, tariffs, treason, And famine’s gnawing pain.7

One memoirist of the provincial theatre recalled a performance of Hamlet in which a celebrated soprano was shoe-​horned into Act Five as the gravedigger’s granddaughter to sing the greatest hits of La Périchole.8 Visiting the northern city of Nizhny Novgorod in 1870, the American George Kennan heard a military band playing airs from Offenbach on the main boulevard in front of the governor’s residence.9 This popularity led to the founding of a new private theatre in St Petersburg in 1870, the Théâtre-​Bouffe, dedicated to French operetta. In the seven years of its existence, it hosted the leading French prima donnas, Hortense Schneider, Anna Judic, Léa Silly, and Zulma Bouffar. Modest Musorgsky was a great fan, coming twice to savor Judic in Madame l’Archiduc in 1875. He wrote enthusiastically to his friend, the composer Count Golenshchikov-​Kutuzov, “Within his little world [Offenbach] is an appealing and well-​bred artist.” The music and the performance contained “no superfluous gestures, … no mindless forcing of the voice, … no indecent twitching or grimaces.” And no cancan.10 Since the Imperial A. I. Vol’f, Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1855 do nachala 1881 goda (St Petersburg: P. Golike, 1884), 75, 79–​80, gives 128 performances; the number is corrected in Institut Istorii Iskusstv Ministerva Kultury SSSR, Istoriya russkogo dramaticheskogo teatra v semi tomakh, 1862–​1881 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980), V, 61. The situation was the same in the provinces: in Novocherkassk in 1870/​71 six performances of La belle Hélène and Orphée aux enfers brought in 4,685 rubles, while a popular play by Ostrovskiy raked in only 118. I. Petrovskaya, Teatr i zritel’ provintsial’noy Rossii vtoraya poloviny XIX veka (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1979), 180. 7 “Kogda ‘Prekrasnaya Yelena’/​Predstanet vdrug …/​Vse zabyvaetsya vokrug:/​Katkov, tarify i izmeny/​ I goloda nedug.” Quoted in Yu. A.  Dmitriev, Mikhail Lentovskiy (Moscow:  Iskusstvo, 1978), 56. M. N. Katkov was a reactionary editor who opposed the socio-​political reforms of the times. 8 Vladimir Gilyarovskiy, Teatral’nye lyudi:  povest’ akterskoy zhizni (Moscow and Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1941). 9 George Kennan, Siberia and the exile system (New York: Century, 1891), I, 8. 10 Letter dated 18 Mar. 1875. Quoted in David Brown, Musorgsky: his life and works (London: Oxford University Press, 2010), 296. Also see Richard Taruskin, Musorgsky. Eight essays and an epilogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3. 6

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6.2.  Orfey v adu at the Bouffe, St Petersburg. Sketch by Broning, Vsemirnaya Illyustratsiya 97 (1870).

theatres had the monopoly on the titles of French works performed, the Bouffe had to come up with alternative but allusive titles: “The arias, duets and rondeaux of the operetta Le beau Pâris will be interpreted by …” left the public to substitute La belle Hélène. Government taxation on the privately managed competition, not public apathy, led to the Bouffe’s premature closure. After it had failed, however, the press noted that “the existence of an entire theatre that lived on nothing but a repertoire of operetta […] the possibility of being able to present 180 performances a year, of paying impressive salaries to import Judic […] and other leading sopranos is incredible and reveals the great difference between the St Petersburg audience and that of Moscow. Remember that in Moscow, a tiny French troupe could barely exist and performed in the little Solodovnikov theatre to an empty house.”11 Teatral’naya gazeta 56 (Moscow, 1877), quoted in Yankovskiy, Operetta. The government monopoly on theatres in the capitals was ended in 1880.

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Confronted with Offenbach’s phenomenal popularity, the Russian intellectual establishment sought a prophylactic against this foreign contagion of licentiousness. In the Slavophil camp, the bureaucrat Mitrofan Shchepkin found the whole genre “untalented, insignificant, and cynical,” and the playwright Aleksandr Ostrovsky denounced it as alien immorality, distracting the populace from the need for a native repertory. He regarded it, along with melodrama and the féerie, as a legacy from “some advanced but anti-​artistic nation.”12 The musical establishment, including the prominent César Cui and Aleksandr Borodin, regarded Offenbach’s works as trivial and nonsensical, Western phenomena irrelevant, even harmful, to the progress of Russian opera. The opposing faction also had misgivings. The most bizarre expression of this was the radical Nikolay Mikhailovsky’s article of 1871, “Darwinism and Offenbach’s operettas,” which appeared in the thinking man’s journal Notes of the Fatherland. Although The Descent of Man and opéra bouffe seem polar opposites, the former recondite but admired, the latter popular but despised, Mikhailovsky declared them both a legacy of the Enlightenment. Darwin advances science and Offenbach advances Voltairean satire, both in opposition to established order. Mikhailovsky regarded the operas as specific exempla of philistine liberalism converging and gathering momentum to legitimize the worst aspects of bourgeois culture. He considered the development of operetta to be “an historical atavism,” arousing base and immoral principles. Offenbach’s operas are “not only an agent but a symptom” of change. Nevertheless, compared with eighteenth-​century libertines, Offenbach is relatively inoffensive. Biased this attitude may be, but it did recognize Offenbach’s appeal to a burgeoning middle class, eager to kick over the traces of elitist “high art.”13 The censorship office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was disturbed by Mikhailovsky’s implication that Darwin and Offenbach were harbingers of revolution, evidence that antiquated concepts should be overthrown and replaced by a new order. Nevertheless, it was content to reprimand Notes of the Fatherland, and never considered banning the source of contagion, Offenbach himself.14 Institut, Istoriya, 62. Ostrovskiy’s animadversions on operettas and féeries were summed up in his proposal for a national theatre, “Zapiska o polozhenii dramaticheskogo iskusstva v Rossii v nastoyashchee vremya (1881),” Polnoe sobranie sochineniy (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1973–​1980), X, 126–​42. 13 Mikhailovskiy, “Darvinizm i operetki Offenbakha,” 229–​56. Also see Insitut, Istoriya, 63; Yankovskiy, Operetta, 248–​50. 14 N. V. Drizen, Dramaticheskaya tsenzura dvukh épokh, 1825–​1881 (Petrograd: Prometey, 1917), 249. Also see Murray Frame, “The early reception of operetta in Russia, 1860s–​70s,” European History Quarterly, 42, 1 (2012): 29–​49. 12

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The liberal camp took Offenbach less seriously than did either the Slavophils or Mikhailovsky. Aleksey Suvorin, though he later became a hardshell monarchist, began as a journalist on the liberal side. In his popular column in the St Petersburg Vedomosti (Intelligencer), he greeted the Russian adaptation of La belle Hélène as typical of the Russian preference for already approved foreign fare, especially after the original had grown stale in its home culture. He equated Offenbach to the left-​wing French politician Henri Rochefort in his satire, his ability to vulgarize and “cascader” things as much as possible. He noted that, although The Grand Duchess had been banned during Lent (when all theatres were closed), Lyadova was singing excerpts from it and the Invocation to Venus in concerts.15 When Hortense Schneider arrived to play the Grand Duchess and Boulotte on tour in Petersburg in 1871–​1872, Suvorin thought the press praised her to show they were capable of appreciating European art. He feared that she pandered to the audience’s worst impulses. As one watches her, one might call to mind certain verses of Heine, which seem to blend passion and tenderness and grace and humor and malicious sarcasm about the holiest things and the most vulgar human feelings, without distinction, but in a kind of harmonious order, which expresses the artist’s feelings. If Mlle Schneider did not give in to the coarse instincts of the crowd, which demands bold strokes, she might present that aspect of her role even better and more rigorously … She sings the aria “Dites lui” with Bacchic movements of a completely unbridled female nature … I know I’ll be pilloried as a moralist, but I am convinced that stage art should have limits, that there are certain pathological and physiological phenomena in life which, taken separately, cannot appear on stage, out of respect for art and for man as a moral individual.16

For all his misgivings, Suvorin, at this point in his career, was sufficiently objective to write a reasoned rebuttal of an essay on “the immorality of our society” published by the retrograde and xenophobic Prince Vladimir Meshchersky. In his ultra-​conservative magazine Grazhdanin (The Citizen), the prince cited as his prime example The Grand Duchess at the Bouffe Theatre, which mocks “patriotism with an immorality unlike anything in the annals of the world.” For him, the adulation of Schneider represented A. S. Suvorin, “‘Prekrasnaya Elena’ Offenbakha na russkoy stsene” (20 Oct. 1868; 3 Mar. 1869), in Teatral’nye ocherki (St Petersburg: Novoe vremya, 1914), 234–​37, 291–​92. 16 Suvorin, Teatral’nie ocherki (12 Dec. 1871), 387, and (23 Jan. 1874), 387–​91. It was rumored that Schneider had dined with Tsar Aleksandr II. P.  D. Boborykin, Vospominaniya v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Izd-​vo khudozhestvennoy literatury, 1965), I, 444. 15

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“a danger threatening the government and society” worse than anything in Russian history, worse even than the nihilist terrorist Nechaev’s murder of a comrade. He denounced The Grand Duchess as “profanation,” “a sign of the times,” “a picture of general licentiousness.”17 To this hysterical hyperbole, Suvorin replied that Schneider did not engineer the fall of the Second Empire, but was the “least consequence of a host of causes,” merely a talented exponent of French wit. “Once upon a time the French flew the banner of civilization from bayonets, now they fly it from their legs.” Popularity of Offenbach among the Germans had not vitiated their victory over the French. As to the mockery inherent in a female-​run kingdom, it had its objective correlative in the court of the former Queen Isabella of Spain, a notoriously loose-​living monarch.18 As Murray Frame points out, these journalistic skirmishes were symptoms of a deeper conflict within Russian society and ideology. In the wake of the Great Reforms of the 1860s, politics became polarized, with the conservatives and reactionaries eager to prevent further erosion of the autocracy, and the liberals and radicals avid to advance greater democracy. In this polemic, operetta could be maligned as a corrupting influence or praised as a civilizing one. Offenbach’s mockery of authority and the enlargement of an urban theatrical audience with appetites rather than taste were straws in the wind, indicating whatever the polemicist chose to emphasize.

Chekhovian The impact made on the Russian public can also be traced in the literature of the period. Fiction often used Offenbach and comic opera as convenient metonyms for loose morals. Ivan Turgenev, living in Paris, had, in a letter to Flaubert, lumped together Offenbach, the playwright Victorien Sardou, and the journalist Auguste Vacquerie as “rot” (pourriture).19 Nevertheless, he wrote four opéras bouffes of his own for domestic theatricals in the household of his Egeria, the mezzo-​soprano Pauline Viardot-​Garcia; in one of them, with the Offenbachian title The Cannibal, he himself took the role of the villainous ogre while Viardot played Princess Saphira.20 V. P. Meshcherskiy, Moi vospominaniya (St Petersburg: Tip. knyazhya Meshcherskogo, 1897–​1898), I, Part 2, 1865–​1881, 170–​71. The censorship insisted that the title could not advertise a reigning sovereign, so it was changed to “Le sabre de mon père.” 18 Suvorin, Teatral’nye ocherki (13 Feb. 1872), 403–​407. 19 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: La Pléïade, Gallimard, 1998), IV, 603. Far from sharing these sentiments, Flaubert sought to have his féerie Le château des cœurs performed at the Gaîté when it was run by Offenbach. 20 Ivan Turgenev, “Iz Baden-​Badena pishut,” Antrakt 20 (1866), quoted in Yankovskiy, Operetta, 364–​65 17

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As a wealthy young man visiting Paris in 1857, Lev Tolstoy attended the Bouffes-​Parisiens and wrote in his diary “Something truly French. It was funny. The comedy is so good-​natured and spontaneous that it can get away with anything. Roamed the streets for an hour with evil thoughts.” A week later he attended a public execution, and his reaction motivated his gradual conversion from hedonism to humanitarianism.21 It is in the latter mood that, in Anna Karenina (1875–​1877), Tolstoy uses Offenbach to cast a sidelight on Vronsky who confesses to regular attendance at opéra bouffe: “I do believe I’ve seen it a hundred times, and always with fresh enjoyment. It’s exquisite! I know it’s disgraceful, but I fall asleep at the opera, yet I sit out the opéra bouffe to the last minute, and enjoy it.” Tolstoy also uses Offenbach to comment on the hypocrisy of the upper crust. When Vronsky attempts to describe the leading actress to a lady of society she refuses to hear about such a “horror,” despite the fact that everyone already knows about such “horrors” (Part 2, vii). Later, the landowner Svyazhsky, whose advanced principles run counter to his squalid everyday life, is characterized as someone who would sell his estate to hear La belle Hélène (Part 3, xxxvi). Mikhail Saltykov-​ Shchedrin in his masterpiece The Hon. Golovyovs (Gospoda Golovyovy, 1876) also uses Offenbach as shorthand for social corruption and personal degradation. When his heroine Anninka runs away from home and goes on the stage, it is with the vague goal of “sacred art”; but she “stripped herself bare in La belle Hélène, played the drunken Périchole, sang every conceivable indecency in La Grande-​Duchesse de Gérolstein, and was even sorry that it was not admissible to show la chose and l’amour on the stage.” Eventually, her acting in these pieces becomes so obscene that “even the uncritical provincial audience” is sickened by it.22 The way Anninka is cast and costumed in Offenbach’s works during her theatrical progress is used by Shchedrin to chart her moral decline. Chekhov, however, never mentions Offenbach in these opprobrious tones, partly because he found such anti-​idealism congenial and partly because he was inoculated during his youth. The high-​water mark of Entries dated 6 and 18 March 1857, Tolstoy’s Diaries, ed. and trans. R. F. Christian (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), I, 131–​32. 22 N. Shchedrin (M. E. Saltykov), Gospoda Golovyovy (Moscow: Moskovskiy rabochiy, 1968), 354, 438. He had earlier mocked Schneider’s Boulotte in Diary of a provincial in Petersburg (1872). A more urbane commentary on French operetta on the Russian stage can be found in K. Skalkovskiy, V teatral’nom mire. Nablyudeniya, vospominaniya i razsuzhdeniya (St Petersburg: A. S. Suvorin, 1899), 230–​33, 276–​91. A description of an actual provincial production of La belle Hélène by one of its participants appears in P. A. Strepetova, Vospominaniya i pis’ma, ed. M. D. Prygunov (Moscow and Leningrad: Academia, 1934), 380–​83. 21

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Offenbach’s popularity occurred during Chekhov’s formative years in the seaport town of Taganrog. One of the leading propagandists for operetta in the provinces was a Taganrog landowner and retired military officer Grigory Stavovich Valyano (1823–​1888). Having run through an enormous legacy, in 1869 he founded the first playhouses exclusively for operetta in Taganrog and nearby Rostov-​on-​Don, where he served not only as impresario but also as actor, director, and translator, maintaining a high level of quality in both musical and dramatic performances. Through his connections in Paris and Vienna, he was able to introduce a new repertory of comic opera into theatres in the capitals and the provinces, before financial reverses reduced him to a player in other people’s troupes.23 As an adolescent, Chekhov was an inveterate playgoer at the Taganrog theatre. According to his brother Ivan, the first play he saw there in his impressionable puberty was La belle Hélène.24 At the age of twelve he might also have attended a farcical takeoff, In Pursuit of La belle Hélène (V pogonyu za prekasnoy Yelenoy by Viktor Krylov, 1872) in the civic theatre’s new building. Later, particularly between 1876 and 1879 when his parents had moved to Moscow and his theatre-​going increased under the aegis of his uncle Mitrofan, Chekhov had the opportunity to enjoy Offenbach’s Barbe-​bleue, Les brigands, and La Princesse de Trébizonde, as well as Hélène herself.25 At this time, it is reported that all the coachmen, peddlers, and organ-​grinders in the Empire were singing the Russian lyrics to “Quand j’étais roi de Béotie” from Orphée –​the young Chekhov may well have been among their number.26 The versions of Offenbach that Chekhov saw had been considerably Russified. Most of the political allusions and word-​play had been replaced by ham-​fisted references to the conventional laughingstocks of the Russian vaudeville. Audiences at Orphée roared when the actor playing Mercury came on wearing a heavy sheepskin coat over his Grecian costume, and when “Vanka Styx” packed his aria with topical verses about a headlong ride down Nevsky Prospect and hoodwinking Siberian merchants.27 Public P. Kallinikov and I. Korneeva, eds., Russkiy biograficheskiy slovar’ v dvadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Terra, 1999), IV, 28; Yanovskiy, Operetta, 265–​66. 24 I. P. Chekhov, “O Chekhove,” in Chekhov i teatr: pis’ma, feletony, sovremenniki o Chekhove, ed. E. D. Surkov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1961), 99. 25 V. F.  Tretyakov, ed., Ocherki istorii Taganrogskogo teatra (Taganrog:  Khudozhestvennaya sektsiya Taganrogskogo okrolitrosveta, 1928), 59–​61. His attendance is attested by his younger brother Mikhail in M.  P. Chekhov, Anton Chekhov i ego syuzhety (Moscow:  no pub., 1923)  and Vokrug Chekhova: vstrechi i vpechatlenniya (Moscow: Moskovskiy rabochiy, 1964). 26 Institut, Istoriya, 276. 27 P. A. Markov, Iz istorii russkogo i sovetskogo teatra (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1974), 179. 23

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Opinion, of little repute in Russia, was clad in rags and Euridice intoned an aria from Askold’s Tomb, an early Russian opera. One of the chief adapters was the extraordinarily prolific Viktor Krylov, who appears in Chekhov’s life as the hack who offered to rewrite Ivanov to make it conform to traditional stage practice. Despite the sea-​changes he and others made to the original libretti, Offenbach’s music remained recognizable, even when rendered by scratch ensembles. The high spirits, infectious sensuality, and social leveling of the dramatic situations persisted. Chekhov was liberated from the grip of the classics by Offenbach’s irreverent treatment of gods and heroes. During his childhood, educational reforms intended to make it more difficult for minorities and lower orders to rise in society had fortified the Greek and Latin curricula. As a consequence, schoolmasters and Latin grammar remain signposts for blinkered and narrow pedantry throughout Chekhov’s work. Whenever he does make a classical allusion, it is never to Homer or Virgil, but to Offenbach’s distortions of legend. Chekhov seems well aware that he was aligning himself with a semi-​literate Russian public whose classical background was so sketchy that its most vivid images of ancient Greece came from the operetta stage. In his satiric “From the Notebook of Ivan Ivanych,” written between 1883 and 1886 (a counterpart of Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées réçues), a disquisition on the harm caused by women offers as its prime historical example “the Trojan War broke out on account of Belle Hélène.”28 Chekhov’s familiarity with Offenbach deepened during his journalistic apprenticeship in Moscow; his letters are studded with quotations from Offenbach songs. In 1883 he complains that he can’t finish a story because a hurdy-​gurdy is churning out La belle Hélène beneath his window.29 Through his brother Nikolay who worked as a scene-​painter for the impresario Mikhail Lentovsky, Chekhov had free access to Lentovsky’s various enterprises, including the Bouffe and the “Fantasy Theatre” in Hermitage Park. This repertory teemed with Offenbach from 1878 on, including a revival of La belle Hélène in 1885. Chekhov’s attitude towards Lentovsky was mocking but affectionate; he appreciated the man’s good sense, amiability, and ingenuity, but in his theatrical gossip columns Chekhov twitted the manager’s fondness for sensational effects. When Chekhov reviewed a Lentovsky production of The Baker Girl Has Lots of Dough (La boulangère a des écus, 1880)  or the lavish six-​hour Trip to “Iz zapisnoy knizhki Ivana Ivanycha,” in A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochineniy i pisem v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1974–​83), X, 236; henceforth abbreviated as PSS. 29 Letter to N. A. Leykin, 21 and 24 August 1883, PSS, I, 81–​2. Also see PSS, II, 257; IV, 159. 28

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the Moon or Geneviève de Brabant (both 1883), his criticism was directed not so much at the operas as at the lack of proportion in devoting such vast resources to light entertainment. Chekhov described the spectacular Trip to the Moon “as grandiose and pompous as a wedding coach, and as high-​pitched as a million ungreased wheels.”30 In another column, he set Offenbach’s ghost to haunt the manager Kuznetsov for mixing opéra bouffe with folk opera; his principals are French but his chorus is Russian, so they sing, in a garbled macaronics, “Bez zhenshchin, sans femmes, bez femm-​ shchin, sans zhen-​femmes.”31 Chekhov’s attitude towards these operettas is part of his attraction/​ repulsion to/​from the theatre in general. While he preserves his precocious fondness for these works, he also demonstrates a growing awareness of the tawdriness and lewdness they promote on both sides of the footlights. The ebullience expressed in the music and lyrics is often coarsened by the responses of the largely male audience and the squalor of backstage intrigue. Chekhov’s earliest stories, located in many cases in a theatrical milieu (“Fairy Tales of Melpomene” he called them) allude regularly to Offenbach, and the operetta stage supplies his humorous pieces with a sustaining stream of local allusion, a bohemian alternative to the petit-​ bourgeois life that he otherwise portrays. Offenbach is also shown to be a Russian cliché for European culture. In Chekhov’s parody of conservative officialdom “Goose Conversation” (October 1884), the old geese view the West as “the land of operetta! Operetta, you’ll agree, is a good, even an indispensable thing.” They complain that by flying south instead of west they had never had a chance of hearing Hélène’s famous aria. In “My Guide to Housekeeping” (1886) the overbearing husband forces his wife to play excerpts from Offenbach as an aid to digestion after a heavy meal. A description of holiday crowds in the week following Easter (March 1885) points out that, while some plebeians sing Russian folksongs, semi-​sophisticated hotel staff and bootblacks yelp (lupyat) the number about cautious husbands from La belle Hélène.32 Valets who fancy such fare seem an early sketch for Yasha in The Cherry Orchard with his longing for Paris. In June 1885 Chekhov drew on Barbe-​bleue for two pieces, “Boots,” in which a man given the wrong boots at an inn “Oskolki moskovskoy zhizni” 16, in PSS, XVIII, 253–​54. On Lentovskiy’s Offenbach productions, see Andrew Donskov, Mixail Lentovskij and the Russian theatre (East Lansing, Mich.:  Russian Language Journal, 1985), 20–​23. 31 PSS, XVI, 128. He also wrote the caption to a cartoon “On the Moon,” meant as a supplement to the opera, see Oskolki, 25 (22 Jun. 1885): 1; PSS, III, 457. 32 “Gusinskiy razgovor,” PSS, III, 78; “Moy domostroy,” PSS, V, 359; “Krasnaya gorka,” PSS, III, 215). 30

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inadvertently reveals that the actor playing Bluebeard is sleeping with the wife of the actor playing King Bobèche and is chased at gunpoint for his pains; and “My Wives,” a misogynistic conceit in which Raoul Bluebeard justifies his uxoricides by describing the insufferable personalities of his spouses.33 Thereafter, Chekhov no longer refers directly to Offenbach in his stories, no doubt because he had become immersed in spheres of experience more varied than the limited milieux of greenroom, pressroom, and consulting room. He was taking himself more seriously as an author. The new care in his writing did not require the instant tinge of ribaldry he could achieve by dropping Offenbach’s name. Yet at the end of his career, in one of his last, great stories, Chekhov was to return to his metonymic use of operetta as the man-​in-​the-​street’s idea of European sophistication. In 1897, Chekhov saw La belle Hélène for the last time, at the Biarritz Casino.34 Revivals at three different Moscow theatres in 1898 were covered in Novosti dnya (News of the Day), a paper Chekhov read regularly. This may have jogged his recollection of the provincial performances of his youth, for in “The Darling” (1899) the impressionable Olenka’s first husband runs a summer music theatre. The couple lament the general public’s failure to comprehend art, especially its refusal to come and see Hervé’s Le petit Faust and Offenbach’s Orphée.35 This reprise of Chekhov’s mockery of philistine taste is more affectionate, even nostalgic, than in his early comic writing. An Offenbachian correlative of greater importance occurs in Chekhov’s one-​act play Lebedinaya pesnya (Swansong, 1887–​1888), based on the short story “Kalkhas” (“Calchas,” November 1886), a title which conveys a special message to an Offenbach aficionado. In both variants of this “Laugh, clown, laugh” scenario, the veteran actor Svetlovidov traces the decline in his fortune back to the moment when his fiancée watched him play “a vulgar, slapstick part” and refused to marry him unless he left the stage. As he recounts this, he wears the costume of Calchas, the wily oracle-​monger of La belle Hélène, a role he has just played at his benefit performance. This costume was a garishly decorated tunic, short enough to reveal the actor’s superannuated legs. In the story (where he is fifty-​eight) and, more effectively because visually, in the play (where his age is increased to sixty-​eight), this garb serves as an ironic counterpoint to the old ham’s plaints and his quotations from Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Griboedov. It not only vividly “Sapogi,” PSS, IV, 7–​10; “Moi zheny,” PSS, IV, 24–​30. Letter to A. S. Suvorin (11/​23 Sep. 1897), PSS, Pis’ma, VII, 49. 35 “Dushechka,” PSS, X, 102–​108. 33 34

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supports his claim that he is relegated to playing crude farce, but undercuts the self-​pity which is a pitfall for anyone assuming the role of Svetlovidov. The classical quotations do not appear in the story, but were provided by Chekhov in the one-​act as a showcase for the popular actor Davydov, who had played leading roles in Offenbach in his early provincial career. To have a celebrated comic bemoaning his status as a comic while wearing a ridiculous costume must have produced a richly Pirandellian effect in the original production. Offenbach’s Calchas is a fraud who appropriates the offerings to the gods and interprets the oracles to suit the occasion. Svetlovidov’s fraud lies in the false faces his profession fixes on him; despite his maudlin tale of the past, he seems to exist only when he is reciting lines. His very nom de théâtre, “Bright Aspect,” is a sorry misnomer. Just as Offenbach’s augur moves between high-​flown addresses to divinity and the latest Parisian colloquialisms, Svetlovidov shuttles back and forth between rhetorical verse imprecations and a fruity, vernacular Russian packed with homely curses. The relation of the Offenbachian character to Chekhov’s play is so crucial that it is pointless, as some have done, to identify Calchas as a character in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, a play never performed in the nineteenth century, least of all on the Russian stage.36

La belle Yelena Lines, themes, and characters from Offenbach’s operettas saturated Chekhov’s imagination. Once this stock of operettic allusion had been absorbed into his literary subconscious, he could draw on it more intuitively in his full-​length plays. The character of Yelena Andreevna, first presented in Leshy (The Wood Goblin, 1890) and then revised for Dyadya Vanya (Uncle Vanya), is an updating, even a sort of parody, of La belle Hélène. The Spartan queen as drawn by Meilhac and Halévy was not intended, says Rissin, as a portrait of any particular society woman, but summed up “the great bourgeoises in general, indeed even the bourgeoisie in its entirety.”37 She is portrayed not as a temptress or even as inordinately susceptible, but Ronald Hingley in Chekhov short plays (London:  Oxford University Press, 1969), 142, and Vera Gottlieb in Chekhov and the vaudeville (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1982), 122–​23, both try to figure out the implications of this “Shakespearean” allusion. Curiously enough, one contemporary journalist did draw a parallel between La belle Hélène and Troilus and Cressida: S. I. Sychevskiy, “Shékspir i Offenbakh,” Odesskiy vestnik 95 (21 May 1873), but the thirteen-​year-​old Chekhov is unlikely to have read the article. 37 Rissin, Offenbach, 135. 36

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rather as a woman who sees herself as the passive pawn of history. Hélène complains that the hand of fate weighs heavily on her, because of both her scandalous parentage and her standing as the most beautiful woman in the world. “I wish I could have been a quiet middle-​class housewife, married to some nice merchant from Mitylene,” she sighs. Ménélas is “a good and excellent man”; she tried to love him but couldn’t.38 When the shepherd Pâris comes on the scene and informs her that he is entitled to the most beautiful woman in the world, she is caught in a dilemma, knowing that she fits the description but has an obligation to remain a respectable wife. Her plight suggests that the system of gods and men calls for the debauch of women, even against their will. It is at this point that she sings her “Invocation à Vénus,” quoted in the Introduction. There emphasis was laid on the use of the neologism “cascader” as an image of physical imbalance and a metaphor for the imminent loss of moral equipoise. Offenbach shows us a sensual and unsatisfied woman struggling against the fatality of her nature. When she finally decides to kick over the traces, the action can (and must, if it is to have any resonance) symbolize liberation not only from sexual mores, but from all socially ordained strictures. Offenbach’s originality comes in his depiction of the conflict from the woman’s point of view. Suvorin had pointed out that, in his adaptation, Krylov had not translated “cascader” literally. The word “kaskadirovanie,” accepted in its wide sense, fully defines [the operas’] satire and, serving as a banner of the times, explains their success … The Russian translator found no word in Russian equivalent to cascader and translated the Venus couplet: O neuzheli, bogi, vas veselit’ Kol’ nasha chest’ kuvyrkom poletit? [O, gods, can it be it rejoices you Whenever our honor turns topsy-​turvy?]39

Hélène in fact continues to repulse Pâris. He bribes Calchas, who pretends to send her sweet dreams. Accepting the shepherd in her bedchamber as a vision, she is willing to succumb to his advances and by the last act, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, La belle Hélène, opéra bouffe en trois actes (Paris: Calmann-​ Lévy, 1960), 8 (Acte I). 39 Suvorin, “‘Prekrasnaya Elena’ Offenbakha na russkoy stsene” (20 Oct. 1868) in Teatral’nye ocherki, 236. Nevertheless, Krylov’s version seems to have become a classic, and was even used in a 2014 production by the Helikon Opera in Moscow. Dmitry Bertman, “Offenbach. La belle Hélène. Helikon-​Opera (Moscow),” https://​bertman.ru/​performances/​offenbach-​la-​ belle-​hélène-​helikon-​opera-​moscow. 38

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yielding wholly to fate, allows him, in the guise of a priest of Venus, to carry her off to Cythaera. The ship sails away as Ménélas fumes impotently on the shore. In Chekhov’s comedy The Wood Goblin, Offenbach’s burlesque of the Homeric abduction is doubly burlesqued. In the first version of the play, Yelena Andreevna, the young wife of an arid professor, is so enervated by her hypochondriac husband, importunate suitors, and a family quarrel that she agrees to run off with the dashing officer Fyodor Orlovsky. In fact, she abandons him at the first opportunity and holes up in a mill, run by a grotesque and voluble landowner named Dyadin. Eventually she returns to her chastened husband. The second version of the play radically rethinks this denouement and reduces its melodramatic overtones. Yelena now runs off with the caricatural Dyadin and goes back home even though her husband has not reformed. At the critical moment of this revised Act IV, Dyadin hands Yelena Andreevna over to the Professor with the words “Your Excellency, I was the one who made off with your wife, as once a certain Paris did the beautiful Helen.” His words –​“prekrasnaya Yelena” –​ are, in fact, the title of Offenbach’s operetta in Russian, and Dyadin goes on to garble another of Chekhov’s favorite plays, “It was I! Although pockmarked Parises don’t exist, still, friend Horatio, there’s more on earth than is met with in your philosophy.”40 Not only is this rustic Russian Paris ugly and middle-​aged, he is also a self-​confessed cuckold. Chekhov’s Helen is abducted by Menelaus. Yelena did not appear in the original cast list for The Wood Goblin as Chekhov drew it up for his intended collaborator Suvorin in October 1888, but he had already experimented with the character of a tempted wife in his short story “Neschastye” (“A Misfortune,” 1886). Like Offenbach’s opéra bouffe, this narrative has a three-​act structure. In the first, Sofya Petrovna, a notary’s wife who thinks herself “an ordinary woman,” half-​ heartedly resists the open-​air advances of the lawyer Ilin, although she is sorely attracted by his insistence that he loves her because she is “so beautiful” (tak prekrasny). In the second, during a card party which seems to correspond to the game of Snakes-​and-​Ladders played in Act II of La belle Hélène, Sofya Petrovna, sure of her “unassailable virtue,” flirts with Ilin. She lets herself be tempted in this frivolous atmosphere, much as Hélène allows herself to be wooed in the suppositious dream. Sofya’s discordant A. P. Chekhov, Leshiy, IV, ix; PSS, XII, 195. The translation here and elsewhere comes from The complete plays of Anton Chekhov, translated and edited by Laurence Senelick (New  York:  W.  W. Norton, 2005).

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feelings emerge in her own central “aria,” as she sings melancholy ballads for her guests, “nervously, with a certain half-​tipsy fervor,” yet sensing that something bad is about to happen. In the third act, she comes to a decision as the strains of a tenor are heard outside her window. When her husband proves to be listless and tendentious in the face of her imminent affair, she walks out, reproving herself as immoral but driven by something “stronger than her shame, and reason, and fear.”41 Contemporary critics remarked on the originality of portraying the conflicted feelings of a young married woman of the educated classes torn between desire and duty, without noting that Chekhov seems to have used the Offenbachian model to reduce Anna Karenina to a petty-​bourgeois plane. Characteristically, whenever Chekhov experiments with a new genre or theme, he parodies it. The romantic fancies of a respectable woman in a conventional love triangle were terra incognita for Chekhov, and so he approached the subject facetiously. As in Offenbach, the husband remains a caricature and the ardent seducer is drawn somewhat sketchily, but the warring factions within the wife’s psyche engage our attention and raise the farce to a higher level. That Chekhov scores them to musical accompaniment is also suggestive. Yelena Andreevna, as she is delineated in The Wood Goblin, is, like Sofya Petrovna, situated in a summer-​house ambience which offers the leisured break from routine equivalent to the games and the seaside resort in La belle Hélène. Her character is handled somewhat differently than it will be in Uncle Vanya. Whereas in the later play her conjugal fidelity is a subject broached only by Voinitsky and Astrov, overheard by Telegin (the Dyadin counterpart), in The Wood Goblin her looks and her faithfulness are debated among a large group of male guests. In other words, the earlier Yelena is a topic for smoking-​room comment, creating a louche atmosphere around her even before her first entrance. Her own worldliness is greater in this earlier avatar: she comments that love letters are a futile stratagem, they may be received but go unread. Surely, this is the voice of experience. She also shares Hélène’s insistence on her virtue. Voinitsky, objecting to her indolence and sluggishness, adds “So much virtue that, pardon me, it makes me sick to look at it …”42 She has had the bad dreams and forebodings of a classical heroine, and the tendency to see her circumstances as exemplary: “I have no will of my own. I’m cowardly, inhibited, and I keep thinking that, if I were to be unfaithful, all wives would follow my example “Neschastye,” PSS, V, 247–​49. Leshiy, III, iii; PSS, XII, 165.

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and leave their husbands.” This heightening of personal experience into a universal recalls the prototype of Helen of Troy, the paradigmatic unfaithful wife who brought international disaster in her wake. Chekhov avoids the epic or the grand gesture. So Offenbach’s satiric leveling of mythological topoi is matched by Chekhov’s thwarting theatrical expectation. After the abduction has been caricatured and aborted, Yelena remarks, on her voluntary return to the Professor, “Do you think she will turn her freedom to any good use? Don’t worry … She will come back … She has already come back.”43 She wryly accepts “a woman’s lot,” to grow stale in household routine; she lacks the courage to make the final break. In other words, Helen chooses to go back to Menelaus, before any harm is done; as Jean Giraudoux’s play has it, “The Trojan War Will Not Take Place.” Chekhov outdoes Offenbach in ironic bathos: Offenbach had suggested that respectable women of the Second Empire need a certain amount of persuasion to give in to their sensuality, but, when they do, the result is cataclysmic. Chekhov implies that respectable women of the Russian Empire are so alarmed by their sensuality that they remain bound to a life they know is a dead end. When he came to convert The Wood Goblin into Uncle Vanya, Chekhov typically omitted many of the most explicit statements, including Yelena’s fear of setting an example for all wives. Some of her worldliness was pared away, but would return highly amplified in Vishnyovy sad (The Cherry Orchard), as the “depraved” Ranevskaya in her Parisian gowns. Still, Voinitsky’s speech about immorality remains unchanged in Uncle Vanya. It is virtually a synopsis of Pâris’s arguments in La belle Hélène: “To be unfaithful to an old husband you can’t stand –​that’s considered immoral; but to try to stifle one’s poor youth and living feeling –​that’s not immoral.”44 By reducing the cast of The Wood Goblin to the tight family circle of Uncle Vanya, Chekhov has moved the Offenbach triangle to the foreground. Both cynosure and catalyst, Yelena is, like Hélène, a young, staid wife, anxious to preserve her virtue when assailed by alluring temptation. She disclaims responsibility for the sexual attraction she exerts on the men around her and protests that their attentions are a nuisance. Her complaint that men cannot look at a woman without desiring her echoes the Spartan queen’s grievances. The Professor, her elderly spouse, is less complaisant, more dictatorial than Ménélas, but he too is a somewhat comic Leshiy, IV, ix; PSS, XII, 194–​95. Leshiy, I, iii, PSS, XII; Dyadya Vanya, I, 131, PSS, XIII, 68.

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valetudinarian. The Greek connection is underlined when Telegin asks him whether he knows a certain Lakedaimonov. It is a natural assumption, one cuckold calling to a putative confrère, since Menelaus was King of Sparta, otherwise known as Lacedaemonia. (In The Wood Goblin, the name was the less outlandish Novosyolov, New Settler.) The Yelena of Uncle Vanya is also given her own version of the Invocation to Venus, a soliloquy in Act III. Here, prompted by Sonya’s hopeless love for Dr Astrov, she fantasizes about what it would be like to give herself to such a man. She ruminates on Vanya’s insistence that she has rusalka’s blood in her veins and should give in to her desires once in her life. A rusalka or water-​nymph is not, as often translated, a mermaid, for although she is dangerous and sexy, she is also undead, usually the spirit of a drowned girl or an unbaptized child, something morbid, freakish. Yelena’s musing seems very close to Hélène’s sorry awareness that she is the offspring of Leda and the Swan, that her nature was born of lustful miscegenation. Vanya had urged Yelena “to hurry up and fall in love up to your ears with some water sprite –​and plop headfirst into the millrace” (i bultykh s golovoy v omut),45 which has two Offenbachian allusions. The Swedish tourist Baron Gondremarck in La vie parisienne sings that he intends to plunge into Parisian pleasures “jusque-​là,” a phrase which became proverbial. Plopping headfirst into a millrace echoes Krylov’s rendition of cascader as “turn topsy-​turvy.” Both Hélène and Yelena end their arias on a querulous and conscience-​stricken note, followed by the entrance of the feared but longed-​for seducer, Pâris/​Astrov. Chekhov was not the only Russian humorist to see a connection between the classical triangle and suburban flirtations. His good friend, Ivan Leontiev, alias Shcheglov, in his popular novel Dachny muzh (The Dacha Husband, 1896), provided the language a new word. Wives left in the country while husbands arrive only on weekends offer opportunities for sexual adventuring. Leontiev’s put-​upon spouse, shuttling between his vacation home and the city with endless errands to run, questions why obscene chansonettes are suitable as children’s entertainment. “In such a case one could produce with the same good reason ‘a matinee La belle Hélène for children’ in the Pavlovsk theater, since the orchestra, playing through the entire repertoire of operettas, the mother-​Helens, all dressed to the nines, and, flirting with them, in the absence of the Dyadya Vanya, III; PSS, XIII, 91. The water-​sprite imagery also has precedents in Pushkin’s Rusalka, cited in The Seagull, and Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Sunken Bell, staged by Stanislavsky in Moscow in 1896.

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dacha-​husband-​Menelauses, the cousin-​Parises, present a scene that is not edifying in the least.”46 In both Offenbach and Chekhov the pressing suit of the intruder is interrupted by another intrusion in a farcical key by a husband or would-​be husband. Chekhov distributes some of Ménélas’s function to Vanya, who longs to be Yelena’s mate and always addresses her as Hélène. Offenbach’s royal wittold bursts into the bedchamber to find his wife in the arms of the Phrygian shepherd, but no scene of melodramatic jealousy ensues: the queen inquires about his trip and the hapless Ménélas is lectured by her and his royal colleagues to the effect that respectable husbands always send advance couriers to report the time of their return. Chekhov’s Vanya inopportunely stumbles upon Yelena’s and Astrov’s kiss and his response too is a damp squib. Instead of an explosion of jealousy or recrimination, Astrov chats about the weather and later mockingly refers to “Uncle Vanya and his bouquet of roses,” while Vanya stammers “Huh? Well, yes … fine … Hélène, I saw it all, all …” Ménélas tries to make a scene: “I’m not an ordinary husband. I’m an epic husband, I am! I want people to talk about this case four thousand years from now!” (II, ix) This ludicrous pretension resonates in Vanya’s cry, “I could have been a Dostoevsky, a Schopenhauer,” a statement whose very absurdity becomes evident to him a moment later. It may be stretching a point to claim that the final chorus in La belle Hélène, with its reiterated “Va pour Cythère, va, va, va” is echoed in the motif of “They’ve gone” (Uekhali) in the last act of Uncle Vanya. Still, Chekhov may be trying for a reductio ad absurdum by sending his Helen, not with her lover but with her husband, not to Cythaera, the shrine of Venus, but to Kharkov, a town which in Chekhov always stands for the most sleepy and dismal backwater, the terminus of unfulfilled lives. The chief value of Offenbach’s inspiration for Chekhov is to provide a dramatic treatment of adultery that is neither slapstick nor melodrama. In plays by Chekhov’s contemporaries that deal with transgressing wives or women contemplating an illicit affair, the tone is hysterical, neurasthenic, charged with overwrought emotion. The women are either destructive Messalinas or guilt-​ridden Phaedras. Without moralizing, La belle Hélène offered a critical means of depicting a wife, who, faced with temptation, has to come to terms with her own nature. The mainspring of all of Offenbach’s plots is frustration: villains are few and a character suffers defeat when his own desire, usually for sex or power, Ivan Shcheglov, The dacha husband, his adventures, observations and disappointments, trans. Michael R. Katz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 15.

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collides with that of others. In grand opera, these individual conflicts engender desperate actions in the characters and strong reactions in the spectators. In Offenbachian opéra bouffe, however, these conflicting desires generate a sense of absurdity; the futility of the characters’ aspirations stirs up a different kind of reaction in them and the spectators: laughter in the face of unreconciled contradictions. Chekhov shares a similar viewpoint and a similar technique, particularly in his plays, in which frustrated desire is a leitmotif. The clash of velleities rarely leads to effective or culminating action, but exhibits ridiculous inconsistencies which evoke laughter or impotent despair. Unlike Offenbach, Chekhov does not discount conventional morality. Offenbach deflates epic and tragic pretentions by hiking up togas and revealing backsides. Chekhov exposes the banality of emotional posturing; he dissolves heroic striving in an acid bath of triviality. Offenbach winds up his situations in a riot of hijinks, a musical finale which celebrates frivolity no matter what. Working in a more realistic mode, Chekhov can have recourse to this manic anarchy only in such one-​act farces as The Wedding or The Celebration. In his major plays, the finales are open-​ended, unresolved, watered more often with tears than with champagne.

Ch apter 7

Doing the Continental

Border Crossings In 1886, addressing the Hellenic Society of London, Heinrich Schliemann, the amateur archaeologist who claimed to have excavated the original sites of Troy and Mycenae, alluded to La belle Hélène. It was, he joked, the way most of his listeners would have heard about the Trojan War.1 Offenbach had permeated the European consciousness so indelibly that even classical scholars could be expected to be familiar with his work. He crossed borders with all the aplomb of a practiced smuggler. From its invention in the sixteenth century, traveling companies carried opera from town to town, winning patronage from nobles and statesmen in quest of prestige. This “mobile professional force” had a limited repertoire, invariably written in Italian or one of its dialects, so that the same operas were performed all over. One such was Francesco Cavalli’s Il Giasone, designed for Venice and its heterogeneous public, which became a European staple after it had been introduced at the palace of the Spanish Viceroy of Naples.2 By the nineteenth century, not only were the same operas being sung in cities across the globe, but singers and whole troupes traveled to wherever they might be best rewarded. The global translocation of light opera begins with Offenbach, whose music recurs in a myriad of ways and occasions that define the modern world. Rebuking those who regard Offenbach as fundamentally French, Philippe Luez has called him “the last truly European composer before music broke into national schools.” Siegfried Kracauer had gone even further to name him “an international musical phenomenon” at

Het nieuwe van den dag (2 Apr. 1887), quoted in Wout Arentzen, Schliemann en Nederland. Een leven vol verhalten (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2012), 434. 2 Louise K.  Stein, “How opera traveled,” Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen M.  Greenwald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 844. 1

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a time when globalization was in its infancy. His music is a “kind of Esperanto.”3 Offenbach took part in the widespread transmission of French culture through adaptations and translations enabled by lack of copyright protection. Take La Grande-​Duchesse: created before an international audience at the Exposition Universelle in April 1867, it appealed to crowned heads and foreign visitors alike. The next month it was performed in Vienna in Julius Hopp’s translation, which became standard in the German-​speaking world, being revived in Berlin (January 1868) and Munich (March 1868). The opera appeared in Swedish in Stockholm (September 1867), English in London and Danish in Copenhagen (both January 1868), Czech in Prague (January 1868), and Portuguese in Rio de Janeiro (February 1868). In April 1868 the London translation emigrated to New York, while a new translation was performed in Birmingham. “And thick and fast they came at last and more and more and more”: Spanish in Madrid (November 1868) and Mexico City (March 1871), Italian in Naples (April 1869), Catalan in Barcelona (May 1870), Polish in Lemberg (December 1871). It was even played by the Mormons in Salt Lake City (June 1869). Meanwhile, between 1867 and 1870, the French original was seen in Brussels, New York (where a steamship was named for it), New Orleans, Liège, Turin, The Hague, Geneva, Antwerp, London, St Petersburg, Milan, Montreal, Cincinnati, Florence, Tournai, Namur, Cairo, Santiago, Valparaiso, Barcelona, Ghent, Constantinople, Liverpool, and on and on.4 When it reached Rome, the Pope is said to have lamented “Che disgrazia! And to think I am the only sovereign who cannot attend this Grand Duchess!”5 The introduction and assimilation of Offenbach outside of France usually follow the same pattern. First, some of his one-​acts are staged, either in French or in translation. Then French touring companies show up and inspire the local talent to imitate or adapt or even plagiarize Offenbach’s more extended work. These versions become imbedded in the culture, sometimes for decades, and serve to liberate composers and librettists from conventional genres and styles. In many cases, this liberation leads to an

Philippe Luez, Jacques Offenbach (1819–​ 1880). Musicien européen (Paris:  Séguier, 2001), 307ff; Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit, ed. Karsten Witte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 151. 4 Philippe Goninet, quoted in Jean-​Claude Yon, “Introduction,” Le théâtre français à l’étranger au XIXe. Histoire d’une suprématie culturelle, ed. Jean-​Claude Yon (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2008), 13–​15. 5 Le Ménestral 1117 (23 Feb. 1868) and 1119 (8 Mar. 1868), cited in Jean-​Claude Yon, Jacques Offenbach (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 417. 3

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efflorescence of native talent, themes, and traditions. There are local variations, but the pattern is generally applicable.

Principalities and Powers Belgium seems to have conducted its statecraft to operatic airs. Its war for independence from the Netherlands broke out in 1830 during a performance of Auber’s La muette de Portici, which depicts a revolt of fishermen. The opera was considered so incendiary that it was prohibited in Paris (briefly), Austria, and Russia. The second-​act duet “Amour sacré de la patrie” and the cry “Aux armes” were the cue for the audience at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels to cheer wildly and pour into the streets of the capital. When Leopold II made his solemn entry into Brussels for his coronation thirty-​five years later, he was warmly received by citizens and foreign visitors, attracted by his youthful affability and long Dundreary whiskers. After a period of mourning for his father, the first King of the Belgians, the populace was eager to throw off its sackcloth and don its glad rags. So the bandmaster of the musicians preceding the royal procession, aware that the recent glut of funeral marches had lowered the public mood, added Offenbach to the program. As Leopold, accompanied by dignitaries, approached the palace where he was to be crowned, the military band began to play the famous entrance of Agamemnon from La belle Hélène: Le roi barbu qui s’avance,    Bu qui s’avance,    Bu qui s’avance. [The bearded king who comes forward]

Evidently, the bandmaster was unaware of the pun on barbu qui s’avance and bouc (billy-​goat) qui s’avance. The next day a minister remarked to a journalist, “It’s lucky this took place in so good-​natured a country as Belgium; if such a thing had happened to one of our neighbors, the king would have been a laughing-​stock for a month.”6 Offenbach was an appropriately upbeat accompaniment, since the reign of Leopold II initiated a period of industrial and colonial expansion for Belgium (which included the rape of the Congo). With the 6

La Publicité belge (24 Dec. 1865), a cutting in Baudelaire’s scrapbook; in Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Y.-​G. Le Dantec and Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 1426–​27.

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music, the country took on a modern guise. The advent of Offenbach in other nations often accompanied political change, the overthrow of elites, and commercial progress.7 What the Goncourts mourned as the demolition of long-​standing canons of manners, taste, and values, young nations and oppressed populations welcomed as a breach in the walls that held them back. Offenbach’s influence had even stronger effect on the indigenous cultures of Scandinavia. In Sweden, the foremost celebrities in the theatre were associated with Offenbach’s advent. Orfeus i underjorden arrived in two distinct stagings:  that of Pierre Deland at Djurgårdsteatern opened on 13 September 1860, with an excellent cast, including Deland himself as John Styx; it was based on a German adaptation, re-​adapted by Knut Almlöf and E. Wallmark. Almlöf, Deland’s son-​in-​law and the first Swedish actor to be knighted, played Jupiter. The success spurred another production at Mindre teatern (28 December 1860) in a translation directly from Crémieux by August Blanche. The acting in the earlier version was judged to be more grotesque and rollicking, but the scenery at the Mindre was more sumptuous. In both cases, the originality of the music was noted.8 A similar double vision operated when Den sköna Helena opened at Södra teatern on 11 May 1865, and at Dramatiska teatern a fortnight later. Dramaten, as it was nicknamed, was Stockholm’s classical theatre, and misgivings were expressed about playing opéra bouffe there. The manager Stedingk asked the opinion of everyone he met, and finally turned to the king, Karl XV. With the royal go-​ahead he hired Frans Hedberg, veteran of 230 adaptations, to rework the libretto, and the eminent director Ludvig Josephson to stage it. Intending to make it as “entertaining as possible,” Josephson turned his rehearsals into bacchanals; the orchestra was enlarged to opera-​size, which somewhat swamped the grotesquerie. The King and guards officers were invited to a lunch at the dress rehearsal, which constituted a veritable command performance. The acting was considered dazzling and free from vulgarity, with Almlöf as Menelaus and Charlotte Strandberg as Helena, whom some thought superior to Hortense Schneider, “beyond description.” Both theatres played forty performances by July 21,

A German-​speaking company run by A. Van Lier appeared at the Hague Royal Dutch Theatre in the 1860s. Gerd Aage Gillhoff, The Royal Dutch Theatre at the Hague 1804–​1826 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1938), 34. 8 Georg Nordensvan, Svensk teater och svenska skådespelare från Gustav III till våra dagar (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers, 1917–​1918), II, 177. 7

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7.1.  Karl Johan Uddman as Calchas in Den sköna Helena, Stockholm.

with Dramaten adding another fifteen and reviving it in September to reach a hundred performances by 18 December.9 Audiences and critics were unanimous in praise, and Helena became a staple in the repertoire. Its staging had two unforeseen results. One was political: Stedingk had selected it for mercenary motives and the box-​office takings met his expectations, but this provided hostile members of the Riksdag with excuses beyond the moral ones for cutting Royal Theatre allocations in 1868. The other result was cultural. The impact on young August Strindberg was overwhelming. He did not see Helena until it had been running for six months, but by that time its lines had become proverbial and “no one could read Virgil without translating Achilles as hot-​headed Achilles.” In his fictionalized autobiography, Son of a Servant (1886), the Swedish dramatist recalls how seeing the operetta at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm on the advice of his college tutor did away with many of his adolescent insecurities. It enabled the deeply inhibited, gloomily pious youth to take a cynical view of the hidebound traditions that were repressing him. In summer 1866, when he was serving as a tutor at a noble country house and delivered a trial sermon at the local church, Strindberg wrote to his older brother Oscar, he celebrated that evening by “dancing like mad.” “I had to dance with one after the other […] and there were Nordensvan, Svensk teater, II, 226–​27.

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so many beauties to choose from –​but I wasn’t impolite –​I danced with them all. […] It was certainly very invigorating to be able to shake a leg to La belle Hélène, which I hadn’t heard since leaving Stockholm.”10 In particular, Offenbach put a fresh slant on the classics and their hold on modern literary efforts. The gay if Germanicized music, the toppling of classical ideals, the burlesque pagan ceremonials that reminded him of Christian rites, the “democracy” of gods and mortals, girls and priests, joining together in a cancan, constituted a “lesson in enjoying life.” It also led Strindberg to realize that the aesthetic could be used to smuggle in something indefinable that was clearly not ethical.11 In the iconoclastic 1880s he characterized himself as a Loke (Loki), set on pulling down Valhalla. In his poem “Loki’s Invective” (Lokes smädelser) Strindberg ridicules, in true Offenbachian fashion, the Gods of Our Time, the philistines and Pharisees who lord it over Stockholm society.12 A five-​act Pariserliv with Baron Gondremarck transformed into the Russian baron Sparavinsky became a fixture in Swedish theatres. In the light of such success, all the minor theatres went down “Offenbach’s slippery path,” and by 1870 Swedes had seen and heard five more Offenbach operas. The familiarity with French operetta inspired native emulation and Swedish sångspels began to be performed in tandem with the imports.13 Norway’s theatre, eager to break away from Danish influence, emphasized national qualities. Its public was less sophisticated than Sweden’s, so Offenbach created far more controversy there. When Ibsen left the post as artistic director of the amalgamated Norwegian-​Danish Kristiania Theater in disgrace in 1863, his fellow-​playwright Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson was appointed in his stead; he was innovative and ambitious, but always under attack from the establishment for his radical political views. After a successful run of his own play The Newly-​Weds, in May 1866 he put on Den skjøne Helene. In a letter to the actress Johanne Luise Heiberg he claimed to have excised the morally objectionable passages, but the critics were not convinced and denounced him for selecting such an obscenity to begin with. They also pointed out his hypocrisy, since he had begun his management with the promise to stage the classics even if they proved to be bad box-​office. His supporters retorted that if the Storting (Parliament), August Strindberg, letter to Oscar Strindberg (15? Jul. 1860), in Strindberg’s letters, ed. and trans. Michael Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), I, 5. 11 August Strindberg, Tjänstekvinnans son (Stockholm: Albert Bonnier, 1886) I, Ch. 8. 12 Gustaf Uddreg, Strindberg the man, trans. Axel Johan Uppwall (Boston: Four Seas, 1920), 22–​23. 13 Nordensvan, Svensk teater, II, 261–​63, 266–​67. 10

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packed with farmers indifferent to the arts, went on refusing adequate subsidy to the theatre, Bjørnson had to supplement the funding with a money-​spinner. Meanwhile, although conservatives deplored the choice and would whistle at the stage, the operetta played to full houses every night, leading Bjørnson to revive it in January 1867.14 Bohemia, under Austrian domination, straining with nationalist urges, adopted Offenbach as a spokesman for independence of spirit. The German-​language Prager Theater, long the leading playhouse, deigned to lend its stage to occasional productions in Czech. On 3 October 1862 the Berlin star Wilhelm Eichenwald offered the “sensational” novelty of Orpheus in der Unterwelt there, although his own style was thought too “discreet” for operetta. Still, it established a “Cult of Offenbach” that held for the next twelve years, eleven of his works the objects of worship. Its chief votaries were German and Austrian guest artists, among them Josefine Gallmeyer as Gabrielle in Pariser Leben.15 Following the fall of the absolutist regime of Minister of the Interior Alexander von Bach in 1860, Czech cultural life showed signs of revival: a society of writers, a choral society, and an artists’ union were founded. The Provisional Theatre (Prozativní divadlo) was created in Prague in 1862 to serve until a National Theatre could be financed and built. Though cramped and technically inadequate, the Provisional played every day in Czech. It premiered its own Orfeus v podsvětí in 1863, under the baton of the native conductor Adolf Čech with the popular comedian František Šamberk as John Styx. No fewer than seventeen Offenbach works were enacted there during its brief existence, before the National Theatre (Národní divadlo) finally opened with great fanfare in 1881. Trebizonská princezna (La Princesse de Trébizonde, 1871) and Bandité (Les brigands, 1870) enjoyed eighty-​six and seventy-​seven performances respectively.16 In the former, the actors learned how to perform circus tricks, balancing plates on wands long before Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bedřich Smetana served at the conductor’s desk for ten of Offenbach’s works. When his comic opera The Bartered Bride (Prodaná nevěsta) Ann Schmiesing, Norway’s Christiania Theatre 1827–​1867. From Danish showhouse to national stage (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 206. 15 Oscar Teuber, Geschichte des Prager Theaters von den Anfängen des Schauspielwesens bis auf die neueste Zeit (Prague: A. Haase, 1888), 523–​24, 660–​62, 669. 16 Marta Ottlová, “Repertoire of the Provisional Theatre,” Miscellanea Musicologica (Charles University of Prague) 34 (1994): 7–​139; Dějiny českého divadla/​III Činohra 1848–​1918, ed. František Černý and Ljuba Klosová (Prague:  Academia, Nakladatelství Československé Akademie Věd, 1977)  133, 135, 140–​41. 14

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7.2.  Jindřich Mošna as Cabriolo in Trebizonská princezna, Provisional Theatre, Prague, 1871.

celebrated its hundredth performance in Prague in 1882, he dismissed it as “only a plaything,” meant to befuddle the critics who had called his heroic Brandenburgers in Bohemia Wagnerian. Bride was an attempt to throw off charges of heaviness and outdo Offenbach. However, while he was composing it in 1865–​1866, Smetana claimed Bride to be a folk opera, so that it wouldn’t be compared with Offenbach. He was consequently offended when a reviewer of the first Russian production referred to it as an “operetta,” far inferior to Offenbach.17 The warm reception of French opera by the Prague public was due in part to the audience’s socio-​economic diversity: refined music lovers could revel in Offenbach’s melodic ingenuity, while the lower orders could enjoy the spectacle and comedy. One dissenting voice could be heard loud and clear, however. The influential music historian August Wilhelm Ambros appreciated Offenbach so long as he followed in the footsteps of Auber, considering Le mariage aux lanternes to be his masterpiece. Ambros deplored the turn to opéra bouffe and its “moral gaminess,” which he too attributed to a need to pander to the Second Empire. For him, there was a smack of Goethe’s “spirit that denies” in this: František Bartoš, Bedřich Smetana. Letters and reminiscences, trans. Daphne Rusbridge (Prague: Artis, 1955); Brian Large, Smetana (London: Duckworth, 1970), 171; Andrew Porter, “Charm checked,” Times Literary Supplement (27 Aug. 1999): 22.

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Ambros was firmly rooted in German idealism with its exalted ethical and cultural concepts, and La belle Hélène, of which he had the lowest opinion, was, of course, Greek to him.

“Il conquera parce qu’il est espagnol” Spain was receptive to Offenbach to the point of staging forty of his works during his lifetime, many of them at the two leading theatres of Madrid, which toured them to Barcelona.19 The Teatro de la Zarzuela housed the indigenous form of comic opera, many of whose classics were produced at the same time that Offenbach was introduced, and he needed to be “Hispanicized” to suit the prevailing local taste. Press coverage of French fashion had already familiarized the reading public with Offenbach’s Parisian successes when French companies brought several of his shorter pieces to Madrid. Les deux aveugles, presented by another itinerant troupe, was quickly plagiarized by the well-​known composer Francisco Asenjo Barbieri as Los dos ciegos. The first staging of a major Offenbach work took place at the Zarzuela in 1864:  Los dioses del Olimpo, a translation by Mariano Pina y Bohiga of Orphée aux enfers. In this version, Public Opinion’s opening lines are spoken by Jupiter, which gives the impression that in Spain the public simply parroted the government line. It had a strong cast who would develop into accomplished Offenbachian interpreters. One of the Zarzuela’s comic actors, who moonlighted as a coffee-​house piano-​player, Francisco Arderíus, son of the French singer Maria Bardán, took a hard-​earned trip to Paris, where he was inspired to transfer the style of the Bouffes to Madrid. “In this blessed land,” he is reported to have said, “we are aficionados of laughter. Neither the ills of the motherland nor the years of poor crops are sufficient cause to abandon good humor

Quoted in William F. Apthorp, program notes, Performance of the twentieth rehearsal and concert, Boston Symphony Orchestra (22–​24 Mar. 1894), 693. Also see Apthorp, “Jacques Offenbach,” International Review X (1881): 288–​89. 19 A detailed and useful account of Offenbach’s faring in romance cultures is Jacobo Kaufmann’s Jacques Offenbach en España, Italia y Portugal (Zaragoza: Libros Certeza, 2008). 18

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… Let’s have bouffes in Spain!”20 In the Variedades playhouse, he opened the Teatro de los Bufos Madrileños, later known as the Bufos Arderíus, with a work commissioned from the composer José Rogel and the librettist Eusebio Blasco. Specifically instructed to copy Orphée, they came up with El joven Telémaco, based very loosely on Bishop Fénélon’s Les aventures de Télémaque (1699). Its highly lucrative success enabled Arderíus to move his enterprise to the large Teatro del Circo and emboldened him to present La Gran Duquesa de Gerolstein in 1868. As Jacobo Kaufmann points out, the timing was perfect, since it opened two months after the ouster and exile of Queen Isabella II, known for her ultra-​Catholic devotion to Vatican policy, her ever-​increasing girth, and, more appositely, her numerous lovers. Her throne was temporarily occupied by an exiled general, rapidly recalled from Paris. Audiences had an easy time of drawing parallels with the characters of The Grand Duchess. Between 1868 and 1870 Offenbach was the leading opera composer on the Madrid stage, as the two theatres offered dueling productions of his works, in different translations and arrangements (his scores were rarely preserved accurately in Spain). The Zarzuela’s greatest hits included Barba azul (Barbe-​bleue), Las Georgianas (Les Géorgiennes) and La vida parisiense (La vie parisienne). Arderíus parried the latter with La vida madrileña, simply changing the scene to the Spanish capital. The repertoires teemed with Offenbach:, when the Bufos offered La favorita, it was not Donizetti but La Périchole under another name. Arderíus made a personal triumph in the role of Robinson, a much altered version of Robinson Crusoé. The popular success of Hispanic Offenbach was offset by the (ineffectual) attacks of the critical establishment. The polemicist Antonio Guerra y Alarcón later noted: Good taste may call to account the many outrages against common sense incurred by the cultivators of a bastard genre, created by an extravagant and transitory fashion and already grown old in its youth: but there is no doubt that if Arderíus had not sponsored those follies born in the theatres of Paris, and never accommodated them with his genuine and original flavor to our stage, other impresarios would have done so; they were delusions of that time, filled with a certain grace and sparkling with wit and malice, but often clumsy and ill-​intentioned.21 Sergio Barreiro Sánchez, “La escena madrileña en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX: Francisco Arderíus y los bufos madrileños,” Stichomythia 8 (2009): 100. Arderíus left his own memoirs: Confidencias de Arderíus:  historia de un bufo, referida por D.  Antonio de San Martín (Madrid:  Imprenta Española, 1870). 21 Antonio Guerra y Alarcón, La América (Madrid) (26 May 1886): 13–​14. 20

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7.3.  “Bufos Arderíus Fifth Theatrical Campaign.” The upper picture is labeled “Leaving a serious theatre” (the poster specifies the Teatro Real); the lower “On leaving a bufo theatre.” Circa 1871.

When a new king, Amadeo of the House of Savoy, was enthroned in 1871, a patriotic upsurge led the Teatro de la Zarzuela to feature twelve new works by Spanish composers and the Bufos ten. In the same year, however, Offenbach continued to hold sway, with twenty-​three operas produced, including thirteen novelties. His popularity continued unabated for some time, although declining receipts caused Arderíus to dissolve his company in winter 1873. What is most significant, however, is that Arderíus and his colleagues cultivated actors and singers whose prowess at Offenbach enabled the indigenous form of opera to be refined into the native zarzuela bufa or género chico.22

Emilio Casares Rodicio, El teatro de los Bufos o una crisis en el teatro lírico del XIX español (Madrid:  Auditorio Nacional de Música, 1993)  and “Historia del teatro de Bufos, 1866–​1881. Crónica y dramaturgia,” Cuadernos de música iberoamericana, 2–​3 (1997): 73–​118.

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A Portuguese Welcome Matters were less settled in Portugal, although Francecismo, Frenchification, had prevailed in eighteenth-​century society. The liberal revolution in Porto in 1820 was followed by a continual to-​and-​fro between factions, with episodes of internecine wars, and the imprisonment and exile of dissidents. As the climate shifted between absolutism and liberalism, there was a massive emigration of intellectuals to France and Spain, where they imbibed the latest fads. Foreign troupes, mainly from France and Italy, regularly visited Lisbon and Porto as “cultural intermediaries,” who introduced European theatrical trends and techniques, though more often in stagecraft than in playwriting. The most prestigious theatre in Lisbon, attended by the court, was the São Carlos; its favored genre was Italian opera. High society came to it to be admired and in turn invited its singers to their soirées. Primacy was given to the vocal arts, especially bel canto, which meant that untrained Portuguese singers were outclassed: “there was singing (cantava-​se), … in Italian, there was squealing (gania-​se) in Portuguese.”23 Eager to transfer the illusions of opera to real life, the gilded youth took the foreign prima donnas as mistresses.24 The installation of a constitutional monarchy initiated Fontismo, the period of progress, and the Setembrismo theatrical reformation, carried out under the aegis of João Baptista Almeida Garrett. For Garrett, dubbed the herald of Romanticism in Portugal, Paris was the “capital of Europe in intelligence” and in 1830 he proposed a renovation of the Portuguese theatre along French lines. Reform did not extend to the São Carlos. For all the lip service paid to theatres as national educational institutions, operas continued to be vehicles for entertainment. A taste for revue and “grand spectacle” was inaugurated with Lisboa em 1850 by Francisco Palha and Latino Coelho at the Teatro do Ginásio. An acquaintance with Gallic fashion was abetted by the expansion of the railways.25 In short, the way was paved for Offenbach. José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, A Tragédia da Rua das Flores, ed. João Medina and J. Campos Matos (Lisbon: Moraes, 1980), 48, 55. There is an English translation, The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers, trans. Margaret Jull Costa. 24 Mário Viera de Carvalho, “Eça de Queirós e a ópera no século XIX em Portugal,” Colóquio/​Letras 91(May 1986): 27–​31. 25 Graça dos Santos, “Offenbach à Lisbonne à la fin du XIXe siècle, entre attraction et repulsion,” in La circulation transatlantique des imprimés –​connexions, ed. Márcia Abreu and Marisa Midori Deacto (Campinas: UNICAMP/​IEL/​Secteurs des publications, 2014), 299–​306. 23

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Offenbach’s supremacy was certified by the Lisbon production of A Grã-​ Duquesa de Gerolstein. The great actor José Carlos dos Santos, impresario of the Teatro do Principe Real, along with Pinto Bastos and Eduardo Garrido, had attended a performance of La Grande-​Duchesse in Paris in 1867; they were inspired to import it to Portugal in Garrido’s translation. The actors had virtually no musical training, so it required two months of rehearsal. Santos, an ingenious stage director, and Rio de Carvalho, the conductor, intended “a living ensemble, mischievous and dazzling for the whole opera.”26 The idea was to make something Portuguese, not Francecismo. The lusophone Duchess opened on 29 February 1868, with the magnificent actress Emilia Letroublon in the lead (she was to die a few months later); the eccentric actor Faria as Boum was adjudged superior to his Parisian counterpart. It was performed hundreds of times in succession. One Portuguese theatre historian has declared “The first production of The Grand Duchess in Lisbon marks a date in the transformation of a theatre where, as they said of the Trinidade, nothing favored art.”27 The Trinidade’s manager, Francisco Palha, was so impressed that he resolved to renounce drama for light entertainment; he not only copied The Duchess but embarked on his own translation of Barbe-​bleue (Barba azul). La Grande-​Duchesse was to be seen in virtually every playhouse in Lisbon, even the Price Brothers circus. Moreover, its music was heard sung by young gentlewomen in every drawing-​room and whistled by street urchins. Even the church carillons in Lisbon called the faithful to prayer with la belle Hélène’s invocation to Venus.28 Thirty of Offenbach’s works were produced in all. Parodies of Second Empire phenomena might have little to say to Portuguese society, but because they were sung in Portuguese audiences applied them to local events. Moreover, opéra bouffe provided a showcase for local actresses, who had previously been unable to compete with Italian divas. At the São Carlos, with the promotion of a well-​rehearsed ensemble, audiences stopped star-​gazing and began to practice a more critical, even ironic observation beyond mere emotional involvement. So opéra bouffe served to cultivate both Portuguese actors and audiences. The latter were a Quoted in Dos Santos, “Offenbach à Lisbonne,” 305. Antonio Sousa Bastos, Carteira do artista; apontamentos para a historia do theatro portuguez e brazileiro. Acompanhados de noticias sobre os principaes artistas, escriptores, dramaticos e compositores estrangeiros (Lisbon: Antiga Casa Bertrand, 1898), 85–​86. 28 Madame Rattazzi [pseudonym of Marie-​ Lætitia Bonaparte-​ Wyse], Le Portugal à vol d’oiseau (Paris: A. Degorce-​Cadot, 1879), quoted in José-​Augusto França, Le romantisme au Portugal. Étude de faits socio-​culturels (Paris: Klincksieck, 1975), 547. 26 27

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cross-​section of society; in Eça de Queirós’s “roman-​operette” Tragédia da Rua das Flores (The Tragedy of Flower Street, written in 1877, not published until 1980) the spectators at an opéra bouffe include the king and queen, a countess, a priest, a deputy, a poet, a pianist, a virtuous aristocrat, and bourgeois dandies. Offenbach’s pre-​eminence on the bills was bound to be controversial; conservative critics contrasted the high art of the São Carlos with opera bufa, insisting that Rossini’s Cenerentola is “immortal” whereas the Grand Duchess was already “decrepit.” Despite, or perhaps because of, lack of government support and the disdain from certain quarters, Offenbach became a code word for derision, anti-​establishment squibs, and criticism of traditional institutions down to the 1920s. The political columnist Mário Viera de Carvalho later took “Jacques Offenbach” as his pen-​name. “Offenbach is the leader of a school, not only musical, but also literary and artistic.”29 This cultural schism is to be clearly seen in the novels of Eça de Queirós, whose concept and practice of realism are as tied to the theatre of Offenbach as the romantic aesthetic and mentality are to the São Carlos. He was eager for realism “to take a photograph, I was almost about to say a caricature, of the old bourgeois world, sentimental, devout, Catholic, exploitative, aristocratic, etc. And, by subjecting it to the scorn, laughter, contempt of the modern, democratic world, prepare for its downfall.”30 He considered writing a comic opera, and regularly cites incidents and characters in Offenbach as analogues to political and social events. For instance, the Grand Duchess’s letter is said to be more successful than the Constitutional Letter, i.e., Offenbach stands for the threat of rebellion from below.31 For him, São Carlos always represents establishment values, Offenbach their subversion. In A relíquia (The Relic), the painter Gorjão uses Offenbach to symbolize the indispensable depravity of art dedicated to the masses: “every painting should act as a ‘barricade.’”32 Respectable Luísa thinks Offenbach’s music is “rowdy” (espalhafatona) and plays grand opera at the piano, while the cocotte Leopoldina identifies with Blue Beard and Grand Duchess. Tragédia da Rua das Flores begins during a performance of Blue Beard at the Trinidade, and sets the tone for the major set pieces. Dreamy, impressionable young Vitor da Silva catches sight of a Pinherio Chagas, “Folhetim de Diário ilustrado, Offenbach,” Diário ilustrado 31 (31 Jul. 1872): 121. Eça de Queiroz, Correspondéncia, ed. Guilherme de Castilho (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-​Casa de Moeda, 1883), I, 142. 31 The Constitutional Letter of 1824 created a parliamentary monarchy but also a Moderating Power which gave the king the last word. 32 Eça de Queiroz, Obras (Porto: Lelio & Irmão, 1958), I, 169. 29 30

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handsomely dressed woman seated in a box, her blonde beauty all the more effulgent for the presence at her side of a scrawny, red-​nosed English companion. She is the predatory and louche Genoveva de Molineux, a poule de luxe, who turns out to be the mother of the lovelorn youth.33 In his novel As farpas (Splinters, 1871), Eça de Queirós addressed the cultural split in a passage jointly defending the realist agenda and Offenbach: The bourgeoisie was not right to adopt him nor playwrights to abuse him. No, my playwright friends, you did not understand Offenbach! Offenbach is greater than you all. He has a philosophy, you have not even an idea; he has a critique, you have not even a grammar! Who else but he battered a breach in the wall of all the prejudices of his time? Who else but he, with four bars of music and two fiddles, could undermine obsolete institutions once and for all? Who other than he could sketch the gaudy caricature of decadence and mediocrity? […] All you have done is to put us to sleep! And what did he do? Militarism, despotism, intrigue, venal priesthood, the baseness of the court, the vanity of the bourgeoisie, all of these he smote, overturned, shook up, in a meteoric ditty! No, high-​placed bourgeoisie, you were wrong to applaud and patronize him. You thought you found in him a diversion, but actually you found a condemnation. His music is your caricature. […] Offenbach is a philosophy in song.34

Mário Vieira de Carvalho, “Eça de Queirós e a ópera no século XIX em Portugal,” Colóquio/​Letras 91 (May 1986): 32–​35. He expanded this into Eça de Queiroz e Offenbach. A ácida gargalhada de Mefistófeles (Lisbon: Colibri, 1999). 34 Eça de Queiroz, Obras, III, 970–​71. His character João de Ega expresses these sentiments in the novel Os Maias (The Maias, 1888). 33

Ch apter 8

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That Offenbach-​mania spread rapidly through Europe is not surprising, since analogous social structures and forms of entertainment prevailed from Belgium to Romania, and, as Napoleon III had hoped, French cultural authority held sway. Nor is it surprising that, in an age of expanding empire, fashions and tastes from the mother countries should be imported along with legal codes, bureaucracies, and culinary practices. However, the farther afield Offenbach was transported, the more idiosyncratic and outlandish the uses to which he was put.

Latin America South America was not a pleasant place to be in 1868. It was roiled by war in Paraguay, where something close to 200,000 casualties were due as much to cholera, typhus, dysentery, and pestilence as to military operations. Uruguay was undergoing a commercial crisis which required the introduction of paper currency. National frontiers were being breached by gangs of brigands. A heat wave, often exceeding 106 degrees Fahrenheit, roasted part of the continent. And despite all these calamities, an excellent Parisian opéra bouffe company made its debut in Buenos Aires in Offenbach’s Les bavards. Unfortunately, neither the political nor the natural climate was conducive to its success.1 Cuba had first encountered Offenbach in 1862, when Tromb-​al-​ca-​zar arrived in Havana, followed by Les deux aveugles and Le violoneux in 1865. These works were the direct inspiration for indigenous imitations, the bufos cubanos, which debuted at the Teatro Villaneuva on 31 May 1868, as an alternative to the Italian opera and Spanish drama, the basic theatrical offerings in a colonial society. Some historians have cited the bufos Louis Moreau Gottschalk (Buenos Aires, 13 Jan. 1868), Notes of a pianist (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1881), 467.

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madrileños of Francisco Arderíus, which arrived in Cuba in 1866, as the model; but since Arderíus was himself inspired by Offenbach, they seem to have been more a conduit than an original influence.2 The honor of the earliest mention of Offenbach in the Latin-​American press falls to Brazil, a notice of Les deux aveugles, presented by the “théâtre français” at São Januario Hall in Rio de Janeiro on 15 November 1856, directed by Florindo Joaquim da Silva. Several Offenbach one-​acts in French and Portuguese followed. Brazil was to prove a more hospitable haven for French comic opera than the Spanish-​speaking centers. In this patriarchal slave society, certain aspects of communal life were more porous, the populace more variegated in race and color than elsewhere in the Americas. Although slavery was not legally abolished until 1888, manumission had created a large community of freedmen. Foreign visitors noted that the ruling classes combined quasi-​British humour with quasi-​ French esprit, particularly in regard to fashion, elegance, and education. Mildly erotic fiction had begun to appear in major journals, often directed at a female reader. Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Donizetti were sung at the Teatro São Pedro, although, since the native musical and dramatic conservatories were ineffective, superannuated European sopranos were imported and showered with diamonds.3 Theatre historians have cited the opening of the Alcazar Lyrique Fluminense on 17 February 1859 as the origin of the decline in audiences for “serious” drama. When its first manager went bankrupt, it was taken over by another Frenchman, Joseph Arnaud Garnier, and, as a café chantant, gained a reputation as a stag resort, the terror of parents. Building on the existing popularity of French plays and players, the Alcazar introduced musical farce and operetta. The epidemic which began with the arrival of Mlle Aimée’s troupe at the Alcazar was spread by parodies performed at the Phenix Dramatica and the Gimnasio. Its enthusiasts were socially diverse, although exclusively male, as might be expected in a culture of machismo. What has been called “operetta fever” set in early and generated immense enthusiasm, to the great dismay of moralists. They regarded this as a sign of decadence, its commercialism redolent of the brothel. Yet none of Offenbach’s operas was ever banned or substantially altered by the censorship. Henry W. MacCarthy, Cuban zarzuela and the (neo)colonial imagination. A subaltern historiography of music theater in the Caribbean (Unpub. diss., Ohio University, 2007), 67. 3 Gilberto Freyre, Vida social no Brasil nos meados do século XIX, trans. Waldemar Valente (Recife: Instituto Joaquim Nabuco de Pesquisas Sociais, 1964), 78, 80, 83, 103, 105,116, 128; Charles Expilly, Les femmes et les mœurs du Brésil, 2nd edn. (Paris: Charlieu et Huillery, 1864), 21–​22. 2

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An unintended consequence of the vogue for Offenbach is its contribution to the ongoing debate about the modernization of Brazilian society. Although the central issue was the abolition of slavery, along with social and moral reform through public education, civil rights, and democratic freedoms, free expression was indispensable to these developments. Songs and lyrics, gossip about plays and players could be widely disseminated even to those who might not have the opportunity to see the spectacles under discussion. The Rio equivalent of the “intelligentsia” saw the operetta craze as a sign of the afrancesamento of Latin-​American elites; the new models of amusement in operettas and music halls were tokens of the progress that would lead to the belated abolition of the slave trade. To those who complained that native Brazilian entertainments suffered in competition with foreign imports, it was riposted that the French comic operas and the Spanish zarzuelas that came in their wake inspired such new forms of Brazilian musical shows as the revista de ano and la burleta.4 Offenbach inspired native wit and introduced the public to a Gallic sophistication that promoted broader views. The literary press, eager to promote “realist” drama with a social purpose, regularly deplored comic opera. The popular press, on the other hand, was laudatory in its extensive coverage of the operas and praise of Offenbach’s “genius.” Back-​page advertisements were printed cheek-​by-​ jowl with notices of slave auctions and theatrical gossip. A French-​language review was founded with the Offenbachian title of Ba-​ta-​clan, Chinoiserie franco-​brésilienne a few weeks after the homonymous operetta opened at the Alcazar in 1867 and remained in circulation until 1871. It combined anti-​establishment satire with detailed theatrical reporting. Professionally composed music at popular prices attracted a wide spectrum of “cariocas” (the local nickname for natives of Rio). A newly prominent middle class, its coffers swollen by coffee exports, was making its presence known politically. Another segment of this audience was made up of immigrants nostalgic for European cosmopolitanism. One enthusiast wrote of the opening of Orphée aux enfers that its appeal was to the larger part of the [Rio] populace which does not consist of blue-​blooded noblemen and has no access to an easy and light genre of entertainment Anaïs Fléchet, “Offenbach à Rio: la fièvre de l’opérette dans le Brésil du Segundo Reinado,” in La circulation transatlantique des imprimés –​connexions, ed. Márcia Abreu and Marisa Midori Deacto (Campinas: UNICAMP/​IEL/​Secteurs des publications, 2014), 321; Orna Messer Levin, “Offenbach et le public brésilien (1840–​1870),” in Abreu and Midori Deacto, La circulation, 307.

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South of the Equator, East of Suez similar to [that] in European capitals, [and for whom the] lyric theatre, with its high cost and agonizing histrionics, is not an option … [At the Alcazar] the lively and cheerful Orphée aux enfers is being welcomed with great enthusiasm.5

The galop infernale which ends Orphée had a special allure. Before the opera opened, Musard-​style balls would end the evening with a cancan, aimed to enliven a respectable family clientele but performed with due propriety. Liberals interpreted Offenbach’s galop as an expression of rebellion and exploited it to act out discontent with the government of Pedro II and the war with Paraguay. A group of insubordinate students was encouraged to dance the cancan to reverse the prison sentence threatened by a local magistrate. Despite the protest that the overheated dance ill suited “our tropical temperatures,” the Carnival Societies (Sociedades Carnivalescas) cancanned through the streets to the blare of brass bands. Earlier avatars of carnival such as the proletarian Zé Pereira, too noisy and charivari-​like to receive official approval, had been replaced in 1855 by the Societies. These associations of masked aristocrats were approved from on high and the Emperor himself attended their lavish parades. The Cordão Carnavalesco and the Ranchos Carnavalescos, a working-​ class celebration, initiated in 1870 and 1872, respectively, aimed attacks at the aristocracy and black servitude. What had once been a celebration of European traditions became, with the injection of the frantic cancan, an exercise in social upheaval, a topsy-​turvydom that featured loose women kicking up their legs on top of the floats. In 1871, the “puff” of one carnival society announced: Rejoice, oh outlawed race [because your] heroes possess no wealth, because although you cannot drape yourselves in golden brocade … your soul stands far above that of the civilized bacchanalian; because in the end, the cancan de rigueur will be danced.6

To some small degree, Offenbach contributed to the identification of Rio with a hedonistic carnival in which citizens of African descent are conspicuous. Sixty different Offenbach works were performed in Rio de Janeiro between 1856 and 1889 in a variety of locales, but at high tide, from 1865 to 1873, the greatest hits were Orphée, Hélène, Barbe-​bleue, and, later, La Jornal de commercio (6 Apr. 1865), quoted in Cristina Magaldi, Music in Imperial Rio de Janeiro. European culture in a tropical milieu (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 98. Translation revised. 6 Jornal de commercio (19 Feb. 1871), quoted in Magali, Music in Imperial Rio de Janeiro, 100–​105. Translation revised. 5

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8.1.  Carnival of 1868: left, “Effects of love and champagne”; right, “Oh Congo! And they say that a Frenchman invented the cancan!” A vida flumineuse (Feb. 1868). Young Research Library, UCLA.

Grande-​Duchesse and Les brigands, performed over five hundred times. Those at the Alcazar were played in French, but there were Portuguese adaptations at the Gimnasio and Phenix Dramatica, which were often objects of scorn to the critics. “Papa” Arnaud paid regular trips to Paris where he conscripted plays and players, whose arrival was heralded by the Brazilian press. Whatever their status at home, Parisian actresses were always billed as “stars” and were indispensable in enhancing Offenbach’s popularity. The novelist Machado de Assis, usually a champion of national theatre, rhapsodized over Mlle Aimée as “a blonde demon, a flimsy, svelte, graceful silhouette, a face half-​woman, half-​angel, sharp eyes, a nose worthy of Sappho, an amorously fresh mouth, which seems to have been shaped by two poems of Ovid.”7 By then the operettas had been supplemented by parodies, starting in 1867 with Orfeu na roça (Orpheus in the Country) by the society comedian Francisco Correa Vasques and the Phenix troupe, which enjoyed a record-​breaking four hundred performances. A Baroneza de Cayapó, a take-​off of La Grande-​Duchesse, created by Furtado Coelho’s company at the Gimnasio, appeared the following year. It had been written by Artur de Quoted in Ruben José Souza Brito, “O teatro cómico e musicado: operetas, mágicas, revista de ano e burletas,” in História do teatro brasileiro, ed. João Roberto Faria (São Paulo: SESC, 2012), I, 219–​33. Machado, a former member of the Brazilian Dramatic Conservatory, wrote a column under the pseudonym M. Semaine for the Semana ilustrada during the years 1864–​1868. His regular commentary on the Alcazar’s offerings has been characterized as “ironic.”

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Azevedo, a dynamic figure in Brazilian cultural life. Born in Maranhão in 1855, the son of the Portuguese consul who was also an historian, Azevedo was acclaimed as a child prodigy when he penned a successful play in his teens. His Orpheus parody Orfeu na cidade (Orpheus in Town, 1870), written when he was eighteen, had been performed hundreds of times in his hometown before it burst onto the Rio stage. It was such a hit that the Emperor attended it twenty times in succession. Rio then enjoyed two parodies of Barbe-​bleue (Barba de milho [Corn-​silk Beard] and Traga-​moças [Bring Me Girls], both 1869). Equally celebrated were Abel-​Helena (Phenix Theatre, 1873) along with Azevedo’s remodelings of Lecocq. A civil servant by day, Azevedo failed as a serious dramatist, but Offenbach’s example enabled him to become the master of indigenous musical comedy. His revue A capital federal (The Federal Capital, 1897) clearly owes a debt to La vie parisienne: a Brazilian provincial and his family are whirled through the temptations of Rio, amidst satirical attacks on Francophilia and the demi-​ monde. In contrast to his mentor’s practice, however, Azevedo’s farce ends on a moralistic, populist note.8 These parodies, referred to in the press as “imitations,” followed a standard pattern, displacing the action to a Brazilian locale, bestowing Portuguese names on the characters, and secularizing the mythological characters, while retaining the original music with some variations. The finale of Orfeu na roça, for instance, replaced the galop infernale with a fadinho brasileiro, “a little Brazilian fado,” with the entire cast in a syncopated orgy.9 Inserting Afro-​Brazilian dances into a take-​off of a foreign original was an ingenious stratagem for exploring local sexuality and slave culture (the Euridice surrogate enters dressed as a Bahiana, a black woman from Bahia, and indulges in exotic hip movements in the closing dance). Musical purists were outraged by the parodies, and caricaturists showed Offenbach being pummeled by personifications of local theatres. However, these alterations in the direction of “Brazilification” disseminated Offenbach’s music and vis comica throughout society. The flocking of audiences to the Alcazar and other performances of Offenbach boosted the urban economy: song-​writers, café-​owners, newspaper reporters, and illustrators all benefited from the craze. Even those respectable families who refrained from attending the theatre could make the acquaintance of Offenbach through sheet music, both imported and Roberto Seidl, Artur Azevedo: ensaio bio-​bibliográfico (Rio de Janeiro: Editora abc, 1937). Fléchet, “Offenbach à Rio,” 326; Magaldi, Music in Imperial Rio de Janeiro, 105–​12. Manoel Joaquim Maria’s fadinho was given a European veneer to smuggle it in more safely.

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domestic. They might also hear his music sung at charity concerts in churches by French chanteuses from the Alcazar. The French companies toured the outposts of the Brazilian Empire and even to Buenos Aires, while the lusophone troupes visited Portugal after 1880, contributing to the transatlantic traffic in entertainment. Offenbach also won popularity as a benefactor by eschewing fees for type-​setters, compositors, and publishers responsible for printing his music. Arnaud Garnier bent every effort to stoke interest in revivals, usually by ordering new scenery from Spanish painters, and by the time he retired in 1871 the Alcazar had assumed a surface respectability. Many of the French actors had settled in Rio, but the Viennese operetta had started to make inroads. By 1876, the Alcazar’s repertoire was described as antiquated, in 1881 a paper could refer to the “good old days of Orphée aux enfers,” and in 1895 Azevedo could designate Offenbach as a classic and register indignation at the “betrayal” of Les brigands in an Italian translation. While praising the liveliness of the music, however, he regretted the creakiness of the original libretti and poor orchestral performance: “If an operetta is heard over fifty times, one has to take dynamic action to keep the spectator from falling asleep. But if the pleasure of Offenbach’s tunes seemed incontestable, this familiarity with his songs allows one to make comparisons between the managements and the performances required of the musicians and singers. Offenbach, consequently, remains a standard and a model.”10

Egyptian Nights One of the enduring canards of theatre history is that the premiere of Verdi’s Aïda took place at the opening of the Suez Canal. He had, in fact, declined to write an inaugural hymn for that occasion; and the Siege of Paris delayed the opera’s performance in Cairo until Christmas Eve 1871.11 The honor of celebrating the Canal’s initiation falls to Offenbach. In Egypt, unlike other Arab countries, the theatrical movement was not the result of populist agitation or an enterprising manager but was imposed from above. The Khedive, Ismā’il Pasha (1830–​1895), who had been educated in France, promoted a “euphoria for progress.” “My land is no longer

Artur Azevedo, “O theatro,” A Noticia (27 Jan. 1895). A Théâtre Khédivial de l’Opéra had been built to entertain the ruling families who were to attend the opening of the Suez Canal; designed by Avoscani on the site of Prince Azbak’s palace, it was built, decorated, and furnished in five months at a cost of 160,000 Egyptian pounds, to seat between 800 and 850. It opened on 1 November 1869 with Rigoletto.

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in Africa,” he proclaimed. “We now represent a piece of Europe.”12 His notion of modernization was to import Western civilization, and, following a visit to the Paris Exposition in 1867, where he regularly attended La belle Hélène, he attempted to reshape Cairo in that city’s image. A casino, café-​concerts, and a playhouse for a boulevard repertoire were imposed on this Islamic if cosmopolitan city. The Théâtre de la Comédie was built by a German architect in Azbakkiya, a disreputable quarter which Ismā’il Pasha, as a patron of the arts, converted to a public garden.13 The Khedive had a private entrance to the theatre for himself and his retinue through the garden; the harem was permitted to watch performances through a grille. The theatre was managed by an Armenian named Seraphin Manasse, who had already toured a French troupe to Istanbul.14 The opening production was La belle Hélène, although the choice of a piece based on Greek mythology is peculiar. However, it happened to be Ismā’il’s preferred opéra bouffe, or rather he favored Hortense Schneider in the part. The largest contingent of Europeans in Egypt was in Cairo (47,316), which could provide an audience for the new theatres but could not be guaranteed to have a classical education. To familiarize the harem and the monolingual courtiers with the new repertoire the Khedive ordered everyone on the staff of the government bureaucracy who knew French and Italian to drop official business and collaborate in translating this and a boxful of opera libretti to be performed the coming winter season in Cairo. “These libretti or poems are in general the work of distinguished poets and it would be a service to the public to enable them to understand and enjoy their beauties.”15 Subsidized by the Khedive, journalists explained that theatres help train and cultivate the soul to adopt good morals, and, to this end, the translated scripts would educate the native public. Consequently, the first translation of a European play into Arabic (and incidentally the first Arabic work published in Egypt) was Hilāna al-​Jamīla (Beautiful Helen) printed at Būlāq on 17 Ramaḍān 1285 (31 December 1868/​ 1 January 1869) three days before the first performance. It is more a paraphrase than an accurate rendition, with puns and ambiguities glossed over, Alexander Flores, “Offenbach in Arabien,” Die Welt des Islams, n.s. 18, 2 (2008): 133. Adam Mestyan, “Power and music in Cairo: Azbakkiya,” Urban History 40 (2013): 681–​704. 14 For Manasse’s fascinating career, see Adam Mestyan, “A garden with mellow fruits of refinement”:  music theatre and cultural politics in Cairo and Istanbul, 1867–​1892 (Ph.D.  diss., Central European University, Budapest, 2011), Ch. 5. 15 Quoted in P. C. Sadgrove, The Egyptian theatre in the Nineteenth Century (1799–​1882) (Durham: Ithaca Press, 1996), 52–​53. 12 13

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obviously meant as a synopsis to be followed during the performance.16 It was put together by a committee under the supervision of Rifā’a Rāfi aṭ-​Ṭahṭāwī, a “giant in Arabic intellectual life,” who had already written about theatre in a book on French culture, and translated hundreds of other works for the Khedive’s grandfather Muhammed ‘Ali. The Arabic newspapers urged the public to buy this translation and those which were to follow. The newspaper Wādī al-​Nīl devoted two editorials to this; the second, published in January 1869, praised Hélène as “the creation of a new literary genre … a useful means to order Arab morals … All this [activity] is like the appearance of the crescent moon, which gradually achieves perfection.17 While Europeans were condemning opéra bouffe as deleterious to morality, Egypt was praising it for its value in national edification. The Comedy Theatre was inaugurated by Hélène on 4 January 1869, before Crown Prince Tewfiq and over three hundred spectators. It created a furore in Cairo.18 The Khedive’s expenditure from the privy purse to bribe journalists and entertain guests, including the Empress Eugénie and, later, the Prince and Princess of Wales, was so prodigal that Larose, the manager of the French theatre, wrote a farce called C’est le Vice-​roi qui paie, which enjoyed a single performance before it was suppressed and Larose reprimanded. Ismā’il also bestowed a munificent subvention on Manasse to engage a theatrical troupe of thirty-​two artists from France, headed by Céline Montaland, to perform opéra bouffe, comedy, and vaudeville. They played to packed houses, made up of Europeans, French-​speaking officers and bureaucrats, and a middle-​class Arab component, dressed in “stambouline” attire (long black frock-​coats) and tarboosh. Schneider’s other hits, La Grande-​Duchesse, Barbe-​bleue, and Hervé’s L’œil crevé appeared in turn. (La Périchole appeared in French-​occupied Algeria in November 1869, but since its main butt is a Viceroy it is no wonder that the Khedive avoided it.) These and the numerous translations of opera libretti were said to have A copy of the text was discovered in 2014 by Amani Gamal Ibrahim, a student at Helwan University in Cairo, and published the following year, edited by Dr Sayyid Ali Ismail (General Egyptian Book Organization). 17 Quoted in Sadgrove, The Egyptian theatre, 53. He also translated Les aventures de Télémaque (1867), which had been made into a buffa in Spain. 18 Zola, typically, was outraged and wrote, in an open letter to Egyptians, “Please do not think that the Grande-​Duchesse and the works she plays are the most beautiful ornament of our country. We have better, I swear. Paris is not yet barking mad, and we have among us people who have never written for the inmates of a madhouse. If you are our friends, do not force irony to the point of applauding.” “Causerie,” La Tribune (3 Oct. 1869) in Écrits sur la musique, ed. Olivier Sauvage (Paris: Éditions du Sandre, 2013), 75–​76. 16

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a positive effect on the development of “Arabic morale.” A contemporary commented, “even Schneider, fit interpreter as she is of the melodious indecencies of Offenbach, can not [sic] amuse a population which, from prince to peasant, has ever been accustomed to the greater levities and license of its own Ghawazee and Almehs, who outstrip any civilized competition however daring.”19 Whether or not the influence extended far beyond court circles, the fashion was short-​lived. In April 1869 a bomb was found under the Khedive’s seat in the royal box; it was alleged that Manasse had planted it himself to claim a reward. The manager was exiled and the Khedive stayed away from the theatre.20 In the 1870s an economic depression forced cut-​backs in the arts. An Egyptian Jew named James Samia took over the Comedy Theatre in 1871, and tried to attract a less upper-​class crowd with operettas in colloquial Egyptian Arabic set to popular tunes.21 Eight years later Ismā’il was deposed by his son Tewfiq, and Azbakiyya reverted to its former status as a red-​light district. The British occupation in 1882 definitively ended the brief reign of French theatrical culture in Cairo. It re-​emerged in the 1920s in a more assimilated fashion. The political unrest that followed the Great War, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and intensive nationalist mobilization against the British created an atmosphere congenial to indigenous artistic innovation. Sayiid Darwīš (1892–​1923), an outspoken bohemian active in the rebellion of 1919, was the most popular composer in Egypt. Between 1917 and 1923 he wrote thirty musicals or operettas, based on French originals and rapidly put on stage. The two most relevant to Offenbach are al-​’Ašara aṭ-​ṭayibba (The Ten of Diamonds, 1920), and Šahrazād (1921). The Ten of Diamonds is almost scene for scene, line for line, a copy of Barbe-​bleue, though with fewer musical numbers. Because the setting has been transferred to Osmanic Egypt, love duets which in Barbe-​bleue come across as lightly ironic take on emotional intensity. Autochthonous Egyptians are the positive heroes, officials of the Turkish governance are the villains. Although the work is suffused with local color, it was not well received; a group of authors sharply criticized it for abetting the “enemy.”

Edwin De Leon, “Ismail Pasha of Egypt,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 39, 231 (Aug. 1869): 748–​ 49. Ghawazi and almeh (a’oulem) are female dancers in the Arab world; the former specialize in the “belly dance.” 20 Manasse retuned to Turkey to resume his impresarial activities; Turkish translations of Offenbach libretti began to appear in the mid 1870s. 21 Mestyan, “Power and music in Cairo,” 701. 19

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Šahrazād, with dialogue by the famous actor-​director ‘Azīz ‘Īd and lyrics by the popular folk poet Maḥmūd Bayram aṭ-​Tūnisi, has nothing to do with the Arabian Nights; it is an exact copy of La Grande-​Duchesse. The original title was Šahwazād, which means lust, but the censorhip office objected. In fact, the lyrics are far more outspokenly erotic than those of Meilhac and Halévy, who preferred innuendo. Again the positive characters are Egyptian, the villains are Turkish, but the blatant patriotism also casts aspersions on the British. These operas have enjoyed a long afterlife through radio broadcasts, theatrical revivals, and music cassettes, playing a major role in the formation of modern Egyptian culture. Native opera took on a political cast from these models. The francophilia of educated Egyptians of the 1920s has now been obliterated by a negative interpretation of foreign influence; French sources are played down, to avoid charges of colonialism. These days Sayyid is lauded as an icon of Egyptian anti-​imperialism. In the words of Alexander Flores, “Intercultural osmosis is not admitted.”22

Australia23 Opera was brought to the Antipodes by William Saurin Lyster (1842–​ 1880), an Irish-​born former American naval officer who had already created the New York Opera Company in 1856. The renamed English Opera Company arrived in Australia in 1861 and continued to tour the continent for the next six years. At first, Lyster concentrated on French and Italian grand opera; his production of The Huguenots was a great hit. He then decided to branch out into comic opera by staging The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein. An earlier French troupe had failed with the same work in 1868, and Lyster’s company, more at home in Meyerbeer and Verdi, had large voices, poor articulation, and scant comic talent. Moreover, many towns considered it sinful for a clergyman to attend even Shakespeare. The “distinct character” of composer and librettists had been a topic of nervous conversation and required a “minute and careful notice.”24 Lyster opened the Offenbach piece at Melbourne’s Princess’s Theatre, a rarely Flores, “Offenbach in Arabien,” 138. This section draws heavily on Harold Love, The golden age of Australian opera:  W.  S. Lyster and his companies 1861–​ 1880 (Sydney:  Currency Press, 1981); Katharine Brisbane, ed. Entertaining Australia: an illustrated history (Sydney: Currency Press, 1991); Eric Irvin, Dictionary of the Australian theatre 1788–​1914 (Sydney: Halle & Iremonger, 1985); and Michael Hopf, “Offenbaciana australiera (or Offenbach down under),” Jacques Offenbach Newsletter 1 (Nov. 1996): 5–​6; 2 (Feb. 1997): 9–​11; 3 (May 1997): 3–​5. 24 The Argus, quoted in Brisbane, Entertaining Australia, 72. 22 23

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frequented house, on 27 February 1871. (The irony of staging this operetta after France’s defeat went unnoticed.) In an effort to appeal to the natives, Fanny Simonsen, Lyster’s prima donna, shouted the aboriginal “Cooee” to hail her co-​conspirators; this sop to blokishness was generally deplored. When the governor Viscount Canterbury and his wife attended the second night, the cancan was replaced by “an elegant pas-​de-​deux.” Although the Leader found the orchestra and costumes “an absolute disgrace,”25 the audience for The Grand Duchess was enthusiastic, in part because the music and plot were familiar to it, the former from barrel organs and minstrel burlesques, and the latter from reports of the success of Australian favorite Julia Matthews in London. The opera ran until 12 March, the eight performances matching the success of The Huguenots; it entered the season’s repertory to chalk up twenty-​three performances in all. This emboldened Lyster in 1872 to plan an Orpheus in the Underworld and a Bluebeard, with splendid new scenery, costumes, colored lights, transparencies, a dance troupe, and pyrotechnical effects. The female men-​ at-​arms were particularly appreciated in the latter.26 Lyster’s chief rival had been the Theatre Royal, whose great size was a liability; when it burned down in 1872, he had the field to himself. Orpheus, with Beethoven’s Egmont overture played before the curtain went up, ran twelve nights, then eight in repertory; Bluebeard, with the music rescored, ran from 23 April to 11 May. That same year the Prince of Wales Opera House opened and offered from June to November 1873 a mixed bill of Offenbach and English opera. Geneviève de Brabant, with extra songs interpolated by the conductor, had a text freely adapted by Garnet Walch, who incorporated Melburnian jokes about “Reckitt’s real frenchblue” (a laundry soap), Yan Yean reservoir water, coffee stalls in Bourke Street, Fitzroy Gardens, and canned mutton. The Argus was of two minds:  it regretted “Offenbach disorder,” a malady afflicting the “musical system”; but it reveled in the irresponsible fun: warriors wielding umbrellas and riding on locomotives, clockwork hermits running down, Lilliputian pastry cooks, and “crowds of people who behave as only people behave in dreams. For pure nonsense this is probably the greatest success that has been achieved in Melbourne.”27 It ran for fifteen nights. The Town and Country Journal, 1874, quoted in Irvin, Dictionary, 205. One of these chorus girls, Nellie Stewart, would later become manager George Musgrove’s leading lady in operetta as well as in his bed. 27 Quoted in Love, The golden age, 220. 25 26

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When considering the length of runs, one has to take into account the size of the playhouses in proportion to the size of the available audience. The Theatre Royal had previously failed because its 3,300 seats had to be filled by those who would pay to see a play or an opera. Lyster benefited not only from smaller modern buildings with more comfortable appointments, but also from a new type of spectator. The first generation of playgoers in the 1850 and 1860s had been young male immigrants, mostly of British or European background, who had cut their theatrical teeth on Shakespeare and opera. Now they were stay-​at-​home husbands and fathers. The new, more numerous audience was also young but unfamiliar with artistic traditions; it preferred Boucicault and opéra bouffe. One critic noted that, when it came to music, Australians were highly tolerant: “the orchestra will be pitiful, the voices not more than mediocre and frequent false notes will not appear to trouble the audiences. As long as the scenery is well done, the dancers pretty and their costumes diaphanous, the performance will be a success.”28 Comic opera completely eclipsed the serious kind in Lyster’s repertoire. The Princess of Trebizonde ran twenty-​nine nights (from 22 June to 24 July), ushering in a revival of The Grand Duchess with Clara Thompson reproducing “all the original business as played in Paris by the great Schneider.”29 Over the next four years, Lyster treated his customers to English versions of La Périchole, La jolie parfumeuse, La belle Hélène, Madame l’Archiduc, Les brigands, Lischen et Fritzchen, M. Choufleuri, and La chatte métamorphosée en femme. Critics decided these productions were up to London, if not Paris, standards, and the Australians were free to create their own performance traditions.30 Success bred imitation, but the most serious competition would come from abroad. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury offered as an after-​piece to La belle Hélène inserted the thin edge of a competitive wedge. In the age of sailing vessels, it took months to travel from Europe to Australia, and at best a handful of stars would venture the crossing. With the advent of steamships and the growth of transnational managements, whole companies could be landed in weeks. The popular English soprano E. Marin la Meslée, The New Australia (1883), trans. and ed. Russel Ward (London: Heinemann, 1973), 11. 29 Quoted in Love, The golden age, 235. The American comedian James Williamson who specialized in “Dutch” characters had doubts about opening his signature comedy Struck Oil in Melbourne, until he heard the audience enjoying Richard Stewart’s German accent as Prince Casimir. It became the longest-​running play in Australian history and Williamson a leading Antipodean producer. 30 However, a revival of The Grand Duchess, based on the “livre de conduite” of the Bouffes-​Parisiens brought back from Paris by George Musgrove, was praised for its French authenticity (Argus, 1 May 1880). 28

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Emily Soldene arrived in 1877 with a troupe hailed as the best ensemble ever to visit Sydney. She provided well-​rehearsed English-​language productions of pretty much the same roster as the locals were showing, with far more “dash and finish.” With long experience in leading roles, Soldene, audiences were relieved to discover, would not “break down in anything she attempts.”31 As usual, the musical side was the weak sister, voices less beautiful than torsos, the chorus, often recruited on the spot, rarely in time with the orchestra. Soldene was prone to interpolate “Silver Threads among the Gold” in Geneviève. She would repeat her triumph in Melbourne and thereafter make regular trips to Australia, eventually settling there. “The absence of music” in Soldene’s troupe, was, according to the press, “excused by a perfect form and its L.E.G.”32 Over the course of a decade the display of legs on stage had moved from a criminal offense to a legitimate attraction, due to the prevalence of comic opera. The first cancan to be danced in Melbourne was by Theresa Schmidt in 1868, and her novelty was followed up in Hobart in April 1873 by the sisters Rosalie and Héloïse Duvalli. When the sisters announced that they would perform it in “authentic costume,” police took up positions in the Theatre Royal to prevent it; with the costumes altered “So far from the performance causing any disapproval on the part of the audience, the artists were called before the curtain and were loudly applauded by all portions of the house.”33 In a few years an unpoliced display had become so common that a Sydney newspaper had to animadvert against “those women who dressed in scant costumes, nearly half nude, with a liberal display of leg, and the hair under the armholes contrasting with the colour of the hair of their heads, steeped in champagne and soda water, and doubtless as strong as the smell of a polecat, who draw crowded houses, and gain the thundering applause of those whose humour chimes in with such scenes.”34 Another editorial noted in 1875 that “of late years it has very frequently been necessary for a gentleman to attend the performance of a play before determining whether it was a suitable one for his wife to witness.”35 Moralists had cause for concern, because the next major production of Offenbach was to be of such consequence that one music historian calls it the “turning-​point in Australian theatre.” A dying Lyster had turned his enterprise over to his nephew by marriage George Musgrove, who decided Illustrated Sydney News, quoted in Brisbane, Entertaining Australia, 90. Town and Country, quoted in Brisbane, Entertaining Australia, 90. 33 Hobart Town Mercury, quoted in Brisbane, Entertaining Australia, 72. 34 Sydney Stockwhip (1876), quoted in Irvin, Dictionary, 200. 35 Town (Sydney), quoted in Irvin, Dictionary, 199. 31

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to stake its success on La fille du tambour-​major. Offenbach’s last great hit, it is opéra comique rather than opéra bouffe, with a plot, half-​military, half-​ sentimental, reminiscent of Donizetti’s La figlia del reggimento. Its minimal comedy is devoid of buffoonery, and the dramatic situations require real acting from the singers. Musgrove imported a company from London, with the scenery painted from London models. The chorus was composed not of beefy wantons but of eight tall, leggy showgirls who “wore their magnificent dresses as if to the manner born.” Reforms extended to the front of house as well. The orchestra had to wear evening dress, and no fees to cloak-​room attendants were exacted. The staging was judged to be “unquestionably tasteful, elegant, and even sumptuous … a great advance in drill, in discipline, in dress and in many major points, which all add to the completeness of stage illusion.” The final tableau was “without doubt the most complete and spirited stage picture ever presented to the audience in Melbourne.”36 It opened on 27 December 1880 and ran for a hundred and two consecutive nights in Melbourne alone, before touring to Adelaide and Sydney. In Sydney, the Mail pointed out the difference between the “set who patronize Offenbach” and those who nightly attended two-​hour piano recitals by the Hungarian virtuoso Henri Ketten. The former were there not due to the music “which is of the weakest description, but to the tout ensemble and the mounting. The finale is one of the most gorgeous scenes ever witnessed on stage here …”37 In other words, La fille set the style for the elaborately mounted musical comedies to come, and Offenbach’s compositions would merely provide a pretext for production.38 On 25 July 1881, during a performance of Les Huguenots, a jealous husband named John Greer shot both his wife and her French lover in the face, then turned his pistol on himself. The guilty couple survived, the offended husband did not. At first, the audience thought it part of the St Bartholomew massacre scene, but panic set in and during the ensuing crush several women were trampled. The self-​righteous, who evidently made no distinction between Meyerbeer and Offenbach, accused opéra Argus, quoted in Brisbane, Entertaining Australia, 99. Sydney Mail, quoted in Brisbane, Entertaining Australia, 99. 38 The first complete English-​language opera company with a full orchestra to visit Australia was Thomas Quinlan’s. Its opening piece at Melbourne’s His Majesty’s Theatre in June 1912 was The Tales of Hoffmann, never seen before in the Antipodes. Despite confusion among those who expected comic opera, it enjoyed thirteen performances. Irony of ironies, “Its nearest competitor among the other 13 operas in the repertoire was Wagner’s Tannhäuser with six performances.” Brisbane, Entertaining Australia, 168. 36 37

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bouffe of being the fons et origo of the catastrophe: its immorality had created the climate in which adultery could thrive. A purifying wind of unstained innocence was called for to blow away overheated passion and Parisian cynicism. The last premieres of an Offenbach piece in Australia were Madame Favart in Sydney that September and La Périchole in 1882. In Melbourne, Soldene expurgated the third act of her Périchole. And the purifying wind blew into harbor the billowing sails of H.M.S. Pinafore.39

Japan The arrival of Offenbach in Japan was due in part to the same ocean-​ ploughing steamships that carried light-​opera companies to Australia. The treaty port of Yokohama, heavily settled by non-​Japanese, saw the introduction of many Western novelties: newspapers, photography, ice cream, beer, horse racing, cricket, rugby –​and comic opera. Before 1870 shows were performed in Yokohama hotel rooms, technical institutes, warehouses, and Professor Risley’s Royal Olympic Theatre (a circus), mostly by resident amateurs or touring professionals. The Gaiety Theatre opened on 6 December 1870 on Honmachi Street with Sullivan’s Cox and Box and then moved to a public hall in the Yamate district. The earliest appearance of Offenbach was an amateur Barbe-​bleue staged at the Gaiety on 13 June 1873. The first foreign professionals, the L’Auney-​Céphas Buffo Opera Company, arrived in April 1876, offering performances of La Périchole (three), Le violoneux (one), Barbe-​bleue (three), La Grande-​Duchesse (two), and La belle Hélène.40 The 1870s ushered in the fashion for zangiri theatre (zangiri means “close-​cropped,” the hair style of a samurai whose topknot has been shorn), modern domestic dramas that copied foreign models. First seen in Tokyo in 1872, it was a short-​lived fad, reaching its climax in 1878 and fading out by 1882.41 Most of the plays were written by the renowned Kawatake Mokuami (Yoshimura Yoshisaburō, 1816–​ 1893); these included Ningen Banji Kane no Yokonaka (Money Makes the World Go Round), an adaptation La fille du tambour-​major was revived in 1881 and 1882, and then disappeared until April 1906 (Princess Theatre). La Périchole had its premiere in July 1882 at the Opera, was revived periodically over the next four years, and then dropped out of the repertoire. 40 It survived to 1923, a cinema in its latter phases. Naka Mamiko,”Die Oper kommt nach Japan. Zur Rezeption westlicher Musik und des Musiktheaters in der Meiji-​und Taishô-​Zeit (1868–​ 1925),” in Silvain Guignard, ed., Musik in Japan. Aufsätze zu Aspekten der Musik im heutigen Japan (Munich: Iudicium, 1996), 164–​67. 41 Samuel L.  Leiter, New Kabuki encyclopedia. A  revised adaptation of Kabuki Jiten (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997). 39

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of Bulwer-​Lytton’s Money, played by an all-​male cast in February 1879 at the Shintomi-​za. At this point a cohort of foreign artistes, the Royal English Opera Company, organized by a popular Australian tenor, Howard Vernon (1848–​1921), after touring Hong Kong and Shanghai, arrived at Yokohama’s Gaiety Theatre. Between June and August 1879, it offered its repertoire of light opera with three Offenbachs (La Grande-​Duchesse, Geneviève de Brabant, and La rose de Saint-​Flour). In La Grande-​Duchesse General Boum was played by a Dutchman, the other roles by Australians, with the music entrusted to a couple of French amateurs. Elcia May, the female lead, had once run her own opera company, which had settled in Shanghai in 1876, introducing La Grande-​Duchesse to the Chinese. By May 1879 her troupe was foundering, unable to round up enough talent to stage a full opera, and so she joined Vernon.42 The theatrical columnist for L’Écho du Japon found that the troupe lived up to their advance publicity. The English-​language Japan Gazette was more censorious, referring to a “mutilated version … performed to the inspiriting accompaniment of a thin wiry piano by such glorious artists as the gentleman who undertook the part of Prince Paul. Verily he deserved the ironical cheers and recall for his intrepidity in leading so forlorn a hope.”43 The Japanese newspapers reported on the bad behavior of the audiences and surmised that the “actors must be low-​class.” When the company moved to the Shintomi-​za to offer three nights of La Grande-​ Duchesse ex-​President Ulysses S. Grant presented a curtain to the theatre. This novelty from overseas inspired the impresario Morita Kan’ya XII to commission a play from Mokuami that could incorporate it. Hyōryū Kidan Seiyō Kabuki (An Amazing Story about Drifters and Western Kabuki) was advertised for a run at the Shintomi-​za from 1 September to 25 September 1879. The fourth act was set in Paris where two Japanese visit a theatre; the scene naturally changes to a play-​within-​a-​play in which three operettas are shown: Act I of La Duchesse, La fille du régiment, and Lecoq’s La fille de Madame Angot (expressly abridged versions, with a playing time of one hour for each as requested by Morita). The main roles were taken by the cohort of foreigners, but minor characters, including Native Americans, Englishmen, and the chorus of German soldiers, were assumed by ten Japanese actors. “Shanghai,” Japan Weekly Mail (24 May 1879): 652. Chronique théâtrale, L’Écho du Japon (9 Jun. 1879) and The Japan Gazette (9 Jun. 1879), quoted in Kobitsu Matsuo, Nihon shingeki rinenshi [The history of the idea of Japanese new theatre]. 2 vols. (Tokyo: Mirashi, 1998–​2001), I, 257–​60.

42 43

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8.2.  Ukiyo-​e triptych, showing (from right to left) male kabuki actors in a version of Bulwer-​Lytton’s Money and Western actors in The Grand Duchess, Shintomi-​za, Yokohama.

Although scheduled to run for six weeks, this hybrid turned out to be an awful failure. The Japanese audience watched with breathless silence and rapt attention every action or note of their countrymen in the walk-​on roles, but greeted the fortissimo that accompanied the prima donna’s last notes with bursts of laughter.44 Receipts were poor, leading to a deficit of 20,000 yen, a huge loss. Vernon and his players departed in late October, although Miss May was still around in November to perform in scenes from Shakespeare. 45 The grafting of French opéra bouffe on to the zangiri style may have failed as a box-​office draw, but it opened the floodgates for French and English light opera companies to pour in during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The itinerary of these troupes also took in the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and the Spanish Philippines.46 Their repertoire invariably The Japan Weekly Mail (6 and 13 Sep. 1879), quoted in Kobitsu, Nihon shingeki rinenshi, 254–​55, 863, 870–​71. The audience included ten actors from the Tokyo Shintomi-​za theatre and a sketch artist who made lightning sketches. 45 My account is reliant chiefly on Kobitsu Matsuo, Nihon shingeki rinenshi, I, 228–​29, 253–​70, 862–​72; Akiba Tarō, Tōto Meiji Engekishi [History of theatre in Tokyo during the Meiji period] (Tokyo: Ōtari shuppan, 1975); Kimura Kinka, Morita Kan’ya (Tokyo: Shin-​taishūsha, 1943); Masumoto Masahiko, Yokohama Gaiety Theatre, 2nd edn. (Yokohama: Iwasaki Museum, 1986); and Ōsawa Yoshio, Nihon Gendai Engeki-​shi. Meiji-​Taishō [The history of modern Japanese theatre. Meiji and Taishō periods] (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 2002), 28–​34. Translations were provided by the late Aya Mihara. 46 See the advertisements and news columns of the Soerabaijasch handelsblad (Dutch Indies), La Oceania española (Philippines), and The Straits Times (Singapore) between 1883 and 1888. In 44

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included, along with many other full-​length and one-​act Offenbach operas, La Grande-​Duchesse. Renamed General Boum, it became a mainstay of the Asakusa Opera repertoire in the first quarter of the twentieth century. This Tokyo venue for popular entertainment offered raffish and well-​attended versions of adulterated Western works, including Offenbach (Orphée was a great hit), to a heterogeneous audience of nursemaids, bored passersby, pious citizens, and drifters off the street. The operas were played for low comedy and cheap melodrama, interspersed with specialty acts and assimilated to Japanese habits wherever possible.47 A dotted line might be drawn from the misalliance of Offenbach and kabuki to his plebeian vulgarization at the Asakusa Opera, thence to the Casino Follies of the 1920s, with Western-​style dress and undress, to the internationally celebrated all-​female Takarazuka.48

Singapore Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company, made up of little people, was popular in La Princesse de Trébizonde, but in Manila Chiarini’s circus outdrew comic opera. My thanks to meLê yamomo of the University of Amsterdam who uncovered this information. 47 Ken Kilto, Visions of desire. Tanizaki’s fictional worlds (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 71–​ 75; Sugiyama Chizuru, “A study on the transition from Asakusa Opera to Asakusa revue: the light opera in Asakusa in the 20’s and the process of this transition,” Ochanononizu University Studies in Arts and Culture 43 (1990): 187–​216. 48 Roland Domenig, “Takarazuka and Kobayashi Ichizô’s idea of kokumingeki,” in The culture of Japan as seen through its leisure, ed. Sepp Linhart and Sabine Frühstück (Albany: State University of New York, 1998), 267–​84. The best full-​length study is Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka. Sexual politics and popular culture in modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Ch apter 9

A Max Reinhardt Production

An Antidote to Wagner By the end of the nineteenth century Wagner dominated the concert halls and the musical aesthetics of the Western hemisphere. Offenbach, when noticed at all, was classified by establishment critics as his diametric opposite. A German history of music published in 1904 made an effort to distinguish Offenbach’s music, “filled with the spirit of Heine,” from the “silly” libretti of his works, but was reluctant to classify him as a satirist. Offenbach “wallowed in the swamp [of the Second Empire] himself ” and thus was a cynic out to besmirch beauty. Despite the promise of Les contes d’Hoffmann, “he prostituted his great talent to the lowest instincts of his time.”1 For those of the opposing camp who considered Wagner’s influence malignant and his anti-​Semitism distasteful, Mozart and, to a lesser extent, Offenbach were put forward as counter-​weights. Nietzsche and Karl Kraus spearheaded this movement, but so did Kraus’s bête noire Max Nordau. Although Nordau was famous for labeling most of the leading artists and artistic movements of his time as “degenerate,” he energetically promoted Offenbach as an important cultural figure, not least because he was Jewish. (Nordau had helped to found the World Zionist Organization.) In Aus dem wahren Milliardenlande:  Pariser Studien und Bilder (1878), he had proclaimed Offenbach not only the Parisian Aristophanes, but also “the complete son of his century, a truly modern man, what the English so expressively call ‘a representative man.’” For Nordau, as for Eça de Queirós, the composer was a philosopher, the inventor of satire in music; his works

Karl Storck, Geschichte der Musik, 2  vols. (Stuttgart:  Muth, 1904), quoted in Paul Walter Jacob, Jacques Offenbach in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg:  Rowohlt, 1969), 165.

1

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constitute “musical guillotines” to behead the repressive forces of classicism, monarchism, and militarism.2 Even so Wagnerian a composer as Richard Strauss confessed more than once to a bewildered Hugo von Hofmannsthal a “vocation to become the Offenbach of the twentieth century.” “Long live the political-​satirical-​ parodistic operetta!” Hofmannsthal, in reply, mocked that ambition, twitting Strauss for his heavy-​handed treatment of the chorus of Faninal’s servants in Rosenkavalier, which the poet had intended to be “rattled off in burlesque fashion, i.e., in the transparent Offenbach style.”3 In the opinion of the Swiss painter Paul Klee, who opposed the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Strauss, along with Wagner and Mahler, though interesting, signaled a decline in artistic creativity; he considered Mozart and Offenbach more accessible as “modernists” and more successful in the fusion of theatre with music, the only purely romantic art. Offenbach in particular attained his ideal of the “abstract.” Offenbach, Klee wrote, “could do what the greats of modern opera can, but he divagates towards ambiguity and thereby accomplishes something whose effects will be longer-​lasting.”4 Klee’s early etchings, particularly “Fairy-​tale Scene” and “Hoffmannesque Scene” (1921), published in his first portfolio of Bauhaus prints, were inspired by Les contes d’Hoffmann, which he had first seen in Bern in 1904 and frequently attended thereafter, even when racked by fever. He appreciated Offenbach’s quotations of Mozart and was prompted to make a first-​hand acquaintance with Hoffmann’s fiction. Of a contemporaneous Munich production, Klee wrote “The recension of Contes d’Hoffmann is beneath contempt; the bastard has no idea of the musical absolute, it seems completely Wagnerized and Pfitznerized.”5 By “musical absolute” he meant the ability of music to transcend the mundane. Later that year Klee attended La Grande-​Duchesse in Munich. His “Suis-​ je belle?,” a work exploring “the temporal nature of physical pulchritude,”

Chr., “Max Nordau über Offenbach und die Operette,” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 18 (4 May 1881): 279–​86; 19 (11 May 1881): 295–​302; Leon Botstein, “German Jews and Wagner,” in Richard Wagner and his world, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 151–​97; Thomas S. Grey, “Eine Kapitulation: Aristophanic operetta as cultural warefare,” in Grey, Richard Wagner and his world, 87–​122. The establishment critics mocked Nordau’s evaluation of Offenbach as excessive and wrong-​headed. 3 A working friendship. The correspondence between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, trans. Hanns Hammelmann and Ewald Osers (New York: Random House, 1961), 176, 250–​51, 258, 262. 4 “ Er könnte wie die Großen der neueren Oper, aber er biegt ab ins Zweideutige und vollbringt damit die Tat, welche von langer Dauer sein wird.” Paul Klee, letter to Lily Klee (6 Dec. 1931), in Briefe an die Familie (1893–​1940), ed. Felix Klee (Cologne: Dumont, 1979), II, 1170. 5 Letter to Lily Stumpf (24 Apr. 1904), in Klee, Briefe, I, 416. 2

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derived from it. He never missed an opportunity to attend an Offenbach performance: Orpheus in Munich in 1906, Hoffmann in Paris in 1928, La Périchole in Düsseldorf in 1931 (twice), and Hoffmann again in Berlin in 1932 (see below). His own increasing physical deterioration may have drawn him to savor the irony in a work left unfinished at its creator’s death.6 Wagner’s Judenthum in der Musik returned from the grave when Heinrich Berl issued his own study with that title in 1924. If Jews are unapt for the plastic arts, said Berl, owing to the Mosaic proscription against idols, they are en revanche the most musical, because the most prophetic and religious. Pursuing this dichotomy, Berl identified musical abilities with the feminine, emotional, and ecstatic elements of the human spirit; the dynamic element of melody is similarly opposed to static harmony. Hence Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, and Offenbach are deeply melodic. The triviality and sentimentality supposed to be faults of the last are, in fact, “musical persiflage,” which Nietzsche himself used against Wagner. (By 1932 Berl was calling Nietzsche “the prophet of the Jewish spirit.”) Berl concluded that the Jew is “subjective-​synaesthetic,” naturally associated with “music … born of a moment’s ecstasy, an immediate feeling: which is Melody.” He then offered a syllogism: melody is lyrical rather than epic; the Jew is melodic rather than harmonic; ergo the Jewish psyche moves towards absolute timeliness, rather than timelessness.7 Berl’s propositions are, in their way, as sophistical as Wagner’s: to label Offenbach a “Jewish” composer seems to encourage anti-​Semitic evaluations. It is noteworthy that when Siegfried Kracauer came to write his popular and influential biography, Offenbach and the Paris of his time (1934–​1937), he too laid emphasis on the composer’s Jewish origins. He saw the transit from Cologne to Paris as enabling Offenbach to become “Ariel,” a timeless (not timely) “aerial spirit.” In other words, the realm of gaiety he aimed for was purely fixed neither in the past nor in the future, for it was pinpointed in neither time nor in space. It was not for nothing that Offenbach used many familiar, traditional Jürgen Glaesemer, “Klee und Jacques Offenbach,” in Paul Klee und die Musik (Frankfurt: Schirn, 1986), 217–​27 (a French translation is available in Klee et la musique [Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/​ Musée national d’art modern, 1985], 169–​77); Christian Geelhaar, “Paul Klee,” Vom Klang der Bilder (1985): 422–​29; K. Porter Aichele, “Paul Klee –​ex musica pictura,” Art Journal 45, 5 (Winter 1985), 357, and “Paul Klee’s operatic themes,”Art Bulletin 68, 3 (Sep. 1986), 465–​66; Hajo Düchting, Paul Klee: painting music (Munich: Prestel, 1997), 8, 10, 14, 50; and Andrew Kagan, Paul Klee/​art & music (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 109. 7 Heinrich Berl, Das Judentum in der Musik (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-​Anstalt, 1924), 86–​92. 6

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tunes in his compositions, tunes which, like fairy-​tales, belong neither to any specific culture, or to any specific age. The Jewish musicians his father had told him of wandered from place to place, playing traditional popular tunes to the greater Glory of God. Offenbach’s gaiety was assigned to the no-​where, which he swept into as easily as did Ariel.8

Ariel in this sense is not only Shakespeare’s mercurial sprite, but the prophet Isaiah’s name for Jerusalem and the sacrificial altar (Isaiah 29:6–​8), with its promise of a happy ending for the Jewish people. Kracauer’s recasting Offenbach’s “domain of cheer” as a token of the eternal Jew results from his own plight as a refugee in the first years of the Nazi regime; it also unwittingly provides fuel for the hostile characterization of Offenbach the Jew as “rootless cosmopolitan.” Kracauer was disseminating Berl’s ideas in a less abstract, more novelistic manner, but in so doing made them more attractive and influential. This became a bone of contention for Walter Benjamin, who objected to Theodor Adorno that Kracauer’s shrill apologetic tone was due to his identification with Offenbach, but that he failed to look for Jewishness in the music.9

The Magician In early twentieth-​century Germany, it was not musicologists who managed to re-​establish Offenbach’s popularity, but a genius of the theatre, Max Reinhardt. If anyone in the civilized world were asked in the mid 1920s to name a stage director, Max Reinhardt would be the first answer. An Austrian Jew by birth (his real name was Goldmann), Reinhardt had gravitated to Berlin and worked as a character actor, before founding a satiric cabaret, Schall und Rauch (Noise and Smoke), and gaining a reputation as a stage director of avant-​garde drama in chamber productions. He soon took over the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, and by the time the Weimar Republic came into being was managing a number of playhouses, from the intimate Kammerspiele to the gigantic Großes Schauspielhaus, as well as enterprises in Salzburg. Abetted by his financially astute brother and teams Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit, ed. Karsten Witte (Frankfurt am Main:  Suhrkamp, 1976), 10, 146. Also see Norbert Nagler, “Jacques Offenbachs musikalische Utopie:  die Sehnsucht nach der herrschaftsarmen Heimat. Reflexionen zu Siegfried Kracauers Gesellschaftsbiographie des Second Empire,” in Jacques Offenbach. Musik-​Konzepte Heft 13. Ed. Heinz-​Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1980): 87–​102. 9 Theodor W.  Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–​1940 (Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp, 1994), 243–​44. For a fuller discussion of Kracauer’s Jewish interpretation of Offenbach, see Gertrud Koch, Siegfried Kracauer. An introduction, trans. Jeremy Gaines (Princeton, N.J.:  Princeton University Press, 2000), 48–​57. 8

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of dramaturges and assistants, he managed to stage scores of plays, ranging through the repertoire from ancient to the most up-​to-​date. Nowadays Reinhardt is remembered for his massive crowd scenes, extravaganzas such as The Miracle, and his endlessly inventive stagings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, as early as 1902, working at Berlin’s Café Monopol, he had expressed a credo that “the theatre was a way of escape from everyday greyness, from the gloom of naturalism and social criticism; it was the mediator of joy, beauty, color, and light.”10 For all his affinity for modernist drama, he was drawn to the concept of festival theatre. The concept had already been popularized by Georg Fuchs’s manifesto “The theatre as a festival of life” (“Die Schaubühne –​ein Fest des Lebens,” 1899) and Peter Behrens’ monograph Festivals of life and art (Feste des Lebens und der Kunst, 1900). Reinhardt predicted that theatre “will turn back into festive play, which is what it originally meant … Through the classics, the stage will take on a new life: color and music and grandiosity and splendor and celebration.”11 Reinhardt, like Nemirovich-​Danchenko, wanted to make music dramatic. His work with Richard Strauss on Rosenkavalier, Le bourgeois gentilhomme, and Ariadne auf Naxos was ground-​breaking, for he insisted that the music beguile by means of the drama being performed. He treated composers as if they were playwrights. In 1904 Reinhardt experimented with his first Offenbach production, Orfeus i underverdenen, in Copenhagen’s Casino with Danish actors. Certain critical clichés were trotted out about Germanic heaviness and the slighting of the opera’s musical aspects. Reinhardt’s influence had already pervaded European theatre, and his epigones had overused drapery for scenery, spotlights, and primary colors. These excesses could be discerned in Orfeus as well. “The first act was brilliant, and the second, the third less so, and the fourth least of all”:12 in short, the production went to Hell in every respect. Nevertheless, it was a breath of fresh air after the stale and lukewarm conventions of operetta. Even the supernumeraries, the rococo shepherdesses and baroque Thebans of Act One, brought life on

Quoted in Henry Kahane, “Arthur Kahane, Reinhardt’s dramaturge,” Theatre Research International 4 (1978): 59–​65. 11 Arthur Kahane, Tagebuch des Dramaturgen (Berlin:  Bruno Cassirer, 1928), 119; quoted in Erika Fischer-​Lichte, “Theatre as festive play. Max Reinhardt’s productions of The Merchant of Venice,” in Jews and the making of modern German theatre, ed. Jeannette R.  Malkin and Freddie Rokem (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 219. Similar ideas were being promulgated in Russia by Nikolay Evreinov and Vsevolod Meyerhold. 12 Gunnar Hauch, “Casino: ‘Orfeus i underverdenen,’” Teatret 4 (1904–​05): 150–​51. Thanks to Peter Bilton for the translation. 10

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to the stage, perhaps far more than was demonstrated by the scratch cast of principals. After this out-​ of-​ town tryout, Reinhardt restaged Orfeus when he moved into the Neues Theater, Berlin, as the finale to the 1905/​6 season (it opened 11 May 1906). It was the first public appearance of Otto Klemperer as conductor. Another first was the engagement of Ernst Stern, who would become chief costume and scenery designer for Reinhardt’s theatres, to deck out what Reinhardt called an operetta. Stern found Reinhardt’s idea for the first act, with fruit trees in blossom, too kitschy, but had free rein for the rest of the show.13 When dealing with operetta, one might expect Reinhardt, with his Viennese background, to have gravitated to Johann Strauss and Franz Lehár, but he disliked the genre, because the quality of music was unable to compensate for childish plots and flimsy characters. His one exception was Offenbach, and even here he was less charmed by the music than by the “Homeric laughter” it underscored. His taste for the grandiose and over-​ornate did teeter on the edge of kitsch. However, his early acquaintance with cabaretic parody and the Expressionists had inoculated him against sentimentality (at least until The Miracle).14 What attracted him in Offenbach, besides the ebullience, was this lack of mawkishness. Orfeus was revived at the Munich Künstlertheater in 1912, but Reinhardt did not set his own distinctive mark on Offenbach until after the World War. In the first years of the Weimar Republic, with its ruinous inflation, extremes between the ostentatious wealth of profiteers and the grinding misery of the war wounded, ubiquitous prostitution of all sorts, and a kind of desperate lust for life, Reinhardt and his dramaturge Arthur Kahane saw a parallel with the Second Empire. Offenbach was suddenly topical, and the sensual, exuberant, even demonic gaiety of his music eloquently expressed the hysterical hedonism of the 1920s. Reinhardt completely reconceived Orfeus for a new production at the Copenhagen Casino in March 1921. His approach to a play required finding the appropriate “atmosphere,” creating the proper ambience out of which everything slowly develops. The characters would enter this atmosphere, breathe its air, and gradually be transformed.15 The atmosphere he devised for Orfeus was that of a Ernst Stern, My life, my stage (London: Victor Gollancz, 1950), 64–​65. Klee saw this production in Munich in 1905. 14 Arthur Kahane, “Phantasie über Offenbach als Vorwort,” in Orpheus in der Unterwelt von Offenbach. With color illustrations by Max Rée (Berlin: F. Fontane, 1922), unpag. 15 Heinz Herald, Max Reinhardt. Ein Versuch über das Wesen der modernen Regie (Berlin:  Felix Lehmann, 1915), 121. 13

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9.1.  Olympus in the Max Reinhardt Orpheus, Munich Künstlertheater. Photo: Gebrüder Hirsch, Munich

breathless, ultra-​modern Ziegfeld revue. He may have been influenced by Julius Freund, who had organized his pre-​war revues at Berlin’s Metropol around a theme, often employing Offenbachian travesties of classical myth. Freund’s Neuestes Allerneustes (Newest of the New, 1903)  began in a Berlin Olympus, while Der Teufel lacht dazu (The Devil Laughs at It, 1906) showed “Lucifer’s audience chamber in Hell.”16 Denmark too had a flourishing tradition of year-​end revue and cabaret, so Reinhardt cast the show with Kleinkunst artistes. Despite problems of translation during rehearsals, the adaptation by Paul Sarauw and Johannes Daru was chock-​ full of topical gags. Addressed by Mercury in tones of high tragedy, Jupiter rejoined “Leave off that unmodern fustian and express yourself expressionistically.” Pluto made his second-​act entrance in a fire-​engine-​red automobile belching and puffing smoke. The uprising of the gods was meant to suggest the Bolshevik Revolution, while Jupiter was regularly accosted by a reporter for his opinions on free love, women’s suffrage, and Communism. The Danish designer Max Rée added an Aubrey Beardsley touch to the Franz-​Peter Kothes, Die theatralische Revue in Berlin und Wien 1900–​1938. Typen, Inhalt, Funktionen (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofer, 1977), 30.

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costumes. On Olympus, Jupiter was a stubby Louis XIV; as a fly he looked like an aviator.17 Audiences were delighted, but, ignoring the fact that the original Orphée had trampled on tradition, conservative critics complained that all these additions weighed down the light Gallic touch. “But where is Offenbach?” bewailed Axel Kjerulf.18 He was in Berlin, where Reinhardt opened the refurbished production at the massive Großes Schauspielhaus on New Year’s Eve, 1921, under the management of the popular songwriter Friedrich Holländer. He did not, however, draw on the hyperactive cabaret scene for his stars: his favorite comic actor Max Pallenberg was cast as Jupiter, his favorite tragedian Alexander Moissi as Pluto, and the famous Wagnerian soprano Elisabeth Rethberg as Eurydice.19 The golden grill of the gate, which disappeared so surprisingly into the top of the proscenium arch to reveal the blue-​and-​white Olympus –​little white clouds that turned into ballerinas –​, and then the gods: […] by Reinhardt’s direction all transcended the old-​fashioned level of operetta and brought us back to Offenbach. It was delightful to watch Reinhardt at rehearsals. He himself took the greatest joy in the music, in the uninhibited audacity of it all. […]20

The premiere was a triumphal success for Reinhardt, Pallenberg, and Rée. Berlin played, sang, and whistled the Orpheus tunes for months. In 1923, Orpheus was transferred to the Royal Theatre in Stockholm, with a Swedish cast and personnel. The few grumblers that an operetta should defile the stage of a royal opera house (echoing Strindberg’s contemporaries) were drowned out by a unanimous press proclaiming “Reinhardt’s masterpiece.” It had played over a hundred times by the end of November.21 As the Scandinavian dissenters indicate, Reinhardt’s approach, while it suited the German mood, came across as heavy-​handed to foreigners. The English impresario Charles Cochran, who saw a revival in 1925, admired Pallenberg, but “thought it as bad as The Miracle was fine. The Soon after, Rée moved to New York, where he designed a number of revues and musicals, before becoming a fixture in Hollywood studios. 18 Politiken (5 Mar. 1921), quoted in Henrik Lundgren, “Max Reinhardt in Dänemark,” Max Reinhardt in Europa, ed. Edda Leisler and Gisela Prossnitz (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1973), 126–​28. 19 Otto Schneidereit, Berlin wie es weint und lacht. Spaziergang durch Berlins Operettengeschichte (Berlin (East): VEB Lied der Zeit, 1968), 237. 20 Gusti Adler, … aber vergessen Sie nicht die chinesischen Nachtigallen. Erinnerungen an Max Reinhardt (Munich: Langen Müller, 1968), 90–​91. Also see Walther R. Volbach, “Memoirs of Max Reinhardt’s theatres 1920–​1922,” Theatre Survey 13, 1a (1972): 28. 21 Michael Muhr, “Max Reinhardt und Schweden,” in Leisler and Prossnitz, Max Reinhardt in Europa, 157–​59. In Göteborg in 1917 Reinhardt had staged the premiere of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ballet pantomime Prima Ballerina to Offenbach’s music. 17

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huge orchestra completely killed the spirit of Offenbach, and the colouring of the costumes and scenery was hideous.”22 That same year the novelist Arnold Bennett, who had been approached to rewrite the book for a possible New York production, found the music and plot “delicious,” but “the production was terrible, and I don’t see how it could be better in the circumstances.” By that he meant the dire economic situation in which even full stalls at inflation prices could barely pay the actors, since they made only three million kr. or about £9 sterling a month.23 The inflation seriously affected the theatre scene throughout Germany. The Hamburg Kammerspiele was about to go under when the dynamic young actor Gustaf Gründgens, taking his cue from Reinhardt, staged an Orpheus there in December 1926, with himself as Pluto. His cast was made up of singing actors, who treated the musical line very freely. Unable to hit Pluto’s high notes, Gründgens, with a gesture of helplessness, lip-​synched to an offstage voice and, when confronted with a high C, pointed to his sore throat. These improvisations saved the theatre.24

Helen Triumphant The pre-​war success of Orpheus had persuaded Reinhardt to mount its counterpart La belle Hélène in Munich in July 1911 as a summer festival production, under the baton of the Viennese composer Alexander Zemlinsky. Stern found that the unit set of the new Künstlertheater, distinguished by a white cyclorama which disallowed traditional scenery, was too constricting; he enlarged the upstage acting area and constructed a Japanese hanamichi or runway through the auditorium. This was particularly effective when Menelaus is hustled away to Crete. The costumes were hybrids, mixing Attic himætions and chitons with the fashions of the first and second Empires. Another member of the Orpheus team was Pallenberg as a Menelaus who ad-​libbed in a bleating, Viennese-​accented voice (in his introductory song, he pronounced his name Mene-​laus [louse] to approximate in German the French calembour “é-​poux de la reine”). Herbert von Meyerinck’s nasal drawl turned Ajax into a Prussian guards officer. Again an opera diva, this time the Czech soprano Maria Jeritza, interpreted the leading female role. A tall and handsome blonde, with an expansive soprano Charles Cochran, Secrets of a showman (London: William Heinemann, 1929), 180. The journal of Arnold Bennett (New York: Literary Guild, 1933), 835. 24 Hans-​Jochen Irmer, “Jacques Offenbachs Werke in Wien und Berlin. Zum 150. Geburtstag des Komponisten am 20. Juni 1969,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-​Universität zu Berlin 18, 1 (1969): 133. 22

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range, she had already played Helen at the Vienna Volksoper, but was gauche on stage. Reinhardt carefully “Parisianized” her to fit an ensemble of comedians and refine her statuesque presence into something more coquettish.25 The biggest innovation was found to be a troupe of eight English chorus girls. At this time, a carefully drilled squad of elegant chorines who were neither ballet coryphées nor overweight burlesque queens was a true novelty, not least because Germans assumed Englishwomen to be bony and bucktoothed. Moreover, they were the first to appear on a continental stage without tights. Most critics found them irrelevant.26 Die schöne Helene’s success led to a tour of major German-​speaking centers. One of those who saw it in Vienna was Karl Kraus, who wrote the following account: Dropped in on Reinhardt’s Belle Hélène. The lead players walk through the stalls to the stage. The audience doesn’t go along with it. The music is stolen from Offenbach.27

Kraus remained one of Reinhardt’s harshest critics, in part because of his own possessive attitude towards Offenbach, in part because Reinhardt’s productions were “unphilological.” Still, Kraus was not alone in rejecting the runway which Reinhardt had earlier used in the pantomime Sumurûn. Siegfried Jacobson considered the “flower way” to be superfluous, “excessive chumminess of the actors marching up and down to the spectators.” In general, he concluded, “Reinhardt has taken Offenbach’s operetta for an old shoe sole, which cannot be eaten without his voluptuous, multifaceted, toothsome and piquant garnishes.”28 Most audiences responded joyously to the festival spirit in which even the colossal statue of Venus began to dance at the end. Die schöne Helene remained a perennial in Reinhardt’s repertoire. The performers might vary, the script might be re-​adapted to be more relevant, but the raciness and the intentional anachronisms were constants. However, when the Deutsches Theater needed a traveling play for summer 1928, something in the way of light entertainment, Reinhardt proposed La vie parisienne, less fascinated by the music than by the possibilities inherent André Tubeuf, “Comment Mizzi devint ‘die’ Jeritza,” in La belle Hélène. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 125. Ed. Michel Pazdro (Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 1989): 86–​89. 26 Stern, My life on the stage, 124–​25; Kothes, Die theatralische Revue, 120–​21; Wolfgang Carlé, Das hat Berlin schon mal gesehn. Eine Historie des Friedrichstadt-​Palastes (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 125. 27 Die Fackel (31 Oct. 1911), quoted in Gottfried Reinhardt, Der Liebhaber: Erinnerungen seines Sohnes an Max Reinhardt (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1973), 144–​45. 28 Quoted in Reinhardt, Die Liebhaber, 146. 25

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9.2.  Die schöne Helena, Act II. Far right in the straw boater is Camilla Eibenschütz as Orestes. Photo: Jos. Paul Böhm, Munich, 1911.

in the title. He made contact with thirty-​one-​year-​old Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Korngold, at the age of fourteen, had attended rehearsals of the Munich Helene and met Jeritza, for whom, nine years later, he composed his international success Die tote Stadt. Korngold was a dab hand at adapting Johann Strauss, and talked Reinhardt into Die Fledermaus instead. The production proved to be an unparalleled getpenny and enjoyed frequent revivals.29 Henceforth, Korngold would be Reinhardt’s indispensable musical adviser, providing incidental music for Shakespeare and Goldoni and, eventually, adapting Offenbach. In June 1931 Reinhardt decided to renovate the whole production of Helene in a lavish and expensive manner. He entrusted the writing of the prologue and some of the scenes to Egon Friedell and Hans Sassmann. Friedell was one of the celebrities of the Viennese scene, a coffeehouse wit, aphorist, and cabarettist. He was also a serious scholar who had composed a history of modern European culture (dedicated to Reinhardt). In it he had characterized Offenbach as similar to Watteau “in reflecting a luxury culture, the breath of Paris, parodying his own times much more than the past; unlike Viennese opera, he is unkitschy, unsentimental, amoral, with no petty-​bourgeois melodrama or skepticism and exhibitionistic sensuality. He is quite nihilistic, unencumbered by psychological logic and artistic Reinhardt, Die Liebhaber, 58.

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dynamism.” Offenbach is free-​spirited enough “to laugh at the laws of his own art.”30 Friedell’s polished, vitriolic wit was alloyed by Sassmann’s more earthbound humor. In the mouth of Calchas describing the rape of Leda, they put their word for the whole event: Schwanerei –​swan stuff (a pun on Schweinerei, smuttiness). They also introduced the character of Mercury, which Friedell played himself. Their dialogue bristled with keen shafts at contemporary follies, and the prediction of impending war was not avoided. The musical adaptation was given over to Korngold. For all his expertise, he probably added too much paprika to Offenbach. This time the Menelaus was Hans Moser, whose comic style, more belly-​laughs than regal nonsense, was accommodated by the new script, which allowed him to make phone calls to Hades. Another Czech diva, the international celebrity Jarmila Novotná, was the Helen. Despite her problems with the German language and her “singerliness,” Reinhardt found ways to capitalize on her beauty and voice to create a brilliant interpretation. The towering sets, designed by Ernst Schütte, were Doric in style, and to accommodate them the decorative elements of the Theater am Kurfürstendamm had to be newly rebuilt. The costumes by Ladislaus Czettel could be described as Attic Baroque. Alexandra Fedorova, choreographer of the ballet of the Latvian National Opera, was invited to Berlin to train the dancers. All of Reinhardt’s organizational abilities and his legendary calm were necessary to pull together all these disparate elements. At the final dress rehearsal he even had the energy and perfectionism to restage the last tableau.31 The show was running too long. A  newly invented third act before the walls of Troy went on half an hour beyond what it should have, and even a magnificent wooden horse was no help. As dawn broke outside the theatre, Reinhardt cut the third act, which contained the most expensive set pieces and had cost the most rehearsal time. To replace it, Friedell and Sassmann wrote an epilogue for Orestes, played by the angelic-​voiced, long-​legged Friedel Schuster, and Korngold came up with the music. It made her a star. Gilding the lily barely describes Reinhardt’s treatment. The whole stage was bathed in light, and the auditorium totally renovated. During the overture a chest on the forestage located over a trapdoor allowed dancers to Egon Friedell, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (Munich:  C.  H. Beck, 1927–​1931), quoted in Jacob, Jacques Offenbach, 167. 31 Adler, Nachtigallen, 271–​73; Reinhardt, Der Liebhaber, 147–​48. 30

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pull out all manner of Homeric rags to be the evening’s props.32 A masked operetta chorus in silhouette stood in for the Greek choregos. Paris was played as an oafish bungler and his judgment was not merely sung but shown as a vision of a trio of goddesses with the Austrian dancer La Jana (later a favorite of Goebbels and Hitler) stripped down to a bikini as Venus born out of the foam of a land canal.33 The second-​act dream duet was followed by a clown act, an interpolated cabaret skit, with a drunken Moser and Friedell as Mercury, recruiting for his cultural history. Menelaus crawls into bed and descries six feet; he gets up, counts the feet to figure out the discrepancy and finds only four. Back to bed: “It was a dream.” The other Greeks begin a war dance, which streams out of the audience on to the stage. A complicated apparatus springs the “falcon” out of the mattress a meter high in the air, where the royal “dove” meets it. A Homeric frieze comes to life. This concatenation of “star numbers” and specialty acts gave the opera the feel of an American musical revue in the style of Ziegfeld or the Shubert Brothers. Helene became a hit, repeated in Vienna and London in 1931, which led to a thorough overhaul for the London stage. (See Chapter 13.) Back in Berlin, the production moved in 1932 to the Großes Schauspielhaus, enlarged even more to suit the bigger house.

Death in Venice Reinhardt’s success and Kraus’s radio broadcasts share credit for the “Offenbach-​Renaissance” in the German-​speaking world in the early 1930s. For four months in 1929 Ritter Blaubart ran at Berlin’s Metropol Theater with the great Moravian tenor Leo Slezak in the lead. For want of funds, most of the revivals copied Reinhardt’s revue style rather than his mode of extravaganza, and none was faithful to the original libretti or scores. The cabaret songwriter Marcellus Schiffer was engaged to compose new dialogue for Pariser Leben. Walter Mehring’s Grande-​ Duchesse of 1931 larded the dialogue with topical gags and reduced the musical element by casting dramatic actors and keeping the orchestra as small as possible. Gustaf Gründgens played Antonio in his own staging of Die Banditen, whose text was refashioned to reflect the Reinhardt may have lifted this business from Yevgenyy Vakhtangov’s opening for Gozzi’s Princess Turandot in Moscow in 1922. 33 Gusti Adler, Max Reinhardt, sein Leben (Salzburg:  Festungsverlag, 1965), 206–​207; “Die Schöne Helena. Photographs from a German production,” Theatre Arts Monthly (Sep. 1931): 779. 32

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current political crisis.34 It was liberties such as these that drove Kraus to distraction. The death of Reinhardt’s brother, who had managed the financial and commercial side of his enterprises, coincided with the growing crisis of the German political scene. Reinhardt was now living most of the time in Salzburg, working chiefly for the summer festival there. Profitable tours to Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere were declined, just as the number of impresarios and theatre owners proliferated. The director staked everything on a staging of Hoffmanns Erzählungen at the 3,500-​seat Großes Schauspielhaus, which had been turned by the impecunious entrepreneur Erik Charell into a venue for revues and operettas. The opera opened on 28 November 1931 and was a happy amalgam of Reinhardt’s major obsessions and achievements. After being banned as a jinx from state opera houses in German-​speaking lands after the Vienna fire, Hoffmann had first been revived by Hans Gregor at the Berlin Komische Oper in 1905, where it enjoyed a phenomenal run of 500 performances. It became a staple of the German repertoire, and the production at the Kroll Opera in 1929 still lingered in the memories of more progressive opera lovers, less for Alexander Zemlinsky’s conducting than for the Bauhaus-​style sets and costumes by László Moholy-​Nagy. Offenbach’s opera served him as pretext for an anti-​romantic “total theatre” experience. It could achieve only fifty-​five performances, however. Reinhardt was less interested in staging Hoffmann than in staging his conception of Hoffmann. He claimed that all previous productions had falsified the hero in the last scene, showing him to be intoxicated with liquor; this, the director insisted, should be “an artistic Hoffmannesque intoxication.” To that end, he chose the Opéra-​Comique variant with spoken dialogue rather than recitative, a choice which enraged certain “experts,” even though the recitatives had been written after Offenbach’s death. More just was the criticism aimed at the musical adaptation by conductor Leo Blech and the changes to the libretto by the inevitable Friedell and Sassmann.35 Albert Gier, “La fortune d’Offenbach en Allemagne:  traductions, jugements critiques, mises en scène,” Lied und populäre Kultur/​Song and Popular Culture 57 (2012):  161–​80; Stephan Stompor, “Die Offenbach-​Renaissance um 1930 und die geschlossenen Vorstellungen für Juden nach 1933,” in Offenbach und die Schauplätze seines Musiktheaters. Thurnauer Schriften zum Musiktheater 17. Ed Rainer Franke (Laaber: Laaber, 1999), 257–​59. 35 Franz Cuno, “Reinhardts Inszenierung von ‘Hoffmanns Erzählungen,’” Maske und Kothurn 3 (1957): 276–​78. It was rumored that Reinhardt had asked Korngold to trim Blech’s version to a more suitable running time. Bernd O. Rachold, letter in The Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 36 (Jun. 2006): 5. All of the scripts for Reinhardt’s Offenbach productions can be found in the Reinhardt collection of the State University of New York, Binghamton. 34

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To bolster his thesis, Reinhardt needed to supply a clear and urgent exposition for the Hoffmann-​Stella conflict which was to constitute the prologue, interlude, and epilogue. He interjected two short dialogue cellar scenes in the course of the action to make the psychological denouement –​ the duet between Hoffmann and his muse –​unambiguous. The ending, now set in a replica of the old Berlin Royal Opera house, had Hoffmann storming on to its stage to address Stella in the midst of an aria from Don Giovanni. This was meant as a paean to the spirituality of love, a reversal of the seducer motif. Hoffmann seizes his beloved to carry off her art forever and save himself. The abduction fails, a scandal erupts, the 1820 audience flees in panic to music from the comic opera Robinson Crusoé. Then follows the lyric conclusion. It is Nicklausse who speaks the brief phrases which appear in the original ending to the duet, before the reappearance of the student chorus, and which, in the words of Friedell, sum up the profound meaning of Offenbach’s conception: “Doll whore woman.” Offenbach’s opera offered Reinhardt a broad canvas:  the life and legend of E.  T. A.  Hoffmann himself, German and French romanticism, the weirdness of the Olympia act with its mannequins and marionettes, and above all Venice. It was Reinhardt’s favorite city, and, throughout his career, he had reveled in reimagining it for his productions of Goldoni and Shakespeare. Oskar Strnad was let loose to create a fantasia of canals, bridges, and palazzi rising in the moonlight out of blue-​green waters. Giulietta’s palazzo featured an enormous mirror, in which gestures were repeated until perfect. Reinhardt let the mirror images play through human beings, coming to a climax as Hoffmann realizes he has lost his shadow. All this was eclipsed, musically and dramatically, by the Antonia act. Novotná returned to Reinhardt’s stage as a magical Antonia, captivatingly beautiful and coached to act through song. As she sang, she slid down into her armchair like a dying bird. Her head sank, just as her last high note rang out, a resounding breath. The old Bamberg house, as designed by Strnad, was the perfect frame, its eerie dimensions and high walls lost in the shadows, broken only by wavering beams of light that created a hellish nimbus around Dr Mirakel. Reinhardt had put together a brilliant ensemble, headed by Hans Fidesser as Hoffmann. With his passion for accumulating celebrities, he could not allow a single soprano to take on four roles. He insisted on a quartet of international fame: besides Novotná, he had Adele Kern as Olympia; the Swede Göte Ljungberg, who had sung in his Stockholm Orfeus and was now at the Vienna Staatsoper and the Met, as Giulietta; and Friedel Schuster, who had shot to fame as Orestes, as Stella. The four

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villains were sung by Russian-​born George Baklanoff, who clung to the standard operatic clichés. Reinhardt had difficulty breaking him and Ljungberg of their well-​practised habits and making them into fantastical figures. One who did achieve the grotesque effect was the former Moscow Art Theatre actor Vladimir Sokoloff as the man in black, while a longtime member of the Reinhardt team, his brother-​in-​law Hermann Thimig, took on the faithful friend Nicklausse. Even here Reinhardt injected a dash of revue: Cochenille was played by Paul Graetz, a cabaret artiste and scurrilous rhymester considered to personify the very essence of Berliner Schnauze (Berlin cockiness). He was allowed to make his sallies in a blue spotlight and exit to a storm of applause, as if he were a music-​hall number.36 Reinhardt also introduced dance between the dramatic scenes, with Anton Dolin and Bronislava Nijinska choreographing the doll ballet and the Christmas angel, danced by the charming young Nini Theilade. Another non-​operatic element might be called cinematic: each moment flowed into the next as in a dream, so that the spectator would be enveloped in a seamless vision. It recalled Reinhardt’s earlier experiments in synaesthesia, where a revolving stage, abetted by all the allure of music, lighting, three-​dimensional scenery, and lavish costuming, seduced the audience to accept the director’s conception. Brecht called such mesmerism “culinary theatre,” but it was an appropriate approach to Hoffmann, suggestive of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. The technical aspect of the production was extremely complicated, with the stage machinery heavily fortified by support beams to hold up the constructed scenery (nearly a century before Robert Lepage’s Ring Cycle at the Met). Strnad had altered the architecture of the Großes Schauspielhaus to heighten the illusion. These alterations were best appreciated in the Venice scene, when the revolving stage brought the Grand Canal with its gliding gondolas and oversized palazzi out of the darkness into the moonlight, as the water shimmered to the sound of the barcarolle. The costumes were designed so that the drabness of everyday garb was incrementally relieved by color, which reached a climax in this act.37 The critical establishment, predictably, was unsympathetic. Alfred Kerr dismissed Hoffmann as a “gigantic attraction for foreigners and locals,” Sokoloff and Graetz both emigrated to Hollywood. The former made a very successful career as a character actor in the movies, usually playing Spaniards or Mexicans. Graetz remained unemployed and died of a heart attack; Reinhardt read a tribute at his grave. 37 Hoffmanns Erzählungen. Ein Sonderdruck der Deutschen Buch-​Gemeinschaft anläßlich der Max Reinhardt-​Inszenierung von Offenbachs Hoffmanns Erzählungen im Großen Schauspielhaus Berlin (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-​Gemeinschaft, 1931), 23–​25. 36

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while Herbert Ihering hyperbolized it as “the most catastrophic misfire known to theatre history.”38 Paul Klee expressed a more balanced response when he wrote, to his wife, “On the musical plane, it is the best performance which I have ever seen. On the theatrical plane, the Venetian act [his favorite] was not so good. It was unfortunately Reinhardt, too present a phantom. Nevertheless, I shall return for the next showing; in this conception, the music is perfectly beautiful.”39 Klee spoke for the general public. Between 28 November 1931 and April 1932, 175 performances were seen, by 3,000 spectators on each occasion. Its time on the boards may have been relatively brief, but Reinhardt’s Hoffmann was remarkably potent in its effect on those who experienced it. One of these was, surprisingly, Theodor Adorno, whose 1932 essay “The Tales of Hoffmann in Offenbach’s Themes” suggested that the special demonism of the composer sprang from the domestic interiors of the nineteenth century; “here place and moment are themselves spirits and ghosts. In their enclosures live human beings, until they suffocate them.” Even Giulietta’s Grand Canal seems to lie under glass, with its empty looking-​ glass unreflective of Hoffmann’s shadow. The alienated things, namely the female characters, which the scenery places before one’s eyes, are, Adorno claims, diabolical, “because they have broken away from every context in which they can serve the living.”40 Walter Benjamin was delighted by this essay, for it chimed in with his own ideas of the hypertrophied, suffocating nature of the nineteenth-​century bourgeois interior.41 It may have been Reinhardt’s early staging of Strindberg’s Chamber Plays that lay behind this effect. Perhaps the oddest repercussion of Reinhardt’s production was experienced by Hans Bellmer, the German artist known for his unsettling erotic exploitation of mannequins, clay figures, and dolls “as a phallic substitute” in castration anxiety. Experts on Bellmer locate the origin of this fixation at the nexus of three events: the discovery of a box of toys as the family moved to Berlin, the visit of a seventeen-​year-​old female cousin to Berlin, and the youth’s attendance at Reinhardt’s Hoffmann. The automaton Olympia, glimpsed in the on-​stage shadows, and framed Alfred Kerr, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Gunther Rühle (Berlin:  S.  Fischer, 1991), VII, 528; Herbert Ihering, “Reinhardts Flucht aus der Verantwortung,” in Von Reinhardt bis Brecht. Vier Jahrzehnte Theater und Film (Berlin: Aufbau, 1961), III, 246. 39 Letter to Lily Klee (23 Oct. 1932), Klee, Briefe, II, 1194. 40 Theodor Adorno, “Hoffmanns Erzählungen in Offenbachs Motiven,”Gesammelte Schriften. Musikalische Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), XVII, 42–​43. 41 Stefan Bub, “Jacques Offenbach bei Walter Benjamin und Siegfried Kracauer,” Euphorion 100, 1 (2006): 117–​28. 38

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by the stalactites of Hans Poelzig’s Schauspielhaus, evoked a particularly powerful reaction owing to Reinhardt’s trickery. In addition to the Olympia sung by Tatiana Menotti (at this particular performance) there were an identically wigged and costumed dancer, Maria Solweg, and, when the mechanism ran down, a life-​sized dummy. Art critics surmise that it was this double and triple vision that urged Bellmer to think sculpturally, as well as to conflate the three erotic attachments of his own life, mother, cousin, and wife. Sue Taylor goes further in her analysis, suggesting that Bellmer, self-​identified with Hoffmann the frustrated lover/​artist, imagined his detested father as Coppelius and Spalanzani, and his consumptive wife as Antonia. The Doll was to unlock the prison of reality and replace it with a surrogate more worthy of his love; its sexual provocation would serve as a weapon against parental tyranny.42 Much of Bellmer’s fixation with the eroticism of inanimate homunculi can thus be traced back to Reinhardt’s Hoffmann.

La vie hitlerienne With the Nazi ascendancy to power, there was no place in the German-​ speaking world for either Offenbach or Reinhardt. Tales of Hoffmann had been among the top fifteen most popular operas in Germany in 1932–​ 1933. By 1938 it had vanished from stage and concert hall.43 As early as 1931, when the conductor and composer Berthold Goldschmidt joined the Berlin Staatsoper, he was twitted by “Aryan” colleagues for having worked on Offenbach.44 With Hitler’s accession as Chancellor, backstage bitchery became official propaganda. A  best-​selling Handbook on the Jewish Question (1933) described “the Jewish cantor’s son” as the greatest and most malignant influence on operetta. His works display ever so accurately the true face of the Jewish “racial enmity” [Gegenrasse] of their writers. They disavow morals and decency, tear down everything noble and beautiful, promote each and every mockery and vile amusement, rejoice in repulsive dirty jokes and smutty witticisms. The piquant music insinuates itself and knows how to distract from its worthlessness. Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer, the anatomy of anxiety (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 13, 33–​34, 62, 65–​66, 241–​42; Rachel Baum, “Bellmer now,” Art Journal 61, 2 (Summer 2002):  104; D.  F. Cheshire, “Tales of Hoffmann and Hans Bellmer,” Theatrephile 2, 7 (Summer 1985): 19. 43 Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), 193. 44 Michael H. Kater, The twisted muse. Musicians and their music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 94. 42

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The handbook’s author sees this as a worldwide “industry” stretching from Sullivan in London to the Jewish operettists of Central and Eastern Europe, a “speculation on the lowest instincts of mankind.”45 Once National Socialism was firmly in power, the performance of Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Offenbach (often cited as Israel Jakob Eberscht [sic]) was banned from all stages under the sway of the regime. A newly opened production of Die Großherzogin von Gerolstein in Hamburg survived only six performances, and by 1934 Offenbach operas had been fully eradicated from the repertoire. Officially sanctioned criticism supported this ban by degrading its victims. In his essay on “The Operatic Ideal of Races and Peoples” (1936), Walter Abendroth mocked classical operettas (“only a Jew could have come up with something like that”); myth as farce was at odds with the German view of “myth as the newly won source of national Art!”46 Any operetta with a libretto by a “non-​Aryan” was viewed as deleterious to the spirit of the Volk, even if its composer was not a Jew.47 In 1939 the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question reiterated the Handbook’s earlier animadversions by blaming Meyerbeer and Offenbach for turning music into an object of financial speculation, a lesson learned by their “racial comrades” and put to good use in light music, which had been laid waste by a Jewish industry in no way handicapped by taste. “The distortion of operetta is as much their work as the infection of the modern production of hits with which it has for decades poisoned the musical taste of the people.”48 As if to illustrate this point, when the opportunist composer Werner Egk made an opera out of Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt (1938), in the final tableau of Act II, when Peer’s nightmare conjures up two anti-​Semitic caricatures, the Redheaded Girl (in Ibsen, the Girl in Green) and the Old Man (in Ibsen, the Dövre King), the score explicitly quotes Offenbach’s “Jewish music.” The dance is backed up by a “line of cancan dancers” who caper wildly to seduce Peer.49 Goebbels was delighted. Theodor Fritsch, Handbuch der Judenfrage. Die wichtigsten Tatsachen zur Beurteilung des jüdischen Volkes (Leipzig: Hammer, 1933), 329. 46 Walter Abendroth, “Opernideale der Rassen und Völker,” Die Musik (Mar. 1936): 424–​25, quoted in Joseph Wulf, Musik im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1983), 400. 47 Herbert Gerigk, “Die leichte Muse und der Rassegedanke,” Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 7 (Munich, 1939):  66–​68. Also see Hermann Bredehöft, “Der Verfall der Operette,” Deutsche Dramaturgie. Zeitschrift für die Probleme der darstellenden Künste (1942): 84–​87. 48 Die Juden in Deutschland, 8th edn. (Munich:  Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage, 1939), 352; quoted in Wulf, Musik im Dritten Reich, 416–​17; Michael Meyer, Politics of music in the Third Reich (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 263. 49 Werner Egk, Peer Gynt. Oper in 3 Akten. LPs (Munich: Orfeo, 1989) (Reissued on 2 CDs. Orfeo C005822H. Munich: Orfeo, 1995.) 45

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The definitive Lexicon of Jews in Music (1940) pretended to an even-​ handed appraisal in its article on Offenbach, while using the vocabularies of clinical and moral contamination. The charms of his music are superficial, it averred in typically tortuous German. By its inordinately deformed and caricatural nature it is doubtless a germ cell which ever since and ever more conspicuously has provided undermining tendencies in operetta, which under the much less wittily talented racial descendants of Offenbach during the decadence reached their deepest nadir. Also for Offenbach’s art, which has no uniform character, Richard Wagner’s remark hits home, that Jewish music tosses various forms and styles of all masters and periods together any old way, “just as in Jewish dialect with wonderful lack of expressiveness words and constructions are thrown together any old way.”50

More temperately, Josef Gregor, the Austrian theatre historian who had persuaded the Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach to found a Central Institute for Theatre Studies in Vienna, offered his own authoritative summing-​ up of Offenbach’s place in music in his 1941 Cultural History of Opera: of the Jewish composers who represent the “triumph of liberalism,” he is the “most talented,” whose prominence in the Second Empire was ephemeral. What a pity that the general public should know German romanticism only from Les contes d’Hoffmann, an opera sunk in materialism, and that German operetta should have to copy Offenbach when it had the Singspiel as a model.51 Yet Offenbach lingered for a while on the margins. The itinerant stages of the Jewish Cultural Union (Jüdisches Kulturbund) were restricted by the government to Jewish composers, but for four years they felt it no hardship. As late as 1937 they put on a reduced version of Hoffmann, and the following year Die schöne Helene (with Calchas as a radio announcer) and a series of Offenbach one-​acts, until the November pogrom put an end to full-​scale stagings. These productions served a symbolic function as morale-​raising vestiges of freedom and wit. In 1941 the Kulturbund toured a mixed concert of “The Grave and the Gay in Poetry and Music” to sold-​ out matinees and produced a modern comedy from the Spanish of Sancho Theo Stengel and Herbert Gerigk, Lexikon der Juden in der Musik mit einem Titelverzeichnis jüdischer Werke (Berlin:  Bernhard Hahnefeld, 1940), 208. See also Karl Blessinger’s comparison of Offenbach’s “Barcarolle” with Mahler’s symphonies as an example of Jewish music’s preference for secondary rhythms over major melodic motifs. Karl Blessinger, Judentum und Musik. Ein Beitrag zur Kultur und Rassenpolitik (Berlin: Bernhard Hahnefeld, 1944), 148. 51 Josef Gregor, Kulturgeschichte der Oper. Ihre Verbindung mit dem Leben, den Werken des Geistes und der Politik (Vienna: Gallus, 1941), 324–​25, 333. 50

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Lopez, Señor Alan Escapes the Fires of Hell, with music by Offenbach. It offered the comforting idea that good conquers evil. However, in September, the Union was banned and its property confiscated.52 At Ravensbrück, the women’s labor camp outside Berlin, a macaronic parody of Orphée entitled Le Verfugbar aux Enfers (The Disposable in Hell) was mounted on 21 October 1943 and performed periodically until the camp was liberated in 1945. The Verfügbaren were the lowest caste on the camp work schedules, raggedy manual laborers with picks and shovels forced by the guards to march singing “Heigh ho, heigh ho” like Disney dwarfs. Pariahs, often drawn from the “asocial” and emotionally broken, but also from French resisters who refused to contribute to the German war effort, they fought back with sabotage and inefficiency. Cultural creation fended off dehumanization. Inspired by the anthropologist Germaine Tillion, herself an inmate, with contributions from many hands, their Offenbach parody was suffused in bitter irony. A Naturalist who studies “inhumanity” has discovered a new species, the Verfugbar, who, whatever the circumstances of repression, shows signs of a spirit of contradiction. Each specimen describes the conditions of her life in song and sketches, but the Naturalist prefers statistics, such as the number of days a fat woman might survive without food; when he turns a deaf ear to their stories, they speak to one another and occupy the performance.53 One complains: “I want a concentration camp with all the mod cons:  running water, gas, electricity.” The chorus replies “Gas, above all.” Karl Kraus would have approved of the Verfugbar use of black humor as an Offenbachian resistance to a savagely absurd situation. Meanwhile, in the “model concentration camp” Theresienstadt/​Terezín the inmates had been encouraged to perform music, even opera. The interned musicologist Dr H. G. Adler recommended Offenbach as preferable to cheap musical comedy, so the Czech opera director Hanuš Thein was ordered to stage Hoffmann. The Gestapo commanded that the complete manuscript score be sent to the camp from the National Theatre of Prague, even though the opera was to be reduced to an hour and a half ’s duration on a cramped stage. The miniature version, which opened on 9 April 1945, consisted of the Prologue, an aria from Act I, the barcarolle from Act II, all of Act III, and the Epilogue. The ensemble was Herbert Freeden, Jüdisches Theater in Nazideutschland, 78, 84, 163; Stompor, “Die Offenbach-​ Renaissance,” 259–​64. 53 Donald Reid, “Available in Hell:  Germaine Tillion’s operetta of resistance at Ravensbrück,” in French Politics, Culture and Society 25, 2 (2007). A cabaret evening based on Ravensbrück material has been devised by the American soprano Lynn Torgove. 52

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packed with talent, headed by the Slovak tenor and cantor Ladislav Moshé Blum as Hoffmann, and the orchestra was conducted by Leo Pappenheim, who had been “repatriated” from his self-​imposed exile in Rotterdam. A rehearsal was attended by Dutch, Danish, and Swedish observers of an international commission, the camp Commandant and his staff, and some of the survivors of the mass deportations and murders. Eva Herrmanová, later director of Prague’s Smetana Theatre, took part in a preliminary discussion. A week after the premiere the educator Hans Epstein delivered a lecture on “The Meaning of The Tales of Hoffmann.”54 This was to be the last opera produced at Terezín before its inmates were sent off to death camps. The score was preserved in safety and after the war it was returned to the librarian of the Czech National Theatre. Most of the participants did not return.

Eva Šormová (1973), based on the notes of Hanuš Thein, quoted in Stompor, “Die Offenbach-​ Renaissance,” 265–​66; Joža Karas, Music in Terezín 1941–​1945 (New York: Beaufort Books), 33, 177. This episode was recreated by W. G. Sebald in his novel Austerlitz, and a photograph of a performance survives at the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel. The inmates also staged their own version of the Orpheus myth, The Death of Orpheus by Georg Kafka, but it was a pessimistic poetic one-​ act. Lisa Peschel, ed., Performing captivity, performing escape:  cabarets and plays from the Terezin/​ Theresienstadt ghetto (London and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014), 333–​59.

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A Dying Fall Operetta had been absent from the Imperial Russian stages in the last decades of the century, even though it throve in the private theatres that sprang up after the abolition of the imperial monopoly in 1880. When the Theatrical Society offered a low-​priced charity performance of an act each of La Périchole and Belle Hélène, followed by Orphée aux enfers, at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1901, the theatre’s administrator Telyakovsky was surprised to find that the box-​office took in 12,300 rubles. Some of the best artists of the troupe appeared in the performance, which lasted from 8 p.m. to 12:30, ending with a general cancan. A strange impression was made on me this Saturday in the Imperial theatre by an operetta, attended by the entire Imperial Family, except for the Sovereign Emperor, Empress, and Heir. Performances are banned on Saturday as a tenet of [Lent], and yet a performance is given by the Theatrical Society, under the auspices of the Sovereign. […] They may be collecting money for impecunious servants, but the medium ought to be more appropriate. Saturdays and operettas are forbidden for the Imperial stage … Operetta is not our business –​it came across as boring, heavy and tiresome. […] the comedy is accompanied by vulgarity.1

Two days later, Telyakovsky was informed that the Empress Alexandra had expressed a desire to see Contes d’Hoffmann at the bijou Hermitage Theatre in the Winter Palace, and the Emperor ordered six performances. Operetta may have been a rarity for royalty, but it was a drug on the market for the general public. Complaining of how badly Offenbach had aged, the conductor A. B. Vilinsky noted “There’s no way to get the audience to see what’s racy about Hélène, when every farce has enough raciness V. A. Telyakovskiy, Dnevniki Direktora Imperatorskikh teatrov 1901–​1903 Sankt-​Peterburg (Moscow: Artist. Rezhissyor. Teatr, 2002), 128.

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for five Hélènes, no galop in Orpheus will amuse it when at every music hall dogs perform their evolutions to the galop of some quite unknown composer, thematically and rhythmically worked out more intricately than the best of old Offenbach’s galops.”2 Rumors ran in winter 1912 that Max Reinhardt’s Belle Hélène would tour to Moscow, sponsored either by the Moscow Art Theatre (highly unlikely since Stanislavsky had a low opinion of the German director’s taste) or by Zimin’s Opera. Instead, Reinhardt brought Oedipus the King. Still, the excitement about the German success inspired private entrepreneurs to invest in Offenbach themselves. When the young Georgian director Konstantin Mardzhanov (Koté Mardzhanishvili) left the Art Theatre and founded his own Free Theatre to put on an eclectically musical repertoire in 1913, he chose La Belle Hélène as the second offering. Mardzhanov conceived the sort of “bright-​idea” interpretation which was to become a tic of modern opera directors: each of the three acts was to be set in a different era and a different country. The first act, as usual, took place in ancient Greece, with the characters arranged as on a Grecian urn; the second in France under Louis XIV, the set occupied by an enormous bed; and the third in a contemporary Russian spa like Kislovodsk. In that act Calchas was costumed as a general, Orestes as a high-​school student, and Paris (who had earlier appeared as a shepherd and a marquis) as an aviator. The script boasted such witticisms as calling Helen “Yelena Swanovna.” Performed by the Free Theatre’s inexperienced company of singers and dancers, it came across as tedious and contrived.3 The millionaire impresario Sergey Mamontov was appalled by “creativity founded on cynicism … no understanding of stage art,” while Stanislavsky wrote to his daughter that it was “a nightmare, a madhouse. Tasteless, garish … it left a dreadful impression.”4 The Free Theatre fizzled out and Mardzhanov moved to Kiev. The up-​ and-​ coming young director Fyodor Kommisarzhevsky was eager to rescue the French composer from this shipwreck, for he looked to Offenbach to offset the mood of desperation and gloom that had overcome Russia on the eve of world war. The son of a celebrated tenor and brother of Russia’s leading actress, he believed in determining the idiosyncratic Teatr i Iskusstvo 25 (1907), quoted in M. Yanovskiy, Operetta. Voznikovenie i razvitie zhanra na zapade i v SSSR (Leningrad and Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1937), 330. 3 Alisa Koonen, Stranitsy zhizni (Moscow:  Iskusstvo, 1975), 177–​78. Also see the review in Teatr v karikaturakh 8 (1913): 10. 4 Letter to Kira Alekseeva (24–​26 Oct. 1913), in Konstantin Stanislavsky, Stanislavsky: a life in letters, trans. and ed. Laurence Senelick (London: Routledge, 2013), 332. 2

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10.1.  Act I of Prekrasnaya Yelena at the Free Theatre, Moscow, 1913. The design is to represent the frieze on a Grecian vase.

nature of every play and then finding the appropriate means of staging it. He proposed La belle Hélène provide the antidote, “a lightness required by a man tormented by the modern mood, a certain spiritual decadence of ours, hatred of humanity and of life.” For Kommisarzhevsky, Offenbach’s age was that of the blagueur and Helen a woman of that age, for whom fate was mere commodité. He recommended consulting photographs of the original performers to get a sense of the frivolity and irony of the opera, in which Greek costumes and hairdos were stylized to suit the erotic tastes of the times. Why not have the heroine arrive in an automobile? Why not update the satire of clergy, monarchy, and even liberalism? (He saw the trio of kings in the last act as a parody of the patriotic trio in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell.)5 Offenbach was, indeed, in demand during the Great War as a means of taking the public’s mind off the worsening conflict.6 After the trauma Fyodor Kommissarzhevskiy, “O ‘Prekrasnoy Yelene,’” Maski 2 (1913–​1914): 30–​40. Among other productions, in St Petersburg, M. Choufleuri at the Alexandrinskiy Theatre (1914) and Contes d’Hoffmann and La Périchole at the Theatre of Musical Drama, and in Moscow Orphée aux enfers at the Hermitage Gardens (all 1916).

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of Revolution, however, the responses to him ran the gamut from distaste to inspiration. The imagist poet Mikhail Kuzmin, who usually embraced Gallic raciness, condemned Le pont des soupirs as “all the same boring nonsense. Lecocq never fell so low as Offenbach. It’s as if the composer is asleep and hums by memory the most banal commonplaces. The posthumous evaluations when all’s said and done are correct, and galvanization rarely succeeds and then only at long intervals. Avis aux snobs.”7 At the other extreme, young Sergey Eisenstein, riding in a troop train in 1919, conceived a novel means of staging the Olympia scene in Hoffmann. The trigger had been Yosef Lapitsky’s well-​received production of the opera in Petrograd, which he found unimaginative; Lapitsky had made all the guests in the Spalanzani episode robotic. The Ballets Russes designer Aleksandr Benois, a stalwart of the World of Art movement, was among those who found that use of dolls a cheap trick: “They say this was done to strengthen the nightmarish impression, and, indeed, the whole administration of the Musical Drama will henceforth seem to me a nightmarish assortment of people very remote from art.”8 Eisenstein’s solution was to make Olympia an angular, glass-​ eyed automaton while the guests are literally marionettes, fusions of humans, animals, and objects. They would be framed by a series of screens, arranged in diminishing perspective, on a checkerboard floor, against black velvet, lit by two-​branched candelabras.9 This would allow them to flit in and out without their strings getting tangled. The marionette motif was in synch with the Russian Symbolist notion that human beings are puppets in the hands of fate; the poets Fyodor Sologub and Aleksandr Blok in their plays had already toyed with this device.10 Two years later, on entering Vsevolod Meyerhold’s directing workshop, Eisenstein drew sketches of Hoffmann costumes that would prevent the guests from moving like Mikhail Kuzmin, “Cheshuya v nevode (tol’ko dlya sebya),” [Trawling the net (only for myself )], in Strelets 3 (St Petersburg, 1922): 95–​109. Reprinted in Esseistika –​kritika, ed. E. G. Domogatskaya and E. A. Pevak (Moscow: Agraf, 2000), III, 367. 8 Aleksandr Benois, “Gofman na stsene,” Rech’ (20 May 1916): 2; quoted in Dassia N. Posner, The director’s prism. E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian theatrical avant-​garde (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 276, n. 45. 9 Sergey Eisenstein, “Teatral’nye tetradi S. M. Eyzenshteyna,” ed. M. K. Ivanova and V. V. Ivanov, in Mnemozina. Istoricheskiy almanakh. Vypusk 2, ed. Vladislav Ivanov (Moscow: Editorial, 2000), 222–​25; “Iz ‘Zametok kasatel’no teatra,’” (13 Jun. 1919), in Eysenshteyn o Meyerkhol’de, 1919–​1948, ed. Vladimir Zabrodin (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2005), 23–​24. 10 See Claudine Amiard-​Chevrel, Les symbolistes russes et le théâtre (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1994); Daniel Gerould, “Sologub and the theatre,” The Drama Review 21, 4 (Dec. 1977): 79–​84; and J. B. Woodward, “From Brjusov to Ajkhenvald: attitudes to the Russian theatre 1902–​1914,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 7 (1965): 173–​88. 7

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ordinary humans. He also suggested that the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky collaborate in rewriting La belle Hélène for a project at the radical Proletkult Theatre.

Meet Comrade Offenbach However, the first production of an Offenbach opera reconceived along post-​revolutionary lines appeared under the aegis of the Moscow Art Theatre, regarded by the far left as a back number. Vladimir Nemirovich-​ Danchenko, the theatre’s co-​founder, had complicated motives in deciding to stage Offenbach. After the Bolshevik take-​over, the Art Theatre was imperiled by radical leftist views that dismissed it as a remnant of an irrelevant bourgeois past. Its repertoire was condemned as obsolete and its leaders as survivors of the old regime. Luckily, its value was championed by the Commissar of Enlightenment Lunacharsky, who classified it as an “academic theatre,” under government protection. Still, it was imperative that the Art Theatre offer plays that could speak to a proletarian audience and promote the ideals of the Revolution. Nemirovich referred to what he was doing as “synthetic theatre.”11 That had in fact been a concept of Mardzhanov, who insisted that an actor should be capable of every performance skill from high tragedy to light opera. When the Bolshoy Theatre had been threatened with dissolution, Stanislavsky had been asked to form a studio of its younger singers. This developed into a well-​ regarded source of experimentation in musical theatre which applied Stanislavsky’s theories of acting to opera singers. Nemirovich had long been contemptuous of Stanislavsky’s numerous studios as a waste of time, energy, and funding, but now realized that the cultivation of a younger generation might be a valuable asset. He may also have been jealous of Stanislavsky’s work with fresh talents. So, taking advantage of the absence of his partner and the veterans of the troupe as they toured the United States in 1922/​23, he founded his own Musical Studio within the body of the Art Theatre itself. This allowed him to draw on the parent company’s budget. Since Stanislavsky was concentrating on opera, Nemirovich claimed operetta and musical comedy as his domain. The choices for the first seasons included Lecocq’s La fille de Madame Angot, Offenbach’s La Périchole, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Bizet’s Carmen (renamed Carmencita and the Soldier) and a pastiche of Pushkin themes. Letter to K.  A. Lipskerova (Summer 1923), V.  I. Nemirovich-​Danchenko, Tvorcheskoe nasledie (Moscow: Moskovskiy Khudozhestvennyy Teatr, 2003), III, 33–​34.

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The inclusion of Offenbach in 1922 was a foregone conclusion. Nemirovich had grown up in Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, in the 1870s, which boasted a reputable opera house. The musical aspect was often inept, but the provincial audience forgave it while they wavered between titillation and outrage at the cancan in La vie parisienne and the revealing slit in Helen’s chlamys. The “gilded youth” of Tiflis were such influential fans that, when they demanded an exhausted, four-​months-​pregnant star to encore her cancan, they got their wish.12 As a high-​school senior, Nemirovich spent twenty-​eight rubles out of his meager allowance for a bouquet for the Gabrielle in La vie parisienne.13 He was to recall “It’s curious that even later, while a youth, what I took with me from Offenbach’s operettas was those lyrical passages rather than the cancan ones.” He was indifferent to the lyrics, but all his life could call to mind the Paris-​Helen duet, the “death” of Eurydice, and the “melodramatic” bits.14 The year before the Great War erupted, Nemirovich had written to his wife from Carlsbad, telling her “I went to the theatre at night. ‘Die Schöne Helene.’ After all I can never walk past a poster of La belle Hélène with indifference.”15 In 1916 he attended a Périchole at the Hermitage Gardens Theatre in Moscow and found it “very, very weak. But the music reminded me of my youth and gave me a thrill.”16 Nemirovich had first conceived of his project in autumn 1918 when the Moscow Central Worker’s Cooperative opened an operetta studio. He considered working there independently of the Art Theatre, were Stanislavsky to put up resistance to his plans. This was not the case, and in 1921 he began to rehearse Orphée with the Comic Opera troupe or K.O., as his musical studio was first known, intending to open three years later.17 The long gestation period was not uncommon at the Art Theatre, and in this case was exacerbated by shortages of personnel and matériel. Nemirovich’s rationale for his Musical Theatre Studio was that the characters of lyric opera needed realistic psychologies and meaningful motivation if they were to interest an audience. “A theatre, not an opera house” was uppermost in his mind. In a world in flux, with traditional standards Previously unpublished autobiographical sketch, in Nemirovich-​Danchenko, Tvorcheskoe nasledie, IV, 547. 13 Yuriy Sobolev, V. I. Nemirovich-​Danchenko (St Petersburg: Svetozar, 1918), 9. 14 Autobiographical sketch in Nemirovich-​Danchenko, Tvorcheskoe nasledie, IV, 533. 15 To his wife E.  N. Nemirovich-​ Danchenko (30 Jun.–​ 1 Jul. 1913). Nemirovich-​ Danchenko, Tvorcheskoe nasledie, II, 334. 16 To his wife (21–​22 Aug. 1916). Nemirovich-​Danchenko, Tvorcheskoe nasledie, II, 498. 17 Ol’ga A. Radishcheva, Stanislavskiy i Nemirovich-​Danchenko. Istoriya teatral’nykh otnosheniy 1917–​ 1938 (Moscow: Artist. Rezhissyor. Teatr, 1999), 40–​43, 102–​105. 12

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overturned and rejected, he sought to introduce an unprejudiced audience to light opera that would be more than diversion. He hoped to inspire the performers to approach their roles as if they were characters in Chekhov or, at least, Mozart. To achieve this psychological complexity, he saw the need to amplify the libretti and tie the music to the rhythm of the inner life. Since the music was always more refined than the words, it would govern every aspect of the staging. Although Lunacharsky appreciated the effort, it was damned by the far left, led by Trotsky, Meyerhold, and Mayakovsky, as “bourgeois” and retrograde. Nevertheless, Trotsky had to admit that audiences for operettas at the Art Theatre eagerly caught “every hint of present-​ day life, even the most insignificant.”18 La Périchole had been familiar on the Tsarist stage in another Krylov adaptation under the title Song Birds (Pevchie ptitsy), which eventually adopted the bipartite third act that Offenbach had added at the Paris revival. Shortly before his death, having heard a radio broadcast of his production, Nemirovich noted that exquisite technique was needed to achieve unity and comedy in the characterization, and to convey to the audience the lines and simplicity and clarity and logic and humanity, and do it all with taste, without forcing. Of course, a sense of the spectator is necessary, a masterful overcoming of his inattention or indifference, but the fear that “it won’t come across” makes one overemphasize, push, and this spoils the art itself. It’s very difficult. But the actors should instinctively understand what is artistically tasteful and what is crass.19

The tsarist censorship had required the Viceroy to be demoted to Governor (and in the provinces Deputy Governor). Nemirovich returned the quasi-​royal rank to the character, but effected even more radical revisions, both dramatically and musically, than he had with Madame Angot. In a gesture of post-​colonialism avant la lettre, he made the heroine and her paramour Piquillo native Peruvians and rejuvenated them as adolescents uninvolved sexually. In the first act they lamented that they cannot kiss because they haven’t enough money to buy a wedding license. Later, in prison, they stretch their chains to try to bring their lips together. La Périchole herself was altered into something resembling Ostrovsky’s “child of nature” (Dikarka): an untamed hoyden who grows into a mature Leon Trotsky, “Revolutionary and socialist art,” in Literature and revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (New York: International Publishers, 1925), 229–​64. 19 To the leadership of the Musical Theatre (6 Feb. 1941), Nemirovich-​ Danchenko,Tvorcheskoe nasledie, IV, 78. 18

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10.2.  Act I of the Moscow Art Theatre Périchole, with Olga Baklanova as la Périchole and Yagodkin as Piquillo.

and independent woman, relying on her wits to overcome a perilous situation.20 Within the theme of the colonial oppression, the confrontation of the Spanish occupiers with the indigenous population was foremost. The atmosphere dripped with suspicion: the conquerors distrusted the populace and the populace conspired against their overlords. The addition of political innuendo provided an overlay of suspense, with the Viceroy as a sinister oppressor of the people, his henchmen Count Panatellas and Don Pedro as paragons of Hispanic sycophancy, and the landladies of the Three Sisters’ Tavern as Andean variants of Madame Defarge. The first player of the Viceroy was Vasily Luzhsky, a veteran character actor and one of the charter members of the Art Theatre, who handled the actual blocking of the production. Luzhsky was not a professional singer, so the Jailer’s number in Act III, “The Jolly Keys,” was deleted and replaced with a virtuoso mime episode. This account draws on Oliver M.  Sayler, Inside the Moscow Art Theatre (New  York:  Brentano’s, 1925), 77–​90.

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The musical adaptation was entrusted to Vladimir Bakaleinikov, who would later become artistic director of the Philadelphia Philharmonic. He expanded the score, changing the sequence of fifteen numbers and their orchestration. Sung themes were transferred to instruments or from tenor to soprano. The general tempo was slowed, except for the Séguedille, which was speeded up as much as possible. Bakaleinikov introduced an authentic Spanish song for Piquillo to sing to the guitar, and added several bars to the first-​act finale to express the “smoldering resentment of the Peruvians.” (This replaced the standard circus-​act celebration of the wedding.) New words were written for the second-​act trio “Les femmes” and moved to its opening. To reduce its sexism, it was transferred from the trio of male courtiers, and bestowed on a French lady-​in-​waiting who instructs a chorus of Spanish camereras in how to outwit men, with an employment of fans worthy of The Mikado. Between Acts II and III Bakaleinikov inserted an intermezzo “in the style of Offenbach.”21 Offenbach’s third act was meant as a parody of melodrama. Nemirovich took it seriously, adding to it a bolero from the now-​denuded wedding celebration and warning shots. An imprisoned Viceroy brooded to the sounds of an ominous violin tremolo played sul ponticello, accompanied by a French horn solo repeating his earlier taunts. The score was revised to stress the threat of an open rebellion, which breaks out at the end, while the duet of the two lovers is made more plangent, a lament rather than a carefree quadrille. La Périchole played to full houses in Moscow.22 When Stanislavsky and his contingent returned to Russia, Nemirovich was allowed to tour his studio in turn, with successes in Leipzig, Prague, and Bremen. Cities with large populations of Russian émigrés, such as Berlin and Paris, were cooler, for they now regarded the Art Theatre as a renegade Soviet institution. In the United States, Nemirovich’s efforts were overshadowed by the parent company’s visit two years earlier. Much of the Russo-​Jewish immigrant audience wanted drama, not comic opera.23 Despite the critics’ desire to be welcoming, they were disturbed both by Offenbach’s seeming irrelevance to the revolutionary situation and Nemirovich’s strained attempt to overcome it. “A good deal of the score sounds tepid and stale Laurent Fraison, “Discographie,” in La Périchole. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 66. Ed. Alain Duault (Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 1986), 104. 22 Letter to Stanislavsky (24 Oct. 1922), Nemirovich-​Danchenko, Tvorcheskoe nasledie, II, 659. The following year it played to 90% box-​office, though, as usual in Soviet theatre, much of this was comprised of theatre parties from factories and army camps. 23 Letter to V. V. Luzhskiy (27 Feb. 1926), Nemirovich-​Danchenko, Tvorcheskoe nasledie, III, 127–​28. 21

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and singularly charmless, and we found ourselves wishing at times that Vladimir Nemirovich-​Danchenko has boldly cut it out altogether and given ‘La Perichole’ as a musicless operetta,” opined the New York Herald Tribune.24 One criticaster said that the comic opera was “almost turned into an Ibsen problem play.”25 There were complaints that the acting was too naturalistic and too slow, the singing too amateurish, the characters un-​Spanish, and elegance sacrificed to political messages and forced exuberance. This began even before the conductor raised his baton, with the chorus churning up an increasing commotion behind the curtain, which then rose to a scene of vivid color and movement. “They pound an athletic vim into it, they sweep up to whirlwind climaxes, they are buxom about it, if not svelte. They leave no somersault unturned to gain a gasp. They handspring for their handclaps.”26 Evidently, some of the Bolshevik emphasis on “biomechanical” acting had affected the Art Theatre as well.

A Five-​Year Plan for Helen of Troy The Musical Studio had been made possible by the New Economic Policy (NEP) instituted by Lenin in early 1921 as a “tactical retreat.” The government was to remain steadfastly socialist in principle, but not in practice. Private enterprise on a reduced scale was permitted again; food allotment was replaced by a limited market economy. As urban life revived, theatrical experimentation was allowed to thrive. Even the avant-​garde Mastfor Studio, run by Nikolay Foregger, dabbled in Offenbach; in 1922, the young sketch writer Nikolay Erdman provided it an adaptation of Madame l’Archiduc. Five years later, the NEP was abolished, and Stalin was fully entrenched as the supreme authority. Yet even in 1931, with the First Five-​Year Plan in operation and socialist realism imposed as the only approved artistic style, Nemirovich was still trying to fit Offenbach into his repertoire. To the Art Theatre’s literary manager Pavel Markov he proposed Orpheé, with the hope that he might avoid imposing a Marxist interpretation on the cancan. “The cancan under Napoleon III was simply a cancan. No one saw anything political or satirical in it. It simply needed to be staged as a Dionysian finale as in [Nemirovich’s] Lysistrata.”27 However, Lawrence Gilman, “The Moscow Art Theatre Studio gives Offenbach,” New York Herald Tribune (23 Dec. 1925): 12. 25 Samuel Chotzinoff, “Music,” New York World (23 Dec. 1925). Also see Olin Downes, “Russians in new ‘La Perichole,’” New York Times (23 Dec. 1925). 26 “Those Russians again,” Boston Transcript (24 Dec. 1925). 27 Letter to P. A. Markov (2 Oct. 1931), Nemirovich-​Danchenko, Tvorcheskoe nasledie, II, 384–​85. 24

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despite four different adaptations by five different hands, this project remained at the planning stage. Meanwhile, La Périchole, as was the wont in Soviet theatre, remained on the bills as a museum-​piece. Just as hostilities with Germany broke out, Nemirovich regretted that this “banal” operetta was off-​putting to audiences both for its “vulgar plot and text” and its performance by a disgracefully stale ensemble.28 He refused to do any work on it, considering it a step back from his new brain-​child, a production of La belle Hélène. Even so, his 1924 Périchole continued to hold the stage into the 1950s and it was one of the few Offenbach recordings (1948) available in the Soviet Union. While in Berlin in 1931 Nemirovich had made a point of not seeing Reinhardt’s Schöne Helene, nor was he impressed by a radically updated production by the Maly Opera Theatre of Leningrad, in which Calchas was a cardinal in striped trousers. For Nemirovich, the problem in reviving the opera was to bypass the parody of classic mythology and find a fresh point of interest, without making tiresome topical allusions to the League of Nations, Poincaré, and Churchill. Irony was out of favor with the literary establishment. Nemirovich decided that the themes of adultery and cuckoldry were to be supplanted by that of the struggle for love and beauty, expressed in the duet of Helen and Paris.29 By July 1936, Nemirovich was in possession of a viable adaptation of La belle Hélène by Vitaly Zak with lyrics by Mikhail Ulitsky, a popular songwriter who had translated Da Ponte’s libretti for Mozart. In this version, Helen was shown to be treated by the kings as a precious material possession. Her husband in particular was portrayed as a business-​like monarch, a “merchant king,” who sends his colleagues and underlings to fight while he stays at home. Paris’s beauty contest with the three goddesses was shown to be his means of using the power of love to realize Helen’s untapped potential for beauty. Pyotr Vilyams’s scenery contrasted the cold and formal grandeur of Sparta with Troy’s tempestuous spirit. The Art Theatre’s literary manager, Pavel Markov, was tasked with preparing the actors while Nemirovich was on vacation; he could not refrain Letter to E. E. Ligovskaya (12–​14 Jun. 1939), in Nemirovich-​Danchenko, Tvorcheskoe nasledie, IV, 30. After its leading actress Olga Baklanova had opted to stay in the United States and star in Hollywood films, the Périchole of the 1920s was Lyubov Orlova, who became the Soviet Union’s favorite musical-​comedy actress on celluloid in the Stalin era. 29 P. A.  Markov, “O ‘Prekrasnoy Yelene’ i Muzykal’nom Teatre imeni Nemirovicha-​Danchenko” (unpub. article, 1937), in Markov, Dnevnik teatral’nogo kritika 1930–​1976 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1977), 141–​44. 28

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from expressing his concerns about the scabrous subject matter. Soviet aesthetics were notoriously prudish. The director replied as follows: Your concern about “Helen” is well-​founded … But how is one to rein in the “comedy” and not fall into drama according to the formula “on stage nothing succeeds like excess?” … How is one to find the reality, which leads to a comedy of passion, and not to pathological sexuality? To what raises a smile, however thrilling and tantalizing it may be, but not to what causes over-​excitement and disapproval? So have [the actors] start by relating to you the experiences of Helen and Paris. My usual technique, you know … You can easily guess where the problem lies. […] If, in the telling, they sincerely and merrily smile, then everything’s all right and there’s nothing to fear …30

After two years’ work, Prekrasnaya Yelena opened in Moscow on 13 July 1938 at the Stanislavsky-​ Nemirovich-​ Danchenko Musical Theatre (a bureaucratic merger of their two opera studios). It gave the impression, in Nemirovich’s words, of a “Romeo and Juliet by Offenbach.” It turned out to be something delicious. Intelligent and witty and funny. A comic opera. I’ve managed to discover not the cancan Offenbach, but a light-​lyrical one. It is acted and sung splendidly… [it] had and is having a huge success, and judging by the mood in the audience and among the critics and from the box-​office –​it’s a solid hit.31

One should bear in mind that the period in which Nemirovich conceived and staged this “light-​lyrical” piece was the era known as the Great Terror, with show-​trials, innumerable arrests and executions, the swelling of the gulag, and the purge of the army command, eventuating in some eight million dead. The only hint of this is a mention in a letter to the Musical Theatre of the “incredibly difficult working conditions” during rehearsals.32 After Nemirovich’s death in 1940, Offenbach disappeared from the Soviet repertoire, except for the occasional revival of pre-​existing productions.

The Paris-​Petrograd Express In the 1920s, when the Moscow Art Theatre was dismissed as retrograde, out of step with proletarian culture, one of the cutting-​edge models for experimental theatre was FEKS, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor. Letter to P. A. Markov (29 Jun. 1937), Nemirovich-​Danchenko, Tvorcheskoe nasledie, III, 511. Letter to Sergey Bertenson (30 Jul. 1938) Nemirovich-​Danchenko, Tvorcheskoe nasledie, IV, 15. 32 Letter to the Collective of the Musical Studio (16 Feb. 1938), Nemirovich-​Danchenko, Tvorcheskoe nasledie, IV, 8. 30 31

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Inspired, as were so many artists at the time, by a hodgepodge of popular forms and avant-​garde movements –​circus, music hall, silent film comedy, “Americanization,” cubism, futurism –​, FEKS was founded in Petrograd in 1921 by Georgy Kozintsev, Georgy Kryzhitsky, and Leonid Trauberg. Their manifesto “Eccentricism” announced “We revere Charlie Chaplin’s behind/​More than Eleonora Duse’s hands.” Two years later they turned their attention to film, pursuing their counter-​logical program. By 1928, however, as Stalin tightened his grip on every aspect of society, “Formalism” was wielded as a blanket term of abuse to be applied to any work that failed to meet the criteria of socialist realism. Trauberg and Kozintsev, under pressure to make a more accessible, politically acceptable movie, came up with a film about the Paris Commune. Infused with the Marxist belief that the fall of the Commune was engineered by a bourgeois conspiracy, the screenplay drew on fiction by Zola and Maupassant for its characters and incidents. The authors called it The New Babylon (Novy Vavilon) after a department store which, in imitation of Zola’s Au bonheur des dames, was to stand for capitalist consumerism and the exploitation of white-​collar workers. Every important silent film had its own musical accompaniment. For Babylon, the directors commissioned a young Dmitry Shostakovich. It was a daring choice, since it was only the second time the composer had scored a film, and, owing to the hostile reception of his opera based on Gogol’s Nose, he was considered politically unreliable. Shostakovich decided to weave into his score familiar French tunes. The cancan from Orphée was employed for ironic effect: it first appears as a theatrical number, an emblem of mindless frivolity, then is juxtaposed with The Marseillaise sung by the vengeful bourgeois in Versailles and recurs throughout the storming of the Commune’s barricades. Unfortunately, the technology for perfect synchronization did not exist at the time, so the first performances were sonically disappointing. Not until The New Babylon was revived at the British Film Institute in 1983 could audiences experience the intended effect. In 1929, technical inadequacies aside, many critics complained of the primitive amalgamation of borrowed material. (This was still a matter of taste, not the party line that would attack Shostakovich for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.) Later musicologists have praised Shostakovich’s use of the “Ivesian quotation” in a classical score.33 Joan Titus suggests that these quotations are Royal S. Brown, Overtones and undertones. Reading film music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 54–​55.

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the “multivalent music equivalent” of the montage style of film editing championed by Eisenstein.34 Certainly, this use of the Offenbach cancan as shorthand to evoke a period initiated a practice which would become endemic, although later the period evoked was, erroneously, the Belle Époque. Trauberg, who as a boy in Odessa had frequented the operetta theatre where his uncle Aleksandr was conductor, claimed to have suggested the cancan to Shostakovich.35 Between 1949 and 1953, Trauberg, a Jew, was pilloried by the “anti-​cosmopolitan” movement instigated by Stalin. Like blacklisted Hollywood screen-​writers, he survived by translating and writing under a pseudonym. He confected an operetta specifically for Shostakovich, but as soon as Trauberg phoned him, the composer fled Leningrad that night.36 In the Thaw period, Trauberg embarked on a study of Offenbach, with the assistance of the Dutch musicologist Theo van Houten and based largely on published works. Issued in 1987 as a book of 320 pages, it is virtually unknown outside of Russia. Until the thaw of the 1960s, non-​Russian stage works were disapproved of as unpatriotic and unsocialist. A Leningrad production of La Grande-​Duchesse tried to dilute the German atmosphere by renaming Wanda Tereza and Fritz Robert.37 Under more relaxed conditions, the journal Teatr could regret that the word “operetta” conjured up only the sentimental Viennese school; the author wished that the satiric verve of Offenbach and Hervé could be tapped as inspiration.38 No one took up the challenge for nearly thirty years, until Genrietta Yanovskaya, the audacious director of the Moscow Theatre for the Young Spectator, offered Love and Ooh-​la-​la (Lyubov i tru-​lya-​lya, 1995). The concept was of a troupe of actors in tuxedos and frilly dresses, with radio microphones at their waists, staging a production of Barbe-​bleue; Offenbach himself was incorporated in the presentation, first as Jakob the cantor’s son (Jewish themes were again permissible on the Russian stage), then as the inventor of the cancan. As is common in such confections, only the Joan Titus, “Silents, sound, and modernism in Dmitry Shostakovich’s score to The New Babylon,” in Sound, speech, music in Soviet and Post-​Soviet cinema, ed. Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 54. 35 Theodore van Houten, “Eisenstein was great eater.” In memory of Leonid Trauberg (’s-​Hertogenbosch-​ Buren: A & R/​GP, 1991), 35. 36 Van Houten, Eisenstein, 15. In summer 1943 Shostakovich proposed to re-​orchestrate Barbe-​bleue for the Malyy Opera Theatre in Leningrad, but nothing came of it. Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: a life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 37 A. P. Vladimirovskaya, Zvezdnye chasy operetty (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1991), 190. 38 L. Zhukova, “Zametki ob operette,” Teatr 6 (1966): 45–​52. 34

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leads had voices worthy of the music, while the choreography was the standard high-​kicking.39 After the implosion of the Soviet Union with the concomitant introduction of capitalism into the Russian Federation, a nouveau-​riche audience had a decided taste for lavish musical spectacles. Several directors catered to it, usually with musicalized versions of Russian classics or Broadway hits. There were occasional performances of La vie parisienne and M. Choufleuri, but, despite the resemblances between the pleasure-​seeking playgoers of the Second Empire and those of Putin’s Russia, Offenbach was rarely produced. The creative relationship between the composer and Hortense Schneider was fictionalized once again in an indigenous operetta, Primadonna. Offenbach is portrayed as a mercurial figure who enters into a pathetic decline in his latter years, fading away while his Galatea enjoys new triumphs.40 The most ingenious production of an Offenbach opera in a Moscow rife with millionaire kleptocrats and free-​spending fashionistas has been La belle Hélène staged by the controversial Helikon-​Opera in 2014 in a small theatre on Moscow’s Arbat. Krylov’s creaky translation was dusted off for the occasion, but the score was as authentically Offenbachian as possible. The opera’s artistic director, Dmitry Bertman, paid the habitual lip-­service to Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, but his aesthetic was more that of Peter Sellars. The sets and costumes by the Austrian Hartmut Schörghofer provided the ambience of a fashionable resort, with the chorus receiving facials; the floor was transparent plexiglass, like a museum exhibit case filled with Attic artifacts. Paris, a Justin Bieber look-​alike, wore a T-​shirt sporting an apple with a bite taken out of it, while Orestes was a counter-​ tenor got up as a surfer with a rubber raft. The Kings of Greece wore body suits that enabled them to appear as nude classical statuary, except for Menelaus who wore a fat suit. After they introduced themselves, the conductor Vladimir Ponkin clambered on stage and, in a serviceable baritone, announced that he was the King of Kings. It was an appropriate gesture for a society that heartily subscribes to the Great Man theory of governance.

John Freedman, “A light opera goes high octane,” Moscow Times 656 (22 Feb. 1995); repr. in John Freedman, Moscow performances:  the new Russian theater 1991–​1996 (Amsterdam:  Harwood Academic Publishers, 2005), 157–​58. The critic Anatoliy Smelianskiy called it “top-​heavy,” meaning that the director’s hand was too evident. 40 Ol’ga Andreykina, “Aleksandr Markelov,” in Zvezdy Moskovskoy stseny. Moskovskaya operetta, ed. B. M. Poyurovskiy (Moscow: Tsentroligraf, 2001), 235–​36. 39

Ch apter 11

French without Tears

Civilization and Its Discontents The political and military humiliation visited on France by the war with Prussia and the brutal suppression of the Commune made it imperative for the Third Republic to rebuild national prestige. It did this in part by denigrating the Second Empire and deploring its moral degeneracy, a practice that became habitual. The Republic also sought legitimacy by affirming its eminence as a conveyor of Western civilization. To substantiate its status as a great power, France blazoned this mission civilisatrice far and wide. Its expanding colonies were to be improved and polished by contact with the long, illustrious traditions of French culture. Theatre and opera followed close upon the establishment of colonial administrations. The first Western opera performed in Saigon was Les deux aveugles in 1864. “The theater … truly was everybody’s dominant preoccupation; this is quite understandable since it was, along with some charity balls, the only evening distraction of the winter season.”1 In the later 1880s and early 1890s, the city became a regular stop-​over for French performers. Often only an overture or a song or a one-​act was performed, rather than a full-​scale opera.2 If Offenbach was an integral part of the French cultural program abroad, at home his music entered the twentieth century with a disputed reputation. The rabid anti-​Semitism that had provoked and accompanied the Dreyfus affair played no small part in this. Chief of the Jew-​ baiters Édouard Drumont contrasted the good-​natured, innocent dances, folk-​songs, and carols of “our fathers” with the “ignoble cancan” and the E. Claude Bourrin, Choses et gens en Indochine: souvenirs de bonne humeur, 1898–​1908 (Saigon: J. Aspar, 1940), 85; quoted in Michael E. McClellan, “Performing empire: opera in colonial Hanoi,” Journal of Musicological Research 22 (2003): 165. 2 Jean Kleinen, “Théâtre et empire. Le théâtre français en Indochine pendant la Belle Époque (1890–​ 1918),” Revue d’histoire du théâtre 264 (2014): 435–​42. 1

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“obscene innuendo, the lecherous rhythms” of Jew-​inspired operetta. The hack novelist Willy referred to Offenbach as an “ill-​omened kike.”3 As late as 1904, Vincent D’Indy could rejoice that French music had bypassed “the sterile productions of the Jewish period.”4 The cumulative message was that the coarse scoffing characteristic of the Jewish “race” was undermining the wholesomeness of French music. The first serious French re-​evaluation, not by a musician but a poet, Édouard Dujardin, appeared in an article addressed to the Jewish violinist Édouard Colonne published in July 1895: “Why should it not be confessed by a man who is chiefly concerned with artistic matters that the music of Offenbach, in spite of all that has been said and believed of it, is a thing of the purest and most authentic art, no less than the symphonies of Beethoven?”5 These sentiments were not echoed in the musical establishment, for there seemed to be no consensus of where he fit. Ravel’s music included certain stylistic references to Offenbach, but so did Erik Satie’s more avant-​garde compositions.6 Reynaldo Hahn’s refined piano renditions made Offenbach literally salonfähig. Yet, despite his declaration that “Beneath his gaiety shines a divine spark,”7 Hahn subscribed to the customary clichés about Offenbach’s relation to his era. “The Second Empire was an essentially anti-​musical period. Its music resembled its furniture: it was ill-​assorted, mediocre, and heavy, comprising elements of every genre and every period; its style consisted of a total lack of style.”8 Hahn predicted a time when La belle Hélène would no longer be performed, even in France. Debussy too regarded Offenbach as significant solely in the context of nineteenth-​century musical wars. Writing in 1903, he claimed that Offenbach was a demolition expert capable of exploding “le grand style” in music. Because he was an exquisite ironist, he alone could burrow under the bombastic nature of such music and discover the element of

Édouard Drumont, La France juive (Paris:  Marpon et Flammarion, 1886), 28; Willy, Le Mercure musical (1 Nov. 1905), quoted in Nicolas D’Estienne d’Orves, Jacques Offenbach (Paris: Actes Sud/​ Classica, 2010), 143–​44. 4 In an unpublished letter of 17 November 1904, quoted in the J. & J. Lubrano catalogue of the Paul Jackson Opera Collection (July 2015). 5 Édouard Dujardin, “De La Périchole et de l’absolu dans la musique,” La revue blanche (1 Jul. 1895): 11–​ 14, trans. in The Musician (Sep. 1897). 6 Satie’s own operettic activity included Pousse l’amour, performed as Coco chéri (Monte-​Carlo, 1913); Jane Fulcher, French cultural politics and music: from the Dreyfus affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 198. 7 Quoted in José Bruyr, L’opérette (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962), 25. 8 Reynaldo Hahn, “La musique au théâtre sous le Second Empire,” Conférencia 26 (15 Feb. 1925): 239. 3

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farce concealed within. “But it was not clear to anyone what he was driving at, for it was thought to be taken as read that Meyerbeer incarnated great art, at which no one must laugh.”9 So, valuable though he may have been to his era, Offenbach’s example failed to take hold, because it was misunderstood. Camille Saint-​Saëns was steeped in Offenbach; in the 1880s, with his taste for amateur drag, he had played Helen of Troy in a drawing-​room romp. He went on record as saying that Les bavards was a “masterpiece.” However, when he came to include an essay on Offenbach in Harmonie et mélodie (1885), he denied that Offenbach was a “great musician,” even while granting that he had “A great fecundity, a gift for melody, an often elegant harmony, a great deal of wit and invention, a considerable theatrical knowhow:  far more than what is needed to succeed.” These gifts were, unfortunately, squandered on unworthy objects. While granting the robust exuberance of early opéra bouffe, Saint-​Saëns believed that the rot had set in when Offenbach moved to the Variétés and his work became familiar to a wider public. His influence, though unavoidable, was irreverent and diabolical, since the taste for operetta came close to being a passion for the vile and petty.10 In 1911 Saint-​Saëns recanted his earlier prediction that Offenbach had been so prodigal with his talents that he would be unknown to posterity. Still, his appraisal was tempered; in his view Offenbach had debauched the taste of a whole generation because he had none himself. He was careless in observing musical principles in his compositions and only rarely made harmonic discoveries. Much of his success was due, opined Saint-​ Saëns, to a shrewd choice of interpreter, but even this disappeared in the latter phases of his career when he wrote for the Opéra-​Comique. To the question of whether Offenbach would become a classic, he gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug.11 Yet he himself contributed to the immortality of Offenbach when, in La carnaval des animaux, the breakneck cancan is slowed to an adagio tempo, a stately ballet for the lumbering gait of the Tortoise. Whatever the opinions of professional musicians and composers, Offenbach could still draw audiences if revivals were sufficiently titivated

Quoted in Alexander Faris, Jacques Offenbach (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 28. Camille Saint-​Saëns, Harmonie et mélodie (Paris: Calmann-​Lévy, 1885), 217–​24. 11 L’Écho de Paris, quoted in “Offenbach in 1911,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Boston (30 Dec. 1911), in Harvard Theatre Collection. The essay was reprinted in Saint-​Saëns, École buissonnière (Paris: Pierre Lafitte, 1913): 301–​307. 9 10

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11.1.  Mistinguett as Pauline in La vie parisienne. Photo: A. Berl.

with popular stars and sumptuous scenery. In 1911, La vie was granted its most magnificent production to date, featuring the music-​hall celebrity Mistinguett in the role of Pauline opposite a host of the city’s favorite comedians.12 Second Empire fashions were exaggerated to enthrall a modern-​day public that had forgotten that era. As the evening progressed, the crinolines grew so wide that by Act III Gardefeu was unable to flirt with Pauline, pinned against a divan by her voluminous skirts. The interpretation of the score restored to Offenbach his reputation as a maker of music, not “musiquette.”13 The outbreak of hostilities with Germany re-​enacted the rejection of Offenbach that had accompanied the Franco-​Prussian War. His German-​ Jewish origins offended the ultra-​chauvinism of the times. Saint-​Saëns had already complained that Offenbach’s music put the stress on syllables in French words as if they were German.14 Debussy turned his back on his earlier praise of Offenbach in an article in Pour la musique française (1917), condemning him as a foreigner who perverted his texts. D’Indy renewed his abuse, sneering at the typical Jewish composer’s gift for assimilation and Mistinguett and Max Dearly had already launched the “valse naturaliste” or apache dance, performed to music from Offenbach’s ballet Le papillon. Natalia Trouhanova, Na stsene i za kulisami: vospominaniya (Moscow: Zakharov, 2003), 103. 13 Louis Schneider, “La première de La vie parisienne et les reprises de cette opérette,” in the souvenir program of the 1931 Vie parisienne (Paris: M. & J. de Brunoff, 1931), unpag. 14 Saint-​Saëns, Harmonie et mélodie, 262–​63. 12

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imitation.15 These sentiments persisted even after the Armistice. The Revue critique des idées et des livres, affiliated to the right-​wing Action Française, in 1923 promoted the “classicism” and delicate humor of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole over Offenbach’s operettas. Fernand-​Georges Roquebrune denounced them for “outrageousness, parodic vivacity allied to all the improbabilities of his subject matter”; he excoriated Offenbach’s lack of taste and alleged that he was incapable of producing French art. In defiance of the facts, Roquebrune declared that Offenbach’s comic operas could not be assimilated in France, since they were inimical to the tactful and modulated Gallic temperament.16 The 1919 centenary of his birth went without official celebration. In the interwar period, however, eclecticism rather than ultra-​nationalism was the order of the day. In 1920 a vote was taken in Paris to determine whether or not to reinstate Wagner into the programs of the Concerts Colonne, and the German became the most performed composer in French orchestral concerts.17 The following year Saint-​ Saëns grudgingly admitted that nineteenth-​century comic opera “has preserved an elegance, a distinction which her younger sisters, I mean modern operetta, are far from possessing.”18 A new appreciation for what Offenbach had to offer began to take shape, particularly among more progressive musicians. Esther de Carpentras, the collaboration of Darius Milhaud and Paul Claudel, values religious and racial tolerance in France and mocks extremism; Milhaud interwove themes from “Jewish music,” especially Offenbach, with fugue and Latin American dance music.19 The influence of Offenbach’s libretti on Claudel can also be seen in his “satyr play,” Protée (1914, revised 1926), in which Helen and Menelaus, on the way home from Troy, stop at the isle of Naxos, home of Proteus, god of metamorphosis. The action pivots on the attempt of the captive nymph Brindosier to pass herself off as Helen. Although there is not a note of music, the tone and much of the dialogue ring with echoes of Meilhac and Halévy. The post-​war reversion to comic opera met with public approval. Some compared it to a similar efflorescence in the period following Sedan, Jane Fulcher, The composer as intellectual: music and ideology in France 1914–​1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35–​36, 122, 135. 16 Revue critique des idées et des livres (1923): 184–​85, quoted in Fulcher, The composer as intellectual, 218. 17 Daniele Pistone, “Opera in Paris during the roaring twenties,” Opera Quarterly 13, 2 (Winter 1997): 66, n. 8. 18 Quoted in Louis Schneider, “L’operette française d’Offenbach et l’œuvre de Reynaldo Hahn,” Conférencia 21, 2 (1 Jan. 1927): 74. 19 Fulcher, The composer as intellectual, 224. Milhaud added to his catalogue an “opérette choréographique,” Le train bleu (1924). 15

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suggesting that the genre thrives immediately before and after a great national convulsion. La Belle Époque preceded the 1914–​1918 War just as the Second Empire did its downfall. “It seems as if operetta encourages the heedlessness of a frivolous and indulgent generation, living in ignorance of the blows about to fall, and acts as an alleviation of the sufferings endured.”20 Another element in the revival of Offenbach was commercial. Throughout France in the 1920s, opera was losing its audiences, as operetta was growing more popular. The press flashed scare headlines such as “Opera in Crisis” and “The Musical Theatre Is Dying,” attributing these woes to high costs and postwar inflation. The franc collapsed in 1925 at a time when the cinema was attracting large audiences. As leading French composers died off, they were replaced not by traditionalists but by avant-​ gardists. The Yankee music imported by the doughboys during the war refused to go home. Operetta theatres enjoyed considerable success. The Opéra-​Comique’s biggest draw remained Les contes d’Hoffmann, back on stage in 1920 and recorded by the Gramophone Company. Other Offenbach revivals took place at this house where Offenbach had tried so hard to gain a hearing: Le mariage aux lanternes in 1923 and Les bavards in 1924. However, an invasion of American musical comedies shouldered them aside, with long runs of No, No, Nanette! and Rose Marie. When Orphée aux enfers was revived in 1931, closely followed by a sumptuous production of La vie parisienne at the Mogador, it was hailed as a “sign that Paris is a little tired of jazz, or at least of the imported American comic opera.” Although Offenbach seemed rather “tame from the modern standpoint,” the gorgeousness of the physical production was adapted to the taste of a musical-​comedy audience.21

Black and White Offenbach as the touchstone of French comic opera in conflict with American popular culture was most clearly exposed in the 1934 revival of La créole with Josephine Baker in the title role. The African-​American chorus girl from St Louis, who had arrived in Paris in 1925, was fêted as the paragon of primitivism and unsophisticated sensuality. Even as she exploited this persona, she was groomed into a pattern of Parisian chic.

Gabriel Groviez, “Jacques Offenbach: a centennial sketch,” Musical Quarterly 5, 3 (Jul. 1919): 331. The Glasgow Herald (10 Apr. 1931): 18.

20

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The selection of La créole as a vehicle for her celebrity moved this duality to the foreground. La créole (1875) had not been revived for sixty years, and no wonder. A product of Offenbach’s opéra-​comique period, it has a feeble libretto by Meilhac and Albert Milhaud, a familiar farrago of two mismatched couples who ultimately link up with the appropriate partner. The imbroglios are far-​fetched passatempi to keep the plot moving. Dora, the title character, wooed by the seaman René, does not appear until the second act. Nothing much is made of her exoticism, and there is no mention of interracial difficulties. The adapters Albert Willemetz and Georges Delance extended the opera from two acts to three, transferring numbers from other Offenbach works and shifting the position of others; the breeches role of René was conferred on a tenor. La Rochelle in Guadaloupe in 1685, newly occupied by France, was exchanged for Jamaica in 1845. The most striking element of the adaptation was the racial overtones of the plot and casting. Dora was partnered with a coal-​black mammy named Crème fouettée (Whipped Cream), whose failed pursuit of the quartermaster Cartahut served as a parodic counterpoint to the central romance. A song with lyrics in créole French was moved to the opening of the show, to exhibit Dora’s exoticism at the outset. Another song, “Les fariniers, les charbonniers” (“The millers, the charcoal-​burners”), lifted from La boulangère a des écus, was provided with new lyrics. Instead of a mildly salacious ballad about a woman whose husband covers her with coal-​dust and whose lover spatters her with flour, it now highlighted the black and white contrasts in the love interest.22 Opportunities were provided for the star to demonstrate her vaunted savagery. Several scenes had her throwing a tantrum, smashing crockery, flinging lamps, leaping “like a panther,” destroying the accouterments of the bourgeois parlor. The dancing Dora had to be taken on board by force, her bare legs kicking in the air. Critics rejoiced when the “young wildcat” raged against the constraints of social convention, displaying aspects of the untamed Josephine. These idiosyncratic moments, though much appreciated, ran against the grain of the plot, which promotes a return to civilized values. Paradoxically, by embedding Baker, an emblem of primal sexuality, into the restrained frame of comic opera, her handlers were attempting to point up her integration into French culture. With her “café au lait” complexion The fullest study of this adaptation is Andy Fry, “Du jazz hot à ‘La Créole’: Josephine Baker sings Offenbach,” Cambridge Opera Journal 16, 1 (2004): 43–​75.

22

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11.2.  Josephine Baker in La créole, Théâtre Marigny, Paris.

and crinolines, the “ravissante créole” is far from her African roots, in contrast with her mammy, “la dame noire,” “la négrillonne” in traditional turban and gold earrings.23 “Josephine, the negress, was no longer black. Josephine was turning paler.”24 Baker’s star turn in Offenbach confirmed her acculturation as a true Parisienne. Her unbridled passions and sex appeal had been tamed, and, for some, denatured. Just as the Offenbach revivals were greeted in some quarters as a healthy reaction to vulgar American trends, so Baker’s new avatar was seen as the end of a “progress.” She had burst on to the French scene as an interpreter of le jazz hot and such uninhibited dances as “the lewd Charleston.” She made this music so popular that it had been appropriated by French composers. According to the critic André Rivollet, the pendulum was now swinging back:  French dance music was becoming more elegant, more mildly syncopated, and this was illustrated in Baker’s performance.25 Rivollet concluded that she had “created an Offenbach for 1935 by instilling him with new life-​blood, a thrilling youthfulness.”26 Comic opera had received an injection of modern revue. In the process, the fever of foreign Precisians pointed out that a “créole” was a white person born in the colonies, and that Dora was in fact a mulatta or mestiza. 24 “La métamorphose de Joséphine Baker,” Le Progrès de Saône-​et-​Loire (25 Dec. 1934), quoted in Fry, “Du jazz hot,” 58. 25 André Rivollet, “Du jazz hot à ‘La Créole,’” Conferéncia 29, 9 (1 Jul. 1935): 101–​111. 26 Rivollet, “Du jazz hot,” 106. 23

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rhythms had subsided, allowed French cultural values to be reaffirmed and its civilizing mission confirmed.

A Symphonic Interlude A much-​employed conductor for the Offenbach revivals was Roger Desormière. In 1938 he was commissioned by Count Étienne de Beaumont to compile a suite of Offenbach music for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo to be choreographed by Léonide Massine. Preoccupied with other projects, Desormière turned the task over to the young operetta composer Manuel Rosenthal.27 Despite his protest that he was ignorant of Offenbach’s works, Rosenthal, with the help of Nadia Boulanger and the composer’s grandson Jacques Brindejont-​Offenbach, put together a medley of polkas, waltzes, cancans, and mazurkas, ending in a subdued fashion with the Hoffmann “Barcarolle.” Gaïté parisienne had its premiere in 1938 in Monte Carlo. Although Massine had his doubts about it as a score, it has since become a perennial favorite with second-​string ballet companies and, in its suite form, pops orchestras. The numerous recordings, along with a garish cinematic rendition by Warner Brothers in 1942 and a 1979 ballet by Maurice Béjart, have ensured that more people know Offenbach from it than from any other source.28 Moreover, its quotation of the Orphée cancan extended Shostakovich’s in the film The New Babylon (1929) (see Chapter 10) to make it an immediately recognizable evocation of –​not the Second Empire –​but the Belle Époque.29 As national and chauvinist feeling intensified during the drôle de guerre, Offenbach once again became a political football. The pro-​German journal Je Suis Partout resumed the attack on Jewish composers, while, as late as 1 January 1938, the opposition journal La Flèche sponsored a concert that included Offenbach’s music, possibly to placate a wealthy, educated audience of assimilated Jews.30 During the Occupation, Alan Riding reports, Offenbach “remained immensely popular, with his operettas performed in the south and his cancan music heard nightly in Paris cabarets.”31 This Rosenthal’s output included Les bootleggers (1933) and a highly successful Poule noire (1937). Desormière himself later conducted a recording of it, as well as excerpts from Hoffmann and La belle Hélène with the superb operetta soprano Fanély Revoil. 29 Pascale Goetschel, “Le Paris du spectacle vivant entre stéréotypes et réalités, XIXe et XXe siècles,” in Imaginaires urbains du Paris romantique à nos jours, ed. Myriam Tsikounas and Sébastien Le Pajolec (Paris: Édition Le Manuscrit, 2011), 67–​114. 30 Fulcher, The composer as intellectual, 250, 274. 31 Alan Riding, And the show went on. Cultural life in Nazi-​occupied Paris (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 142. 27

28

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indulgence may have sprung from an attitude of Hitler’s: when asked by Albert Speer “Does the spiritual health of the French people matter to you?,” he replied “Let’s let them degenerate. All the better for us.”32 One of the more surprising enthusiasts for Offenbach among the collaborators was the anti-​Semitic Louis-​Ferdinand Céline, who frequently cites his operas, especially La chanson de Fortunio, in his novels. Céline could not conceive of a deity who did not dance; operatic and popular songs were his touchstones for beauty. In Normance (1954), which he intended as an “opérette macabre,” a day in the life of civilians under heavy bombing is depicted in a Joycean manner. At one point a singer performs the first-​act aria of La Périchole while cowering beneath a table during a bombardment. She comments on this juxtaposition of chaos and musical rationality, “an unholy mess [la tourneboulerie] and singing! La Périchole underneath a table!”33 Offenbach becomes an emblem of the civilization put at risk by modern warfare.

Invitation to the Waltz Following the humiliations of the Occupation and perhaps in reaction to Italian neorealism, the postwar French cinema reveled in period narratives, often drenched in nostalgia for the Second Empire and Third Republic. It was only natural that Offenbach should play a part in this gavotte down memory lane. La valse de Paris, originally entitled La valse des Champs-​ Elysées, was written and directed by the successful boulevard playwright Marcel Achard in 1949. He explained to a reporter that it was intended to be neither a “film à grand spectacle” nor a blow-​by-​blow biography. A single episode from 1865 to 1867, when the composer was forty-​five and involved with the singer Hortense Schneider, was its subject, treated in the style of Ernst Lubitsch. Achard had two previous screen credits, L’homme des Folies Bergère (1935) and Jean de la lune (1949). Like much of the work of Sacha Guitry and other Parisian hommes de théâtre who tried their hand at film-​directing, these movies are hopelessly stage-​bound. La valse de Paris does not fully escape this drawback, for its dialogue is studded with Wildean aphorisms, such as “Wit takes two, gaiety can stand alone.” However, it has the benefit of a picturesque era to lend it visual interest, and Achard had a good eye.

Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 184. Philippe Destruel, Louis-​Ferdinand Céline (Paris: Armand Colin, 2000), 373–​74.

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Schneider first appears as an unknown singer, eager to be featured in Offenbach’s upcoming operetta; Offenbach is shown as smitten with her talent, but resistant to her coquetry.34 He grooms her into a star, but the imbroglios of her love life, moving from one affair to another, lead her eventually to confess that she is attracted to the composer. As written, the role presents some unattractive if possibly accurate characteristics: social climbing, raw ambition, amorous voracity. At one point, thinking herself pregnant by a now-​distant lover, she tries to pin the paternity on a discarded beau. However, the performance by the popular musical-​comedy star Yvonne Printemps is so engaging, so ripe with professional charm, so self-​aware about her own allure, that she almost eclipses the ostensible subject of the biopic. A third of the hour-​and-​a-​half screen time is reserved for the music drawn from seven of the operas, the numbers chronologically jumbled but interpolated so as to advance the action and comment on the characters’ motivations.35 Printemps’s renditions are stylistically appropriate and vocally adept. To accommodate the wasp-​waist of the period, she lost three kilos but refused to wear false breasts; consequently, she looks, in the twelve gowns designed by Christian Dior and executed by Pierre Cardin, quite unlike the buxom Schneider. Despite the attention to period detail in set dressing and costuming, the scenario plays fast and loose with the facts. The film acknowledges as much at the outset in an off-​screen exchange between screenwriter and composer. Marcel Achard Excuse me for the liberties I took with the truth. Jacques Offenbach Oh, I’m used to it … But I  hope you haven’t touched my music! Marcel Achard Of course not, mon cher maître!

Printemps’s lover in real life, Pierre Fresnay, cast as Offenbach, was no musician, but somehow managed to simulate playing the piano, conducting an orchestra, singing, and dancing. In his interpretation, the composer is a good-​natured eccentric, wholly devoted to his work, fond of recounting The opening-​night cocktail party for the film was held in Hortense Schneider’s former apartment in avenue de Versailles; the décor was intact owing to the conditions in her will, which left it to the Orphelinat des Arts. Pierre Bertin, “123, avenue de Versailles,” in Le siècle d’Offenbach. Cahiers Renaud-​Barrault 24, 80. 35 Interview with Paul Carrière, Le Figaro (7 May 1949), cited in Jacques Lorcey, Marcel Achard ou 50 ans de vie parisienne (Paris: Éditions France Empire, 1977), 217. The familiar excerpts, often with new lyrics, came from La chanson de Fortunio, La vie parisienne, La Périchole (“Ô mon cher amant, je te jure”), Madame Favart, La belle Hélène (“Oui, c’est un rêve,” “Dis-​moi, Vénus”), La Grande-​ Duchesse de Gérolstein (“Ah, que j’aime les militaires,” “Dites-​lui”), and La belle Lurette, along with the inevitable “galop infernal” from Orphée aux enfers). 34

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11.3.  Yvonne Printemps as Hortense Schneider and Pierre Fresnay as Offenbach in Valse de Paris.

parables, a cigar forever in his mouth. As happens so often in films about poets and composers, Offenbach takes his inspiration from an overheard phrase or momentary need. When Schneider exclaims “Ah, que les hommes sont bêtes!” (“Aren’t men stupid!”), he knocks off a refrain to those words, and later writes “J’aime les militaires” to rebuke her for her taste in lovers. The order of his operas is hopelessly muddled, so that Schneider auditions for Offenbach with the hit number from La chanson de Fortunio (1861) and then makes her first stage appearance in La vie parisienne (1866), which is followed by Madame Favart (1878), La Périchole (1868), La Grande-​Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867), and finally La belle Hélène (1864). At least the hackneyed cancan is used only as jokey accompaniment to a silent comedy moment.36 That arbiter of fashion Jean Cocteau seems to have been prompted by the film to praise Offenbach as “a musician of genius. Everything is invented, brand-​new, airy, inimitable.”37 It has been claimed, however, that the greatest influence of La valse de Paris was on fashion: Second Empire A novelized version of the screenplay appeared in Mon Film 215 (4 Oct. 1950): 3–​7, 10–​14. Jean Cocteau, Le passé défini, journal 1951–​52 (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), I, 371.

36

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taste was revived. Antique dealers and flea markets were ransacked for over-​decorated porcelain and over-​ornate jewellery, dark furniture inlaid with mother-​of-​pearl. Bare shoulders, flaired skirts with petticoats, sharp-​ toed pumps with stiletto heels, more suitable for riding in a victoria than walking on concrete pavement, became the rage.38 The ubiquitous poodle skirt owes much to Offenbach.

A National Treasure Another factor in Offenbach’s rehabilitation was his integration into the dramatic canon. The leading power couple in French theatre, Jean-​Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud, formed their own repertory company at the Théâtre Marigny in 1947. The locale was auspicious, having housed Offenbach’s Folies-​Marigny in 1855 and three years later Charles Deburau, son of the mime Barrault had portrayed in the film Les enfants du paradis. The Renaud-​Barrault company proved to be so successful in promoting French culture that the government offered them a subsidy and an official residence, the Odéon. Barrault’s taste ran to contemporary drama:  he championed Claudel, Sartre, Camus, Gide, Montherlant, Ionesco, Duras, Beckett, and Genet. He showed no particular interest in the nineteenth century, although he was to stage the occasional bedroom farce and historic melodrama whenever the box-​office needed stimulation. Nor was the Compagnie Renaud-​ Barrault engaged with musical theatre, despite the occasional commission of notable composers to provide accompaniment for French classics. So, at first sight, the choice of La vie parisienne as one of the three premieres of the 1958/​59 season seems anomalous, even arbitrary, particularly since the others were Claudel’s rarefied poetic play Le soulier de satin and Anouilh’s La petite Molière. However, as Barrault made clear in the Offenbach issue of the house journal, it was a polemical choice. At a time when the leaders of the French stage were preaching Brechtian alienation and political commitment, Barrault insisted on the independence of the theatre to be theatrical: “We are definitely feather-​brains, neither alienated nor didactic, neither affiliated nor committed: ‘performers,’ that’s us!”39 Barrault did, indeed, have a program, but it was aesthetic rather than political; it promoted total theatre centered on all the resources of the actor, be it speech, song, dance, Véra Volmane, “Esthétique de rechange,” in Le siècle d’Offenbach, 79. Jean-​Louis Barrault, “Je ne sais quel accueil …,” in Le siècle Offenbach, 10–​11.

38 39

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or expressive movement, in order to create a sense of joy. Such a theatre requires “complete actors.” As examples, he pointed to Russian, Asian, and some American actors, as well as Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. For all his devotion to literary drama, Barrault saw the actor as paramount, and in that same issue of his journal, he published an essay by the sociologist of acting Jean Duvignaud, who explicated the value of what had been denigrated as bourgeois theatre. Historical necessity had caused the bourgeois theatre to become more purely commercial during the Second Empire, but this should not diminish its importance. […] This entertainment theatre which has so many ill-​wishers has not only been an art of popular expression, as is proven by the stupendous and permanent success of the works of Meilhac and Halévy, but even more, this playing has had a profound influence. […] More effective than the theories of the romantics, which failed to reach the general public, [Offenbach’s operas] delivered us from the eternal themes. […] Now no playwright had experienced this pleasure in belonging to a freed era before 1860: historically, the bourgeois theatre left its preoccupations, most of them confused, to produce an art for contemporaries and not for eternal judges.40

Duvignaud’s use of the word “populaire” was well-​chosen. Since the late nineteenth century, there had been calls for a “théâtre populaire,” a theatre for the people that would be scattered across the map and lure the general public to the masterpieces of world drama. After the war, Barrault’s mentors, Charles Dullin and Louis Jouvet, themselves disciples of Jacques Copeau, had worked for this idea. Jean Vilar had founded the Théâtre National Populaire with its summer festival in Avignon to accomplish this task. As for Barrault, his productions of Racine and Shakespeare were the credentials that allowed him to “stoop” to entertainment, whose profits in turn supported his experiments with Kafka, Cervantes, and Ionesco. As Duvignaud put it, it was the shop that fed the laboratory. Barrault’s archives, now at the Bibliothèque Nationale, reveal a sedulous preparation for La vie parisienne.41 He conceived the production and the deployment of the ensemble in their entirety, with all the entrances and exits, role switching and costume changes, transitions, along with the musical measures, tempi, and gestures. He trusted the libretto and its stage directions, aware that Offenbach had personally directed the original production with scenic effects and moves calculated to given musical measures, a tightly wound clockwork that could be deranged by the slightest deviation. Jean Duvignaud, “Le fantôme du théâtre bourgeois,” in Le siècle d’Offenbach, 56. Details of the Barrault material appear in Jean-​Claude Liéber, “Jean-​Louis Barrault monte ‘La vie parisienne,’” Romantisme 102, 4 (1998): 51–​61.

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The troupe at the Palais-​Royal which had created the original Vie had been peopled with comic actors, with Offenbach’s addition of his favorite soprano and mistress du jour Zulma Bouffar. To demonstrate the versatility of his company, Barrault also preferred actors, most of whom were cast in Soulier as well. The only outsiders were the mezzo-​soprano Suzy Delair for Métella and the soprano Dénise Benoit for Pauline.42 Compared with the sumptuous Mogador revival of 1931 with sixty-​some actors, the Barrault cast was made up of twenty-​seven performers and three children playing over forty roles.43 Barrault himself sketched the preliminary concept for the scenery, which was redesigned and executed by Jean-​Denis Malclès. The gare waiting room of Act I was a pastiche of all the glass-​enclosed railway stations of the Second Empire, an intricate interlacing of grillwork, a study in blues and whites. The red and gold restaurant of Act IV was dominated by a grand staircase and a vestibule based on the entrance to Chez Maxim’s; furniture was kept to a minimum so that there was plenty of space for the masquerade and the dancing. In contrast Métella’s rondo, delivered by Delair in a throaty Sprechgesang, took place upstage, in a night-​time Paris, its gaslights giving way to a pallid daybreak, as delayed mirthmakers were greeted by the voice of a street sweeper: “Ohé! les heureux du jour!” As one of the most adept mimes of his era, Barrault could not refrain from adding pantomime episodes to set the scene or cover changes. As the curtain rose, Gardefeu was discovered on a bench surrounded by a fifteen-​strong squad of clerks, postmen, customs officials, porters, a florist, a tobacconist, a charwoman, a couple with a little girl, dancing across the stage as they argued, worked, awaited passengers; with precise choreography; this devolved into the opening chorus of employees. Another special effect was planned for the scene in which the Baron gets drunk. After the chorus “Tout tourne, tout danse,” speech is slurred, while the Baron is continually spun around. Then “starting with ‘Il est gris,’ the drunken set starts to vanish slowly over 2 to 3 minutes. To disappear completely only at the end.”44 A metaphor is made literal.45 The other main roles were Jean Dessailly as Gardefeu, Jean-​Pierre Granval as Bobinet, Pierre Bertin as the Baron, Georges Aminel and Dominique Rozan alternating as the Brazilian (Barrault himself played it occasionally and is heard on the recording), and Madeleine Renaud, who had scant singing voice, as the Baroness. 43 The intimacy of Barrault’s staging can also be gauged by comparing it with the hyperthyroid Bercy revival of 1997 which had 230 performers, 50 extras, and 920 costumes. 44 Liéber, “Jean Louis Barrault monte,” 59. Curiously, this resembles a pre-​Revolutionary Russian cabaret play by Boris Geyer, in which, as the main character gets progressively drunker, the setting and other characters change form. 45 The original recording of the production was reissued on CD by Musidisc. A color film was made for television in 1967, with Micheline Dax as Métella and Germaine Kervine as the Baroness. 42

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The opening night was as much a high-​society event as a theatrical one. Those in attendance ranged from Jean Cocteau and Albert Camus to Olivia de Havilland and Simone Signoret. Criticism seemed to be disarmed: “Very merry, very vivacious, very youthful: with a veneer of distinction, real grace which other revivals have not had” wrote Robert Kemp in Le Monde.46 Gabriel Marcel in Nouvelles littéraires defied anyone to object, even though he could not explain the enchantment of the evening, “for after all the play, taken on its own, is practically nothing.” He considered the music insignificant, “but it persists as an irresistible rhythm.” Kemp evoked “the sprightliness of the rhythm, its dancing lightness, its exciting virtues which make you dance with pleasure in your seat.” Everyone mentioned the entrain and contagious gaiety of the rejuvenated operetta, the naturalness of the actors, the impetuosity of the cancan which seemed to drag the ancestral portraits into the dance in Act III. Reynaldo Hahn had already noted the same phenomenon, which was an effect of the staging: The flowers, the chandeliers, the bottles are taken with a dancing delirium. The fever of beings is communicated to things, everything is animated by a frenetic vibration:  an agitated vertigo reigns, like a hypertrophy of the instinct of rhythm.

He had attributed it to the composer, the poet who was able to realize and communicate “an impatient thirst for pleasure.”47 The acclamation of La vie parisienne led Barrault to keep it on the bills longer than was usual for a repertory company. He even put off the premiere of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to prolong the operetta’s run.48 Barrault’s La vie certified that Offenbach was a national treasure, on a par with such classics as Molière and Racine and such illustrious moderns as Beckett and Claudel; he was worthy of entombment in the Panthéon. In addition, he was shown to be worthy of attention by even the most progressive of stage directors. From that time on, Offenbach has not left the French stage, interpreted by the widest spectrum of animateurs.

Quoted in Liéber, “Jean-​Louis Barrault monte,” 60. Hahn, “La musique au théâtre,” 239. 48 Rhinoceros had its first production in Germany, and Ionesco was slow to forgive Barrault. Marie-​ Christine Gay, “‘Nous ne parlons pas la même langue, mais nous parlons le même langage.” La collaboration artistique entre Karl Heinz Stroux et Eugène Ionesco (1955–​1970),” Trajectoires 7 (2013): 14. 46

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English As She Is Spoke

Urban Planning The fortunes of Offenbach in the English-​speaking world were decidedly rocky. By the 1890s, tastemakers were declaring that the English language was “too downright, too stern, for the light tripping measures that skim over the dangerous places of Gallic suggestiveness. It is too earnest, it means what it says, and so, what is fun in French is coarseness in English.”1 In the United States, at a time when many small towns and colleges housed an active Gilbert and Sullivan society, Offenbach was known, if at all, for the handful of tunes from Orphée played by palm-​court orchestras. An American high-​school textbook for students of French summed up the composer this way: “[His] astonishing facility kept him from pondering over and devoting care to his works but one can find, here and there, pieces of great beauty.”2 The two works it selected as representative were both lyrical: the “Barcarolle” and the “Chanson de Fortunio.” The former had become so familiar that it was adopted by the Industrial Workers of the World as a tribute to the “Wobbly” martyr Frank Little, who had been lynched in 1917.3

Fred Lyster, “Thoughts on matters lyric and dramatic,” Bedford’s Monthly (Chicago) 9 (Nov. 1892): 623–​24. 2 R. P.  Jameson and A.  E. Heacox, Songs of France. A  selection of patriotic and popular songs (New  York:  D.  C. Heath, 1922), quoted in Donald H.  Fox, “Why doesn’t the average educated American know more about Offenbach’s works?,” Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 69 (Sep. 2014): 10. 3 The words by Gerald J. Lively begin You’ve fought your fight, a good long night Is all that we can say. Sleep on, sleep on, your work is done, Brave fighter for the Day. Upton Sinclair has his female lead sing it in his propaganda drama Singing Jailbirds, a drama in four acts (Long Beach, Cal.: The Author, 1924), 44. 1

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Despite the odds, The Tales of Hoffmann managed to gain a foothold in the operatic repertoire. Oscar Hammerstein’s opulent staging at the Manhattan Opera House in November 1907 introduced a number of significant innovations. He restored the dialogue and was the first producer in America to cast one baritone (Maurice Renaud) as all four villains. The Metropolitan waited until 1913 to perform Hoffmann, dropping it after five performances. The critical consensus was that Hoffmann was no masterpiece: musically inferior to Orphée and Hélène, yet, at the same time, devilishly difficult to perform, owing to complicated vocal lines, the need for actor-​singers comfortable with French language and style, and the cinematic leaping from locale to locale.4 To attract a reluctant audience in the 1908/​9 season, the itinerant Aborn Opera Company felt it necessary to retitle it Hoffmann’s Love Tales. Even so, the first truly imaginative setting for Hoffmann saw the light not in Paris or London but at Boston’s prestigious Opera House. What distinguished this production was the designs of Joseph Urban. A product of the Wiener Werkstätte that sought to reform the practice of arts and crafts towards simplicity and Gesamtkunstwerk, Urban had scant theatrical experience. In Vienna he was chiefly known as an illustrator, architect, and interior decorator. Nor was he a pure exponent of the New Stagecraft, which rejected the traditional painted stage. Urban concurred with the Wagnerian desire to unite all the elements of a production into an artistic whole; but he preferred scene painting with saturated primary colors over three-​dimensional elements to create the pictorial ensemble, “freeing the singers to break with convention and interpret the atmospheric illusion created by the stage pictures.”5 As both designer and director, Urban read Hoffmann’s original tales, researched the historical period, and analyzed each scene to determine the movements and motivations of the characters. He created a kind of “story board,” in which a textual description of the action was illustrated with miniature vignettes. The detailed costume renderings were grouped around each relevant set design, and only then were the models built. The Prologue and Epilogue were to be played out at the regular stage level, the three tales on a raised platform. The cyclorama at the Boston Opera House was 64 feet high and 170 feet wide, so the scenery was painted on a grand scale with “light-​proof ” colors that could withstand intense Oscar Thompson, Musical America (22 Nov. 1924). Arnold Aronson, Architect of dreams. The theatrical vision of Joseph Urban (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2000), 13–​14.

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12.1.  Joseph Urban’s sketch for the tavern scene in Hoffmann. Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.

electric lighting. A precept of the new stagecraft was that scenery could be effective only when properly lit; Urban discarded the footlights and used a “pointillist” technique, stippling the canvas to achieve his effects under “four-​colored lights.” The décor was intended to illuminate the meaning of each episode: the Olympia episode was dominated by floral images, the

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ladies’ bright costumes in contrast with the gentlemen’s somber evening dress forming human bouquets, the flowers in their hair a wreath when they turned their backs. The motif of the Antonia scene was a washed-​out blue; the costumes in the Giulietta bacchanal were reminiscent of Bakst’s orientalist fantasies for the Ballets Russes. To provide a running thread, at the end of each act Hoffmann was always in cobalt blue, with a servant in red at the foot of his mistress in red. The dominating villain was invariably in black with red hair.6 America’s foremost music critic H. T. Parker devoted three columns to the production; he declared it “the first time in American theatrical history, every element of the stage –​scenery, costumes, properties, and direction –​came from a single hand.” The first-​nighters, Boston Brahmins for the most part, displayed scant enthusiasm. “To call Urban before the footlights lay quite beyond the imagination of this elegant crowd,” but some day, Parker wrote, “the records may say that a revolution in the setting and lighting of the American stage dates from these innovations at the Boston Opera House … Then how proud we Bostonians will be of ourselves –​ even though we did not half suspect it while it was actually going forward.”7 He later insisted “Well, the audience that can’t enjoy Offenbach’s music has the blood of a fish, the musician who cannot respect it is lacking in knowledge and understanding of his own art.” Unwittingly echoing Rossini and Wagner, he repeated “without flippancy. Offenbach is the Mozart of operetta.”8 After a lapse of ten seasons, the Metropolitan Opera revived Hoffmann in 1924, with a strong cast and “impressive trappings” by Urban. The musical press, lagging behind in its appreciation of scenic novelty, preferred the tavern scene to the other three because it was the only one strictly in period. Why, it was asked, did the costumes of Spalanzani’s guests range from Louis XV to post-​Napoleonic? Why was Giulietta’s gown “a modern ball dress?” The steeple seen through the window in the Munich episode “bore no resemblance to the twin spires of the Frauenkirche, which are as characteristic of the Bavarian capital as the Sphynx is of Egypt.”9 This literal-​mindedness may explain why critics, accustomed to verismo and Bayreuth-​style overproduction, were resistant to the fantastic nature of Randolph Carter and Robert Reed Cole, Joseph Urban. Architecture –​Theatre –​Opera –​Film (New York: Arbeville Press, 1992), 52–​57. 7 Boston Evening Transcript (25 Nov. 1912), quoted in John Dizikes, Opera in America. A cultural history (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 367–​68. 8 Boston Evening Transcript (1 Jan. 1914), quoted in Dizikes, Opera in America, 368. 9 Thompson, Musical America; Cyrus Durgin, Boston Globe (8 Apr. 1937). 6

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Offenbach’s opera in general. Nevertheless, Urban’s settings were retained in Boston through 1937 and in New York through 1939. In hopes it might rival the Schubert-​inspired Blossom Time, the Shubert organization imported to Broadway Edward Künneke’s German musical comedy of Offenbach’s life, loves, and tunes Meister von Montmartre. The libretto was Americanized by the inevitable Harry B. Smith, and, unimaginatively retitled The Love Song, it opened at the Century Theatre in January 1925. The dramatis personae scintillated with Second Empire notables:  Napoleon III and Eugénie, the Countess Castiglione, Prosper Mérimée, Victorien Sardou, although Offenbach’s intimate theatrical colleagues were conspicuous by their absence. It limped along until it had attained 157 performances by June. The Love Song contrasted with the Moscow Art Theatre Périchole provoked a leading New York journalist, Gilbert W. Gabriel, to wonder why “Offenbach is not played here … We are willing enough to listen to a sickish fabrication of his most familiar melodies made into a very dull operetta on the subject of his history. We can stand a monumentally dull production of ‘Tales of Hoffmann’ at the Metropolitan.”10 However, even at a time when musical comedies opened and closed weekly on Broadway, no manager was willing to invest in Offenbach. It was not until after the stock-​market crashed in 1929, when financial backing for original work was hard to find, that Orphée was produced for the first time since the 1880s. The Little Theatre Opera Company at the Heckscher Theatre modernized it in an adaptation by John Alan Haughton. It was found to have “vim, spirit and gusto” but no finesse; the best gag was said to be John Styx killing off members of the fly ballet with a flit-​gun of insecticide after failing with a swatter. It is noteworthy that the orchestra was found to be the least effective part of the evening.11

Helen’s Abduction to London London was more receptive. After Max Reinhardt’s Die schöne Helene had become the rage of the German-​speaking stage, it toured to England in 1931, and Lady Ethel Snowden, a great friend of Reinhardt’s who had earlier canvassed to get him the Nobel Prize,12 urged the influential producer Gilbert W. Gabriel, “The perils of La Périchole,” New York Sun (22 Dec. 1925): 22. “Little Theatre’s Opera Company gives ‘Orpheus,’” New York Times (17 Dec. 1930); “‘Orpheus in Hades’ given by Opera Comique,” unidentified clipping (8 Mar. 1932), Harvard Theatre Collection. 12 The plan was sabotaged by the vote of the playwright Knut Hamsun, an anti-​Semite and later a Quisling in Norway; ironically, Reinhardt had popularized Hamsun’s plays in Germany. 10

11

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C.  B. Cochran to bring over Die Fledermaus. Cochran, a canny businessman who had staged The Miracle at the Olympia in 1911, thought the English would not care for Strauss’s opera; still, he was intrigued by Helene’s resounding success. He, the designer Oliver Messel, and the humorist Alan Patrick Herbert, a veteran deviser of smart revues, traveled to Berlin. Cochran had long wanted to stage Offenbach’s opera in London and carefully tracked every European production as it opened; Reinhardt shrewdly invited the trio to stay at his baroque mansion Leopoldskron, a former bishop’s palace outside Salzburg. Herbert had already written, with A. Davies Adams, La vie parisienne, whose introduction explained that it was “an attempt to provide a new entertainment, based upon the music of Offenbach and the spirit of his time. We have borrowed from MM. Meilhac and Halévy the title of their libretto, but very little else. Indeed (under instruction) we have never read it.”13 This was not the most reassuring background for a potential librettist for one of Offenbach’s masterpieces. Reinhardt and Messel hit it off from the start, but Herbert insisted that a new third act which takes place ten years later outside the walls of Troy was necessary to round out the plot. (He had traveled with a copy of “Tales from Homer.”)14 This was precisely the innovation that had almost sunk the Berlin production. After hours of argument Reinhardt finally capitulated.15 Reinhardt was not the sort of director to reduce his actors to puppets or subordinate them to a “concept”; his productions were often tailored to capitalize on the specific talents or personalities of attractive performers. He distrusted “actors who think.” Heroic roles were to be filled by dynamic, well-​ built leading men, female leads by seductive, attractive women, and comic parts by natural comedians. So London’s Helen was to be Evelyn Laye, a proven mistress of musical comedy and, Cochran claimed, his inspiration for the production. It was a calculated move, since she had recently been at the heart of a scandalous divorce case. Menelaus was George Robey, the country’s most popular music-​hall comedian, whose chief comic scene came in Act II, when he takes Paris in bed to be his own double: “There’s my wife lying in bed, beautiful girl, and there’s me lying beside her.” When Menelaus mildly protests “I think your friend might have the decency to get up,” Helen’s reply, A. P. Herbert and A. Davies-​Adams, La vie parisienne. A comic opera in three acts (London: Ernest Benn, 1929). It opened at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith on 18 April 1929. A prior modernized adaptation had been George Grossmith’s The Guide to Paris (1912). 14 A. P. Herbert, A. P. H.: his life and times (London: Heinemann, 1970), 90. 15 Gusti Adler, … aber vergessen Sie nicht die chinesischen Nachtigallen. Erinnerungen an Max Reinhardt (Munich: Langen Müller, 1968), 273–​74. 13

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“He’s rather tired, poor man. He’s been singing,”16 never failed to bring the house down. To enhance the titillation quotient, Cochran brought out the exotic dancer Tilly Losch, whom he had met at Leopoldskron, for a pantomime sequence. Herbert retained the interpolated scene of the Judgment of Paris in Act One, in which Venus “lets fall her robe.”17 In the finale, he recalled, “Venus slowly floated across the stage stark naked” as she spread a mist and disappeared with Paris (at the Manchester opening she walked, in London the flying apparatus invariably went haywire). Neither Cochran nor Herbert had any interest in preserving the rationales of Meilhac and Halévy’s concept. For Cochran, Helen was a “giddy blonde, running after a young man” and for Herbert the original ended “just where the real importance of Helen began.” Offenbach’s Helen is a femme moyenne sensuelle who needs the excuse of fatality to justify her desires. Herbert’s is a frail flirt, who, in her last moment on stage, ogles the “handsome young captain” of the ship taking her back to Sparta. As the adaptation’s Calchas puts it, “she is rather like an over-​ripe peach –​one good shake and she’ll fall.”18 Herbert’s rendition of the Invocation to Venus makes this clear: Ah, Venus, nobody could wonder     If now and then a woman fell; Man is enough to make us blunder,     And we must fight the gods as well; A man goes wrong of his own choosing,     We only do as you dictate; Men sin because it is amusing –​     When woman falls it is her fate […]      Ah, what a life      For a virtuous wife! […]19

The concept of “sin” is out of keeping with the classical ethos, and the notion of a “fallen” woman is high Victorian; there is no intimation here of the prankish insinuation packed into cascader. With a disdain for dramatic economy, the new third act takes place ten years after Paris and Helen have escaped to Troy; although they are discovered in a bedroom, the mood is a gloomy one. Helen is clearly experiencing remorse. The Trojan prince makes sardonic post-​Great War comment on old men urging the young to battle; Pylades is said to have been killed; and boredom with Helen, who “snored last night,” has set in. Herbert, Helen, 81. Herbert, Helen, 38. 18 Herbert, Helen, 7, 14, 43. 19 Herbert, Helen, 65–​66. 16 17

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The Plain of Troy is revealed, with a view of the Chersonese (or Gallipoli Peninsula); Gallipoli could have only mournful memories of the massacre of Commonwealth troops there a few years before. The soldiers, “clad in a brave array of green and yellow and grey, with red-​splashed plumes in their helmet, raised their spears and swords, in salute to Helen, clothed in white, as she stood with arms uplifted, against a background of blue sky, whilst Achilles sang a version of the words of Homer.”20 The now bearded and pugnacious Menelaus, urged to fight, protests that “Life is sweet, however disgusting.” In the ensuing battle, he “does prodigies of valour,” which would have surprised Offenbach whose comic characters are virtuosos of cowardice. Paris and Menelaus engage in single combat with the latter shouting “Done, you little Dago!” Helen looks on from the walls, as Agamemnon paraphrases Christopher Marlowe: “Is that the face that launched a thousand ships,/​The fatal grace, the killing eyes and lips?”21 After Paris is wafted away by Venus, Menelaus draws his sword on Helen, but is unmanned when she exposes her bosom to his blade. The music for this new act was composed chiefly of reprises; Helen’s last lines in Amour divin reveal Herbert trying to turn Offenbach’s fatalistic heroine into something romantic: There’s no life without love, and no love without pain; I have lived, I have loved, and I will not complain. I have opened my heart like a rose in the rain, I have played a great part –​I would play it again.22

As she sails away, “PARIS, having escaped from the clutches of VENUS [!]‌, stumbles out from the City Gate, […] and calls despairingly ‘Helen!’ and stretches out his hands.” This image of love forsaken was more suitable for Les contes d’Hoffmann than for La belle Hélène. For audiences accustomed to the revue-​style musical comedy and saccharine operetta it had its appeal, however. One legal historian goes so far as to say that Herbert intended his highly romantic gloss on Offenbach to support the arguments he put forth for no-​fault divorce when serving as a Member of Parliament.23 Previewed at Christmas 1931 in an overcast Manchester, Helen was pronounced a “smash hit,” which was repeated on the transfer to the Royal Harold Hobson, Theatre in Britain. A personal view (Oxford: Phaidon, 1984). Herbert may have been inspired by St John Irvine’s Dramatic Sequels (1925), in which famous romantic couples are shown to be trapped in unhappy marriages after the curtain has fallen. 21 Herbert, Helen, 102–​104. 22 Herbert, Helen, 112. 23 C. W.  Marshall, “A. P.  Herbert’s Helen and every marriage since 1937,” Theatre Notebook 67, 1 (2013): 54–​55. 20

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12.2.  The finale of Reinhardt’s Helen: Evelyn Laye as Helen and George Robey as Menelaus return to Sparta. Photo: Stage Photo Co.

Adelphi Theatre in London. Doubts about the extent of the public’s classical background led to the provision of “Some Interval Reading for Those Who Have Neglected Their Classical Studies” in the program and the published libretto. Messel’s white-​and-​gold sets were far more elegant than anything Reinhardt’s German designers had contrived: they made his reputation and had some influence on interior decoration. Most memorable was Helen’s circular bed flanked by larger-​than-​life-​sized sculpted swans, Lohengrin out of the Folies Bergère, which always drew applause on its second-​act revelation. Léonide Massine of the Ballets Russes was engaged to choreograph a wild bacchanal that followed “the peace conference,” which was more orgiastic than anything seen on the London stage since Diaghilev’s company had toured there. One critic claimed that this production set the fashion for “bringing the classics up to date.”24 It was certainly Cochran’s biggest financial success to date, but, owing to the James Cleugh, Charles Blake Cochran, Lord Bountiful (London, Pallas, 1923), 114. This is to overlook Barry Jackson’s modern-​dress Hamlet of 1923 and experiments by Theodore Komisarjevsky.

24

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defection of actors to other projects, it closed after 163 performances and was never revived. For all its West End success, the Adelphi Helen failed to satisfy connoisseurs of Offenbach. The playwright Ashley Dukes complained that Cochran and Reinhardt had played down the artistic and musical aspects of the opera in favor of visual opulence and musical-​comedy pizazz. He thought Korngold not up to the musical demands, particularly of the parody that should accompany the temple and battlefield scenes. Whatever sting there might be in Herbert’s libretto, it was blunted by the spectacle. Dukes concluded it “is not an important Reinhardt production in the sense that Sumurûn or The Miracle were important. But it is an important piece of news for the theatre and about the theatre, employing important talents and never failing to impress the public with the possibility of theatrical art.” Its faults originated in its need to compete with the movies for press attention.25 Helen remained in the minds of British theatre-​goers as an inimitable example of theatrical synaesthesia. “Never again,” declared Harold Hobson, “was so much taste to be allied on the musical stage with so much splendour.”26 The war prevented similar expenditure of cash or talent in the London theatre, and Offenbach all but disappeared from the English stage, barring the occasional Hoffmann, until the 1960s.

An Aquatic Interlude If Offenbach’s operas were absent from the Anglo-​American stages, his music continued to be heard, owing to Massine’s 1938 ballet Gaîté parisienne (see Chapter 11). A popular diversion from heavier bills, its climax was a celebratory cancan in a restaurant sweeping up pairs of lovers and waiters, against high green draperies, looped back against brass pillars. The effect was redolent of musical comedy, especially the spectacular dance numbers in Hollywood films. A  performance of it by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the Met in autumn 1938 inspired Joseph Cornell, of Cornell-​box fame, to create a Pantry Ballet (for Jacques Offenbach) (1942), a chorus line of tiny plastic lobsters, normally found in a fish tank, in cheesecloth tutus, flanked by knife and fork superimposed on a proscenium arch with a paper doily curtain.27 They dangle from strings, so that the slightest jolt causes Ashley Dukes, “The English scene,” Theatre Arts Monthly (Apr. 1932): 280–​82. Hobson, Theatre in Britain, loc. cit. 27 There is also a later, expanded variant entitled Zizi Jeanmaire Lobster Ballet Box (1949). Richard Martin, “Some lobsters, some elephants, surrealist reflections on Joseph Cornell’s ‘A Pantry Ballet 25 26

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them to jiggle. The margins teem with snails and trilobites. The objet trouvé equivalent of a shore dinner, it serves as both a homard-​hommage to ballet as comic entertainment and a provocation to balletomanes. Cornell was seeking to withdraw from a world at war into a fantasia combining the dance’s chorus girls and waiters. He subscribed to Gérard de Nerval’s métaphysique d’éphémères (life’s fleeting experiences), savoring the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life (Nerval was rumored to walk a pet lobster on a leash). It was in tune with Baudelaire’s and Offenbach’s tribute to the trivial and the everyday. Cornell’s whimsical tribute, which also calls to mind Lewis Carroll’s lobster quadrille, served up the exuberance of Offenbach à la carte.28

Broadway Bound After the London Helen, Reinhardt returned to Germany, but, with the rise of National Socialism, he created a foothold for himself in the United States in 1935 with his acclaimed stage production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl and the subsequent film based on it. Korngold remained Reinhardt’s chief musical adviser, and indeed the collaboration had been vital to the composer’s survival once Hitler’s regime closed the doors of German opera houses to his compositions. His chief source of income was their adaptation of Die Fledermaus. Reinhardt brought him to Hollywood to tart up Mendelssohn’s music for Dream, and Korngold stayed there, finally making a career as a versatile studio composer after his success scoring the Errol Flynn Robin Hood.29 Enthused by Dream’s critical and box-​ office success, in May 1936 Reinhardt suggested to Korngold a motion picture based on La vie parisienne. Once more Korngold countered with Die Fledermaus. The discussion was fruitless, for with the Nazi Anschluss of Austria in 1938 Reinhardt escaped back to America, hoping to capitalize on his earlier work there. Having persuaded Warner Brothers to let him film The Tales of Hoffmann,

(for Jacques Offenbach),’” Arts Magazine 60, 6 (Feb. 1986): 30–​32; Ingrid Schaffner, The essential Joseph Cornell (New York: M. N. Abrams, 2003), 68–​69. 28 Richard Martin points out other influences or analogues: postcards of seafood waitresses in lobster costumes, an Elsa Schiaparelli gown embroidered with lobsters (1937), Salvador Dalí’s surrealist lobster telephone (1936), George Platt Lynes’s photos of Dalí paired with a lobster (c. 1939), and, moving to mammals, George Balanchine’s circus polka for elephants (1942). Martin, “Some lobsters,” 31. 29 Bryan Gilliam, “A Viennese opera composer in Hollywood: Korngold’s double exile in America,” in Driven into Paradise: the musical migration from Nazi Germany to the United States, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 226–​28.

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for which they procured the rights, he set to work on the screenplay. Deciding to locate all the action in Venice, he wrote that the film script will be so worked out that the role of Antonia runs through the whole piece and as the female leading role stands in the center of a thrilling plot. She fights through a dramatic conflict between a moving love for Hoffmann and her love of singing. She sings in the Teatro Fenice in Venice and comes under the diabolical influence of her master and teacher (Mirakel). At first art triumphs, to the despair of Hoffmann, who seeks in vain to forget her. Finally love triumphs. However, I hope that in our case art may triumph at last.30

Was Reinhardt aware that, unwittingly, he had turned Offenbach’s opera into the tale of Svengali and Trilby? He hoped to persuade Novotná to repeat her luminous Antonia, but she refused to learn English or leave Europe. With his fondness for stars, he wanted to recruit Richard Tucker, Grace Moore, Fyodor Chaliapin and Charles Laughton for the project.31 Reinhardt also asked Warner Brothers to contract Thornton Wilder and Franz Werfel for his collaborators. Wilder, who had never been to Venice, was polite but claimed to be overcommitted. Werfel in Baden was excited by the idea. However, talked out of it by his wife Alma Mahler, he demurred that scoring a changed plot to an unchanged score was not a good idea. He was also concerned that Offenbach was a Jewish composer, so every intervention or alteration would be closely scrutinized and criticized. Eventually, the project collapsed. With his son Gottfried as his manager, Reinhardt then staked everything on a modernized stage production of La belle Hélène. As before, he thought it important to collaborate with an American and in 1939 got in touch with Ben Hecht who sent him an outline for the first part. The topical references that had studded Reinhardt’s earlier versions would be prominent in their comment on the dire international situation. Calchas and the elders would be members of the Dies Committee, who would bring Paris and Helen together and thus instigate the Trojan War. (The Dies Committee, a precursor of the U.S. House Un-​American Activities Committee, had been responsible for dismantling the Federal Theatre Project and would later promote the internment of Japanese-​Americans.) Paris would be a Fifth Columnist in Greece. The chorus and crowd scenes would be pared away, leaving the emphasis on the dialogue and verses to be delivered parlando. Even after Hecht had dropped out of the project, Quoted in Gusti Adler, … aber vergessen Sie nicht, 335–​38. Bernd O. Rachold, letter in The Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 36 (Jun. 2006): 6.

30

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Reinhardt persisted, eager to recruit Gertrude Lawrence as Helen. To his wife Helena Thimig, he explained why: I saw Gertrude Lawrence in the “hit” Lady in the Dark [with music by another refugee, Kurt Weill]. The play is not worth a good comment. She herself is a great comedienne –​not a quiet, introverted actress –​she will have no opportunity for it, and 500 performances must wear away even the best performer too flatly. But her humor is masterful and bold. It sparkles with wit, parody and graceful audacity … Lawrence has of course no operatic voice (quite the contrary), but would be of all the women I know the best Belle Helene, if it is not presented as a comic opera (which it basically is not). I am convinced that the famous [Josefine] Gallmeyer played this part exactly the way Lawrence would play it. The only problem is the big love duet (“’Tis a dream.”). Here Korngold would have to work it over as he did for your brothers in the Berlin Fledermaus.32

For the next few years, however, Reinhardt tried in vain to find an “angel” who would be prepared to “bring Offenbach to New York.”33 What came to his aid was a war-​time predilection for light music. The Hot Mikado and The Swing Mikado, with all-​black casts, had been proven box-​office hits of 1939. The refurbishing of Gilbert and Sullivan suggested to commercial producers that Offenbach might make money, if properly “Harlemized.” Of operettas out of copyright, La belle Hélène had the most promising sex appeal, and Reinhardt’s success in London was a guarantee of sorts. The outcome was another African-​American remake, The Glamour Girl of Troy, with a libretto based on A. P. Herbert and music by Herbert Kingsley, drawn from Offenbach. Since there were no Offenbachian equivalents of Savoyards to complain, the adapters were free to update it as a “swing opera.” Even the title was topical, since “glamour girl” was a neologism for pin-​ups and Hollywood starlets. The piece was enlivened by a dancing chorus of thirty, an eight-​piece swing orchestra including a piano and saxophone, and a tap-​dancing Mercury. Following Reinhardt’s lead, the goddesses sung about by Paris were shown on stage in a beauty contest, the kings of Greece took part in a heated peace conference, and Act III moved to Troy. The cast included both such outstanding singers as Anne Wiggins Brown (Helen) and Chitlin Circuit comics like Hamtree Harrington (Menelaus). Directed by Stewart Cheney, it was tried out at the Westport County Playhouse in

Gusti Adler, … aber vergessen Sie nicht, 380. Helene Thimig-​Reinhardt, Wie Max Reinhardt lebte (Percha am Sternberg See:  R.  R. Schulz, 1973), 359.

32 33

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12.3.  Helen the Glamour Girl of Troy, with Hamtree Harrington as Menelaus, Anna Wiggins Brown as Helen and Lawrence J. Whisonant as Agamemnon.

Connecticut on 7 July 1941, but failed to transfer to the big time.34 One out-​of-​town reviewer made a remark that spelled doom for Offenbach on Broadway: “Whether the original would stand a straight performance here is debatable. The French text shows its years and has pretty dolorous puns.”35 Still, Helen describing Menelaus in bed as “like clinging to a cold hot water bottle” can hardly be blamed on Meilhac and Halévy. This trend for smartening up time-​worn operettas affected the New Opera Company, founded by the Hungarian pianist Yolanda Mérő-​Irian in 1941. It proposed a Vie parisienne with new lyrics by Marion Farquhar and a new book by Felix Brentano and Louis Verneuil (with additional dialogue by Leo Riskin and Frank Torloff). The Hungarian conductor Antal Dorati, who had already woven Offenbach’s music into the ballet suites Blue Beard and Helen of Troy, was invited to spice up the orchestral element.36 The result “La Belle Helene is big success,” Norwich (Conn.) Hour (9 Jul. 1941): 1, 11; unidentified clippings, Harvard Theatre Collection. 35 “‘Belle Helene’ makes it back as swing opera,” New York Herald Tribune (9 Jul. 1941). 36 Antal Dorati, Notes of seven decades (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981); John K. Sherman, The story of the Minneapolis Orchestra (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1952), 291–​92. 34

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was better received than the company’s more weighty offerings, which led them to concentrate on light-​weight fare. Reinhardt had brought the New Opera Company his project for Helen, but, as months passed in futile discussions, the project fell victim to circumstances: the entrance of the United States into the war dried up funding for new productions, especially lavish extravaganzas. Reinhardt and Korngold had practically trademarked their version of Die Fledermaus throughout the German-​speaking world. Exiled from their homeland and their royalties, with the aid of Gottfried Reinhardt, they recreated it as Rosalinda. The adaptation was far more respectful than the dueling Mikados had been, and the Viennese confectionary was so much to the taste of a war-​weary public that the New Opera Company production ran it on Broadway from May 1942 to October 1944. This success37 emboldened the same team to turn back to Reinhardt’s Helen project. Throughout 1942 and 1943 the press had reported that the soprano Grace Moore was about to appear as a modernized Helen in partnership with the promoter Mike Todd. When she heard of the New Opera Company’s plans, she withdrew from the competition.38 Recycling was promoted as a patriotic activity, and this movement affected music as well. Blossom Time, Sigmund Romburg’s saccharine recension of Schubert, had been the second longest-​running musical of the 1920s; in 1943 it was taken out of mothballs for another protracted run. This led to the ransacking of Edvard Grieg for Song of Norway the following year. Their settings in an idyllic nineteenth-​century Europe, free of bombardment, fed the need for escapist entertainment. Max Reinhardt himself died shortly into Rosalinda’s run, but Korngold had the power of attorney for his estate. Six months later, enough investors were found to put up $140,000 to produce Helen Goes to Troy. Gottfried Reinhardt had provided the book in collaboration with the screenwriter John Meehan (Boy’s Town), with lyrics supplied by Meehan’s son. Korngold padded out the score with the Hoffmann barcarolle and other familiar Offenbach pieces. A good deal of talent was lavished on the production: the direction was by the émigré Herbert Graf, the dialogue coach was the English comic actor Melville Cooper; Massine tried to recreate his Berlin choreography with Broadway showgirls. The distinguished Czech soprano Jarmila Novotná of the Metropolitan Opera, herself a refugee, sang Helen, One nay-​sayer was George Jean Nathan, who complained of its “Broadway nightclub” atmosphere. Theatre book of the year, 1942–​1943 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), 119–​20. 38 “Modern ‘La Belle Helene’ now expected to reach Broadway during May,” New  York Herald (2 Mar. 1943). 37

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while a veteran American character actor, the diminutive Ernest Truex, appeared as Menelaus. (William Gaxton, who had been the star of the Pulitzer-​prize winning musical Of Thee I Sing, had been approached to play Paris, but declined.) Although the illustrious Robert Edmond Jones was credited for scenery and lighting, still photographs reveal the sets and costumes to be bargain-​basement reductions of the London Helen! This travesty of Offenbach’s creation and Reinhardt’s intention opened at the Alvin Theatre on 24 April 1944, but even a wartime public eager for mindless entertainment could not prolong its run beyond 96 performances.39 A revival of A. P. Herbert’s La vie was attempted in 1945, with Massine brushing up the dances. The vogue for foreign operetta seems to have played itself out, however, for it limped along for only thirty-​seven performances.40 (Another factor in the poor showings was the man-​power shortage: a paucity of draft-​age men deprived the casts of masculine sex appeal.) Faint rumors of the Moore-​Todd Helen resurfaced in 1949.41 In summer 1960 Helen of Troy, a “very free adaptation” by Bill Hoffman, got up at the Cambridge Mass. Drama Festival, gained enough acclaim to launch a move to Broadway. Supported by a small investment of $300,000, with Joan Diener as Helen and the Yiddish comedian Menasha Skulnik as Menelaus, Helen re-​opened in Philadelphia and closed almost at once, written off as “a lousy show.”42 Not until 1977, when the New York City Opera offered an English version by Geoffrey Dunn, revised by Julius Rudel, under the embarrassing title That Heavenly Helen, was the work given professional musical attention.43 What accounts for this dismaying history? Ignorance of classical mythology may play a part, for Orphée has been even more neglected. And yet musical comedies based on classical themes won favor throughout this period: Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse out of Shakespeare (1938); By Jupiter (1942), based on Julian Thompson’s The Warrior’s Husband; and Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus (1943), derived from a Victorian comic novel. Perhaps the musical element is too difficult for untrained voices, while the comedy requires skilled actors. George Jean Nathan, The theater book of the year, 1943–​1944 (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1944), 311–​12. 40 A similar fate met a reworking of Gilbert and Sullivan numbers in Memphis Bound! and Gilbert and Sullivan characters in Hollywood Pinafore (both 1945). 41 “Michael Todd will produce a modernized version of Offenbach’s ‘Hélène,’” New York Herald (24 Feb. 1949). 42 Sam Zolotow, “Gill to rewrite ‘La Belle Hélène,’” New York Times (14 May 1962); Elliot Norton, “Ex-​Hub hit, ‘Helen’ fails in Philly,” Boston Record-​American (6 Sep. 1962). 43 Herbert Kupferberg, “Taking light opera seriously,” unidentified clipping, Harvard Theatre Collection. 39

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An Offenbachian approach to classical mythology might be glimpsed in The Golden Apple of 1954. John Latouche and Jerome Moross transferred the action of Homer’s epics to Washington State after the Spanish-​ American war, perhaps hoping to capitalize on the taste for folk Americana that infused post-​war musicals. With its innovative durchkomponiert style and parodic perversion of popular culture it turned out to be a succès d’estime. The closest imitation of Offenbach’s mythological operas was, however, The Happiest Girl in the World by E.  Y. Harburg, Fred Saidy, and Henry Myers in 1961. The title gave no clue that it was Aristophanes’ sex-​strike comedy Lysistrata, set to Offenbach’s music, orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett. The concept was promising, but the execution left much to be desired. Had Offenbach’s French collaborators written a libretto based on Lysistrata, they would probably have centered it around the leading character, providing a juicy role for an attractive soprano. The heroine’s psychology could easily have been expressed by music written for Eurydice, Helen, the Grand Duchess, and La Périchole. Despite the play’s feminist potential, however, Harburg and Co. elected to make the musical a vehicle for Cyril Ritchard, who not only got to play the Chief of State, Pluto, A Heckler, A Gay Blade, A Wine Smuggler, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, A Playwright, and an Ambassador but also directed the galimaufry. Ritchard, an Australian musical-​comedy actor who made a name for himself in London revue of the 1930s and 1940s, had become a Broadway favorite when he played a gurgling, smarmy Captain Hook in the musical version of Peter Pan with Mary Martin (1954). With scant competition, Ritchard acquired a reputation as the leading exponent of comedy of manners on the New York stage. Ritchard’s friend Noël Coward journeyed to the tryout in Philadelphia, where, as he noted in his diary (5 March 1961), he found Happiest Girl “boring, tasteless and ghastly beyond belief.” Poor Cyril Ritchard was quite, quite dreadful. He camped about like an old-​fashioned queen at a drag party. All his innate vulgarity came bubbling unpleasantly to the surface. [The score] is ruined by bad orchestration, common lyrics and indifferent singing. The whole thing was arch and lascivious […] Naked young men lying about; no jokes above the navel; an appalling scene in a Turkish bath, and Cyril bouncing on and off the stage in ladies’ wigs and ladies’ hats. It was so embarrassing that at moments I was unable to look at the stage. I fear the poor beast will be massacred in New York.44 The Noël Coward diaries, ed. Graham Payne and Sheridan Morley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 465–​66.

44

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The New York press was, in fact, indulgent, and petted the chimera for its charming “combination of sex and melody.” “For the tired businessman, there are shapes, shapes, shapes, and legs, legs, legs.”45 In other words, the musical was touted as a reasonably respectable equivalent of a burlesque show. Although the title song, set to Périchole’s letter aria, received some air play, Happiest Girl closed in a couple of months. Ritchard’s stock rose high enough, however, to make him the director of choice when Rudolf Bing decided to smarten up the comic components of the Metropolitan Opera’s repertoire. After The Barber of Seville, Ritchard was tasked with the far more complicated job of staging The Tales of Hoffmann, which opened Bing’s sixth season as managing director. Pierre Monteux at the conductor’s desk guaranteed a certain amount of musical authenticity. The four heroines, however, were divided among Roberta Peters (Olympia), Risë Stevens (Giulietta), Lucine Amara (Antonia), and Natalie Kelepovska (Stella). Stevens was the weakest link, too far past her prime to incarnate a femme fatale. By and large, the critics welcomed the entry of this “reasonable curiosity” in the Met’s repertoire, though they lamented that it was not sung in English.46 The next season Ritchard was entrusted with La Périchole. As usual, the adaptors were much in evidence. As if to answer the critics of Hoffmann, this was performed in an English version by Maurice Valency, a Columbia professor who made a career of adjusting Giraudoux and Dürrenmatt to the mental capacities of Broadway audiences. He boasted that his text was fuller than any previous English version and “better balanced in structure.”47 Typical of his translation, “Il conquera parce qu’il est espagnol” became the halting “A Spaniard knows the ways of love.” Too many had a hand in the score, among them Julius Berger, the conductor Jean Morel, and the associate conductor Ignace Strasfogel; along the way it acquired touches of musical comedy and the Savoy operettas, the orchestration enhanced by an omnipresent harp. A  fragment of a duet from Fantasio (1872) remade into a solo for the heroine replaced the famous “Mon Dieu, que les hommes sont bêtes”; and two numbers from Le 66 (1856) ousted “La clémence d’Auguss.”48 The title role was Howard Chapman, New York Daily News; Coleman, New York Mirror; quoted in “An Olympian hit!,” the jacket notes to the original-​cast recording (Columbia Masterworks KOS 2050). 46 Irving Kolodin, The Saturday Review (Nov. 1955). 47 Maurice Valency, “The little coach that isn’t there,” libretto to La Périchole (RCA Victor LOC-​1029), 12. 48 Laurent Fraison, “Discographie,” in La Périchole. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 66. Ed. Alain Duault (Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 1984): 104–​105. 45

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conferred on a coloratura soprano, Patrice Munsel, rather than a mezzo. Piquillo, renamed Paquillo, was sung by Theodor Uppmann, the first London Billy Budd. Although he had only the ghost of a voice, Ritchard cast himself as the Viceroy. Rather than opening the opera with a chorus, he entered on a donkey and interpolated a spoken prologue. The whole production aimed to be a crowd-​pleaser at any cost. The press response was ecstatic, though tempered with comparisons meant to appeal to an audience wary of opera. “Something of Gilbert and Sullivan (and not a little of Moss Hart),” “the world’s largest funhouse,” “a carefully contrived ‘pomme soufflé,’” and the somewhat backhanded “If you can’t get into ‘My Fair Lady’ don’t miss ‘La Périchole’”: these encomia all come from one review by the learned Irving Kolodin of The Saturday Review (5 January 1957). That opera could be fun was offered as a revelation. Questions of authenticity were not posed. The “appreciation” of Offenbach that prefaced the libretto in the LP recording said straight out “You could not call his music serious” and also referred to My Fair Lady as a modern, if less brilliant, equivalent.49 Once again Offenbach had become the standard-​bearer for hijinks, at the expense of his own musical refinement. A reliable money-​spinner for the Met, it was kept in the rep far too long, touring for nearly twenty years. In 1971, a Boston reviewer wondered why “a basically museum-​oriented organization such as the Met” might not restage the piece “with a knowledgeable stage director, a stylistically-​attuned conductor and singers with a real sense of the French light opera tradition?”50 The acceptance of the Met’s fast-​and-​loose treatment of Offenbach raises questions about the level of musical sophistication even in major centers. A  revival of Ritchard’s Hoffmann in 1964, with Nicolai Gedda, spurred the New York Times, no less, to worry that audiences might be disturbed that there is no happy ending, indeed, no ending at all. Each of the acts, horribile dictu, repeats the former; however, the music is “always easy on the ear. With a little more dissonance and with fewer numbers ending so conclusively, it would be even better.”51 This dismissal of Offenbach’s last work is not simply a token of the times. When Barlett Sher’s Hoffmann, a Howard Taubman, “Appreciation,” Libretto for La Périchole (RCA Victor LOC-​1029), 7–​8. Craig Smith, “N.Y. Met performs ‘Perichole,’” Boston Globe (21 Apr. 1971). Smith was himself a knowledgeable conductor. Also see Allen Hughes, “Ritchard’s stylish ‘Perichole’ at Met,” New York Times (2 Jan. 1971); McLaren Harris, “Offenbach’s ‘La Perichole,’” Boston Herald Traveler (22 Apr. 1971); David Sterrit, “Offenbach’s ‘Perichole’ with Cyril Ritchard,” Christian Science Monitor (28 Apr. 1971): 8; Peter M. Knapp, “A perky Perichole,” Quincy Patriot-​Ledger (22 Apr. 1971). 51 Howard Klein, “Nicola Gedda sings title role in ‘Tales of Hoffmann’ at Met,” New York Times (19 Dec. 1964). 49 50

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production of impeccable trendiness, finally replaced Ritchard’s in 2009, the reviewer for Variety attributed the lukewarm reception to the composer rather than the director. “Offenbach was no Rossini or, for that matter, Richard Rodgers when it came to musical invention. […] ‘Hoffman’ desperately needs an editor to bring it down to size.”52

Robert Hofler, “The Tales of Hoffmann,” Variety (4 Dec. 2009).

52

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The De-​Nazification of Comic Opera Comic opera, like every other aspect of culture under National Socialism, had to serve “our posterity as a cornerstone of a new world order, which is to stand among forecasts of idealism.”1 This goal comes from an essay of 1943 called “Operetta at the crossroads.” In passing it rebukes “the Jewish” Max Reinhardt for breaking the three acts of Die Fledermaus into twelve episodes. However, the Nazi eradication of Jewish composers both from the repertoire and from the history of music was so effective that even such an article failed to mention Offenbach. Consequently, it was not for “rehabilitated” directors and conductors to engineer the rediscovery of Offenbach in the post-​war period. Gustaf Gründgens, the time-​serving star who served as model for Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, staged Les brigands in Düsseldorf in 1948 and in Munich the next year; the cast was composed of singing actors, who treated the musical line very freely. To compensate, Gründgens indulged in considerable improvisation. His Offenbach was “an operetta for actors” (Benno Besson), full of elegance and irony.2 In spring 1947, still in exile in Hollywood, Bertolt Brecht made notes for a film version of The Tales of Hoffmann, which he submitted as a project to Lewis Milestone. It is unclear whether he knew of Reinhardt’s earlier proposal. The story outline which he deposited with the Screen Writers Guild was cast in a “realistic” format, in which music and song would occur at acceptably probable moments and transmit a social message. Brecht pursued the idea on his return to Germany, hoping to produce a major color Hermann Bredehöft, “Operette am Scheideweg,” Deutsche Dramaturgie. Zeitschrift für die Probleme der darstellenden Künste (Berlin) (1943): 159–​62. 2 Hans-​Jochen Irmer, “Jacques Offenbachs Werke in Wien und Berlin. Zum 150. Geburtstage des Komponisten am 20. Juni 1969,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-​Universität zu Berlin 18, 1 (1969): 133. 1

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film with the director Erich Engel; he invited the scene designer Caspar Neher to collaborate on the scenario with the alluring post-​war sum of 800 francs.3 Eventually the project was abandoned. Brecht had chosen to resettle not in Zurich or Munich, but, true to his Communist sympathies, in the Russian zone of Berlin. East Berlin, as it became known, was where the true Offenbach revival was to take place, under the aegis of Walter Felsenstein. Director of the Komische Oper from 1947 until his death in 1975, Felsenstein reinvented Reinhardt’s concept of Regietheater (Director’s theatre) in the realm of the opera. Felsenstein subscribed to the concept of the director controlling every aspect of the production, but his understanding of music was much more profound than Reinhardt’s. Whereas Reinhardt regarded text and music as instruments to be wielded by a master magician to some greater effect, Felsenstein concentrated on the veracity and verisimilitude of the libretti as equals to the music, in order to bring out the authentic significance of the work. If Reinhardt preferred actors who could sing to singers who could be passed off as actors, Felsenstein trained his soloists and choristers to become actors. And he invariably presented opera in German so that his audiences could follow the story in detail. To do this he researched thoroughly the variants and sources of the libretti, commissioning new translations. His approach was labeled by his successor Joachim Herz komödiantische Realismus or histrionic realism.4 Reinhardt was not the only influence. During a tour by the Kamerny Theater of Moscow, Felsenstein saw Aleksandr Tairov’s highly theatricalized, constructivist staging of Lecocq’s Giroflé-​Girofla. He did not, however, subscribe fully to the Russian experimentalists’ notion of an “unfettered imagination,” but always professed fidelity to the qualities of an accomplished work of art. He later also observed the Copiaux, the commedia-​ inspired troupe of Jacques Copeau’s disciples, on tour in Basel.5

Bertolt Brecht, “Offenbachs Hoffmanns Erzählungen in einer neuen Version,” in Gesammelte Werke. Supplement Band 2 (Texte für Filme 2)  (Frankfurt am Main:  Suhrkamp, 1969), 628–​31, 666. Bertolt Brecht to Caspar Neher (28 Jan. 1949), in Letters, trans. Ralph Manheim, ed. John Willett (New  York:  Routledge, 1990), 415; James K.  Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 81–​82. 4 Joachim Herz, “Die realistich-​ komödiantische Wagnerinterpretation 1960–​ 1976,” in Richard Wagner 1883–​1983. Die Rezeption im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Gesammelte Beiträge des Salzburger Symposions (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1984), 3–​32. Also see Joachim Herz, “Von der Realität des singenden Menschen” (1960) and Walter Felsenstein, “Methodische Grundfragen des Musiktheaters” (1965), both in Felsenstein and Herz, Musiktheater. Beiträge zur Methodik und zu Inszenierungskonzeptionen (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1976), 58–​66, 79–​93, esp. 80. 5 Walter Felsenstein and Siegfried Melchinger, Musiktheater (Bremen: Carl Schünemann, 1961), 25–​26. 3

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Felsenstein had been born in Vienna, in 1901; after studying mechanical engineering, he became an actor. In Cologne from 1932 he devoted himself to musical works. After time in Frankfurt, he was brought in as Oberspielleiter (Chief Director of Production) to revitalize the Berlin Admiralspalast. Possessed of Communist sympathies and a Jewish wife, Felsenstein was banned from national theatres in 1936, but, since his work was grounded in German opera texts, he was limited to employment in the German-​speaking world. As chief director of the Zurich Stadttheater from 1938 to 1940, he produced in 1939 a Vie parisienne and an Orphée; both, of course, in German. Felsenstein returned to Nazi-​occupied Austria when Clemens Krauss invited him to stage a Figaro for the Salzburg Festival in 1942. After the war Berlin was the first German city to reconstruct its theatrical activity out of the rubble. Felsenstein moved to the Hebbel-​Theater, where his staging of Pariser Leben in December 1945 excited considerable comment, even though the audience and the orchestra both froze in the unheated building.6 The Komische Oper re-​opened in September 1947 in a new building on the site of the former Metropol Theater under the protection of the occupying Soviet forces. The order for the move had been issued as early as 30 September 1945 by the Soviet Military Administration, and Felsenstein was officially installed in the presence of the municipal dignitaries. His first productions repeated his Zurich successes: after a Fledermaus, Orpheus in der Unterwelt, which opened on 22 August 1948, enjoyed 146 performances before it closed at the end of the 1952/​53 season. The critic Jürgen Riehle, who had defected to the West, used this success to illustrate “the total poverty of musical life under Communist rule.”7 A  reliance on light opera had not figured in Felsenstein’s original plan, however; he had hoped to stage contemporary and experimental opera but ran afoul of the Soviet censorship. Subsequently he justified his revival of operetta by a manifesto-​like statement, in which he declared his intention to bring singing on stage to a convincing and truthful expression of human feeling. The effect is to be produced by fantasy and musical wit, not meretricious pseudo-​romanticism and smutty substitutes for humor, which characterize Otto Schneidereit, Berlin wie es weint und lacht. Spaziergänge durch Berlins Operettengeschichte (Berlin (East): VEB Lied der Zeit, 1968), 324. 7 Quoted in David Caute, The dancer defects. The struggle for cultural supremacy during the Cold War (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), 259. 6

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Rebirth from the Ruins so many products of the modern salon operetta. We want music that arises from the dramatic situation, not as stimulation, song as intensified, urgent expression, not as hits and interpolations. In short we shall seek over time to bring the most precious works of classical, exuberant musical theatre up to the level of interpretation and effect which it originally had and still potentially has …8

In this, Felsenstein declared his fealty to Stanislavsky, by this time a totem of Soviet theatrical culture. Stanislavsky’s many years of work in his opera studio had attempted to inculcate in musical performances the same adherence to psychological and emotional “truth” that characterized the Moscow Art Theatre’s dramatic performances. Although Felsenstein was not doctrinaire, he was sympathetic to the Communist imposition of the Russian’s precepts on all theatres and drama schools behind the Iron Curtain, if not to the demands for socialist realism imposed as the official style. In 1947 Felsenstein, under these constraints, defined musical theatre as a genre of drama, with music secondary. Whereas Brecht considered songs to be a means of stopping the action and generalizing the specific, Felsenstein’s quasi-​socialist realism began with the axiom that characters in opera sing because spoken language is not sufficient to express their thoughts and feelings. Over time, he would modify these views, but he always preferred Stanislavsky to Brecht.9 In his draft of a repertoire for the next decade, Felsenstein explained that Offenbach invented the operetta or, more correctly, opéra bouffe to hone more keenly the inherent social aggression of opéra comique. Offenbach’s creations should not be identified as operetta. “The Viennese operetta, that mixture of folkloric suburban theater and imported opéra-​bouffe spirit, is more closely related to comic opera than opéra comique. Gallic mockery and mordancy are inimical to ‘Veeneze’ accommodation.”10 This lesson was learned by the astute East German critic Paul Rilla; on seeing Felsenstein’s Orpheus, he wrote that operetta had taken a wrong turning when it adopted the insipid dullness of the Viennese school, whereas the experiments of Kurt Weill and Carl Orff were the true progeny of Offenbach.11

Walter Felsenstein, “Rede aus Anlaß der Lizenzabrechnung,” in Wege zum Musiktheater. Aufsätze, Berichte, Kritiken zur Arbeit und Methodik der Komischen Oper Berlin, ed. Klaus Schlegel (Berlin: Komische Oper, 1965), 9–​10. 9 Felsenstein, Methodische Grundfragen, 79–​93, esp. 80. 10 Martin Vogler, “Spielplan eines Jahrzehnts. Eine dramaturgische Betrachtung,” in 10 Jahre Komische Oper, ed. Wolfgang Hammerschmidt (Berlin: Komische Oper, 1958), 136–​37. 11 Paul Rilla, “‘Orpheus in der Unterwelt.’ Offenbach in der Komischen Oper,” Berliner Zeitung (24 Aug. 1948). 8

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Felsenstein might also have quoted Arnold Schoenberg, who believed that Offenbach was one of the few composers, among them Johann Strauss and Gershwin, “whose feelings actually coincide with those of the ‘average man in the street’; to them it is no masquerade to express popular feeling in popular terms.”12 Convinced that Musiktheater was theatre first, music second, Felsenstein and his followers took an almost philological approach to libretti and scores, studying variants in order to arrive at the Ur-​version, the intended original, and generating new translations. This was the method he used with his Komische Oper Orpheus, which, following a long tradition of opening the season with a comedy, premiered in August 1948. Instead of combining the 1858 and 1874 versions, Felsenstein returned to the original two-​act opéra bouffe, and translated the libretto himself to bring the text closer to the French. Act I  he staged as a “Ragout Mythologique” in cabaret mode, with two-​dimensional clouds and sheep, a few stalks of wheat to stand for a meadow, and a couple of broken columns. The intent of the production became clearer in the Olympus of Act II, presided over by Jupiter and Juno in a swing. A captivating rhythm began to take over. Act III was staged as a a Dionysiac death-​wish, with Pluto a premonition of Bluebeard and John Styx a grotesque out of Hoffmann.13 Felsenstein’s notes to the actors were, as always, extremely punctilious, noting how even the change of emphasis of a syllable can affect the audience’s response to a joke. In his next Offenbach, Pariser Leben, Felsenstein installed a counterfeit Offenbach to conduct the orchestra. His cast was a mixture of actors and singers and, like Gründgens, they often had to resort to lip-​synching to offstage or in-​the-​orchestra-​pit vocalization. Felsenstein wanted not only to recreate a bygone ghost world of plush elegance, but also to recover the intimacy between audience and players that had existed in his postwar production at the Hebbel-​Theater. However, it was performed only seventy-​ three times before it was removed in 1954, as out of step with the prevailing mood. It had opened on “New music, outmoded music, style and idea,” in Style and idea. Selected writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonid Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 124. 13 “Orpheus in der Unterwelt oder Ragout-​Mythologique” in 50 Jahre Komische Oper oder Die Sau hat kein Theaterblut (Wilhelmshorst:  Märkische, 1997), 19–​20; H.  H. Stuckenschmidt, “Felsensteins Orpheus-​ Inszenierung. Offenbach-​ Premiere in der Komischen Oper,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (24 Aug. 1948); Hans-​Jochen Irmer, “Jacques Offenbachs Werke in Wien und Berlin. Zum 150. Geburtstage des Komponisten am 20. Juni 1969,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-​ Universität zu Berlin 18, 1 (1969): 139. 12

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10 February 1951 when the Sovietification of East Germany had congealed and a five-​year plan had been imposed on the economy. Harsh living conditions prompted mass emigration to the West and the workers’ uprising of 1953, which was brutally put down by the Soviet army. Staging a lavish production that reproduced the conspicuous consumption of an obsolete bourgoisie seemed to many counter-​productive. Achieving it was certainly arduous in a time of constant shortages. Even during Orpheus, Felsenstein had had to obtain special meals from the Soviet military administration to keep up the strength of Aribert Wäscher as Jupiter. Throughout the rehearsals and the run of Pariser Leben, Felsenstein’s correspondence runs on the need for Westmarks to buy spotlights, note paper, hair and dye for wigs, mastic, gold and silver lace brocade, and stiff taffeta. The dancers had to be taught to cancan exuberantly but without breaking the irreplaceable glassware. Theft was endemic, of everything from paper streamers to candelabras and table settings.14 Felsenstein’s assistant Götz Friedrich declared Hoffmanns Erzählungen to be the creative foundation for a music theatre, with every means used to bring a score to life on stage, a dependable control for determining whether the interpretation and its performance were correct.15 The company was desirous of taking on something challenging, but Felsenstein at first quailed before the task. So, as usual, he began by plunging into the source material. Unlike predecessors who had used the opera’s complicated history as a pretext for reorganizing it to their taste and publishers who flooded the market with all manner of adaptations and arrangements, Felsenstein tried to strip away all the accretions and distortions that had led to the Choudens edition of 1907 and its epigones. This took a full year with Felsenstein and his musical colleague Karl-​Fritz Voigtmann examining the microfilm of the original manuscripts of the 1851 play by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, the 1881 libretto and piano reduction at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, and the handwritten score for the Antonia act at the Paris Opéra, along with other fragments, to prove that the recitatives and certain musical passages were not by Offenbach.16 Hoffmann’s tales Der Sandmann, Don Juan, Die Phantasiestücke in Callots Manier, and Die Serapionsbrüder were plumbed for salient details. 50 Jahre Komische Oper, 93–​94, 99, 100, 105–​109. The fullest analysis of Felsenstein’s work on Hoffmann is in Robert Braunmüller, Oper als Drama. Das “realistiche Musiktheater” Walter Felsensteins (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002), 131–​80. 16 Rainer Homann, Die Partitur als Regiebuch. Walter Felsensteins Musiktheater (Osnabrück:  Epos, 2005), 77–​ 79; H.  H. Stuckenschmidt, “Felsensteins zauberhafter Realismus. ‘Hoffmann’s Erzählungen’ in Hochglanz,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (30 Jan. 1958). 14 15

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The musicologist Jean-​Christophe Keck neatly sums up the results: While basing himself on the texts of the 1851 play, he reintroduces the role of the Muse, thus returning to the work its original meaning, viz. the poet torn between art and a woman’s love. He re-​establishes the order of the acts and that of the tableaux in the Venice act. Finally, he recovers the spirit of the creation by replacing Guiraud’s recitatives by spoken dialogue [in iambic pentameter]. Unfortunately, he sins by excess and also suppresses a good deal of music written by Offenbach. He gives in to the taste of the period by introducing into the second act Alvarez’s air from Maître Péronilla (1878). Finally, he entrusts Voigtmann with the “care” of revising and reorchestrating the score, and even adding some of his own music!17

A portion of the spoken dialogue was underscored by music from other Offenbach works. To serve the director’s concept, the spirit chorus and Lindorf ’s entrance aria in the first episode were suppressed, and graftings were made on to the musically undernourished Venice act. He inserted two more cellar scenes between the acts. Nevertheless, the effort represented the first serious attempt to return to the source. Felsenstein grappled with the problem that had stumped earlier adaptors:  what was the connection between the frame scenes in Luther’s tavern and the three narrative acts? For him, the frame held the central theme: Hoffmann is not a pathetic drunk but a Dichter, a word which carries connotations of creative genius; his love for Stella has rendered him artistically impotent and crippled his creativity. Hoffmann’s struggle is with himself. Felsenstein did not have the students urge him to sing about Kleinsack; Hoffmann launches into this paean to ugliness on his own, in reaction to beauty’s rejection of him. The three episodes with the women are not fantasies but parables, stages in Hoffmann’s development which begin at the end and show retrospectively how things got to this point. The women, all sung by the same soprano, may seem like visions or apparitions, but that is because Hoffmann is the only character to receive multidimensional treatment. In the last scene, set in Stella’s dressing-​room, he exclaims “My beloved? Rather say, my three beloveds! Three women in one!” Stella’s time with Hoffmann was happy, and she doesn’t understand the wonder of love until she realizes that he is lost to her forever. Hoffmann’s salvation is the Muse who appears to him and declares “Stop being a human being! I love you! Be a Dichter!”18 Jean-​Christophe Keck, “La genèse et les legendes …,” in Les contes d’Hoffmann. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 25. Ed. Michel Pazdro (Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 1993), 14. 18 Felsenstein and Melchinger, Musiktheater, 24, 54. One of the more surprising subscribers to this idea was the American political comedian Mort Sahl, who quoted Hoffmann when his career tanked after 17

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To realize his conception, Felsenstein explicitly identified Nicklausse with the Muse. “The Muse is the key figure of the events; she inspires and corrects Hoffmann, influences his imagination, and steers his thoughts to new awareness. She is motor and counterpoint,” his better self and his conscience. (When the Muse disrobed, her draperies flew up as a suit of male clothing descended from heaven.) The Coppélius episode had to be performed with classical French clarity. As to the villains, Lindorf is the soul of bourgeois inhibition, inimical to artistic creativity; Mirakel not a Mephisto, but a deadly earnest obsessional whose hobby is driving people to death; Dapertutto a gangster who believes “people sell their souls for gold and diamonds.” By the opera’s end, Hoffmann, disillusioned by Stella and her avatars in a soulless beauty, an egoistic musician, and a courtesan, gains the awareness that his fulfillment is not in love, but in art, his vocation as poet. Grounded as he was in psychological realism, Felsenstein strove to justify the opera’s seeming irreality, but kept running up against the “various fantastic levels,” what he referred to as “surrealism.”19 Eventually, he came up with a Brechtian rationale: “Jacques Offenbach found it possible to let the musty demonism of the scurrilous romantic poet and musician E. T. A. Hoffmann flow into the figures of his opera Tales of Hoffmann precisely because the form imposed a distanciation [Distanzierung] on it.”20 During rehearsals, he insisted that “In such a fantastic piece the fantastic element must not be contributed by the designer. It can only be hinted at, so that the characters of the work remain in the foreground. Their actions more than anything else produce the fantastic effect which stirs the imagination of the spectator.”21 To this end, and contrary to his usual practice, Felsenstein installed a black proscenium arch “in the style of Schinkel” to create a distinct separation from the auditorium, while a reflection of the auditorium was suggested behind this portal in the shape of several gas-​lit chandeliers. “In this fashion we deliberately blended the realistic impression, made possible by the distinct separation from the stage, with an element of fantasy.”22 the Kennedy assassination, “You’ll always be left with your friend, your talent.” Gerald Nachman, Seriously funny. The rebel comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 91. 19 Walter Felsenstein, “Bemerkungen zu ‘Hoffmanns Erzählungen.’ Aus Probennotaten zur Inszenierung” (1958), in Schriften, 284–​92. 20 Martin Vogler, “Spielplan eines Jahrzehnts,” 136–​37. 21 Felsenstein, “The approach to the work” (1961), in The music theater of Walter Felsenstein: collected articles, speeches and interviews, ed. Peter Paul Fuchs (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 185–​86. 22 The music theater of Walter Felsenstein, 53–​54.

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In the scene with Nicklausse even “the most naïve spectator must be aware that The Tales of Hoffmann is not romantic, but an aggressively modern play, here and everywhere the lines must be spoken intimately and flatly, without theatrical effect.”23 The original music was to be played unornamented as a sharp contrast to the dialogue, with the sense that the singer was emitting every note for the first time. “Singing can be presented as singing only in such cases as the Antonia-​Hoffmann duet,” Felsenstein insisted.24 Antonia and her illness must be the most real things on stage; Hoffmann’s interchange with her on the divan is the most expressive in the whole work, and must be ice-​cold, underlined by pride and hate. For Felsenstein, she was not the traditionally languorous damsel in distress, but a music-​possessed energumen, who sacrifices her lover to her ambition. “Hysterically she ravages the keyboard of her spinet, rabidly she tries to batter her debilitated body with song. By means of tuberculosis, the ‘Dove so lovely’ turns into an infirm Callas.”25 When the production opened on 25 January 1958, those who followed the work of the Komische Oper found this to be one of its most remarkable achievements as well as the richest in inner contradictions. The contrast of light and dark was especially noticed: the use of spotlights throughout the space, picking out singers’ faces in close-​up, bright patches emerging from the deepest dark, moving lights copying the frantic movements of guests seeking Olympia’s abductor, the darkness following Giulietta’s death out of which the dwarf Pitichinaccio whines his plaint. In a theatrical season dominated by gritty social messages and Brechtian anti-​illusionism, Felsenstein opted, after all, for phantasmagoria. The caricatural figures reminded viewers of the drawings of James Ensor and Alfred Kubin, and Gustav Meyrinck’s gruesome novella The Waxworks Museum. Every movement and gesture had been dictated by Felsenstein over the course of nine months’ rehearsal, using the performers as raw material; he forced Crespel’s servant Franz, the senile lever of fate, to expend immeasurable effort to rise and sing, and reduced Olympia to a totally dead machine, whose aria is sung in a broken super-​staccato like a hurdy-​gurdy.26 Felsenstein, “Bemerkungen zu ‘Hoffmanns Erzählungen.’ Aus Probennotaten zur Inszenierung” (1958), in Felsenstein, Schriften. 24 Felsenstein, “Method and attitude” (lecture in Vienna 1963), Theater 6, 2 (Winter 1975): 9–​17. 25 Stuckenschmidt, “Felsensteins zauberhafter Realismus”; “Ein neuer Hoffmann,” Der Spiegel 7 (1958). 26 Stuckenschmidt, “Felsensteins zauberhafter Realismus”; W.  Sch., “Alte Opern –​neu gefaßt. In Berlin: Hoffmanns Erzählungen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (31 Jan. 1958); Julia Tardy-​Marcus, “Seltsamer 23

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As a result, as Felsenstein intended, the drama dominated the music. The singers had difficulty making the transition from distinctly enunciated dialogue to song, especially since the conductor Václav Neumann maintained an unbroken if flexible tempo. The effect on the audience of East Berliners, starved of sensory experiences, was overwhelming, something akin to the reaction Robert Walser had experienced at a Komische Oper Hoffmann in 1905. He lovingly recalled how at the time the “gleaming intoxication of the production, the mind-​besotting, graceful commotion, and collective, dazzling world of elegance” enriched the consciousness of a benighted country lad.27 An observer of the 1969 revival deemed it “total theatre.” There was not any particular element that stood out; everything fell into place and contributed to a performance that felt right from beginning to end. Singing, acting, sets, costumes, lighting, orchestra, chorus, dancing –​all seemed to work together and to serve one common purpose. […] this interpretation was consistent and always made sense, and was also technically and visually brilliant. […] But this is what surprised me most: realism in the Felsenstein sense has little to do with the way the leaves on a tree are painted –​at least initially and superficially. It is the psychologically truthful adherence to the plot, and this truth must become evident in every detail of the production … we find a great deal of visual stylization (but never to the point of abstraction) … which means that his realism is spiritual, and that it is far removed from bricks-​and-​mortar realism –​perhaps “aborted naturalism” might be a better term …28

Felsenstein’s Hoffmann was broadcast on East German television in 1958; his second version was filmed by Deutsche Fernsehfunk Berlin in 1970 and remained in the repertoire of the Komische Oper until 1972.

Bluebeard’s Castle Felsenstein’s next foray into staging Offenbach is generally considered the acme of his work on comic opera, all the more because it was so unlikely. In the century since its 1866 premiere, Barbe-​bleue had rarely been revived. In the 1930s there had been a production at Berlin’s Metropol Theater with Applaus,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 114 (20 May 1959): 11; Heino Lüdicke, “Der Dichter, die Frauen und das Böse,” (25 Jan. 1958), unidentified clipping in Munich Theatermuseum. 27 Robert Walser, “Erinnerungen an ‘Hoffmanns Erzählungen,’” in Poetenleben (Leipzig: Huber, 1918), 124–​26. 28 Peter Paul Fuchs, “Foreword,” The music theatre of Walter Felsenstein: collected articles, speeches and interviews by Walter Felsenstein and others (London: Quartet Books, 1991), unpag.

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Leo Slezak and Käthe Dorsch (later Goering’s mistress), but without much resonance. It had earlier been rediscovered by Karl Kraus, whose verse on the composer begins “O Offenbach, from whose magic violin the miracle bursts blue like yonder knight’s beard –​Thou charming contemporary of all the world, unutterably delicate declension from pleasure to pain!”29 Felsenstein seems not to have been influenced by modernist musical variants of Perrault’s tale, Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (A kékszakállú herceg vára) and Paul Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-​bleue. In a society where irony and black comedy were proscribed for literature and art, even though they were to be met with on a regular basis in everyday life, Felsenstein was particularly attracted by Offenbach’s comic treatment of sadism. “Cruel and criminal sovereignty in Offenbach touches us because we have experienced it on our own bodies,” he declared.30 Felsenstein stuck to the anachronistic Middle Ages sketched by Meilhac and Halévy; in their retelling, Bluebeard’s latest bride is a down-​to-​earth cowherd who is chosen as the village rosière or Queen of the May. He intends to marry her, introduce her at court, and then despatch her. Meanwhile, it is revealed that the alchemist Popolani, his partner in crime, has put all the past wives in a state of suspended animation, from which they emerge to make Bluebeard’s future problematic. Unhampered by performance tradition or audience expectation, Felsenstein was free to mold the text and music to make his points. The new, witty translation was provided by Felsenstein and Horst Seeger. Although it was faithful to the original in scenes and numbers, the dialogue was tightened and sharpened, that between Popolani and Oscar in Act I trimmed to make it more melodramatic, and the King’s verses between Acts III and IV rewritten to give them more pungency. Felsenstein boasted that there were no graftings from other Offenbach works, but this was not true of the music, which was virtually a medley. To balance the cuts, the overture was a potpourri of music from Act IV, a theme from Act III, and, yet again, Maître Péronilla; offstage music was provided for the finale of Act II; Popolani’s “bird organ” was lifted from Le Roi Carotte, and the newly inserted song for the King was set to a duet from Le fifre enchanté, a comic opera of 1864. The original parts had been lost during the war,

“O Offenbach, von dessen Zaubergeige das Wunder blaut wie jenes Ritters Bart –​Du aller Welten holder Gegenwart, von Lust zu Schmerz unsagbar zarte Neige!” Karl Kraus, “Verse VII,” Worte in Verse I–​VII (Vienna: Die Fackel, 1922). 30 Walter Felsenstein and Dieter Kranz, “Gespräch über ‘Ritter Blaubert’” (1963), in Felsenstein, Schriften, 280–​84. 29

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13.1.  Ritter Blaubart: sets and costumes by Wilfred Werz. Clementine (Ruth Schob-​ Wipka), King Bobèche (Werner Enders), Hermia (Ingrid Czerny), and Saphir (Manfred Hopp).

but the orchestration was authenticated by reference to Offenbach’s correspondence with his German publishers.31 The many facets of the title character were explored to the point that he grew to become a demonic Falstaff. Felsenstein’s most striking invention, however, was the built-​up role of King Bobèche. In Meilhac and Halévy he is a royal booby, cousin-​german to Ménélas and Sifroid. Felsenstein turned him into a totalitarian paranoiac, while admitting that such a king would be bankrupt in twenty-​four hours. As performed by Werner Enders, an egg-​bald cretin in a clown costume, his greedy hopping on a gigantic globe was reminiscent of Chaplin in The Great Dictator. One critic was reminded of Erich von Stroheim at his most megalomaniacal.32 His toadying courtiers are so accustomed to cringing that they cannot stand erect, an image that evoked allusions to Daumier, Otto Dix, and George Grosz. “Something macabre and quite ghostly [condenses] whenever the king appears.”33 Horst Seeger, “Vorwort,” Ritter Blaubart, trans. Walter Felsenstein and Horst Seeger (Berlin: Henschelverlag, n.d.), unpag. 32 K. H.  Ruppel, “Felsenstein inszeniert Offenbach’s ‘Ritter Blaubart,’” Süddeutsche Zeitung (19 Feb. 1965). 33 Horst Koegler, “‘For a theatre yet to be built …,’” Opera (Apr. 1965): 264–​65; Helmut Schmidt-​ Garre, “Felsenstein zeigt, was ein Offenbach ist,” Münchner Merkur (19 Feb. 1965): 6. 31

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Bertolt Brecht had died in 1956, by which time his company, the Berliner Ensemble, was acclaimed as the national theatre of East Germany. A Soviet perversion of Stanislavsky might still be taught in the acting schools, but scene design was beginning to be dominated by Brecht’s example:  bare stages furnished only with emblematic pieces and well-​worn props and costumes that resembled real clothes, stark lighting, no theatrical concealment that might assist illusion. Felsenstein’s Ritter Blaubart seems to have been intended, though not programmatically, as a counterblast to the Brechtian model. He objected to what he saw as Brecht’s rendering the performer impotent by proscribing empathy. The epic interruption of narrative flow in order to promote social commentary also struck him as wrongheaded. Felsenstein’s own principle was “Think through the story with all its consequences, relay the word into gesture and enable the actor/​singer to know what he’s doing.”34 The monumental scenery and costumes by Wilfred Werz for Blaubart made ironic commentary not through impoverishment but by opulence. The village in Act I  was a kitschy illustration from a children’s book, a parodic pastoral; the King’s court an anachronistic jumble of Versailles splendor and Second Empire bric-​à-​brac, a Belle Époque nightmare furnished from flea markets. As usual with Felsenstein, every movement was choreographed, including supers as horses, and therefore the overall effect, the socialist critics judged, was not bourgeois, precisely because Schlamperei, sloppiness, was nowhere to be descried. This precision contributed to the seriousness with which Felsenstein wished the audience to take the romantic episodes and particularly the finale. Without using Brecht’s technique, Felsenstein intended a Brechtian result, a question which the spectators would revolve in their minds as they headed home. As he explained it, with an offhand reference to the Epic Theatre’s Verfremdungseffekt, Bluebeard is caught in his rascality in a mixture of self-​pity, sense of mission (Sendungsbewußtsein), erotic thirst for action, and criminal intent. In the interpretation ordinary reality and the ironic are so strongly blended that even a denouement and with it a possibility for distanciation must be provided by Bluebeard’s doubtful question to the downcast Boulotte: ‘Did I hurt you?’ Act III must offer “a muddle of feelings,” muddle in a positive, provocative sense.35 Charlotte Kerr, “Kampf dem Opernkitsch,” Abendzeitung München (17/​18 Dec. 1966):  6; Karl Schumann, “Die Operette als Weltgericht,” Abendzeitung München (19 Feb. 1965):  10; K.  H. Ruppel, “Felsenstein inszeniert Offenbachs ‘Ritter Blaubart,’” Süddeutsche Zeitung (19 Feb. 1965). 35 Felsenstein and Dieter Kranz, “Gespräch über ‘Ritter Blaubert’” (1963), in Felsenstein, Schriften, 280–​84. 34

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Felsenstein wanted to use this “Grusical,” as one reviewer dubbed it, to push the theme of human eroticism to its farthest frontiers, to explore it both seriously and merrily. Of the twenty-​eight productions Felsenstein created at the Komische Oper, Ritter Blaubart was adjudged to be his masterpiece, as well as the production most popular with audiences. It was celebrated as “Uninhibited theatre, the surrealist madness of which is well matched by pedantic precision and convincing attention to detail.”36 In 1973 it was filmed for television, with the role of King Bobèche amplified to accommodate Enders’ inventiveness in the part (he was never replaced by an understudy). It remained in the repertory until 1992, achieving 369 performances over nearly three decades. It was the company’s leading trump-​card on its foreign tours, and led to a great revival of interest in the work itself and Offenbach generally in German theatres.37

Horst Koegler, “‘For a theatre yet to be built …,’” Opera (Apr. 1965): 264–​65. For a thorough analysis, see Jacques Offenbach:  Musik-​Theater. Theater-​Musik. Die Felsenstein-​ Inszenierung von Offenbachs Blaubart im Jahr 1975, 2 vols. Bad Emser Hefte 108 and 109, Offenbach Series 7 and 8 (Berg: Verein für Geschichte, Denkmal-​und Landschaftspflege e.V. Bad Ems, 1993).

36

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In a 1992 production of Les contes d’Hoffmann, which originated in Opera Colorado, the director-​designers Renaud Doucet and André Barbe dominated the stage with a massive Beaux-​Arts monument featuring a bust of Offenbach and topped by a statue of the Muse. No sooner did the overture end, when the bust stepped out as a gray-​tinted, life-​sized Offenbach, while the Muse made her own appearances in propria persona, as well as assuming the role of Nicklausse. This visual metaphor emblematizes what has happened to the composer in our own time. Without becoming a monument classé, he has attained classic status; while active on the opera stage, his “grayness” may stand for the unfamiliarity with most of his work. In a poem dedicated to Offenbach in his sequence “Homage to Nadar,” Richard Howard takes an elegiac tone; he portrays the composer in poverty, “a skeleton/​in pince-​nez and puce knit gloves.” His profligate music is said to have caused the Prussians to bombard Paris. The poem ends “Genius balked only because you could not bear/​to be alone with talent;/​the will says free and the world says lost.”1 In other words, had Offenbach not been so gregarious and so eager to please audiences, he might have accomplished something great. Poets are not on oath, but the general impression, based on misinformation, hardly does justice to a virtuosic and original musical genius. Since Offenbach composed roughly 121 scores for the theatre (among them incidental music, ballets, and revisions), the operas that remain current may seem dismayingly few. The musicologist Peter Hawig has classified them by frequency of performance in the modern opera house. First come those works that have become fixtures in the international repertoire: Orphée aux enfers, La belle Hélène, La Grande-​Duchesse de Gérolstein, La vie parisienne, La Périchole, and Les contes d’Hoffmann. The second Richard Howard, “Jacques Offenbach,” Misgivings (New York: Athenaeum, 1979), 31–​33.

1

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group is made up of works that drop in and out of the repertoire but without any regularity: Barbe-​bleue, Les brigands. The next group includes the works that are only rarely performed: Ba-​ta-​clan, Le pont des soupirs, L’Île de Tulipatan, and La Princesse de Trébizonde. Finally, there are the works that are all but forgotten: Geneviève de Brabant and Le château à Toto.2 One could easily take exception to this taxonomy, protesting “Yes, but …” M. Choufleuri restera chez lui … is frequently performed; Le voyage dans la lune is occasionally revived. Others have been recorded. On the whole, however, the classification is accurate.

Hoffmann of 1,000 Faces Only Les contes d’Hoffmann can be said to be firmly ensconced in the standard repertoire. This took some time, due in part to its unfinished state, but also to the fire at the Vienna Hofoper after which it assumed something of the reputation of a jinx. The opera’s inchoate state allowed conductors and managers to shape it to their wills. When Gustav Mahler brought Hoffmann back to the Hofoper in 1901, he let Marie Gutheil-​ Schoder sing all the soprano roles, initiating an often unfortunate tradition. Hans Gregor, who conducted it at the Berlin Komische Oper over 500 times between 1905 and 1909, interlarded the opera with songs from other Offenbach works, gave Coppélius an aria of Dapertutto, borrowed the air “Scintille, diamant” from a theme in Le voyage dans la lune, and had Giulietta sing a duet with her arch-​enemy Nicklausse.3 Throughout the twentieth century, artists turned to Les contes d’Hoffmann as a playing field on which to exercise free expression. The lucubrations of Klee, Bellmer, Brecht, and Eisenstein were carried out on paper, but Urban, Reinhardt, and Felsenstein managed to realize their visions in the theatre. Yet the most powerful agent in familiarizing the public with the

Peter Hawig, Jacques Offenbach in Baden-​Baden (1869), Bad Emser Hefte 319.1 and 319.2, Offenbach Series 181 and 182 (Berg: Verein für Geschichte, Denkmal-​und Landschaftspflege e.V. Bad Ems, 2011). 3 The tangled tale of Hoffmann has been thoroughly unraveled by musicologists and cultural critics. See, inter alia, Fritz Oeser, Jacques Offenbach. Hoffmanns Erzählungen. Quellenkritische Neuausgabe. Vorlagenbericht (Kassel:  Alkor-​Edition, 1977); Attila Csampai and Dietmar Holland, eds., Hoffmanns Erzählungen:  Texte, Materialien, Kommentare (Reinbek bei Hamburg:  Rowohlt, 1984); Gabriele Brandstetter, ed., Jacques Offenbach. Hoffmann’s Erzählungen. Konzeption. Rezeption. Dokumentation (Laaber:  Laaber, 1988); Michel Pazdro, ed., Les contes d’Hoffmann. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 25 (Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 1993); Heather Hadlock, Mad loves. Women and music in Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2000); and Josef Heinzelmann, “Jacques Offenbachs ‘Hoffmanns Erzählungen’ –​die Entstehungsgeschichte und derzeitige Quellenlage,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 58, 7 (Jul. 2003): 5–​31. 2

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opera was the 1950 film Tales of Hoffmann of Michael Powell and Emmerich Pressburger. The film-​makers were drawn to Hoffmann’s immersion in the supernatural, his attraction to hallucinations, his fascination with insanity. They also seemed to share Hoffmann’s “Serapionic” idea that the artist is elevated by vocation to a lofty sphere of his own creation, where reality is supplanted by a personal irreality. Powell himself later called it “the culmination of everything I wanted to do and show the audience.”4 It was only natural that they should want to replicate their previous success The Red Shoes, but in so doing they denatured Offenbach’s work. The Red Shoes is a simple fable of Earthly Love versus Love of Art: a talented ballerina, played by Moira Shearer, is torn between her romance with a young composer and her career, managed by a sinister impresario half-​ Svengali, half-​Diaghilev. Unable to reconcile these desires, she destroys herself. Powell and Pressburger impressed this stencil on Hoffmann, to the point of casting four prominent ballet dancers from The Red Shoes in major roles:  Moira Shearer as the incarnation of two of Hoffmann’s inamoratas, Robert Helpmann as the villains, Frederick Ashton as the auxiliaries, and Léonide Massine as the secondary heavies. In addition, Liudmila Tchernina appears as Giulietta. Hoffmann was filmed like a silent movie, with the soundtrack, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, recorded first and footage of artists shot in synchronicity with the playback. All the voices, except for Robert Rounseville in the title role, were dubbed. Stella is now a prima ballerina, and the overture is used to score a balletic solo and pas de deux from a performance of the fictional ballet Enchanted Dragonfly. Of course, this eliminates the important musical and dramatic references to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It also implants the theme of the vampiric paramour who victimizes men, which displaces the centrality of Hoffmann’s quest for wholeness. For all its saturated color and tricky camera angles, the Powell-​Pressburger Hoffmann is remarkably uncinematic: the painted sets, unsubtle makeups, synthetic wigs, and compressed crowds all evoke the theatre, as does the highly choreographed movement. The design might be called “Festival-​of-​ Britain Gothic,” a medley of neo-​classicism, de Chirico surrealism, Miró and Jackson Pollock, picture-​book whimsy and Christmas pantomime. On the big screen, the effect can be cloying. The film-​makers’ intention had been to create a synaesthetic spectacle, but the various components seemed to its first viewers to be unincorporated into a satisfactory whole. Michael Powell, Million Dollar Movie (London: William Heinemann, 1990), 139.

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14.1.  Moira Shearer as Olympia and Léonide Massine as Spalanzani in the Powell-​ Pressburger Tales of Hoffmann.

After the world premiere of 15 February 1951, not in a movie palace but at the Metropolitan Opera House, the press was far from enthusiastic. “Tedious” and “ponderous” were recurrent pejoratives: “a prolonged and sometimes tedious process during which the eye and ear contend for mastery to the ultimate dissatisfaction of both;” “an indifferent Burne-​Jones suffering from Beardsley hallucinations”; “a gigantic panorama of dreamland and nightmare, sometimes rising to enchanted heights, then falling to dismal banality.”5 If cinematic purists reviled it for its unabashed theatricality, musical purists rejected it as a bowdlerized and vulgarized hybrid. Even the critic Raymond Durgnat, who attempted a rehabilitation of Powell in an essay of 1965, memorably apostrophized Hoffmann as “this gallimaufry of Gothicism, this pantechnicon of palettical paroxysms, this

The Musical Times 93, 1300 (Jun. 1951): 279; Gabriel Fallon, “The technicolors of Offenbach,” Irish Monthly 79, 941 (Nov. 1951):  183–​86; Catherine de la Roche, “Films of the month:  The Tales of Hoffmann,” Film Bulletin (May 1951): 17–​18.

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meddle-​muddle of media, this olla podrida of oddsboddikins, this mighty accumulation of midcult Wurlitzerisms.”6 In time, The Tales of Hoffmann became favorite fodder for film theorists. It has been read as a Marxist attack on the art market, a self-​referential critique of film-​making, a psychoanalytic study of “female subjectivity and desire,” a Jungian amalgam of the mythic and the personal, and an exercise in Wagnerian “operality.”7 Martin Scorsese has testified to its powerful effect on him when, as a boy, he watched it in black-​and-​white, stripped of the Antonia episode and interrupted by commercials, on a diminutive television screen.8. Only Marcia Citron’s comparison of the film with Hans-​Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal9 refers back to Offenbach. What earlier critics regarded as heavy-​handed, Citron praises as the sharpening of themes already present in the original and an indictment of music itself when its power is used for self-​aggrandizement.10 The visual jokes, the interrupted narrative and the operatic satires praised by Citron promote a sense of irony which, although she doesn’t say so, is Offenbachian in the extreme. The “grand opera” aspect of Hoffmann is brought back to the musical parodies and cultural demolitions of the opéra bouffe. Now the film receives such praise from music critics as this: “In its quirky way, this Hoffmann captures the singular magic of Offenbach’s fantasy better than any stage production ever could.”11 What was once condemned as an over-​ ornate, over-​determined half-​breed is now, for all the liberties taken with the score, lauded as the ideal interpretation of Les contes d’Hoffmann. This would suggest that Offenbach foresaw the potentiality of modern media and provided a fertile opportunity for them to be realized. And so it came to pass in Czechoslovakia. Raymond Durgnat, “Michael Powell,” Movie 14 (1965), reprinted in Powell, Pressburger and others, ed. Ian Christie (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 69. 7 Thomas Elsaesser, “The Tales of Hoffmann,” Brighton Film Review 1 (1968), reprinted in Powell, Pressburger and others, 62–​65; Bruce Babbington and Peter Evans, “Matters of life and death in Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann,” in A night at the opera: media representations of opera, ed. Jeremy Tambling (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994): 145–​68; David Scott Diffrient, “A fetish for fugitive aesthetics:  cinematic kitsch and visual pleasure in The Tales of Hoffmann,” Modern Issues (Jun. 2011): 1–​21, which considers the film “a bad taste classic”; Amy Greenfield, “Tales of Hoffmann,” Film Comment 31, 2 (Mar. 1995); Lesley Stern, “The Tales of Hoffman. An instance of operality,” in Between opera and cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Rose Teresa (London: Routledge, 2002), 39–​57. 8 Martin Scorsese, “Foreword,” in Ian Christie, Arrows of desire. The films of Michael Powell and Emmerich Pressburger (London: Faber & Faber, 1985). 9 Marcia Citron, “Cinema and the power of fantasy: Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann and Syberberg’s Parsifal,” Opera on screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 112–​60. 10 Citron, “Cinema and the power of fantasy,” 114. 11 F. Paul Driscoll, “Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann,” Opera News 70, 11 (May 2006): 90. 6

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“Lord, what joy we experienced working on The Tales of Hoffmann in 1946!,” wrote the scenographer Josef Svoboda in his memoirs. “We spoke the same language and delighted in the same things. Everything seemed possible, as if we were both intoxicated. The text and music lent themselves to our ideas and immediately prompted others.”12 The “we” refers to his collaboration with Alfred Radok. As a director, Radok’s visual sense was much influenced by Marc Chagall. His directorial concepts were informed by what he called věčnost, literally, thingsness, a matter-​of-​factness somewhat akin to the German Sachlichkeit or Objectivity. In opposition to the bourgeois theatre preferred by the Nazis and the tendentious socialist realism imposed on Soviet-​dominated Czechoslovakia, objects and actions are left to speak for themselves, their polarities subtly underlined by an ironic attitude. Their juxtaposition takes on a surrealistic tinge, as it reveals their otherwise unseen associations. In Jarka Burian’s words, Radok showed “a flair for orchestrating ironic, satiric, or simply hilarious confrontations of seemingly discordant elements, whether props, characters, or special bits of business.”13 Svoboda, who had been studying scene design until the Nazis closed down the theatres in 1944, had helped establish the Grand Opera of the Fifth of May in the building of the Neues Deutsches Theater. A member of the Communist Party, Svoboda was in demand for his stage designs. A production at the Grand Opera endowed the partners with a sizeable budget and technical possibilities for experimentation on a grand scale. Svoboda’s post-​war work was dominated by collage, not surprisingly in a Europe whose cityscapes had been reduced to rubble. Svoboda combined painted flats with spindly skeletal constructions against a background of emptiness to compose an abstract space shaped by lighting. “The composition balanced on the very border between an actual object and its painted reconstruction.”14 What Svoboda was attempting to gauge was the “disproportion of forces between the artificial reality of theatre and the ‘real.’”15 By synthesizing illusion, one could avoid the audience’s disillusionment at, and realization of the phoniness of, what was on stage. For Svoboda, conscious artifice was more “real” than traditional illusionism. Hoffmann would be conceived as photomontage. Josef Svoboda. The secret of theatrical space. The memoirs of Josef Svoboda, ed. and trans. Jarka M. Burian (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1993), 39. 13 Jarka Burian, Leading creators of the twentieth-​ century Czech theatre (London:  Routledge, 2002), 60–​65. 14 Svoboda, The secret of theatrical space, 15. 15 Svoboda, The secret of theatrical space, 18, 20. 12

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Radok, for his part, was attracted to Offenbach’s opera because he could relocate it in his favorite period, the belle époque, and escape the constraints of behavioral psychology in the acting. Both artists realized that nineteenth-​ century operas, to speak to a world traumatized by war, had to shed their traditional skins. Parody was insufficient. The solution was to “estrange” the realistic elements of the past and relocate them to unfamiliar environments, to produce a “new and effective theatrical reality.” The “collage,” or, more accurately, “bricolage,” by juxtaposing signs from various epochs, was meant to produce a sense of timelessness. Both the libretto and the music of Hoffmann “lent themselves to our ideas and immediately prompted others.” Radok began the action in the costume storeroom of a theatre and then shifted it to a non-​specific space with multiple acting areas in which blatantly contemporary elements jostled with the period realia. Dapertutto drove up in a Tatra mini-​auto to a power-​line tower, whose insulators flashed electric charges; Hoffmann approached Olympia encased in a huge crystal ball along a path full of shrubs hung with tiny white spheres. In addition to the skeletal towers and bridges and gridiron flooring, an antique miniature theatre hung from a block and tackle; in Giulietta’s scene, Venice was conjured up with painted flats. The duel was repeated by fifteen other duellists; a white cyclorama turned black. A huge sphere suspended six feet off the floor opened like a locket in the third act to reveal Antonia’s tiny room in one half and a photograph of her mother in the other. Her gown fell to the ground and was drawn aside by a hearse harnessed to a rocking-​horse. As the opera ended, the gown was raised to reveal a traditional theatre curtain that came down in the old-​fashioned way. In Svoboda’s view, the abundance of poetic imagination, color, sound, and form was stylistically coherent. The critical response was cautious. The press was content to describe what it saw without attempting to praise or condemn it. To quote a Czech director, The production contains a combination of elements –​real, every-​day, perhaps even technical –​that reveal the deep influence of contemporary technological civilization on our thinking, along with elements that are stylized, traditional, even “cultural.” This synthesis of “culture” and “civilization,” symbolically illustrated by the juxtaposition of machinery and baroque objects, electrical insulators and flowers, is clearly a new way of representing our contemporary life on the stage.16 Jiří Karnet, “Cesta k novému slohu,” unidentified clipping, quoted in Jarka Burian, The scenography of Josef Svoboda (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 133.

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14.2.  Alfred Radok’s Hoffmann designed by Josef Svoboda, Grand Opera of the Fifth of May, Prague, 1946.

Such a forcible yoking of past and present had long been a familiar directorial device in such comic operas as Orphée and Hélène; to apply it to a “serious” work was unsettling. After the Communist Party seized power in February 1948 and proclaimed the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, such free-​spirited experimentation became less viable. There is some irony, therefore, that the next major innovation in Czech staging was introduced as an arm of government policy. On the tenth anniversary of the socialist republic, Radok introduced Laterna Magika at the Brussels Expo 58. In a revue-​like format, live performers were combined with images from films and slides projected on to a large Cinemascope-​style screen up center, flanked by three narrower vertical screens down left and right. The live actor or dancer had to enter the virtual world which extended the stage action, but stage and film co-​existed on different dramatic planes. Since the action had a determined rhythm within the overall dramatic tempo, what seemed impromptu had to be timed with great exactitude. Synchronization had to be meticulous, so that each incident harmonized with the next, yet appeared as an interactive improvisation. Within the multi-​media structure, the director, according to Radok, had to build the plot in a sequence of situations or “signs” to evoke an

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“emotional convention” in the viewer. The signs were derived from the devices of “film language” or the artificial reality of cinema. When differentiating between the dimension of these signs and the sum of at least two signs, we could obtain from them a certain logical or spatial significance … signs evoke in the viewer an “emotional convention.” Emotional convention would be in our multi-​stage scenic unit a staging element with meaning reaching beyond logic which ever increases the psychological dimension.17

The stir created by this “new reality” convinced the Czech Ministry of Culture to institutionalize the innovation, but Radok himself proved to be out of step with State policy and was dismissed.18 Instead, in 1962 the government teamed Svoboda with the stage director Václav Kašlík to produce a Tales of Hoffmann for Laterna Magika. The working relationship was not entirely simpatico. Kašlík, who served as adapter of the music, scenario author, stage director, and conductor in one, later referred to the “very strange combination of his technical realism and my imagination, which favors clear shapes and situations that are very unusual and make surreal combinations.”19 Svoboda might have balked at the description of his aesthetic as “realism.” His own definition was more in tune with Radok’s: “There’s more truth and honesty in conscious artifice than in a traditional illusion of reality.”20 The desideratum was “the utmost flexibility,” employing cinematic means without being overwhelmed; the stage would have to respond instantly to the progression of images, “as in a filmic quick-​cut.”21 Whatever the creators’ ideas, spectators viewed the Laterna Magica Hoffmann as an abandonment of “realism” to accomplish Offenbach’s dream of a “Théâtre imaginaire,” a magical stage of fantasticated romanticism. The unfinished nature of the score justified reworking the piece, eliminating all descriptive elements and stripping the opera down to its “basic poetry, fantasy and human relationships.”22 In production, the orchestra and conductor were hidden. Only Hoffmann and his three Dulcineas were flesh-​and-​blood doubles of their filmed personae and did not interact with them. So, at Spalanzani’s ball, the guests marched in a polonaise Lanterna [sic] Magika, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Espace Electra, 2002), 120. Burian, Leading creators, 67–​70. 19 Václav Kašlík, Jak jsem dělal operu (Prague: Panton, 1987), 101. 20 Svoboda, The secret of theatrical space, 18. 21 Josef Svoboda, “Laterna Magika,” Tulane Drama Review 11, 1 (Fall 1977): 142. This article reproduces the scenario. 22 Svoboda, “Laterna Magika,” 143. 17

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14.3  The Antonia episode in the Laterna Magika production of Tales of Hoffmann, with Dr Mirakel’s face projected onto a screen. Photo: Bill Doll and Co., New York.

on the screen, while only the “real couple” danced on stage. On film Olympia could swoop through a series of filmed galleries and salons, playing with imaginary dimensions, while the stereophonic sound overlapped the images. The vision of Antonia presented her singing on the actual stage, while on the screen, Svengali-​like, Dr Mirakel as prompter kept her hypnotized. The diabolic Coppélius, Dr Mirakel, and Dapertutto were all played on film by bald Rudolf Pellar, with vocal doubling by Jaroslav Horáček; his face was often half in shadow, suggesting his omnipresence in the cinematic sequences. The other secondary characters existed only on the screen, and there were only three friends in the Luther’s cellar scenes. The camera work by Jan Stallich offered the Olympia and Giulietta episodes in full color, with Antonia’s in black-​and-​white. The Venice act was almost purely filmic, with silhouette-​like façades of palazzi, a horseless coach abandoned in the waters of the lagoon, and the waves plashing over Giulietta, reminiscent to some of Dalí’s surrealism. It was not so much a romantic reverie as ultra-​ kitsch: the dense vapors barely conceal the glowing, toad-​ like garbage in the canals. From a huge

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gondola a courtesan tosses an apple-​core into the water; in front of the palazzi low-​rent Lorelais comb their long tresses, while on a lone rock a buxom lady strums a harp and sings the barcarolle. An underwater camera surrounds her with heavily symbolic fish. Mirrors are all around, reflecting from above and below formidable nudes in flimsy draperies by Titian, Correggio, and Veronese, gigantic on film, Lilliputian on stage. The duel with Schlemihl was a virtuosic display of flashing foils amid the wooden pilings in the canals, although the failure to make use of mixed media at this point seemed a missed opportunity. The ultimate effect was the kind of softcore sinfulness found in a Hollywood Biblical epic, though without its glamor and sex appeal. At the end, Hoffmann escapes not into drink, as in Offenbach, but into the arms of three young men in a hopeful green landscape that comes to meet him.23 Some critics found insufficient interaction between the stage and the screens, and Svoboda agreed that the relationship between the actor on stage and on screen remained wide open. “The stylistic purity of the presentation was a problem yet to be solved.”24 Nevertheless, the production proved to be a popular attraction, which was toured round the world for several years and inspired a spate of imitations, not least Svoboda’s own reconceptions of Hoffmann throughout his career.25

Taking Comic Opera Seriously While new productions of Hoffmann are announced every year, few of the comic operas, the “usual suspects,” get even an occasional look-​in. The infrequency of performance may be due to the difficulty in translating or adapting the libretti. On the other hand, Offenbach’s top half-​dozen are still more regularly revived than anything by Meyerbeer; and his rivals in the comic-​opera sphere Hervé, Planquette, and Lecocq receive only sporadic productions of curiosity value. Most opera companies stick to the tried-​and-​true and, if they do gamble on Offenbach, are loath to trust the material. One music critic said that the “breezy jokes” that riddled Geoffrey Dunn’s anglicized libretti Effi Horn, “Die große Show von Hoffmanns Erzählungen,” unidentified clipping (22 Jun. 1964); K. H. Ruppel, “Surrealisticher Offenbach aus Prag,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (22 Jun. 1964). 24 Svoboda, “Laterna Magika,” 115–​16; Helena Albertová, Josef Svoboda scenographer (Prague: Divadelní ústav, 2008). 25 Hessisches Staatstheater, Wiesbaden, March 1966; Deutsche Oper, West Berlin, dir. Kašlík, January 1969; Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, Mainz, 1970; Städtische Bühne, Frankfurt, dir. Kašlík, June 1972; and Národní (Smetonovo) divadlo, Prague, October 1981. 23

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for Sadler’s Wells productions of Offenbach “are all conceived on the principle that if you chuck enough balls some of them will hit the coconuts. Elegance and precision of aim are certainly not their strong points, and it could be said they substitute a bludgeon for a rapier …”26 When the New York City Opera ventured to revive La belle Hélène in 1977, it decided, on second thought, not to retitle it That Heavenly Helen; however, it did borrow Dunn’s libretto, which the critics damned as “humorless and graceless,” and the staging as “camped-​up.”27 This epitomized the American approach to Offenbach. Writing of a Philadelphia Périchole in 2003, the reviewer David Shengold deplored the “over-​the-​top, no-​holds-​ barred ‘romp,’ without much thought to a unified style or to the quite touching story.”28 Conductors and directors could not be expected to take Offenbach seriously when musical scholarship did not. Very few works in the French repertoire had been published in sound editions, a state of affairs that was particularly deleterious not only to Offenbach, but also to Gounod and Bizet, whose works were played on the basis of incomplete and error-​ ridden scores, leading to a distorted sense of their complexity.29 There was no scholarly edition of any of Offenbach’s compositions, no truly complete catalogue of his works, no thorough-​going musicological studies. The bulk of his works had never been recorded, and those that were were often heavily cut and unevenly performed with variable sound quality. This situation began to change in 1970, when the conductor and musicologist Antonio de Almeida discovered 1,250 manuscript pages of Les contes d’Hoffmann by Offenbach and Barbier. A  critical edition was published seven years later by Fritz Oeser, who tried to reconstruct a version closer to Offenbach’s intention; this was recorded by Sylvain Cambreling. Another stripped-​down version, by Jean-​Pierre Ponelle, appeared at Salzburg in 1980. In 1984, 300 more manuscript pages with cuts made in 1881, which had been discovered in the chateau of the late Raoul Gunsbourg, were auctioned at Sotheby’s. Three years later, the censor’s copy of the libretto turned up, with indications of the dialogue in the Venetian act. These Martin Cooper, “Orpheus returns from the shades,” unidentified clipping about Wendy Toye’s 1960 staging of Orpheus in the Underworld, Harvard Theatre Collection. 27 “Minor and Evans bow in City Opera ‘Hélène,’” New  York Times (28 Oct. 1976); Herbert Kupferberg, “Taking light opera seriously,” New York Herald Tribune (undated clipping, Harvard Theatre Collection). 28 Unidentified clipping from Philadelphia newspaper, Harvard Theatre Collection. 29 Hervé Lacombe, The keys to French opera in the nineteenth century, trans. Edward Schneider (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 65. 26

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materials enabled Michael Kaye and Jean-​Christophe Keck (who discovered the Stella-​Hoffmann duet to be the true finale of the opera) to fashion a streamlined version for the stage. These discoveries are a mixed blessing; nowadays most productions and recordings pick and choose from the new editions, offering up a mixed salad of Choudens, Oeser, Kaye, and Keck. Trying to solve the conundrum of Hoffmann led to a wider exploration of the Offenbach canon. Almeida turned up an alternative finale for La Grande-​Duchesse and numerous variant arias for other operas. He also compiled a thematic catalogue of Offenbach’s music. Keck resurrected Die Rheinnixen, which had its first revival at Montpellier in 2002 as Les fées du Rhin. Meanwhile he embarked on a massive catalogue of Offenbach’s complete works, to be published by Boosey & Hawkes in forty-​three volumes; it has grown so unwieldy and vulnerable to new trouvailles and revisions that he has decided to make it available on the Internet.30 In the meantime, Ralph Fischer has issued a provisional catalogue. All these efforts have been abetted by organizations and publications that appeared in the lead-​up to the Offenbach centenary in 1980. The first and most substantial of these organizations is the Jacques-​ Offenbach-​Gesellschaft, founded in Bad Ems on 19 October 1979, the brainchild of Heinz Wadepuhl, the director of the resort. Bad Ems had been the composer’s preferred spa between 1858 and 1870. He would often rehearse his ensemble for works to open in Paris in the autumn and even premiered eight operas in its Marble Hall. The Gesellschaft’s intention was to make Offenbach better known, through both publications and productions. From an initial subscription of forty-​nine signatories, by the mid 1990s it boasted a membership of four hundred. The original “Festival Week” in October expanded in 1991 to an International Festival, where many less familiar operas were staged; it was discontinued in 2007. Equally valuable are the scholarly activities, initiated in 1994, including the issuance of the Bad Emser Hefte, intensively researched monographs on various aspects of Offenbach’s life and works. They usually appear in German, but English translations have been made available in the newsletters and journals of other societies. The Gesellschaft attracted a number of specialists, both academics and amateurs, who have published widely on Offenbach: these include Robert Pourvoyeur and Jean-​Claude Yon in France, Peter Hawig in Germany, and George Hauger in England. Yon’s magisterial biography, published Jean-​ Christophe Keck, letter to Robert Folstein, Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 77 (Sep. 2016): 7.

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in 2000, is a treasure-​trove of information, which debunked many of the legends which have accreted around Offenbach and are invariably repeated in print. Yon and the collector Laurent Fraison were also responsible for a splendid Offenbach exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in 1996. The Anglo-​American Jacques Offenbach Society was founded that same year “with the object of bringing Offenbach’s music back into the public awareness,” according to its website. It issues a quarterly newsletter which announces and sometimes evaluates current productions and recordings and offers translations of previously printed material. Somewhat belatedly, Offenbach’s hometown created the Kölner Offenbach-​Gesellschaft in December 2015; its declared purpose is the “goal of establishing an appropriate memorial to the works of Jacques Offenbach in Cologne” (http://​ koelner-​offenbach-​gesellschaft.de). One of the most beneficial effects of these efforts has been a renewed interest in the staging of Offenbach and the recording of his music. The Festival des Châteaux de Bruniquel in the Pyrenees, founded in 1997, offers an annual performance, sometimes a classic, sometimes a rarity, under Keck’s musical supervision. The collaboration of the conductor Marc Minkowski with the co-​directors of the Théâtre nationale des Mi-​Pyrénées, Laurent Pelly and Agathe Mélinand, has blown the dust off many of the familiar operas, while Maurice Rosenthal has unearthed delightful obscurities. Accomplished artists such as Felicity Lott and Frederica von Stade have devoted themselves to perfecting the Offenbachian style, as younger singers learn the technique. Older recorded performances have been reissued, including radio broadcasts of many unfamiliar pieces, while commercial companies preserve interesting current performances. Sometimes there is a misguided attempt to titivate the operas with stars whose style is out of keeping with opéra bouffe (Jessye Norman as la belle Hélène?); but the availability to the listener of so many different interpretations, often based on well-​edited scores, is to be welcomed. An encouraging if inadvertent sign of renewed interest in Offenbach relates to Gilbert and Sullivan, The D’Oyly Carte Company had lost its monopoly on the Savoy Operas in 1961; lacking funding and facing strong competition from such competitors as the English National Opera, it folded in 1982. A legacy bequeathed to it by Bridget D’Oyly Carte enabled a brief resuscitation six years later, primarily as a producing organization. In 1993, it made its first foray into Offenbach since La Grande-​Duchesse nearly a century before; in tandem with an Australian Pirates of Penzance, it sponsored Opera North’s racy Orpheus in the Underworld, based on the 1858 version, with a Public Opinion strongly resembling Margaret

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Thatcher. Advertised as “a sexy romp” and “an operatic Rocky Horror Show,” it outraged traditionalists who complained “the Savoy operas were produced to clean up the stage and protect us from the sexual immoralities imported from France.”31 It toured twenty-​four venues, and an audience questionnaire called for more Offenbach. The waning taste for the Savoy Operas also led the Glasgow Orpheus Club to stage its namesake opéra bouffe in 2000; their losses were considerable, but their membership increased remarkably.32 The still thriving Leeds Gilbert and Sullivan Society, which does not disdain Broadway musicals, added Orpheus to its repertory in 2016. Along with performances of integral works there were olios and revues that drew music from numerous operas; these were particularly favored in France and Germany. One of the best was Rue de la Gaîté Offenbach, a life and times devised by the musical director of the Comédie-​Française, Michel Frantz, and first produced at the Nouveau Théâtre Mouffetard in Paris in 1993.33 Frantz himself assumed the role of Offenbach, in a very convincing makeup and the thickest of German accents, playing the piano accompaniment very deftly. The leitmotiv was personified by a sinister bass-​ baritone, part Coppélius, part Dr Mirakel, who keeps urging Offenbach to leave off light music and devote himself to grand opera. Eventually, he gets his wish: Les contes d’Hoffmann reaches the stage and Offenbach perishes in the process. The British and Americans prefer pastiche, perhaps because the translation and adaptation of the libretti are daunting exercises. One of the more successful is Christopher Columbus by John White, with a score plundered from Offenbach by Patric Schmid (1976); it had a successful run in Belfast before coming to London, with later revivals in the United States. The English National Opera had already had success at the London Coliseum with an English-​language Orpheus (1960, 1999), La vie (1961), and Helen (1963). In 1995 the playwright Michael Frayn confected La belle Vivette, the tale of a Second Empire diva whose lover, a penniless composer, has written an opera about Helen of Troy. His plans are dashed when his backer, who is keeping Vivette, invests instead in an epic music-​drama entitled The London Daily Telegraph (19 Mar. 1993), quoted in Ian Bradley, Oh joy! Oh rapture! The enduring phenomenon of Gilbert and Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 59–​60; David Fallows, “Heading for an Ur-​Orphée,” Times Literary Supplement (26 Jun. 1992): 18. 32 Bradley, Oh joy!, 139. These efforts were in vain. The D’Oyly Carte Co. succumbed definitively in 2003, and the Glasgow Orpheus Club, which had been active since 1897, in 2014. 33 When the revue was revived at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens eleven years later, it was filmed and made available on disc. 31

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Horn of the Norns. The lovers fly away from a besieged Paris in a balloon. For all the knowing references to Paris in the 1860s (the two Ajaces are “les frères Gonfleur,” the Tannhäuser fiasco is mentioned), too many gags and too many characters led the audience to lose interest.34 Two years earlier the Snow Troupe of the all-​female Takarazuka Company in Japan inaugurated Heaven and Hell. The Tale of Offenbach, a musical romance by Ueda Shinji with music by Terada Takio and Yoshida Yūko. A  musical group is rehearsing a new drama about Offenbach in a small Manhattan studio. We flash back to 1855, where actors from the frame story play the historical figures. Nobles grumble about Les deux aveugles. Hortense Schneider shows up for a role and turns out to be perfect for Orphée; the prima donna Cora Park (Cora Pearl?) quits in a huff and complains to Louis-​Napoléon that a sacred Greek myth is being parodied for fools. She convinces Jules Offenbach, the composer’s older brother, to help her recruit nobles to humiliate Jacques at a royal ball. His opera is a success, however; the sovereign is delighted, Cora is defeated. Back in present-​day New York, the cast learns the producer has run away with all the money. They split up, but not before singing about tomorrow being a better day.35

The Wandering Jew A jarring misstep in Rue de la Gaîté Offenbach was the interjection of an Eastern European Jewish peddler, claiming to be a relative of Offenbach; the anti-​Semitic caricature clashes with the good-​natured fooling of the other episodes. Offenbach’s Jewish background moves to the foreground in a recent attempt to put him on screen. The Hungarian director István Szabó often deals with the backstage maneuvers of performers and managers, but his best work presents the interaction of politics and theatre, particularly under the Nazis (Mephisto, 1981; Hanussen, 1988; Taking Sides, 2001). Artists struggle to maintain their integrity despite the demands made upon them by the powers-​that-​be, and, in the process, find themselves badly compromised. Offenbachs Geheimnis (Offenbach’s Secret, 1996) is set during the composer’s tenure at the Bouffes-​Parisiens in 1855, and the action is confined to the

Jonathan Keates, “Dubbing little Mozart,” Times Literary Supplement (22 Dec. 1995): 17. The plot seems to have influenced Baz Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge. 35 The four Takarazuka troupes combined in 1996 to offer an Offenbach medley in a grand revue Melodies and Memories, and in 2008 the Moon Troupe ambitiously presented a Tales of Hoffmann, adapted by Tani Masazumi. 34

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performance of a double bill: Les deux aveugles, which did appear that year, and Croquefer, ou Le dernier des paladins, which had its premiere only two years later. There is no attempt to recreate the performance conditions of the period. The film was shot in the József Katona Theatre in Kecskemét, a later, far more ornate and spacious house than Offenbach’s 300-​seat house in the Champs Élysées. In this film, the Comte de Morny is depicted as a machiavellian intriguer, eager to undermine his imperial half-​brother and his policies. He orders Offenbach to add certain names to the dialogue in Les deux aveugles, to insult the ambassadors of Turkey, Russia, Poland [sic], and Prussia and embarrass the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The tactic works; the opprobrium lights on the composer, while Morny takes credit as an appeaser with a popular appeal. In the intermission the Count goes further in forcing Offenbach to insert allusions to the Emperor himself in Croquefer. The composer complies, but in the finale the on-​stage quintet are garbed in white straitjackets, to be taken off to the asylum. As they sing, a grille comes down, separating them from the audience (shades of Peter Brook’s Marat/​Sade). Morny is livid and confronts Offenbach in his dressing-​room: “For whom was that meant?” he demands. “He who takes it personally” is the reply. For Szabó, the power relations between artists and politicians may seem farcical but are symptomatic of more serious issues. Halfway through the film Offenbach has a brief encounter in a corridor upbraided by his brother “Isaac” (not Juda/​Jules). Isaac is outraged that one of their father’s sacramental cello melodies has been incorporated into the score for a burlesque. Offenbach retorts that tunes belong to all the world and, in this instance, sacred and profane are meaningless categories. Although the word Jew is never used, this is a rare occasion in a film about Offenbach in which his paternal religion is alluded to. Earlier film-​makers shied away from the ticklish subject of the composer’s Jewishness. Many members of Szabó’s own family had, like Offenbach, converted to Catholicism, but were persecuted as Jews by the fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross Party (this is dramatized in his film Sunshine, 1999).36 Szabó’s movies often feature an individual who has perforce to conceal an aspect of his identity. What matters most to him is how the artist survives and preserves his own vision when pressured by a relentless power structure. For Szabó’s remarks on being Jewish, see Susan Rubin Suleiman, “On exile, Jewish identity, and filmmaking in Hungary:  a conversation with Istvan Szabó,” KinoKultura (24 Jan. 2008), http://​ www.kinokultura.com/​specials/​7/​ssi-​szabo.shtml.

36

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Offenbach’s Secret, while presenting two delightful, rarely seen, and uncut one-​act operas, also manages to turn the composer into a metonym for the artist’s conflict with power. Yet Offenbach’s position as the sexual liberator is still current on the modern stage. Staid Swiss playgoers, especially those who brought children with them, were affronted by full-​frontal male nudity and simulated lesbian sex in Olivier Pye’s Hoffmann at Geneva’s Grand Theatre in 2002. The Théâtre de l’Athénée in Paris staged a “gay-​marriage-​ friendly” La Grande-​Duchesse in 2013, in which Wanda is now a private soldier named Krak and Boum gets it on with Baron Grog in drag. The next year at the Bregenz Festspielhaus, the radical Norwegian director Stefan Herheim programmatically violated Hoffmann; in the first five minutes the Muse stripped off to reveal a pendant dildo as Lindorf shouted “What is this gay shit?” At the other end of the spectrum, a performance of Orpheus at the Victoria Theatre in puritanical Singapore was commended for omitting the cancan and covering the chorus in chemises.37 As La Périchole likes to sing, Mon Dieu, que les hommes sont bêtes!

Robert Evans, “Sex scenes and nudity intrigue Geneva opera fans,” Reuters (12 Jan. 2002); “Shining young stars in opera,” Straits Times (1 Aug. 2016).

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Periodicals Bulletin de la Société Jacques Offenbach. Dexter Smith’s Paper. The Era. Le Figaro. The Mask. Journal of the Jacques Offenbach Society. New York Clipper. Nineteenth-​Century Music. Maske und Kothurn. Opera Journal. Opera News. Revue d’histoire du théâtre. Teatr i Iskusstvo. Theatre (London). The Times of London. The Tomahawk.

Books and Articles General Reference Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, ed. Ettore Lo Gatto et  al. 8  vols. + supplements. Rome: Casa Editrice Editoriale, 1966. Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse. 15 vols. + 3 supplements. Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire universel, 1879–​1890. New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell. 2nd edn. 20 vols. New York: Grove, 1995. The Jewish Encyclopedia, ed. Isidore Singer et al. 15 vols. New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1907.

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Pipers Enzyklopädie des Musiktheaters, ed. Carl Dahlhaus and the Forschungsinstitut für Musiktheater der Universität Bayreuth directed by Sieghart Döhring. 7 vols. Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1991.

Works on Offenbach Actes du colloque Offenbach. Les Cahiers des amis du Festival d’art lyrique d’Aix-​ en-​Provence (Dec. 1999). Almeida, Antonio de. Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Jacques Offenbach. London:  Oxford University Press, 1997. (Now transferred to an on-​line website.) Apthorp, William F. “Jacques Offenbach,” International Review X (1881): 286–​96. Balsano, Maria Antonella. “Satira e parodia nelle operette di Offenbach,” in Sette variazioni a Luigi Rognoni. Musiche e studi dei discepoli palermitani. Palermo: Flaccovio, 1985. Pp. 139–​68. Barrault, Jean-​Louis and Madeleine Renaud, eds. Le siècle d’Offenbach. Cahiers de la compagnie Jean-​Louis Barrault-​Madeleine Renaud 24. Paris: Julliard, 1958. Brindejont-​Offenbach, Jacques. Offenbach, mon grand-​père. Paris: Plon, 1940. Brincken, Anna-​Dorothee von den. Jacques Offenbach. Katalog zur Ausstellung des Historischen Archivs der Stadt Köln. Cologne: Historisches Archiv, 1969. Chr. “Max Nordau über Offenbach und die Operette,” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 18 (4 May 1881): 27–​86; 19 (11 May 1881): 295–​302. Decaux, Alain. “Jacques Offenbach, peintre musical de la vie parisienne,” Historia 469 (Jan. 1986): 20–​28. De Mazza, E. M. “Small theatre. On the farce of normality in Jacques Offenbach’s operettas,” Modern Language Notes 120, 3 (Apr. 2005): 562–​89. D’Orves, Nicolas d’Estienne. Jacques Offenbach. Paris: Actes Sud/​Classica, 2010. Faris, Alexander. Jacques Offenbach. London: Faber and Faber, 1980. Folstein, Robert L. “A bibliography on Jacques Offenbach,” Current Musicology 12 (1971): 116–​28.   Jacques Offenbach: an annotated discography in five volumes. Bad Emser Hefte 181.1–​185.16 (also available on CD-​Rom from the author). Berg: Verein für Geschichte, Denkmal-​und Landschaftspflege e.V. Bad Ems, 1998–​2000. “The founder of opera bouffe,” Era (2 Dec. 1882). Francke, Rainer, ed. Offenbach und die Schauplätze seines Musiktheaters. Thurnauer Schriften zum Musiktheater 17. Laaber: Laaber, 1999. Gammond, Peter. Offenbach, his life and times. Speldhurst: Omnibus Books, 1980. Goninet, Philippe, ed. Jacques Offenbach. Lettres à Henri Meilhac et Ludovic Halévy. Paris: Séguier, 1994. Groviez, Gabriel. “Jacques Offenbach: a centennial sketch,” Musical Quarterly 5, 3 (Jul. 1919): 329–​37. Hanslick, Eduard. “Jacques Offenbach,” in Aus dem Opernleben der Gegenwart. Neue Kritiken und Studien. Berlin: A. Hoffmann, 1885. Pp. 268–​90. Harding, James. Jacques Offenbach. A biography. London: John Calder, 1980. Hawig, Peter. Jacques Offenbach. Facetten zu Leben und Werk. Cologne: Dohr, 1999.

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  Jacques Offenbach in Baden-​Baden (1869). Bad Emser Hefte 319.1 and 319.2. Offenbach Series 181 and 182. Berg: Verein für Geschichte, Denkmal-​und Landschaftspflege e.V. Bad Ems, 2011. Heinzelmann, Josef. “Offenbach-​Irrtümer,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 35, 7/​8 (Jul.–​Aug. 1980): 356–​70. Henseler, Anton. Jakob Offenbach. Berlin: Max Hesse, 1930.   “Offenbachs Komik,” Der Auftakt 10, 9–​10 (1930): 209–​12. Hersee, Henry. “Opéra-​bouffe,” The Theatre (1 Nov. 1878): 282–​83. Howard, Richard. “Jacques Offenbach,” in Misgivings. New York: Athenaeum, 1979. Jacob, Paul Walter. Jacques Offenbach, in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969. Kirsch, Winfried and Ronny Dietrich, eds. Jacques Offenbach:  Komponist und Weltbürger, ein Symposion in Offenbach am Main. Mainz: Schott, 1985. Kracauer, Siegfried. Jacques Offenbach and das Paris seiner Zeit, ed. Karsten Witte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976. Lamb, Andrew, “Offenbach in one act,” Musical Times 12, 1652 (Oct. 1980): 615–​17. Lasalle, Albert de. “Offenbach,” Le Monde illustré (17 Oct. 1880): 235. Lehmann, Victor. “Offenbach,” Blätter des Deutschen Theaters 8, 9 (1922): 65–​68. Leibowitz, René. “Jacques Offenbach oder die Verkleidungen der Großen Oper,” in Jacques Offenbach. Musik-​Konzepte Heft 13. Ed. Heinz-​Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1980. Pp. 5–​16. Loyrette, Henri, ed. Entre le théâtre et l’histoire. La famille Halévy. Paris: Librairie Anthème Fayard, 1996. Luez, Philippe. Jacques Offenbach (1819–​ 1880). Musicien européen. Paris: Séguier, 2001. Marcenaro, Marion. “Jacques Offenbach en de operette. Het Parijse muziekleven in de tweede helft van de negentiende eeuw,” Muziek & Wetenschap –​Dutch Journal for Musicology 3, 3 (1993): 215–​22. Martinet, André. Offenbach, sa vie et son œuvre. Paris: Dentu, 1887. Matala de Mazza, Ethel. “Kleines Theater. Zur Farce der Normalität in Jacques Offenbachs Operette,” Modern Language Notes 120, 3 (2005): 562–​89. Metzger, Heinz-​Klaus and Rainer Riehn, eds. Jacques Offenbach. Musik-​Konzepte Heft 13. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1980. Moss, Arthur and Evalyn Marvel. Cancan and barcarolle. The life and times of Jacques Offenbach. New York: Exposition Press, 1954. Nordau, Max. Aus dem wahren Milliardenlande: Pariser Studien und Bilder. 2 vols. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1878. Northcott, Richard. Jacques Offenbach. A sketch of his life and a record of his operas. London: Press Printers, 1917. Obituary of Jacques Offenbach, Times (London) (16 Oct. 1880): 236. Offenbach, Jacques. Histoire d’une valse. Score. Paris: A. Choudens, 1878. Offenbach, Jacques and Albert Wolff. Offenbach en Amérique. Notes d’un musicien en voyage. Paris: Calmann-​Lévy, 1877. Offenbach, Jacques. Orpheus in America. Offenbach’s diary of his journey to the New World. Trans. Lander MacClintock. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1957.

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Offenbach 1819–​1880: a tribute. London: Offenbach 1980 Committee, 1980. Patochka, Ralph-​Günther. Operette als Moraltheater. Jacques Offenbachs Libretti zwischen Sittenschule und Sittenverderbnis. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002. Pourvoyeur, Robert. Offenbach. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Richardson, Joanna. “Offenbach,” History Today (1 May 1969): 310–​16. Rieger, Erwin. Offenbach und seine Weiner Schule. Vienna:  Wiener literarische Anstalt, 1920. Rissin, David. Offenbach, ou le rire en musique. Paris: Fayard, 1966. Schipperges, Thomas, Christoph Dorr, and Kerstin Rüllke, eds. Bibliotheca Offenbachiana: Jacques Offenbach (1819–​1880), eine systematisch-​chronologische Bibliographie (Beiträge zur Offenbach-​Forschung). Cologne: Dohr, 1998. Scott, Jesse L. “The operetta and Jacques Offenbach: the genre as a valid source of history,” Opera Journal 16:3 (1983), 3. Schneider, Louis. Offenbach. Les maîtres de l’opérette française. Paris:  Librairie académique Perrin, 1923. Senelick, Laurence. “The Offenbach century,” in The art of theatre. Word, image and performance in France and Belgium c.  1830–​ 1910, ed. Claire Moran (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013). Pp. 15–​42. Stein, Elliott. “Offenbach, or a Parisian life,” Musical Times 102, 1420 (Jun. 1961): 348–​50. Tozzi, Lorenzo. “La smofia graffiante di Offenbach,” in program for La Périchole, Teatro dell’opera di Roma, 1984–​85. Pp. 16–​25. Trauberg, Leonid. Zhak Offenbakh i drugie. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987. Wegener, Gertrude. Jacques Offenbach. Schauplätze eines Musikerlebens. Katalog zur Ausstellung des Historischen Archivs der Stadt Köln in Bad Ems und Köln 1980. Cologne: 1980. Wehmeyer, Grete. Höllengalopp und Götterdämmerung. Lachkultur bei Jacques Offenbach und Richard Wagner. Cologne: Dittrich, 1997. Wiegler, Paul. “Das Theater Offenbachs,” Blätter des Deutschen Theaters 8, 9 (1922): 68–​70. Yon, Jean-​Claude. Jacques Offenbach. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.   “L’opéra-​bouffe offenbachien:  quelques pistes pour l’étude de la circulation mondiale d’un repertoire au XIXe siècle,” in La circulation transatlantique des imprimés –​connexions, ed. Márcia Abreu and Marisa Midori Deacto. Campinas: UNICAMP/​IEL/​Secteurs des publications, 2014. Pp. 291–​98. Yon, Jean-​Claude. and Laurent Fraison, with Dominique Ghesquière. Offenbach. Les Dossiers du Musée d’Orsay no.  58. Paris:  Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1996.

Individual Works of Offenbach Almeida, Antonio de. “‘Hoffmann’:  the original(?) version”, Opera (Dec. 1980): 1169–​72. Babbington, Bruce and Peter Evans. “Matters of life and death in Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann,” in A Night at the Opera:  Media

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Representations of Opera, ed. Jeremy Tambling. London:  J. Libbey, 1994. Pp. 145–​68. La belle Hélène/​Jacques Offenbach (1819–​1880). Program for the production at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, 2000. Bertall, “Les costumes des Brigands aux Variétés,” La vie parisienne (25 Dec. 1869): 987. Citron, Marcia. “Cinema and the power of fantasy:  Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann and Syberberg’s Parsifal,” in Opera on screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 112–​60. Crowther, Bosley. “The Tales of Hoffmann,” New York Times (5 Apr. 1951). Csampai, Attila and Dietmar Holland, eds. Hoffmanns Erzählungen:  Texte, Materialien, Kommentare. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984. De la Roche, Catherine. “Films of the month:  The Tales of Hoffmann,” Film Bulletin (May 1951): 17–​18. Diffrient, David Scott. “A fetish for fugitive aesthetics: cinematic kitsch and visual pleasures in The Tales of Hoffmann,” Modern Issues (Jun. 2011): 1–​21. Driscoll, F. Paul. “Offenbach:  The Tales of Hoffmann,” Opera News 70, 11 (May 2006). Duault, Alain, ed. La Périchole. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 66. Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 1984. Dujardin, Édouard. “De La Périchole et de l’absolu dans la musique,” La Revue blanche (1 Jul. 1895): 11–​14. Fallon, Gabriel. “The technicolors of Offenbach,” Irish Monthly 79, 941 (Nov. 1951): 183–​86. Fallows, David. “Heading for an Ur-​Orphée,” Times Literary Supplement (26 Jun. 1992): 18. Fry, Andy. “Du jazz hot à ‘La Créole’:  Josephine Baker sings Offenbach,” Cambridge Opera Journal 16, 1 (Mar. 2004): 43–​76. Gibbon, Monk. The Tales of Hoffmann. A  study of the film. London:  Saturn Press, 1951. Girardi, Michele. “‘La stravaganza è il mio impero, per me la follia è un’arte.’ Parodia musicale in Orphée aux enfers,” in program for Orfeo all’inferno, Teatro La Fenice, Venice, 1985, 21–​31. Greenfield, Amy. “Tales of Hoffmann,” Film Comment 31, 2 (Mar. 1995): 31. Hadlock, Heather. Mad loves. Women and music in Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Heinzelmann, Josef. “Jacques Offenbach: ‘Hoffmanns Erzählungen’: Entstehungs­ geschichte und derzeitige Quellenlage,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 58, 7 (2003): 15–​31. Henderson, Robert. “Opera on the gramophone 49: ‘Les contes d’Hoffmann,’” Opera (Dec. 1980): 1173–​79; (Jan. 1981): 31–​39. Hoffmanns Erzählungen. Ein Sonderdruck der Deutschen Buch-​Gemeinschaft anläßlich der Max Reinhardt-​Inszenierung von Offenbachs Hoffmanns Erzählungen im Großen Schauspielhaus Berlin. Berlin: Deutsche Buch-​Gemeinschaft, 1931. Hofler, Robert. “The Tales of Hoffmann,” Variety (4 Dec. 2009).

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Kesting, Jürgen. “Focus: Krick-​Krack oder: Hoffmanns Tod auf den Schienen: Zur Hamburger ‘Uraufführung’ der rekonstruierten ‘Contes d’Hoffmann’ von Jacques Offenbach,” Opernwelt –​das internationale Opernmagazin 40, 3 (Mar. 1999): 11–​13. Lb., H. “Madame l’Archiduc,” Der Auftakt 10, 9–​10 (1930): 218. Lefebvre, Thierry. “A Trip to the Moon. A composite film,” in Fantastic voyages of the cinematic imagination. Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon, ed. Matthew Solomon. New York: SUNY Press, 2011. Pp. 51–​63. Liébert, Jean-​Claude. “Jean-​Louis Barrault monte ‘La vie parisienne,’” Romantisme 102, 4 (1998): 51–​61. Macdonald, Hugh. “Hoffmann’s melancholy tale,” Musical Times 12, 1617 (1980): 622–​24. Meilhac, Henri and Ludovic Halévy. Les brigands. Opera bouffe en trois actes. L’adaptation anglaise par W. S. Gilbert. London: Boosey & Co., 1871. [Mortier, Arnold]. Promenade autour d’Orphée aux enfers, par un monsieur de l’orchestre. Paris: Charles Schiller, 1874. Negri, Gino. “Offenbach e Orfeo,” in program for Orfeo all’inferno, Teatro La Fenice, Venice, 1985, pp. 7–​19. Neuschäfer, Hans-​Jörg, “Die Mythenparodie in La Belle Hélène. Zum 100. Todestag von Jacques Offenbach,” Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 5, 1 (1981): 63–​73. O’Connor, Patrick. “Offenbach, the Opéra-​Comique and Vert-​Vert,” in booklet, Opera Rara ORC 41, 2 CDs (2010): 30–​34. Pazdro, Michel, ed. La belle Hélène. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 125. Paris:  Éditions Premières Loges, 1989.   Les contes d’Hoffmann. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 235. Paris:  Éditions Premières Loges, 1993.   Orphée aux enfers. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 125. Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 1998. Perdoni, L. A. Jacques Offenbach’s Whittington –​London 1875 and 2005. Bad Emser Hefte 264. Berg:  Verein für Geschichte, Denkmal-​und Landschaftspflege e.V. Bad Ems, 2006.  “Vert-​Vert in London in 1874,” Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 50 (Dec. 2009): 7–​13. Rabbi, Stella Gargantini. “La critica accusa Offenbach di lesa mitologia. Il pubblico lo assolve,” in program for Orfeo all’inferno, Teatro La Fenice, Venice, 1985, pp. 43–​48. Revard, Stella P. “Mythic structure in Offenbach’s ‘Tales of Hoffmann’: Orpheus and the muse,” Ars Lyrica 8 (1994): 25–​32. Scheier, Claus-​Artur, “Der Großaugur schummelt –​Die schöne Helena im Paris Jacques Offenbachs,” in Troia –​Traum und Wirklichkeit. Ein Mythos in Geschichte und Rezeption, ed. Hans-​Joachim Behr, Gerd Biegel, and Helmut Castritus. Braunschweig: Theiss, 2003. Pp. 206–​13. Schneider, Louis. “La première de La vie parisienne et les reprises de cette opérette,” souvenir program of the 1931 La vie parisienne. Paris: M. & J. de Brunoff, 1931.

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Senelick, Laurence. “The opening night of Vert-​Vert,” Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 71 (Mar. 2015): 17–​23. Sitwell, Sacheverell. La vie parisienne. A tribute to Offenbach. London: Faber and Faber, 1937. Stern, Lesley. “The Tales of Hoffmann: an instance of operality,” in Between opera and cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Rose Teresa. New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. 39–​57. Théâtre, Le (Paris). Orphée aux enfers. Special issue 99 (1903). U., Dr M. “Jacques Offenbach: Robinsoniade,” Der Auftakt 10, 9–​10 (1930): 215–​16. Wilder, V. “I racconti di Hoffmann di G. Offenbach all’Opéra Comique di Parigi,” Il Teatro illustrato 3 (Mar. 1881): 3–​4. X.X. “La vie parisienne,” in Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, La vie parisienne. Pièce en cinq actes. Musique de M. J. Offenbach. Paris: Librairie illustrée, 1875. Pp. i–​vii. Yon, Jean-​Claude, ed. La vie parisienne. L’Avant-​scène Opéra 206. Paris: Éditions Premières Loges, 2002.

Works on Opera, Opera Bouffe, Operetta, and Light Opera Bouvery, André. Les musiciens célèbres du Second Empire jugés par leurs contemporaines ... Paris: Augustin Challemel, 1911. Bruyr, José. L’operette. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962. Conrad, Peter. A song of love and death. The meaning of opera. New York: Poseidon Press, 1987. D’Ollone, Max. Le théâtre lyrique et le public. Paris and Geneva: La Palatine, 1955. Duteurtre, Benoît. L’opérette en France. Paris: Fayard, 2009. Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. “The musical representation of the grotesque in nineteenth-​century opera,” Opera Quarterly 16, 1 (Winter 2000): 34–​51. Einstein, Alfred. Music in the Romantic era. New York: W. W. Norton, 1947. Gänzl, Kurt. The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre. 2 vols. New York: Schirmer Books, 1994. Gier, Albert. “‘Orpheus’ und ‘Carmen’. Arbeit am Mythos bei Crémieux, Halévy und Meilhac,” Bremer Jahrbuch für Musikkultur 3(1997): 38–​88.   “Volkslied und Bänkelsang. Einlagelied von Grétry bis Jacques Offenbach,” in Die Opéra comique und ihr Einfluß auf das europäische Musiktheater im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Schneider and Nicole Wild. Hildesheim:  Georg Olm, 1997. Gregor, Joseph. Kulturgeschichte der Oper. Ihre Verbindung mit dem Leben, den Werken des Geistes und der Politik. Vienna: Gallus, 1941. Huebner, Steven. French opera at the fin de siècle. Wagnerism, nationalism and style. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. James, Henry. The scenic art:  notes on acting and the drama, 1872–​ 1901. New York: Hill & Wang, 1946. Keller, Otto. Die Operette in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung. Musik. Libretto. Darstellung. Leipzig: Stein, 1926.

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Baum, Rachel. “Bellmer now,” Art Journal 61, 2 (Summer 2002): 103–​4. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tillman Rexroth. 4 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973. Berl, Heinrich. Das Judentum in der Musik. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag-​Anstalt, 1926. Blessinger, Karl. Judentum und Musik. Ein Beitrag zur Kultur-​und Rassenpolitik. Berlin: Bernhard Hahnefeld, 1944. Bloch, Ernst. “Rescuing Wagner through surrealistic colportage,” in Heritage of our times. Trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Pp. 338–​45.   “Der eigentümliche Glücksfall über Jacques Offenbach,” in Siegfried Kracauer. TEXT+KRITIK Heft 68. Ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1980. Pp. 73–​75. Botstein, Leon. “German Jews and Wagner,” in Richard Wagner und his world, ed. Thomas S. Grey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. 151–​97. Branscombe, Peter. “Die frühe Offenbach-​ Rezeption in Wien und Nestroys Anteil daran,” Austriaca. Cahiers universitaires d’information sur l’Autriche, Université de Rouen 46 (Jun. 1998): 41–​52. Braunmüller, Robert. Oper als Drama. Das “realistiche Musiktheater” Walter Felsensteins. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002. Brecht, Bertolt. Schriften zum Theater. Berlin and Weimar: Suhrkamp, 1964. Bredehöft, Hermann. “Der Verfall der Operette,” Deutsche Dramaturgie. Zeitschrift für die Probleme der darstellenden Künste (1942): 84–​87. Bredehöft, Hermann. “Operette am Scheidewege,” Deutsche Dramaturgie. Zeitschrift für die Probleme der darstellenden Künste (1943): 159–​62. Bub, Stefan. “Jacques Offenbach bei Walter Benjamin und Siegfried Kracauer,” Euphorion 100, 1 (2006): 117–​28. Buck, Elmar. Thalia in Flammen. Theaterbrände in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Erlensee and Cologne: EFB, 2000. Carlé, Wolfgang. Das hat Berlin schon mal gesehn. Eine Historie des Friedrichstadt-​ Palastes. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978. Cheshire, D. F. “Tales of Hoffmann and Hans Bellmer,” Theatrephile 2, 7 (Summer 1985): 19. Chrysander, Friedrich. “Max Nordau über Offenbach und die Operette,” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, third series 18, 4 (11 May 1881):  279–​86, 295–​305. Cuno, Frank. “Reinhardts Inszenierung von ‘Hoffmanns Erzählungen,’” Maske und Kothurn 3 (1957): 276–​79. Deutsch, Otto Erich. “Offenbach, Kraus und die Anderen (1931),” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, 18 (1963): 408–​12. Deutsche Buch-​ Gemeinschaft, ed. Hoffmanns Erzählungen. Ein Sonderdruck der Deutschen Buch-​Gemeinschaft anläßlich der Max Reinhardt-​Inszenierung von Offenbachs Hoffmanns Erzählungen im Großen Schauspielhaus Berlin. Berlin: Deutsche Buch-​Gemeinschaft, 1931. Devrient, Eduard. Aus seinen Tagebüchern. Karlsruhe 1852–​1870. Ed. Rolf Kabel. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1964.

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Klee, Paul. Briefe an die Familie, ed. Felix Klee. 2 vols. Cologne: Dumont, 1979. Knepler, Georg. Karl Kraus liest Offenbach. Erinnerungen, Kommentäre, Dokumentationen. Vienna: Löcker, 1984. Kobán, Ilse. Routine zerstört das Stück oder Die Sau hat kein Theaterblut. Erlesenes und Kommentiertes aus Briefen und Vorstellungsberichten zur Ensemblearbeit Felsensteins. Zum 50jährigen Bestehen der Komischen Oper Berlin. Wilhelms­ horst: Märkischer, 1997. Koch, Gertrud. Siegfried Kracauer. An introduction. Trans. Jeremy Gaines. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Köhler, Joachim. Nietzsche and Wagner:  a lesson in subjugation. Trans. Ronald Taylor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Kothes, Franz-​Peter. Die theatralische Revue in Berlin und Wien 1900–​1938. Typen, Inhalt, Funktionen. Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofer, 1977. Kraus, Karl. “Offenbach-​Renaissance (zum Vortrag von ‘Pariser Leben’),” Der Auftakt 10, 9–​10 (1930): 197–​203.   Theater der Dichtung. Jacques Offenbach. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. Křenek, Ernst. “Karl Kraus und Offenbach,” Der Auftakt 10, 9–​10 (1930): 212–​15. Leisler, Edda and Gisela Prossnitz, eds. Max Reinhardt in Europa. Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1973. Lerner, Gerda. A life of learning. Charles Homer Haskins lecture for 2005. Princeton, N.J.: American Council of Learned Societies, 2005. Levi, Erik. Music in the Third Reich. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994. Liébert, Georges. Nietzsche and music. Trans. David Pellauer and Graham Parkes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Liegler, Leopold. “Nachwort zu Johann Nestroys ‘Häuptling Abendwind’,” Der Pflug (Sep. 1926): 39–​40. Love, Frederick R. “Nietzsche, music and madness,” Music and Letters 60, 2 (Apr. 1979): 186–​203. Mandl, Henriette. Cabaret und Courage. Stella Kadmon –​eine Biographie. Vienna: Wiener Universitätsverlag, 1993. Max-​Reinhardt-​Forschung Stätte Salzburg. Max Reinhardt. Sein Theater in Bildern. Velber bei Hannover: Friedrich, 1968. McMurray, John. “Die Komische Oper, Berlin,” Musical Times 130, 1758 (Aug. 1989): 452–​54. Meyer, Michael. The politics of music in the Third Reich. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Michaelsen, René. “Eine andere Ausdrucksform für ernste, philosophisch begründete Inhalte, Jacques Offenbachs Spuren in Kurt Weills Musiktheater am Beispiel von Der Zar lässt sich photografieren,” in Kurt Weill und Frankreich, ed. Andreas Eichhorn. Münster: Waxmann, (2014): pp. 157–76. Moltke, Johannes von. “Teddie and Friedel:  Theodor W.  Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and the erotics of friendship,” Criticism 51, 4 (Fall 2009): 683–​94. Nagler, Norbert. “Jacques Offenbachs musikalische Utopie:  die Sehnsucht nach der herrschaftsarmen Heimat. Reflexionen zu Siegfried Kracauers Gesellschaftsbiographie des Second Empire,” in Jacques Offenbach.

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Smith, Matthew Wilson. The total work of art. From Bayreuth to cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2007. Sokolskiy, M. “Tamino otpravlyaetsya v put ...,” Teatr 3 (1960): 177–​83. Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Spohr, Mathias. “Häuptling Abendwind. Nestroys Entgegnung auf das kulturelle Umfeld der Pariser Operette,” Nestroyana 1/​2, 9 (1989): 17–​21. Stengel, Theo and Herbert Gerigk. Lexikon der Juden in der Musik mit einem Titelverzeichnis jüdischer Werke. Berlin: Bernhard Hahnefeld, 1940. Stern, Ernst. My life on the stage. Trans. Edward Fitzgerald. London:  Victor Gollancz, 1951. Stern, Ernst. and Heinz Herald. Reinhardt und seine Bühne. Bilder von der Arbeit des Deutschen Theaters. Berlin: Dr Ensler, 1919. Sternbach-​Gärtner, Lotte. “Karl Kraus und Offenbach,” Der Monat (Berlin) 96, 8 (Sep. 1956): 55–​61. Strauss, Richard and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. A working friendship. The correspondence between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Trans. Hans Hammelmann and Ewald Osers. New York: Random House, 1961. Taylor, Sue. Hans Bellmer:  the anatomy of anxiety. Cambridge, Mass.:  MIT Press, 2000. Thimig-​Reinhardt, Helene. Wie Max Reinhardt lebt. Percha: R. R. Schulz, 1973. Timms, Edward. “Karl Kraus’s adaptations of Offenbach: the quest for the other sphere,” Austrian Studies 13 (2005): 91–​108. Vogler, Martin. “Spielplan eines Jahrzehnts. Eine dramaturgische Betrachtung,” in 10 Jahre Komische Oper. Ed. Wolfgang Hammerschmidt. Berlin: Komische Oper Berlin, 1958. Pp. 130–​42. Volbach, Walther R. Memoirs of Max Reinhardt’s theatres 1920–​1922. Theatre Survey Monograph 13. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972. Wagner, Cosima. Cosima Wagner’s diaries, ed. and annotated by Martin Gregor-​ Dellin and Dietrick Amack; trans. Geoffrey Skelton. 2  vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978–​1980. Wagner, Richard. Richard Wagner’s prose works. Trans. William Ashton Ellis. 8 vols. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1895–​1899.   Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Julius Kapp. 12 vols. Leipzig: Hesse & Becker, 1914.   Wagner on music and drama. A compendium of Richard Wagner’s prose works. Ed. Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1964.   Briefe. Ed. Hans-​Joachim Bauer. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995. Wahnrau, Gerhard. Berlin. Stadt der Theater. Der Chronik. Teil I. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1957. Weigel, Hans. Karl Kraus oder Die Macht der Ohnmacht. Vienna: Brandstätter, 1972. Weissweiler, Eva. Ausgemerzt! Das Lexikon der Juden in der Musik und seine mörderische Folgen. Cologne: Dittrich, 1999. Williams, W. D. Nietzsche and the French. A  study of the influence of Nietzsche’s French reading on his thought and writing. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952. Wulf, Joseph. Musik im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation. Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1983.

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Youngkin, Stephen D. Lost one. A life of Peter Lorre. Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. Zweig, Arnold. “Zu ‘Hoffmans Erzählungen,’” Die Weltbühne (Berlin) 22 (19 Feb. 1958).

United Kingdom Adams, W. Davenport, “Our Musical-​box,” The Theatre (1 Feb. 1881): 119. Archer, William. About the theatre. Essays and studies. (London: T. F. Unwin, 1886). Bennett, Arnold. The Journal of Arnold Bennett. New York: Literary Guild, 1933. Bradley, Ian. Oh joy! Oh rapture! The enduring phenomenon of Gilbert and Sullivan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Christie, Ian, ed. Powell, Pressburger and others. London: British Film Institute, 1978.   Arrows of desire. The films of Michael Powell and Emmerich Pressburger. London: Faber & Faber, 1985. Cleugh, James. Charles Blake Cochran. Lord Bountiful. London: Pallas, n.d. Cochran, Charles. The secrets of a showman. London: William Heinemann, 1929. Cotes, Peter. George Robey “the darling of the halls.” London: Cassell, 1972. Craufurd, Russell. The ramblings of an old mummer. London: Greening, 1909. Davis, Tracy C. Actresses as working women. London: Routledge, 1991. Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge. The letters of Lewis Carroll. Edited by Morton N. Cohen with the assistance of Roger Lancelyn Green. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. “Dramatic notes,” The Westminster Papers: a monthly journal of chess, whist, games of skill, and the drama 11 (1 Feb. 1879): 224–​27. Dukes, Ashley. “The English scene. Visitors to London,” Theatre Arts Monthly 16 (Apr. 1932): 280–​82. Eden, David, ed. The Chieftain: a centenary review of Sullivan’s partnership with F. C. Burnand. Coventry: The Sir Arthur Sullivan Society, 1994. Foulkes, Richard. Lewis Carroll and the Victorian stage. Theatricals in a quiet life. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Gänzl, Kurt. Emily Soldene. In search of a singer. 2 vols. Wellington, N.Z.: Steele Roberts, 2007. Goddard, Scott. “Offenbach und England,” Der Auftakt 10, 9–​10 (Sept.–​Oct. 1930): 207–​9. Hamilton, Edith. “W. S.  Gilbert:  a mid-​Victorian Aristophanes,” Theatre Arts Monthly 11 (1927): 781–​90. Hauger, George. “Offenbach: English obituaries and realities,” Musical Times 12, 1652 (1980): 619–​21.   “Offenbach in English: a checklist,” Theatre Notebook 34, 1 (1980): 9–​14. Herbert, A. P. Helen. A comic opera in three acts based upon “La belle Hélène” by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. London: Methuen, 1932.   A. P. H.: his life and times. London: Heinemann, 1970. Herbert, A. P. and A. Davies-​Adams. La vie parisienne. A comic opera in three acts. London: Ernest Benn, 1929.

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Hersee, Henry. “Opéra-​bouffe,” The Theatre (1 Nov. 1878): 281–​84. Hobson, Harold. Theatre in Britain. A personal view. Oxford: Phaidon, 1984. Hollingshead, John. Gaiety chronicles. Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1898. Hudson, Derek. Munby, man of two worlds. The life and diaries of Arthur J. Munby 1828–​1910. London: John Murray, 1972. Keates, Jonathan. “Dubbing little Mozart,” Times Literary Supplement (22 Dec. 1995): 17. Linton, Elizabeth Lynn. Essays upon social subjects. London: Richard Bentley & Sons, 1883. Mars-​Jones, Adam. “Between two worlds,” Times Literary Supplement (13 Mar. 2015): 17. Marshall, C. W. “A. P. Herbert’s Helen and every marriage since 1937,” Theatre Notebook 67, 1 (2013): 44–​57. McElroy, George. “Meilhac and Halévy –​and Gilbert:  comic converses,” in Gilbert and Sullivan. Ed. James Helyar. Lawrence:  University of Kansas Libraries, 1961. Oost, Regina B. Gilbert and Sullivan. Class and the Savoy tradition, 1875–​1896. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009. Pascoe, Charles Eyre. Dramatic notes. An illustrated handbook of the London theatres, 1879. London: David Bogue, 1879. Planché, J. R. The extravaganzas of J.  R. Planché, Esq., (Somerset Herald) 1825–​ 1871, ed. T. F. Dillon Croker and Stephen Tucker. 5 vols. London: Samuel French, 1879. Powell, David. “Offenbach in English,” Theatre Notebook 35, 2 (1981): 87–​8. Powell, Michael. Million dollar movie. London: William Heinemann, 1990. Rendle, Thomas McDonald. Swings and roundabout:  a yokel in London. London: Chapman and Hall, 1919. Senelick, Laurence. “Eroticism in early theatrical photography,” Theatre History Studies 11 (1991): 1–​47. Shaw, George Bernard. Collected letters 1898–​ 1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt, 1972.   London music in 1888–​ 89 as heard by Corno di Bassetto (later known as Bernard Shaw) with further autobiographical particulars. New York: Vienna House, 1973.   Music in London 1890–​94. Criticisms contributed week by week to The World. 3 vols. New York: Vienna House, 1973.   Collected letters 1911–​1925. Edited by Dan H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985. Sherson, Erroll. London’s lost theatres of the nineteenth century. London: Ayer, 1925. Sichel, Walter. “The English Aristophanes,” The Fortnightly Review 96 (Dec. 1911): 681–​704. Soldene, Emily. “‘La Périchole’: a memory,” The Sketch (27 Oct. 1897): 24.   My theatrical and musical recollections. London: Downey, 1898. Stedman, Jane. W. S. Gilbert. A classic Victorian and his theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Sturgis, Howard O. Belchamber. London: Gerald Duckworth, 1904.

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Trudgill, Eric. Madonnas and magdalens: the origin and development of Victorian sexual attitudes. London: Heinemann, 1976. Van Vechten, Carl. “Sir Arthur Sullivan,” in In the garret. New  York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1920. Pp. 171–​204. Wells, Walter J. Souvenir of Sir Arthur Sullivan Mus. Doc. M.V.O. A brief sketch of his life and works. London: George Newnes, 1901. Williamson, Audrey. Gilbert & Sullivan opera. An assessment. London:  Marion Boyars, 1982. Wilson, Geoffrey. “W. S.  Gilbert and Les Brigands,” Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 33 (Sep. 2005): 10–​11.

North America Aronson, Arnold. Architect of dreams:  the theatrical vision of Joseph Urban. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Beecher, Henry Ward. Lectures to young men on various important subjects. New York: M. H. Newman, 1850. Bilodeau, Louis, “Offenbach à Montréal avant 1914,” in Le théâtre français à l’étranger au XIXe. Histoire d’une suprématie culturelle, ed. Jean-​Claude Yon. Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2008. Pp. 90–​106. Brown, T. Allston. A history of the New York stage from the first performance in 1732 to 1901. 2 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1903. Buckley, Peter G. “The culture of ‘leg-​work’: the transformation of burlesque after the Civil War,” in The myth-​making frame of mind. Social imagination and American culture, ed. James Gilbert, Amy Gilman, Donald M. Scott, and Joan W. Scott. Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1993. Pp. 113–​34. Caldwell, Sarah with Rebecca Matlock. Challenges. A memoir of my life in opera. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Carter, Randolph and Robert Reed Cole. Joseph Urban. Architecture –​Theatre –​ Opera –​Film. New York: Abbeville Press, 1992. Coward, Noël. The Noël Coward diaries, ed. Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley. Boston: Little, Brown, 1982. Davis, Ronald L. A history of opera in the American West. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-​ Hall, 1965. Dorati, Antal. Notes of seven decades. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981. Dizikes, John. Opera in America. A cultural history. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Eaton, Quaintance. The Boston Opera Company. New York: Appleton-​Century, 1965. Elderkin, John. A brief history of the Lotos Club. New York: Club House, 1895. Ellington, George. The women of New  York, or Social life in the great city. New York: New York Book Co., 1870. Fox, Donald H. “Why doesn’t the average educated American know more about Offenbach’s works?”, Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 69 (Sep. 2014): 10. “From opera bouffe to ‘Pinafore’,” Boston Transcript (24 Nov. 1900). Gabriel, Gilbert W. “The perils of La Périchole,” New York Sun (22 Dec. 1925): 22.

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Gagey, Edmond. The San Francisco stage. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1950. Gilfoyle, Timothy. City of Eros. New York City, prostitution, and the commercialization of sex, 1790–​1920. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Gilliam, Bryan. “A Viennese opera composer in Hollywood: Korngold’s double exile in America,” in Driven into paradise: the musical migration from Nazi Germany to the United States, ed. Reinhold Brinkman and Christoph Wolff. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Rereading sex. Battles over sexual knowledge and suppression in nineteenth-​century America. New  York:  Alfred A.  Knopf, 2002. Howells, William Dean. “The new taste for theatricals,” Atlantic Monthly (May 1869): 635–​44. Kaiser, D. J. The evolution of Broadway musical entertainment 1830–​2009: interlingual and intermedial influence. Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 2013. Klein, Howard. “Nicolai Gedda sings title role in ‘Tales of Hoffmann’ at Met,” New York Times (19 Dec. 1964). Koegel, John. Music in German immigrant theater. New  York City, 1840–​1940. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2009. Lamb, Andrew, “Offenbach in one act,” Musical Times 12, 1652 (Oct. 1980): 615–​17. Lawrence, Vera Brodsky. Strong on music. The New York scene in the days of George Templeton Strong. Vol. III. Repercussions 1857–​1862. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1999. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/​lowbrow. The emergence of cultural hierarchy in American culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Lyster, Fred. “Thoughts on matters lyric and dramatic,” Bedford’s Monthly (Chicago) 9 (Nov. 1892): 623–​24 Marks, Edward B. They all had glamour, from the Swedish Nightingale to the Naked Lady. New York: Julian Messner, 1944. Martin, Richard. “Some lobsters, some elephants, surrealist reflections on Joseph Cornell’s ‘A Pantry Ballet (for Jacques Offenbach),’” Arts Magazine 60, 6 (Feb. 1986): 30–​32. Moon, Krystyn R. Yellowface. Creating the Chinese in American popular music and performance 1850s–​ 1920s. New Brunswick, N.J.:  Rutgers University Press, 2005. Morgan, James Oliver. French comic opera in New York, 1855–​1890. Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois, 1959. Morrell, Parker. Lillian Russell, the era of plush. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing Co., 1940. Nachman, Gerald. Seriously funny. The rebel comedians of the 1950s and 1960s. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. Nathan, George Jean. The theater book of the year 1942–​1943: a record and an interpretation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.   The theater book of the year, 1943–​1944. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944.

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Norton, Elliot. “Ex-​Hub hit ‘Helen’ fails in Philly,” Boston Record-​American (6 Sept. 1962). “Opera bouffe and its manager,” Every Saturday (4 Feb. 1871): 114–​15. Prince, Ancliffe. Helen goes to Troy. A  comic opera in three acts. Mimeographed script, National Operatic and Dramatic Association, n.d. Rella, Ettore. The history of burlesque. San Francisco Theatre Research Series 14. San Francisco: Work Projects Administration, 1940. Root, Deane L. American popular music 1860–​1880. Ann Arbor, Mich.:  UMI Research Press, 1977. Schaffner, Ingrid. The essential Joseph Cornell. New York: M. N. Abrams, 2003. Schonberg, Harold C. “Music view,” New York Times (8 May 1977): 61. Schrecker, John. “‘For the equality of men –​for the equality of nations’: Anson Burlingame and China’s first embassy to the United States, 1868,” Journal of American-​East Asian Relations 17, 1 (2010): 9–​34. Shengold, David. “Denyce Graves tries out La Périchole” (2002) (unidentified clipping at the Harvard Theatre Collection). Sherman, John K. The story of the Minneapolis Orchestra. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1952. Sinclair, Upton. Singing jailbirds, a drama in four acts. Long Beach, Cal.:  The Author, 1924. Smith, Craig. “N.Y. Met performs ‘Perichole’,” Boston Globe (21 Apr. 1971). Strang, Lewis C. Famous stars of light opera. Boston: L. C. Page, 1900. Strong, George Templeton. The diary of George Templeton Strong. Post-​ war years 1865–​ 1875, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas. New York: Macmillan, 1952. Stuckey, Marian. Warrior culture of the U.S. Marines. Plum Beach, S.C.: Heritage Press International, 2001. Van Vechten, Carl. Sins of New  York as “exposed” by the Police Gazette. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1930. White, Richard Grant. “The age of burlesque,” The Galaxy (Aug. 1869). Williams, Frederick Wells. Anson Burlingame and the first Chinese mission to foreign powers. New York: Scribner’s, 1912. Wong, Edlie L. “‘In a future tense: immigration law, counterfactual history, and Chinese invasion fiction,” American Literary History (2014): 1–​25. Zolotow, Sam. “Gill to rewrite ‘La belle Hélène,’” New York Times (14 May 1962).

Russia Amiard-​Chevrel, Claudine. Les symbolistes russes et le théâtre. Lausanne:  L’Age d’homme, 1994. Andreykina, Ol’ga. “Aleksandr Markelov,” in Zvezdy Moskovskoy stseny. Moskovskaya operetta, ed. B. M. Poyurovskiy. Moscow: Tsentroligraf, 2001. Boborykin, P. D. Vospominaniya v dvukh tomakh. Moscow: Izd-​vo khudozhestvennoy literatury, 1965. Brown, David. Musorgsky. His life and works. London: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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Brown, Royal S. Overtones and undertones. Reading film music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Chekhov, Anton. Polnoe sobranie sochineniy i pisem v tridtsati tomakh. Moscow: Nauka, 1974–​1983. Chekhov, M. P. Anton Chekhov i ego syuzhety. Moscow: no pub., 1923.   Vokrug Chekhova: vstrechi i vpechatlenniya. Moscow: Moskovskiy rabochy, 1964. Chotzinoff, Samuel. “Music,” New York World (23 Dec. 1926). Dmitriev, Yu. A. Mikhail Lentovskiy. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1978.   et  al., eds. Istoriya russkogo dramaticheskogo teatra v semi tomakh. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980. Donskov, Andrew. Mixail Lentovskij and the Russian theatre. East Lansing, Mich: Russian Language Journal, 1985. Downes, Olin. “Russians in new ‘La Perichole,’” New York Times (23 Dec. 1925). Drizen, N. V. Dramaticheskaya tsenzura dvukh épokh, 1825–​ 1881. Petrograd: Prometey, 1917. Eisenstein, Sergei. “Teatralnye tetradi S. M. Eyzenshteyna,” ed. M. K. Ivanova and V. V. Ivanov, in Mnemozina. Istoricheskiy almanakh. Vypusk 2, ed. Vladislav Ivanov. Moscow: Editorial, 2000. Frame, Murray. “The early reception of operetta in Russia, 1860s–​1870s,” European History Quarterly 421, (2012): 29–​49. Freedman, John, “A light opera goes high octane,” Moscow Times 656 (22 Feb. 1995). Gerould, Daniel. “Sologub and the theatre,” Drama Review 21, 4 (Dec. 1977): 79–​84. Gilman, Lawrence, “The Moscow Art Theatre Studio gives Offenbach,” New York Herald Tribune (23 Dec. 1925): 12. Gilyarovskiy, Vladimir. Teatralnye lyudi:  povest akterskoy zhizni. Moscow and Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1941. Gnedich, P. P. Kniga zhizni. Vospominaniya 1855–​1918. Moscow: Agraf, 2000. Grekova-​Dashkovskaya, O. P. Starye mastera operetty. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990. Institut Istorii Iskusstv Ministerva Kultury SSSR. Istoriya russkogo dramaticheskogo teatra v semi tomakh, 1862–​1881. 8 vols. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980. Kallinikov, P. and I. Korneeva, eds. Russky biograficheskiy slovar v dvadtsati tomakh. Moscow: Terra, 1999. Kennan, George. Siberia and the exile system. 2  vols. New  York:  The Century Co., 1891. Kommissarzhevskiy, Fyodor. “O ‘Prekrasnoy Yelene,’” Maski 2 (1913–​1914): 30–​40. Koonen, Alisa. Stranitsy zhizni. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975. Kuzmin, Mikhail. Esseistika –​kritika, ed. E. G. Domogatskaya and E. A. Pevak. 3 vols. Moscow: Agraf, 2000. Levik, S. I. The Levik memoirs:  an opera singer’s notes. Trans. Edward Morgan. London: Symposium Records, 1995. Malmstad, John F. and N. A. Bogomolov. Mikhail Kuzmin. A  life in art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Markov, P. A. Dnevnik teatralnogo kritika 1930–​1976. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1977.   Iz istorii russkogo i sovetskogo teatra. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1974.

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Tretyakov, V. F., ed. Ocherki istorii Taganrogskogo teatra. Taganrog: Khudozhestvennaya Sektsiya Taganrogskogo Okrolitrosveta, 1928. Trotsky, Leon. Literature and revolution. Trans. Rose Strunsky. New  York: International Publishers, 1925. Van Houten, Theodore. “Eisenstein was great eater.” In memory of Leonid Trauberg . ’s-​Hertogenbosch-​Buren: A & R/​GP, 1991. Vilde, N. “Bez godu sto let,” Teatr 7 (1918): 4. Vladimirskaya, A. P. Zvezdnye chasy operetty. Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1991. Volf, A. I. Khronika peterburgskikh teatrov s kontsa 1855 do nachala 1881 goda. St Petersburg: P. Golike, 1884. Vsevolodskiy [Gerngross], V. Istoriya russkogo teatra, ed. E. V. Alpers. 2 vols. Leningrad and Moscow: Tea-​Kino-​Pechat’, 1929. Woodward, J. B. “From Brjusov to Ajkhenvald: attitudes to the Russian theatre 1902–​1914,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 7 (1965): 173–​88. Zabrodin, Vladimir, ed. Eysenshteyn o Meyerkholde, 1919–​1948. Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2005. Zhukova, I. “Zametki ob operette,” Teatr 6 (1966): 45–​52.

Elsewhere Akiba Tarō. Tōto Meiji Engekishi [History of theatre in Tokyo during the Meiji period]. Tokyo: Ōtari shuppan, 1975. Albertová, Helena. Josef Svoboda scenographer. Prague: Divadelní ústav, 2008. Arderíus, Francisco. Confidencias de Arderíus:  historia de un bufo, referida por D. Antonio de San Martín. Madrid: Imprenta Española, 1870. Arentzen, Wout. Schliemann en Nederland. Een leven vol verhalten. Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2012. Azevedo, Artur de. “O theatro,” A Noticia (27 Jan. 1895). Barreira Sánchez, Sergio. “La escena madrileña en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX:  Francisco Arderíus y los bufos madrileños,” Stichomythia 8 (2009): 96–​107. Bartoś, František. Bedřich Smetana. Letters and reminiscences. Trans. Daphne Rusbridge. Prague: Artis, 1955. Sousa Bastos, Antonio. Carteira do artista; apontamentos para a historia do theatro portuguez e brazileiro. Acompanhados de noticias sobre os principaes artistas, escriptores dramaticos e compositores estrangeiros. Lisbon:  Antiga Casa Bertrand, 1898. Bourrin, E. Claude. Choses et gens en Indochine. Souvenirs de bonne humeur, 1898–​ 1908. Saigon: J. Aspar, 1940. Brisbane, Katherine, ed. Entertaining Australia. An illustrated history. Sydney: Currency Press, 1991. Burian, Jarka M. The scenography of Josef Svoboda. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971.   Leading creators of twentieth-​ century Czech theatre. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

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Černý, František and Ljuba Klosová, eds. Dějiny českého divadla/​III. Činohra 1848–​ 1918. Prague: Academia, Nakladatelství Československé Akademie Věd, 1977. Chagas, Pinherio. “Folhetim de Diário ilustrado, Offenbach,” Diário ilustrado (Lisbon) 31 (31 Jul. 1872). De Leon, Edwin. “Ismail Pasha of Egypt,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 39, 231 (Aug. 1869): 739–​41. Domenig, Roland. “Takarazuka and Kobayashi Ichizō’s idea of kokumingeki,” in The culture of Japan as seen through its leisure, ed. Sepp Linhart and Sabine Frühstück. Albany: State University of New York, 1998. Pp. 267–​84. Dos Santos, Graça. “Offenbach à Lisbonne à la fin du XIXe siècle, entre attraction et repulsion,” in La circulation transatlantique des imprimés –​connexions, ed. Márcia Abreu and Marisa Midori Deacto. Campinas: UNICAMP/​IEL/​ Secteurs des publications, 2014. Pp. 299–​306. Eça de Queiroz, José Maria de. Correspondéncia, ed. Guilherme de Castilho. 2 vols. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-​Casa de Moeda, 1883. Eça de Queiroz, José Maria de. Obras. 10 vols. Oporto: Lelio & Irmão, 1958. Eça de Queiroz, José Maria de. A Tragédia du Roa des Flores, ed. João Media and J. Campos Matos. Lisbon: Moraes, 1980. Evans, Robert. “Sex scenes and nudity intrigue Geneva opera fans,” Reuters (12 Jan. 2002). Expilly, Charles. Les femmes et les mœurs du Brésil. 2nd edn. Paris:  Charlieu et Huillery, 1864. Feon, Kai. “Friluftsteatret i Søndermarken,” Teatret 16, 18 (Jul. 1917): 130–​36. Fléchet, Anaïs. “Offenbach à Rio: la fièvre de l’opérette dans le Brésil du Segundo Reinado,” in La circulation transatlantique des imprimés –​connexions, ed. Márcia Abreu and Marisa Midori Deacto. Campinas:  UNICAMP/​IEL/​ Secteurs des publications, 2014. Pp. 319–​32. Flores, Alexander. “Offenbach in Arabia,” Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 42 (Dec. 2007): 16–​27. (Abridged translation of “Offenbach in Arabien,” Die Welt des Islams n.s., 48, 2 (2008): 131–​69.) França, José-​Augusto. Le romantisme au Portugal. Étude de faits socio-​culturels. Paris: Klincksieck, 1975. Freyre, Gilberto. Vida social no Brasil nos meados do século XIX. Trans. Waldemar Valente. Recife: Instituto Joaquim Nabuco de Pesquias Socias, 1964. Gillhoff, Gerd Aage. The Royal Dutch Theatre at the Hague 1804–​ 1826. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1938. Gottschalk, Louis Moreau. Notes of a pianist. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1881. Hauch, Gunnar. “Casino:  ‘Orfeus i underverdenen,’” Teatret (Copenhagen) 4 (1904–​1905): 150–​51. Hjørnef, Charles. “Offenbach –​før og nu, ‘Røverne,’” Teatret (Copenhagen) 21, 3 (Nov. 1921): 34–​36. Hopf, Michael. “Offenbaciana australiera (or Offenbach down under),” Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 1 (Nov. 1996): 5–​6; 2 (Feb. 1997): 9–​11; 3 (May 1997): 3–​5.   “Offenbach in Vietnam or bound to Hanoi,” Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 8 (Mar. 1999): 7–​9.

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Irvin, Eric. Dictionary of the Australian theatre 1788–​ 1914. Sydney:  Halle & Iremonger, 1985. Kašlik, Václav. Jak jsem dělal operu. Prague: Panton, 1987. Kaufmann, Jacobo. “The best kept secret. Jacques Offenbach in Spain, Italy and Portugal,” Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 38 (Dec. 2006): 28–​33.   Jacques Offenbach en España, Italia y Portugal. Zaragoza: Libros Certeza, 2008. Kilto, Ken. Visions of desire. Tanizaki’s fictional worlds. Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1991. Kimura Kinka. Morita Kan’ya. Tokyo: Shin-​taishūsha, 1943. Kleinen, Jean. “Théâtre et empire. Le théâtre français en Indochine pendant la Belle Époque (1890–​1918),” Revue d’histoire du théâtre 264 (2014): 435–​42. Kobitsu Matsuo. Nihon shingeki rinenshi [The history of the idea of Japanese new theatre]. 2 vols. Tokyo: Mirashi, 1998–​2001. Large, Brian. Smetana. London: Duckworth, 1970. Leiter, Samuel L. New Kabuki encyclopedia. A revised adaptation of Kabuki Jiten. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Levin, Orna Messer. “Offenbach et le public brésilien (1840–​1870),” in La circulation transatlantique des imprimés –​connexions, ed. Márcia Abreu and Marisa Midori Deacto. Campinas:  UNICAMP/​ IEL/​ Secteurs des publications, 2014. Pp. 307–​18. Love, Harold. The golden age of Australian opera: W. S. Lyster and his companies 1861–​1880. Sydney: Currency Press, 1981. MacCarthy, Henry W. Cuban Zarzuela and the (neo)colonial imagination. A subaltern historiography of music theater in the Caribbean. Ph.D.  diss., Ohio University, 2007. Magali, Cristina. Music in Imperial Rio de Janeiro. European culture in a tropical milieu. Latham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Marin de Meslée, E. The new Australia (1883), ed. and trans. Rusel Ward. London: Heinemann, 1973. Masumoto Masahiko. Yokohama Gaiety Theatre. 2nd ed. Yokohama:  Iwasaki Museum, 1986. McClellan, Michael E. “Performing empire: opera in colonial Hanoi,” Journal of Musicological Research 22 (2003): 135–​66. Mestyan, Adam. “A garden with mellow fruits of refinement”: music theatre and cultural politics in Cairo and Istanbul, 1867–​1892. Ph.D. diss., Central European University, Budapest, 2011.   “Power and music in Cairo: Azbakkiya,” Urban History 40 (2013): 681–​704. Naka Mamiko. “Die Oper kommt nach Japan. Zur Rezeption westlicher Musik und des Musiktheaters in der Meiji-​und Taishô-​Zeit (1868–​1925),” in Musik in Japan. Aufsätze zu Aspekten der Musik im heutigen Japan, ed. Silvain Guignard. Munich: Iudicium, 1996. Pp. 159–​78. Nakai Yoshiyuki. “Mori Ogai’s German trilogy:  a Japanese parody of Les contes d’Hoffmann,” Harvard Journal of Asiastic Studies 38, 2 (Dec. 1978): 381–​422. Nordensvan, Georg. Svensk teater och svenska skåspelere från Gustav III till våra dagar. 2 vols. Stockholm: Albert Bonnier, 1917–​1918.

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Ōsawa Yoshio. Nihon Gendai Engeki-​shi. Meiji-​Taishō [History of the modern Japanese theatre. Meiji and Taishō periods]. Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1985. Ottlová, Marta. “Repertoire of the Provisional Theatre,” Miscellanea Musicologica (Charles University of Prague) 34 (1994): 7–​139. Parsons, Philip and Victoria Chance, eds. Companion to theatre in Australia. Sydney: Currency Press, 1995. Pinto, Paul A. and Judith A. Pinto. “Music as narrative in Eça de Queirós’s O Primo Basílio,” Hispanica 73, 1 (Mar. 1990): 30–​65. Porter, Andrew. “Charm checked,” Times Literary Supplement (27 Aug. 1999): 22. Robertson, Jennifer. Takarazuka. Sexual politics and popular culture in modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Rodicio, Emilio Casares. El teatro de los Bufos o una crisis en el teatro lírico del XIX español. Madrid: Auditorio Nacional de Música, 1993. Ruppel, K. H. “Surrealisticher Offenbach aus Prag,” Suddeutsche Zeitung (22 Jun. 1964). Sadgrove, P. C. The Egyptian theatre in the nineteenth century (1799–​ 1882). Durham: Ithaca Press, 1996. Schmiesing, Ann. Norway’s Christiania Theatre, 1827–​1867. From Danish showhouse to national stage. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006. Seidl, Roberto. Artur Azevedo:  ensaio bio-​bibliográfico. Rio de Janeiro:  Editora abc, 1937. Senelick, Laurence, ed. National theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe 1746–​1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Sousa Brito, Ruben José. “O teatro cómico e musicado: operetas, mágicas, revista de ano e burletas,” in História do teatro brasiliero, ed. João Robert Faria. São Paulo: SESC, 2012. Strindberg, August. Tjänstekvinnans son. 2 vols. Stockholm: Albert Bonnier, 1886.   Strindberg’s letters. Selected, edited, and translated by Michael Robinson. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Sugiyama Chizuru, “A study on the transition from Asakusa Opera to Asakusa revue: the light opera in Asakusa in the 20’s and the process of this transition,” Ochanononizu University Studies in Arts and Culture 43 (1990): 187–​216. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “On exile, Jewish identity, and filmmaking in Hungary: a conversation with István Szabó,” KinoKultura (24 Jan. 2008):  www. kinokultura.com/​specials/​7/​ssi-​szabo.shtml. Svoboda, Josef. “Laterna Magika,” Tulane Drama Review 11, 1 (Fall 1966): 141–​49.   The secret of theatrical space. The memoirs of Josef Svoboda. Ed. and trans. Jarka M. Burian. New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1993. Teuber, Oscar. Geschichte des Prager Theaters von den Anfängen des Schauspielwesens bis auf die neueste Zeit. Prague: A. Haase, 1888. Uddgren, Gustaf. Strindberg the man. Trans. Axel Johann Uppvall. Boston: Four Seas Co., 1920. Vieira de Carvalho, Mário. “Eça de Queirós e a ópera no século XIX em Portugal,” Colóquio/​Letras 91 (May 1986): 27–​37.

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Vieira de Carvalho, Mário. Eça de Queiroz e Offenbach. A  ácida gargalhada de Mefistófeles. Lisbon: Colibri, 1999. Waldron, Arthur. “The warlord:  twentieth-​century Chinese understandings of violence, militarism and imperialism,” American Historical Review 96, 4 (Oct. 1991): 1073–​100. Yon, Jean-​Claude, ed. Le théâtre français à l’étranger au XIXe siècle. Histoire d’une suprématie culturelle. Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2008. Young, David. “Orpheus in the South Pacific. A history of Offenbach premieres in New Zealand, part  2,” Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter 21 (Sep. 2002): 14–​16.

Index

À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, novel (M. Proust, 1918)) 85 Abel-​Helena, parody (A. de Azevedo, 1873) 184 Abendroth, Walter 216 Aborn Opera Company 252 Academy of Music, Montreal 122 Academy of Music, New York 132 Achard, Marcel 244–​45 Action Française 239 Adam, Adolphe 30 Adams, A. Davies 256 Adelphi Theatre, London 101, 120, 259–​60 Adler, Hans Günther 218 Admiralspalast, Berlin 273 Adorno, Theodor W. 5–​6, 201, 214 Adventures of Robin Hood, The, film (M. Curtiz and W. Keighley, 1938) 261 Æneid, epic poem (Vergil) 18 Agoult, Marie, comtesse d’ (Daniel Stern) 73 Aïda, opera (G. Verdi, 1871) 185 Aimée, Marie 133, 136–​37, 180, 183 Aimée Opera Company 128 Albert of Saxe-​Coburg and Gotha, Prince Consort 98 Albert, Mary 117 Alcazar Lyrique Flumineuse, Rio de Janeiro 180–​81, 183–​85 alcôve, Un, opéra comique (J. Offenbach, 1847) 31 Alexander II, tsar of Russia 143 Alexandra, Empress of Russia 220 Alexandrinsky Theatre, St Petersburg 144 Alhambra Music Hall, London 106 Alhambra Theatre, London 54, 105, 111, 116 Almée, L’, painting (Gérôme) 132 Almeida, Antonio de 296–​97 Almlöf, Kurt 167 Alvin Theatre, New York 266 Amadeo I, King of Spain 174 Amara, Lucine 268 Ambros, August Wilhelm 171–​72

Anderson, Percy 120 Angélo, tyran de Padoue, play (V. Hugo, 1835) 41 Anna Karenina, novel (L. N. Tolstoy, 1875–​77) 151, 159 Anouilh, Jean 247 anti-​semitism 96, 300–​301 in France 68, 235–​36, 238–​39 in Germany 73, 77–​78, 215–​19, 271 Wagner’s 67–​71, 198 Antony, play (A. Dumas père, 1831) 19 Arcadians, The, musical comedy ((R. Courtneidge, A. M. Thompson and M. Ambruin, music L. Monckton and H. Talbot, 1909) 120 Archer, William 116, 118 Arderíus, Francisco 172–​74, 180 Argus, Melbourne, periodical 190 Ariadne auf Naxos, opera (R. Strauss, 1912) 202 Ariane et Barbe-​bleue, opera (P. Dukas, 1907) 281 Aristophanes 112, 264, 267 Arlequin barbier, pantomime (J. Offenbach from G. Rossini, 1855) 34 Aronson, Rudolph 138–​39 Arrow Cross Party 301 Asakusa Opera, Tokyo 197 ’Ašara aţ-​ţayibba, al-​(The Ten of Diamonds), musical comedy (S. Darwīš, 1920) 188 Ashton, Frederick 287 Atala, novella (F. Chateaubriand, 1801) 13 Athénée, Théâtre de l’, Paris, see Théâtre de l’Athénée Au Bonheur des dames, novel (E. Zola, 1883) 231 Auber, Daniel 30, 65, 98, 133, 166, 171 Augé de Lassus, Lucien 11 Augier, Émile 23 Augustine, St 46 Aus dem wahren Milliardenlande, study (M. Nordau, 1878) 198 aventures de Télémaque, Les, novel (F. Fénélon, 1693–​94) 173 Avenue Theatre, London 108, 117

332

Index Avoscani, Pietro 185 n.11 Azbak Tatakh al-​Zahiry, Amir 185 n.11 Azevedo, Artur de 184–​85 Babes in the Wood, pantomime (T. Taylor, 1867) 103, 141 Bach, Alexander von 170 Bach, Johann Sebastian 109 Bad Ems, Germany 292 Badeau, Adam 125 Bakaleinikov, Vladimir 228 Baker, Josephine 96, 240–​43 Baklanoff, George 213 Baklanova, Olga 230 n.28 Bakst, Léon 254 Bal Mabille, Paris 34 Balanchine, George 261 n.28 Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo 243, 260 Ballets Russes 120, 223, 254, 259 Banville, Théodore de 43–​44 Barba de milho, parody (A. de Azevedo, 1869) 184 Barbe, André 285 Barbe-​bleue, opéra bouffe (H. Meilhac and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1866) 8 n.30, 48, 60, 66, 92, 114, 126, 137, 152, 154–​55, 173, 176–​77, 182, 187–​88, 190, 194, 210, 233, 286 Brazilian parodies 183–​84 Felsenstein’s production 280–​84 Karl Kraus on 93 Barber-​Blue, minstrel show 138 Barber of Seville, see Barbiere de Siviglia Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules 52 Barbier, Jules 276, 296 Barbiere di Siviglia, Il, opera (G. Rossini, 1816) 44, 268 Barbieri, Francisco Asenjo 172 Barcarolle 2, 243, 251, 265 Bardán, Maria 172 Barkouf, opera bouffe (E. Scribe and H. Boisseaux, music J. Offenbach, 1860) 31, 38, 53 Barnett, Benjamin 99 Baroneza de Cayapó, A, parody (A. de Azevedo, 1868) 183 Barrault, Jean-​Louis 247–​50 Bartered Bride, The, opera (B. Smetana, 1882) 170–​71 Bartók, Bela 281 Bastos, Pinto 176 Ba-​Ta-​Clan, chinoiserie musicale (L. Halévy, music Offenbach, 1855) 12–​13, 87, 99, 103, 123, 129–​30, 286 Ba-​Ta-​Clan, Rio de Janeiro, periodical 181

333

Bateman, H. L. 123–​26 Baudelaire, Charles 9, 75, 261 on modernity 9, 17–​18 on the modern woman 25 bavards, Les (Bavard et Bavarde), opera bouffe (C.-​L. E. Nuitter, music J. Offenbach, 1862) 96, 126, 179, 237, 240 Bayram aț-​Tunisi, Mahmūd 189 Bayreuth Festival 77–​78 Beardsley, Aubrey 204, 288 beau Pâris, Le, subterfuge 147 Beaumarchais, Pierre Caron de 49 Beaumont, Count Étienne de 243 Beckett, Samuel 247, 250 Beecham, Sir Thomas 109 n.35, 287 Beecher, Henry Ward 131 Beerbohm Tree, see Tree, Herbert Beerbohm Beethoven, Ludwig von 50, 190, 256 Behrens, Peter 202 Béjart, Maurice 243 Bell, Digby 137 Bell, Rose 128 Bell L.N., minstrel show 128 Bellaigue, Camille 21 belle Hélène, La, opera bouffe (H. Meilhac and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1864) 16, 20, 24–​25, 41, 47, 48, 52, 60, 72, 74–​76, 80, 94, 97, 110, 129, 138, 164, 166, 172, 182, 191, 194, 217, 224, 236, 246, 252, 285 compared to Papal encyclical 18 Heinrich Schliemann on 164 Howells on 134 Helikon-​Opera production 234 in Cairo 186–​88 in Christiania 169 in London 299 in Munich 66 in New York 125–​36 in St Petersburg 144, 147, 149, 151, 220–​21 in Stockholm 167–​69 in Vienna 87–​88 influence on Strindberg 168–​69 influence on Uncle Vanya 152, 155–​63 Johanna Richardson on 4 Jules Lemaître on 4 Komissarzhevsky on 221–​22 Lillian Russell in 140–​41 Mardzhanov’s production 221–​22 Nemirovich-​Danchenko’s production 230–​31 Premiere 42–​45 Reinhardt’s productions 206–​10, 230, 236, 253–​63, 265–​66

334 belle Lurette, opéra comique (E. Blum, G. Blau and R. Toché, music J. Offenbach, 1880) 9, 117 Belle Vivette, La, operetta (M. Frayn, music J. Offenbach, 1995) 299 Bellini, Vincenzo 75, 128 Bellmer, Hans 214–​15, 286 Benchley, Robert 14 Benigni, Roberto 2 Benjamin, Walter 5–​6, 201, 214 Bennett, Arnold 206 Bennett, Robert Russell 267 Benois, Alexander 223 Benoit, Dénise 249 Bergenz Festspielhaus 302 Berger, Julius 268 bergers, Les, opéra comique (H.-​J. Crémieux and P. Gille, music J. Offenbach, 1865) 48 Berl, Heinrich 200 Berliner Ensemble 283 Berlioz, Hector 39, 45, 64–​65, 68 Bertin, Pierre 249 n.42 Bertman, Dmitry 234 Berton, Francisque 143 Besson, Benno 271 Betz, Hans 59 Beuys, Josef 81 n.61 Bibliothèque nationale, Paris 248, 276 biche au bois, La, ou La royaume des fees, féerie (T. Cogniard, music Pilati, 1845) 132 Bieber, Justin 234 Bijou Opera Company 137 Binder, Carl 85 Bing, Rudolf 268 Birgfeld, Adolphe 126 Birth of Tragedy, The, essay (F. Nietzsche, 1872) 77 Bismarck, Otto von 17, 50, 71–​72 Bizet, Georges 77, 224, 296 Bizzelli, Annibale 58 n.74 Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne 169–​70 Black Crook, The, extravaganza (C. M. Barras, 1866) 132–​33 Blague 14–​15 Blanche, August 167 Blasco, Eusebio 173 Blasel, Karl 88 Blech, Leo 211 Blessinger, Karl 217 n.50 Blok, Aleksandr 223 Blossom Time, operetta (D. Donnelly from A. M. Wilner and H. Reichert, music S. Romburg, 1921) 255, 265 Bluebeard, see Barbe-​bleue

Index Bluebeard Repaired, a Worn-​out Subject Done Up Anew, one-​act (1866) 101 Bluebeard, ballet suite (A. Dorati, 1941) 264 Bluebeard’s Castle, opera (B. Bartók, 1911–​18) 281 Blum, Ladislav Moshé 219 Bobèche (Antoine Mandelard) 14 Boieldieu, François-​Adrien 65 Bolshoy Theatre, Moscow 224 Bombastes Furioso, burlesque (W. B. Rhodes, 1811) 125 Bonaparte, Louis-​Napoléon, see Napoleon III Bonnet, Hippolyte 64–​65 Boosey and Co., Boosey and Hawkes, music publishers 108, 297 Boots, short story (A. P. Chekhov, 1885) 154 Borge, Victor 32 Borodin, Aleksandr 148 Boston Globe, periodical 132 Boston Herald, periodical 253 Boston Opera House 252–​54 Boucicault, Dion 191 Bouffar, Zulma 41–​42, 49, 114, 146, 249 Bouffe Theatre, St Petersburg 146–​47 Bouffes-​Parisiens, Théâtre des, Paris 5, 11–​15, 34–​35, 37–​38, 41, 47, 53, 55, 84–​85, 89, 99, 102, 110, 151, 300–​301 Boulanger, Nadia 243 boulangère a des écus, La, opéra bouffe (H. Meilhac and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1875) 53, 111, 153, 241 Boule de neige, opéra bouffe (C.-​H. L. Nuitter and E. Tréfeu, music J. Offenbach, 1871) 53 Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le (Būrger als Edelmann), opera (R. Strauss from Molière, 1918) 202 Box and Cox, farce (J. M. Morton, 1847) 102 Boys from Syracuse, The, musical comedy (R. Rodgers and L. Hart, 1938) 266 Boy’s Town, film (N. Taurog, 1931) 265 Brandenburgers in Bohemia, opera (B. Smetana, 1862–​63) 171 Brandl, Johann 85 Brecht, Bertolt 9, 178–79, 213, 271–​72, 274, 278–​78, 283–​84, 286 on opera 86 Brentano, Felix 264 Brickwell, H. T. 117 brigands, Les, opéra bouffe (H. Meilhac and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1869) 22, 52, 68, 94, 96, 108, 111, 126, 139, 152, 170, 183, 185, 191, 210–​11, 271, 286 Brindejont-​Offenbach, Jacques 95, 243

Index British Film Institute 232 Broodthaers, Marcel 81 n.61 Brook, Peter 170, 301 Brown, Anne Wiggins 263 Brussels Expo 58, 295 Bryars, Gavin 38 n.74 Buckstone, John Baldwin 100 Bufos cubanos 179–​80 Bülow, Hans von 71, 73 Bulwer Lytton, Edward 195 Burian, Jarka 290 Burlingame, Anson 129 Burnand, Francis 101–​103, 106 Burne-​Jones, Edward 288 Busch, Wilhelm 66 n.10 Butler, Samuel 122 By Jupiter, musical comedy (R. Rodgers and L. Hart, 1942) 266 Byron, H. J. 102 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The, film (R. Wiene, 1920) 60 Caesar and Cleopatra, play (G. B. Shaw, 1898) 118 Café Monopol, Berlin 202 caïd, Le, opéra comique (A. Thomas, 1849) 115 “Calchas,” short story (A. P. Chekhov, 1886) 155–​56 Caldwell, Sarah 56 n.68 Callas, Maria 278 Cambreling, Sylvain 296 Cambridge, Mass. Drama Festival 266 Camus, Albert 247, 250 cancan 1, 101–​02, 106–​07, 132, 135, 146, 229 used as ballet music 243 used as film motif 1–​2, 232–​33 Cancan and Barcarolle, biography (A. Moss and E. Marvel, 1954) 1 Can-​Can, film (W. Lang from C. Porter, 1960) 1 Cannibal, The, opéra bouffe (I. S. Turgenev) 150 Canterbury, John Manners-​Sutton, 3rd Viscount 190 Cantinflas (Mario Reyes) 1 capital federal, A, revue (A. de Azevedo, 1897) 184 Capitulation, A Comedy, play (R. Wagner, 1870) 67–​71 Capoul, Victor 106 Cappiani, Louisa 139 Cardin, Pierre 245 Carl-​Theater, Vienna 54, 85, 87–​88, 93 Carmen, opéra comique (G. Bizet, 1875) 77, 224 Carmencita and the Soldier, comic opera (Lipskerov from G. Bizet, 1924) 224 carnaval des animaux, Le, suite (C. Saint-​Saëns) 237

335

carnaval des revues, Le, revue (E. Grangé, L. Halévy and Ph. Gille, music J. Offenbach, 1860) 63–​64 Carncross and Dixey’s Minstrels 129 Carnival societies, Rio de Janeiro 182 Carpeaux, Jean-​Baptiste 46 Carré, Michel 276 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) 116–​117, 261 Carte, Bridget D’Oyly 298 Carte, Richard D’Oyly 109–​110, 117–​18 Carvalho, Rio de 176 cascader 27–​25, 57, 161, 257 Case of Wagner, The, polemic (F. Nietzsche, 1888) 79–​80 Casino, Biarritz 155 Casino, Copenhagen 202–​205 Casino Follies, Tokyo 197 Casino Theatre, New York 108 n.33, 138 Castiglione, Virginia Oldoini, Countess 255 Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia 26, 50 Cavalli, Francesco 164 Čech, Adolf 170 Celebration, The, play (A. P. Chekhov) 163 Céline, Louis-​Ferdinand 244 Cenerentola, La, ossio La bontà in trionfo, opera (G. Rossini, 1817) 177 Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia 136 Cercle Français de l’Harmonie, New York 131–​32 Cervantes, Miguel de 248 C’est le Vice-​roi qui paie, play (Larose, 1869) 187 Chabrier, Émile 3 Chagall, Marc 28, 290 chahut, le 1 Chaliapin, Fyodor 262 chandelier, Le, play (A. de Musset, 1835) 32 n.13 Channing, Carol 32 n.13 chanson de Fortunio, Le, opéra comique (H. Crémieux and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1861) 41, 60, 66, 96, 126, 244, 246, 251 chapeau de paille d’Italie, Le, vaudeville (E. Labiche and Marc-​Michel, 1851) 19, 48 Charell, Eric 211 Charing Cross Theatre, London 108 Charivari, Le, Paris, periodical 39 chat au diable, Le, see Dick Whittington château à Toto, Le, opéra bouffe (H. Meilhac and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1868) 286 Chateaubriand, François, 13 Châtelet, Théâtre du, Paris, 54 chatte metamorphosée en femme, La, opérette (E. Scribe and Mélesville, music J. Offenbach, 1858) 103, 123, 191

336

Index

Chekhov, Anton 56, 142, 266 humorous stories 154–​55 Offenbach’s influence on his plays 155–​63 youthful playgoing 151–​54 Chekhov, Ivan 152 Chekhov, Mitrofan 152 Chekhov, Nikolay 153 Cheney, Stewart 263 Cherry Orchard, The, comedy (A. P. Chekhov, 1904) 154, 160 Cherubini, Luigi 30 Chez Maxim’s, Paris 249 Ching-​Chow-​Hi, comic opera (W. Brough and T. German Reed, music J. Offenbach, 1865) 99, 103, 129 Ching Chow Hi, minstrel show (from J. Offenbach, 1876) 129 Ching-​Chung-​Hi, or Burlingame’s Teacaddy, burlesque (from J. Offenbach, 1869) 129 Chitlin Circuit 263 Christopher Columbus (D. White and P. Schmid from Offenbach, 1976) 299 Chu Chin Chow, musical comedy (O. Asche, music F. Norton, 1916) 119 Churchill, Winston 230 Cimarosa, Domenico 37 Cirque d’Été, Paris 34 Citron, Marcia 289 Citrouillard au désert , parodie, pièce d’occasion (J. Offenbach, 1846) 32 Claudel, Paul 239, 247, 250 Clay, Frederic 108, 112 clé du caveau, Le, songbook (1811) 15 cloches de Corneville, Les, operetta (R. Planquette, 1877) 56, 111 Cochran, Charles Blake 205, 255–​60 Cocteau, Jean 246, 250 Coelho, Furtado 183 Coelho, Latino 175 Colin-​Maillard, Le, comic opera (J. Verne, music A. Hignard, 1853) 55 Cologne Carnival 28–​29 Colonna troupe 106 Colonne, Édouard 236 Columbia University 141 Comédie Française, Paris 11, 17, 32, 34, 143, 299 Comédie Italienne, Paris 4 Comstock Law 131 Comte de Monte-​Cristo, Le (A. Dumas père, 1844) 19 Comte Ory, Le, comic opera (G. Rossini, 1828) 111 Concerts Colonne 239 Congress of Vienna 29 Conrad, Peter 10, 60

Conservatoire, Paris 30–​31 Contes d’Hoffmann, Les, opéra comique (J. Barbier and M. Carré, music J. Offenbach and E. Guiraud, 1881) 2, 21, 31, 42, 113, 198–​ 200, 217, 220, 240, 258, 260, 265, 285–​87, 296–​97, 299, 302 Boston Opera Company’s 252–​55 Brecht’s concept for 271–​72 composition 58–​60 Eisenstein’s concept for 223–​24 Felsenstein’s production 276–​80 in London 120–​21 in New York 137, 252, 254–​55, 268–​70 in Theresienstadt 218–​19 in Vienna 62 Laterna Magika production 293–​95 Opera Colorado production 285 Paul Klee on 199, 214, 286 Powell and Pressburger’s film 286–​89 Radok’s production 290–​91 Reinhardt’s production 211–​15, 261–​62 Theodor Adorno on 5–​6, 214 Contrabandista, The, comic opera (F. C. Burnand and A. S. Sullivan, 1867) 103 Cooper Union, New York 132 Cooper, Melville 265 Copeau, Jacques 248, 272 Copiaux, Les 272 Cordão Carnavalesco, Rio de Janeiro 182 Cornell, Joseph 260–​61 Correa Vasques, Francisco 183 Correggio, Antonio da 295 Count of Luxembourg, The, operetta (F. Lehár, 1909) 120 Courbet, Gustave 48 Courrier des États-​Unis, periodical 122 Covent Garden Opera House, London 103 Coward, Noël 267 Cox and Box, or The Long-​lost Brothers, comic opera (F. C. Burnand, music A. S. Sullivan, 1866) 102–​03, 194 Craig, Edward Gordon 120 Cramer, Karl 39 Crémieux, Adolphe 30 Crémieux, Hector-​J. 18, 30, 35, 39, 100, 167 Créole, La, opéra comique (A. Millaud and H. Meilhac, music J. Offenbach, 1875) 58 Josephine Baker in 96, 240–​28 Crimean War 32, 90, 143 Croisset, Francis de 20 Croquefer, ou le dernier des paladins, opéra bouffe (L. A. Jaime and É. Tréfeu, music J. Offenbach, 1857) 13, 41, 301 Cui, César 148 Cukor, George 128 n.17

Index Cultural History of Opera (J. Gregor, 1941) 217 Czech Ministry of Culture 218–​19 Czech National Theatre, Prague 209 Czettel, Ladislaus 209 Dacha Husband, The, novel (I. Leontiev-​ Shcheglov, 1896) 161–​62 Dale, Alan 140–​41 Dalí, Salvador 261 n.26 Dame aux camélias, La, play (A. Dumas fils, 1852) 19 Danse, La, sculpture (J.-​B. Carpeaux, 1870) 46 Da Ponte, Lorenzo 230 Daphnis et Chloé, opérette (Clairville [L. Nicolaïe] and J. Cordier [E. T. de Vaulabelle], music J. Offenbach, 1860) 89 Darling, The, short story (A. P. Chekhov, 1899) 155 Daru, Johannes 204 Darwin, Charles 148 Darwīś, Sayiid 188–​89 Darwinism and Offenbach’s Operettas, article (N. Mikhailovsky, 1871) 148 Daudet, Alphonse xii Daudet, Léon 4 Daumier, Honoré 8, 10, 282 Davydov, Vladimir 156 Death of Orpheus, The, play (G. Kafka) 219 n.54 Débats, Les, Paris, periodical 40 Deburau, Charles 247 Deburau, Jean-​Baptiste 14, 24, 34 Debussy, Claude 76, 236–​38 De Chirico, Giorgo 287 Deichmann, F. W. 66 Déjazet, Virginie 51 n.19 De Koven, Reginald 140 Delair, Suzy 249 Delance, Georges 241 Deland, Pierre 167 Délibes, Léo 37 Descent of Man, The, and Selection in Regard to Sex, scientific work (Ch. Darwin, 1871) 148 Désiré (Amable Courtecuisse) 12 Désormière, Roger 243 Deutsche Fernsehfunk, Berlin 240 Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Berlin 201, 207 deux aveugles, Les, bouffonnerie musicale (J. Moinaux, music J. Offenbach, 1855) 123, 126, 179, 300–​301 in London 99, 102, 122 in Madrid 171 in Rio de Janeiro 180 in Saigon 235 in Vienna 86 premiere 34–​36

337

Dévèria, Augustine 144 Devienne, François 87 Devrient, Eduard 66 Diaghilev, Sergey 120 Dick Whittington and his Cat, pantomime (H. B. Farnie, music J. Offenbach, 1875) 54, 105 Dickens, Charles 10, 67 Dictionary of Music and Musicians, A, reference work (Geo. Grove, 1880) 116 Dictionnaire des idées reçues, jeu d’esprit (G. Flaubert, 1870s, pub.1911-​13) 3, 153 Diener, Joan 266 Dies Committee 262 D’Indy, Vincent 236, 238–​39 Dior, Christian 245 Disney, Walt 218 diva, La, opéra bouffe (H. Meilhac and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1869) 51–​52 Dix, Otto 282 Dizikes, John 130 Djurgårdsteatern, Stockholm 167 Docteur Ox, Le, opéra bouffe (P. Gille and A. Mortier from J. Verne, music J. Offenbach, 1876) 56–​58, 132 Doctor Ox’s Experiment, opera (G. Bryars, 1998) 38 n.74 Dolaro, Selina 109 Dolin, Anton 213 Dollfuss, Engelbert 96 Don Giovanni, opera (L. da Ponte, music W. A. Mozart, 1787) 59, 212, 287 Don Juan, story (E. T. A. Hoffman, 1813) 276 Donizetti, Gaetao 51, 58, 89, 180, 193 Dorati, Antal 264 Doré, Gustave 37 Dorsch, Kãthe 281 dos ciegos, Los, comic opera (F. Asenjo Barbieri, 1855) 171 Dos Santos, José Carlos 176 Dottor Ox, Il, opera (A. Bizzelli, 1936) 8 n.74 Doucet, Renaud 285 D’Oyly Carte Company 288–​90 Dragonette, opéra bouffe (L.-​A. Jaime, music J. Offenbach, 1857) 89 Dramatiska Teatern, Stockholm 167–​68, 205 Dreyfus affair 70 Drumont, Edmond 235–​36 Duchamps, Marcel 45 Dujardin, Édouard 236 Dukas, Paul 281 Dukes, Ashley 260 Dullin, Charles 248 Dumas, Alexandre fils 19, 23 Dumas, Alexandre père 18–​19, 32 Du Maurier, George 102

338

Index

Dunn, Geoffrey 266, 295–​96 Duras, Marguerite 247 Durgnat, Raymond 288 Dūrrenmatt, Friedrich 268 Duse, Eleonora 232 Duvalli, Rosalie and Héloīse 192 Duvignaud, Jean 248 Dwight’s Journal of Music, Boston, periodical 125–​26 Eberst, Issac Juda 28–​29 Eberst, Marianne 28 Ecce homo. Wie man wird, man man ist, treatise (F. Nietzsche, 1888) 76 Eccentricism 252 Écho du Japon, L’, Yokohama, periodical 195 Egk, Werner 216 Egmont overture, (L. von Beethoven, 1811) 190 Eichenwald, Wilhelm 170 Eisenstein, Sergey 223–​24, 235, 286 Elisabeth, Empress of Austro-​Hungary 88 Ellis, William Ashton 80 Enchanted Dragonfly, The, ballet (F. Ashton, 1950) 287 Encyclopædia Britannica 113 Enders, Werner 282–​84 Énéide burlesque, L’, poem (Ch. Perrault) 39 enfants du paradis, Les, film (M. Carné, 1945) 247 Enfer burlesque, L’, poem (M. C. P. D., 1649) 39 Engel, Erich 272 Englander, Ludwig 140 English National Opera 299 English Opera Company 189–​93, 298–​99 Ensor, James 278 Epic Theatre 96, 283 Epstein, Hans 219 Erdman, Nikolay 229 Escoffier, Auguste 45 esprit 3–​4 Esther de Carpentras, opera (D. Milhaud and P. Claudel, 1924–​25) 239 Eugénie de Montijo, Empress of the French 5, 7, 45, 187, 255 Evangeline, musical comedy (J. C. Goodwin and E. E. Rice, 1874) 135 Evening Standard, London, periodical 119–​20 Exposition universelle of 1855 19, 34 Exposition universelle of 1867 17, 19, 47, 51, 165, 186 Eyre, Richard 119 Fackel, Die, Vienna, periodical 92 Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), Petrograd 231–​32

Fairy Tales of Melpomene, short stories (A. P. Chekhov, 1884) 154 Fairy-​tale Scene, etching (P. Klee, 1921) 199 Fraison, Laurent 298 Fal-​sa-​cappa, comic opera (H. S. Leigh from Meilhac and Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1871) 108 fantasie du Docteur Ox, Un, novel (J. Verne, 1872) 56–​57 Fantasio, opéra comique (P. de Musset from A. de Musset, music J. Offenbach, 1872) 21, 31, 53–​54, 268 Fantasy Theatre, Moscow 153 Faria, actor 176 Farnie, H. B. 57, 105, 111, 120, 141 Farpas, As, novel (Eça de Queiróz, 1871) 178 Farquhar, Marion 264 Farren, William 100 Favorita, La/​La Favorite, opera (G. Donizetti, 1840) 51 Federal Theatre Project 262 fées du Rhin, Les, see Die Rheinnixen Fedorova, Alexandra 209 Felsenstein, Walter 272–​84, 286 Fénélon, Bishop François 173 Feste des Lebens und der Kunst, essay (P. Behrens, 1900) 202 Festivals des Châteaux de Bruniquel 298 Feydeau, Georges 14 Fidesser, Hans 212 fifre enchanté, Le, ou Le soldat magician, opéra comique (Ch. Nuitter and É. Tréfeu, music J. Offenbach, 1864) 281 Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York 126, 177 Figaro, Le, Paris, periodical 35, 45 figlia del reggimento, La/​La Fille du régiment, opera (G. Donizetti, 1840) 58, 89, 193, 195 fille de Madame Angot, La, opéra-​comique (Ch. Lecocq, 1872) 57, 105, 195, 224, 226 fille du tambour-​major, La, opéra comique (H. Chivot and A. Duru, music J. Offenbach, 1879) 59, 78, 111, 116, 122, 193 financier et le savetier, Le, opérette bouffe (H. Crémieux and E. About, music J. Offenbach, 1856) 57, 89 Findon, B. W. 113 First Five-​year Plan 229 Fischer, Ralph 297 Fisk, James, 126 FitzHenry, Miss, see Soldene, Emily Flaubert, Gustave 3, 23, 37 n.19, 150, 153 Flèche, La, Paris, periodical 243 Fledermaus, Die, operetta (C. Haffner and R. Genée, music J. Strauss Jr, 1874) 208, 256, 261, 265, 271, 273

Index Fleming, Renée 2 Fleurette, oder Trompeter und Näherin, opéra comique (J. Offenbach, 1872) 54 Flotsam and Jetsam (Malcolm McEachern and B. C. Hilliam) 141 Flynn, Errol 266 foire St-​Laurent, La, opéra bouffe (H.-​J. Crémieux and A. de Saint-​Albin, music J. Offenbach, 1877) 58 Folies-​Marigny, Théâtre des, Paris 247 Folies-​Nouvelles, Théàtre des, Paris 34 Folly Theatre, London 57, 109 Foregger, Nikolay 229 Foucher, Paul 49 Fould, Achille 8, 35 n.14 Fra Diavolo, ou L’hôtellerie de Terracine, opéra comique (D. Auber, 1830) 118 Frame, Murray 150 Frankfurt School of Social Criticism 5–​7, 58 Frantz, Michel 299 Franz-​Joseph I, Emperor of Austro-​Hungary 88, 90–​91 Frayn, Michael 299 Free Theatre, Moscow 221 Freeman, Max 137 French Cancan, film (J. Renoir, 1954) 1 Fresnay, Pierre 245–​46 Freund, Julius 204 Friedell, Egon 208–​12 Friedrich, Götz 276 Friedrich-​Wilhelm Theatre, Berlin 66, 69, 72 From the Notebook of Ivan Ivanych, satire (A. P. Chekhov, 1883–​86) 153 Fuchs, Georg 202 Fulcher, Jane 23, 33 Fun, London, periodical 108 Funambules, Théâtre des, Paris 14, 34 Gabriel, Gilbert W. 255 Gaïté Parisienne, ballet (L. Massine, music J. Offenbach, arr. M. Rosenthal, 1938) 1, 243, 260 Gaîté, Théâtre de la, Paris 30, 54–​55, 105, 135 Gaiety Theatre, London 108, 113 Gaiety Theatre, Yokohama 194–​95 Galimafré (Thomas Auguste Guérin) 14 Gallery of Illustration, London 99, 103 Gallmeyer, Josefine 67, 170, 263 galop, le 1–​2, 7, 184, 221 Gambetta, Léon 70 Garnier, Charles 10, 81 Garnier, Joseph Arnaud 180, 183, 185 Garrett, João Baptista Almeida 175 Garrick Theatre, London 118 Garrido, Eduardo 176

339

Gautier, Théophile 43 Gavarni, Paul 37 Gaxton, William 266 Gedda, Nicolai 269 Geistinger, Marie 66 General Boum, see La Grande-​Duchesse de Gérolstein Genet, Jean 247 Geneviève de Brabant, opéra bouffe (H. Crémieux and E. Tréfeu, music J. Offenbach, 1859, rev. 1867) 41, 51, 126, 138, 154, 192, 195, 286 revival 54 Genevieve de Brabant, operetta (H. B. Farnie, music Offenbach, 1873) 114, 190 Emily Soldene as Drogan 114–​15 Men-​at-​arms song 115, 141–​42 Gentleman in Black, The, comic opera (W. S. Gilbert and F. Clay, 1873) 108 Géorgiennes, Les, opéra bouffe (J. Moinaux, music J. Offenbach, 1864) 41–​42, 110, 173 German Reed, Thomas 99 Gérôme, Jean-​Léon 132 Gershwin, George 275 Gesamtkunstwerk 9, 29, 75, 79, 92, 199, 213, 252 Giacometti, Alberto 28 Giasone, Il, opera (P. F. Cavalli, 1649) 164 Gide, André 247 Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck 14, 22, 25–​26, 56, 77, 107–​108, 138–​39, 191, 251, 263, 269 collaboration with Arthur Sullivan 109–​13, 116–​18 translation of Les brigands 108 Gille, Philippe 57, 63, 90 Gilmore, Patrick S. 136 Gilmore’s Gardens, New York 136 Gimnasio, Rio de Janeiro 180 Gin-​nieve de Graw, minstrel show 272 Giraudoux, Jean 160, 268 Giroflé-​Girofla, operetta (Ch. Lecocq, 1874) 272 Glamour Girl of Troy, The, musical comedy (A. P. Herbert and H. Kingsley, 1941) 263–​64 Glasgow Orpheus Club 299 Globe Theatre, London 108, 111 Gluck, Christoph 64 Gnedich, Pyotr 145 n.5 Goddard, Scott 120 Goebbels, Josef 210, 216 Goering, Hermann 281 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 171 Gogol, Nikolay 111 n.45, 146, 232 Golden Apple, The, musical comedy (J. Latouche and J. Moross, 1954) 267 Goldoni, Carlo 208, 212 Golenshchikov-​Kutuzov, Count 146

340

Index

Goncourt, Jules and Edmond XII 16, 34, 167 on la blague 15 on the Bouffes-​Parisiens 12–​13 Gondoliers, The, or The King of Barataria, comic opera (W. S. Gilbert and A. S. Sullivan, 1889) 112–​113 Goose Conversation, satire (A. P. Chekov, 1884) 154 Götterdämmerung, Die, opera (R. Wagner) 71 Gounod, Charles 10 n.29, 65, 68, 296 Graetz, Paul 213 Graf, Herbert 265 Graham, Susan 2 Gramophone Company 240 Grand Dutch S, The, minstrel show 12 Grand Opera House, New York 126 Grand Opera of the Fifth of May, Prague 290 Grand Theatre, Geneva 302 Grande-​Duchesse de Gérolstein, La, opéra bouffe (H. Meilhac and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1867) 17, 26, 44, 52, 71, 78, 80, 101, 108, 114, 116–​18, 128, 132, 134, 182, 187, 189, 199, 210, 216, 246, 285, 297–​98, 302 in Australia 190–​91 in Lisbon 176–​77 in London 103–​104, 106 in Madrid 173 in Montreal 122 in New York 123–​26, 139 in Russia 149–​59, 233 in Yokohama 194–​95, 197 international popularity 165 Lillian Russell in 139 Premiere 50 Grange, Eugène 63 Grant, Ulysses S. 125–​27, 195 Grau, Jacob 126 Grau, Maurice 122, 136 Grazhdanin (Citizen), St Petersburg, periodical 149 Great Dictator, The, film (Ch. Chaplin) 282 Greer, John 193 Gregor, Hans 120, 211, 286 Gregor, Josef 217 Grétry, André Ernest Modeste 64, 98 Grey, Thomas 69 Griboedov, Aleksandr 146, 155 Grieg, Edvard 265 Grock (Adrien Wettach) 14 Grois, Louis 89 Grosses Schauspielhaus, Berlin 205, 210–​11, 213, 215 Grossmith, George, Jr 256 n.13 Grosz, George 282 Grove, George 116

Gründgens, Gustaf 206, 210, 271, 275 Guerra y Alarcón, Antonio 173 Guide to Paris, The, musical comedy (Geo. Grossmith, music J. Offenbach, arr. Geo. W. Byng, 1912) 256 n.13 Guillaume Tell, opera (G. Rossini, 1829) 75, 222 Guiraud, Ernest 277 Guitry, Sacha 244 Gunsbourg, Raoul 296 Gutheil-​Schoder, Marie 286 Guys, Constantin 17 Guys and Dolls, musical comedy (J. Swerling and A. Burrows from D. Runyon, music F. Loesser, 1950) 119 Gymnase, Théâtre du, Paris 33 H. M. S. Pinafore, or The Lass That Loved a Sailor, comic opera (W. S. Gilbert, music A. S. Sullivan, 1878) 110–​111, 124 Haase, Friedrich 72 Hahn, Reynaldo 236, 250 Hale, Philip 140 Halévy, Fromenthal 30 Halévy, Ludovic 3 n.6, 7, 9, 11, 18, 23, 30, 34–​35, 39, 42–​43, 48, 51, 53, 110, 112, 156, 189, 239, 256, 264, 281–​82 on La Grande Duchesse 50 Halles Centrales, Paris 56 Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, tragedy (Wm Shakespeare, 1601?) 146, 155, 259 n.24 Hammerstein, Oscar 252 Hamsun, Knut 255 n.22 Handbook on the Jewish Question, polemic (Th. Fristsch, 1933) 215–​16 Hanover Square Rooms, London 99 Hanslick, Eduard 67, 79, 87 on Offenbach 16, 72 Hanussen, film (I. Szabó, 1988) 300 Happiest Girl in the World, The, musical comedy (E. Y. Harburg, F. Saidy and H. Myers, 1961) 267–​68 Happy Result, A, comic opera (from Offenbach, 1865) 99 Harburg, E. Y. 267 Harington, Hamtree 263 Harrison, Benjamin 139 Harrison, Louis 140 Harrison, Rex 248 Hart, Lorenz 266 Hart, Moss 269 Hauger, George 297 Haughton, John Alan 255 Häuptling Abendwind, oder das greuliche Festmahl, comic opera (J. Nestroy, 1862) 90–​91

Index Haussmann, Baron Georges-​Eugène 15, 84 Havilland, Olivia de 250 Hawig, Peter 285, 287 Haydn, Josef 123 Haymarket Theatre, London 100 Heaven and Hell. The Tale of Offenbach, musical comedy (S. Ueda, T. Terada and Y. Yoshida, 1993) 300 Hebbel-​Theater, Berlin 273, 275 Hecht, Ben 262 Heckscher Theatre, New York 255 Hedberg, Frans 167 Heiberg, Johanne Luise 169 Heine, Heinrich 3–​4, 8–​9, 30, 198 Helen!, musical comedy (A. P. Herbert, music E. M. Korngold from J. Offenbach, 1932) 255–​60, 266 Helen Goes to Troy, musical comedy (G. Reinhardt and J. Meehan from Offenbach, 1932) 265–​66 Helen of Troy, ballet suite (A. Dorati, 1943) 264 Helen of Troy, comic opera (B. Hoffman and M. Bares, music J. Offenbach, 1960) 166 Helikon-​Opera, Moscow 234 Hellenic Society of London 164 Heller in Pink Tights, film (G. Cukor, 1960) 128 n.17 Helpmann, Robert 287 Herbert, Alan Patrick 256–​60, 263, 266 Herheim, Stefan 302 Hermanová, Eva 219 Hermitage Gardens Theatre, Moscow 225 Hermitage Theatre, St Petersburg 220 Hérold, Ferdinand 30 Hervé (Louis Roger) 3, 34, 54, 115, 128, 155, 187, 233, 294 “He’s just my Bill,” song (J. Kern, 192-​) 27 heure espagnol, L’, opera (M. Ravel, 1907) 239 Hignard, Aristide 54 Hilāna al-​Jamīla (Beautiful Helen), comic opera (Rifā’a Rāfi aţ-​Ţahţāwī, 1869) 186–​87 His Majesty’s Theatre, London 118 Hitler, Adolf 97, 210, 215, 244 Hobson, Harold 260 Hoffman, Bill 266 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 52, 212, 275–​76, 278, 287 Hoffmann’s Love Tales, opera (C. H. Meltzer, music J. Offenbach, 1911) 252 Hoffmannesque scene, etching (P. Klee, 1921) 199 Hofmann, Albert 71 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 199 Hofoper, Vienna 42, 67, 286 Hohenlohe, Princess 63 Holländer, Friedrich 205 Hollingshead, John 117

341

Hollywood Bowl 261 Hollywood Pinafore, musical comedy (G. S. Kaufman, music A. S. Sullivan, 1945) 266 n.40 Homage to Nadar, poems (R. Howard, 1979) 285 Homer 153 homme des Folies Bergères, L’, film (M. Achard, 1935) 244 Hon. Golovyovs, The, novel (M. Saltykov-​ Shchedrin, 1876) 151 Hopp, Julius 93, 165 Hopper, Edna Wallace 140–​41 Horaček, Jaroslav 294 Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz 130 Hot Mikado, The, musical comedy (C. L. Cooke from Gilbert and Sullivan, 1939) 263 Hotel Lamm, Vienna 86 House Un-​American Activities Committee 262 Houssaye, Arsène 32 Houten, Theo van 233 Howard, Richard 285 Howells, William Dean 134–​35 Howson Opera Company 128 Hugo, Victor 25, 35, 41, 49, 70 Huguenots, Les, opera (G. Meyerbeer, 1836) 12, 40, 129, 189–​90, 193 Humberta, Mme 117 Huston, John 1 Ibrahim, Amani Gamel 187 n.16 Ibsen, Henrik 169, 216 ’Id,’Aziz 189 Ihering, Herbert 214 île de Tulipatan, L’, opéra bouffe (H. Chivot and A. Duru, music J. Offenbach, 1868) 54, 96, 286 Illustrated London News, periodical 103 Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, London, periodical 105 Illustrated Times, London, periodical 108 In Pursuit of La Belle Hélène, parody (V. Krylov, 1872) 152 Indianer in England, Die, play (A. von Kotzebue, 1789) 90 Indigo und die vierzig Räuber, operetta (J. Strauss Jr., 1871) 91 Industrial Workers of the World 251 Inspector General, The, comedy (N. V. Gogol, 1836) 111 n.45, 146 Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question 216 Iolanthe, or The Peer and the Peri, comic opera (W. S. Gilbert and A. S. Sullivan, 1882) 56, 110 Ionesco, Eugène 247–​48, 250

342

Index

Irma, see Marié, Irma Isabella II, Queen of Spain 173 Isaiah, prophet 201 Isma’il Pasha, Khedive of Egypt 185–​88 Italiens, Théâtre des, Paris 63 Ivanov, play (A. P. Chekhov, 1880) 187 n.16 Jackson, Barry 259 n.24 Jacobson, Siegfried 207 Jacques-​Offenbach Gesellschaft 297–​98 Jacques Offenbach Society 298 Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit, biography (S. Kracauer, 1937) 67, 60, 164, 200–​201 James, Henry 16 Janin, Jules 40–​41, 44 Jana, La, see La Jana Japan Gazette, Yokohama, periodical 195 Jardin Mabille, Paris 101 Je Suis Partout, Paris, periodical 243 Jean de la Lune, film (M. Achard, 1949) 244 Jecker, Gaston 52 Jefferson, Joseph 115 Jeritza, Maria 206–​208 Jewish Cultural Union 217–​18 Johnson, Lyndon 56 n.68 Jolie parfumeuse, La, opéra comique (H. Crémieux and E. Blum, music J. Offenbach, 1873) 58, 102, 136–​37, 191 Jószef Katona Theatre, Budapest 301 Josephson, Ludvig 167 Jouvet, Louis 248 Joven Telémaco, El, comic opera (J. Rogel and E. Blasco, 1866) 173 Judenthum in der Musik, Das, polemic (R. Wagner, 1850, 1869) 68–​69, 200 Judentum in der Musik, Das, counter-​polemic (H. Berl, 1924) 200 Judic, Anna 146–​47 Juive, La, opera (F. Halévy, 1835) 34 Junk, Victor 96 Kafka, Franz 248 Kafka, Georg 219 n.54 Kahane, Arthur 79–​81, 203 Kalisch, Ludwig 89 Kálmán, Emmerich 93 Kamerny Theatre, Moscow 272 Kammerspiele, Hamburg 206 Kammerspiele, Munich 201 Karl XV, king of Sweden 167 Kašlik, Václav 293 Katkov, Mikhail 146 Kaye, Michael 297 Keck, Jean-​Christophe 277, 297

Keeley, Louise 100 Kelepovska, Natalie 268 Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels 128–​30 Kemp, Robert 250 Kennan, George 146 Kenney, Charles Lamb 103, 113 Kern, Adele 212 Kerr, Alfred 94, 213 Kerry, Otto 93 Ketten, Henri 193 King Lear, tragedy (W. Shakespeare, 1606) 155 Kingsley, Henry 263 Kissi-​Kissi, comic opera (F. C. Burnand, 1873) 106 Kjerulf, Herbert 205 Klee, Paul 199, 214, 286 Klemperer, Otto 203 Kock, Paul de 8 Köhler, Joachim 67 Kölner Offenbach-​Gesellschaft 298 Kolodin, Irving 269 Komische Oper, Berlin 211, 272–​84, 286 Komische Oper, Vienna 62 Kommisarzhevsky, Fyodor (Theodore Komisarjevsky) 221–​22, 259 n.24 König ihres Herzens, operetta (K. Pauspertl and W. Sterk, 1930) 93 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang 208–​209, 261, 265 Kotzebue, August von 90 Kozintsev, Georgy 232 Kracauer, Siegfried 6–​7, 60, 164, 200–​201 Kraus, Karl 6, 92, 198, 210–​11, 218 on Hitler 97 on Max Reinhardt 94–​95, 207 public lectures 93 translation of libretti 93–​97 Krauss, Clemens 273 Křenek, Ernst 94 n.28 Kristiania Theatre 169 Kroll Opera, Berlin 211 Kroll Theatre, Berlin 66, 85 Krupp, Wilhelm 72 Krylov, Viktor 144, 152–​53, 157, 161, 226, 234 Kryzhinsky, Georgy 232 Kubin, Alfred 278 Künnecke, Edward 255 Künstlertheater, Munich 203, 206 Kuzmin, Mikhail 223 Kuznetsov, manager 154 Kyōryu Kidan Seiyō Kabuki (An Amazing Story about Drifters and Western Kabuki), play (K. Morukami, 1879) 195 La Jana (Henriette Hiebel) 210 Labiche, Eugène 8, 19, 48

Index lac des fees, Le, opera (E. Scribe and Mélesville [A.-H.-J. Duveyrier], music D. Auber 1839) 87 n.7 Lacaze, prestidigitator 34 Lacombe, Hervé 59 Lady in the Dark, musical (M. Hart, music K. Weill, 1941) 263 Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, opera (D. Shostakovich, 1934) 232 Lamb, Andrew 115 Lambelle, Aline 128 Landi, Stefano 39 Lapitsky, Yosef 223 Larose, manager 187 Larousse Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe Siécle, reference work (1866-90) 10-11, 14 Las Marismas, Marquise de 34–35 Laterna Magika, Prague 292–95 Latouche, John 267 Latvian National Opera 209 Laughton, Charles 262 L’Auney-Cephas Buffo Opera Company 194 Lawrence, Gertrude 263 Laye, Evelyn 256 League of Nations 230 Lecocq, Charles 2, 39, 115, 128, 184, 195, 224, 272, 295 Leçon du chant électro-magnetique, La, bouffonerie musicale (E. Bourget, music J. Offenbach, 1867) 55 Leeds Gilbert and Sullivan Society 249 leg show 132–33 Lehár, Franz 203 Leigh, Harry 108 Lemaître, Jules 4, 25, 44 Lenin, Vladimir 229 Lentovsky, Mikhail 153 Leon, Francis 128 Leontiev-Shcheglov, Ivan 161 Leopold II, King of the Belgians 166 Leopoldskron, Salzburg 256–57 Lepage, Robert 213 Lespès, Léo 43 Letroublon, Emilia 176 Lexicon of Jewish Music (T. Stengel and H. Gerigk, 1940) 217 Liebe Augustin cabaret, Die, Vienna 97 Liegler, Leopold 91 Lincoln, Abraham 129 Linton, Mrs Elizabeth Lynn 107 Lisboa em 1850, revue (F. Palha and L. Coello, 1850) 175

343

Lischen et Fritzchen, conversation alsatienne (P. Dubois=P. Boisselot, music J. Offenbach, 1863) 99, 126, 191 Liszt, Franz 68, 71, 73 Little, Frank 251 Little Nell and the Marchioness, musical play (J. Brougham from C. Dickens, 1866–67) 124 n.7 Little Theatre Opera Company, New York 255 Little Tom Tug, or The Fresh Waterman, extravaganza (F. C. Burnand, 1873) 106 Lively, Gerard J. 251 n.3 Ljungberg, Göte 212–13 Lohengrin, opera (R. Wagner, 1850) 65, 259 “Loki’s invective,” poem (A. Strindberg, 1883) 169 Loliée, Frédéric 4 Lonergan, Kenneth 2 Lopez, Sancho 217–18 Loren, Sophia 128 n.17 Losch, Tilly 257 Lotos Club, New York 137 Lott, Felicity 298 Louis XIV, King of France 39 Louis XV, King of France 254 Louis Philippe, king of the French 39 Love, Frederick R. 80 Love and Fortune, comedy (J. R. Planché, 1862) 99 Love and Ooh-la-la, play (G. Yanovskaya, 1995) 233 Love by Lantern Light, comic opera (B. Barnett, 1862) 99 Love Song, The, musical comedy (H. B. Smith, music J. Offenbach and E. Künnecke, 1925) 255 Ludwig II, king of Bavaria 70 Luez, Philippe 164 Luhrmann, Baz 1 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 224, 226 Lurette, comic opera (F. Desprez and Alfred Murray, lyrics H. S. Leigh, music J. Offenbach, 1883) 117 Lussan, Zélie de 123 Luzhsky, Vasily 227 Lyadova, V. A. 145, 149 Lyceum Theatre, London 115 Lynes, George Platt 261 n.28 Lysistrata, comedy (Aristophanes, 412–411 B.C.E.) 75 n.38, 224, 229, 267 Lyster, William Saurin 189–92 Macfaren, G. A. 113 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria 183 Madame Bovary, novel (G. Flaubert, 1856) 23

344

Index

Madame Favart, comic opera (H. B. Farnie, music J. Offenbach, 1879) 14, 116–​117, 194 Madame Favart, opéra comique (A. Duru and H. Chivot, music J. Offenbach, 1878) 58, 246 Madame l’Archiduc, opéra bouffe (A. Millaud, music J. Offenbach, 1874) 58, 94, 96, 105, 109, 146, 191, 229 Mahler, Alma 262 Mahler, Gustav 199, 215, 286 Mail, Sydney, periodical 193 Maître Péronilla, opéra bouffe (C. Nuitter, P. Ferrier and Offenbach, music J. Offenbach, 1878) 277, 281 Malclès, Jean-​Denis 249 Mallarmé, Stéphane 82 Maly Opera Theatre, Leningrad 230 Mamontov, Sergey 221 Manasse, Séraphin 186–​88 Manet, Édouard 9 Manhattan Opera House, New York 252 Mann, Klaus 271 Manon, opéra comique (H. Meilhac and P. Gille from Prevost, music J. Massenet, 1884) 26 Mansfield, Josie 126 Mansfield, Richard 111 Marat/​Sade, film (P. Brook from P. Weiss, 1967) 301 Marcel, Gabriel 250 Mardzhanov, Konstantin 221 Maretzek, Max 124 Margaret, film (dir. K. Lonergan, 2011) 2 mariage aux lanternes, Le, opérette (M. Carré and L. Battu, music J. Offenbach, 1857), rev. Le Trésor à Mathurin, 1853) 37, 85, 87, 99, 123, 171, 240 Mariage de Figaro, Le, comedy (P. C. de Beaumarchais, 1784) 49 Marié, Galli 126 Marié, Irma 126, 128 Marié, Paola 126 Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg 1, 220 Marivaux, Pierre de 44 Markov, Pavel 229–​31 Marlowe, Christopher 258 Marocaine, La, opéra bouffe (P. Ferrier and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1879) 58 Marseillaise, La, anthem (C. J. Rouget de Lisle, 1792) 7, 40, 58, 232 Martel, Charles 41 Martin, Mary 269 Marx, Karl 72–​73 Marx Bros 12 Mascotte, La, operetta (E. Audran, 1880) 58 Massine, Léonide 243, 259–​60, 265–​66, 287

Mastfor Studio, Moscow 229 Matthews, Brander 25 Matthews, Julia 103–​105, 114, 122, 190 Maupassant, Guy de 232 May, Elcia 195–​96 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 224, 226 McCaull, John 138 McLemore, Col. A. S. 141 Meehan, John 265 Mehring, Walter 210 Meilhac, Henri 12, 18, 23, 35, 39, 43–​44, 48, 53, 110, 112, 156, 189, 239–​41, 256, 265, 281–​82 Meister von Montmartre, musical comedy (E. Künnecke, 1922) 255 Meistersinger von Nuremberg, Die, opera (R. Wagner, 1868) 66, 68 Melba, Nellie 138 Melbourne Leader, periodical 190 Meliès, Georges 56 Melinand, Agathe 298 Melodies and Memories, musical spectacle (Takarazuka troupe, 1996) 300 n.35 Memphis Bound!, musical comedy (A. W. Barker and S. Benson, music D. Walker and C. Warwick from A. S. Sullivan, 1945) 266 n.20 Mendelssohn, Felix 41, 73, 98, 200, 216, 261 Ménestral, Le, Paris, periodical 56 Menotti, Tatiana 213 Mephisto, film (I. Szabó from K. Mann, 1981) 300 Mephisto, novel (K. Mann, 1936) 271 Mérimée, Prosper 255 Mérö-​Irian, Yolanda 264 Mesdames de la halle, opérette bouffe (A. Lapointe, music J. Offenbach, 1858) 47, 89 Meshchersky, Prince Vladimir 149–​50 Messager de l’Europe, Le, Paris, periodical 47 Messel, Oliver 256, 259 Metropolitan Opera, New York 252, 254–​55, 260, 268–​70, 288 Metropol-​Theater, Berlin 204, 210, 273, 280 Metternich, Count Klemens von 84 Metternich, Count Robert von 41 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 8, 12, 39, 41, 75, 180, 189, 193, 200, 216, 237, 295 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 223, 226 Meyerinck, Herbert von 206 Meyrinck, Gustav 279 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, comedy (W. Shakespeare, 1594) 170, 202, 261 Mikado, The, or The Town of Titipu, comic opera (W. S. Gilbert and A. S. Sullivan, 1885) 112–​13, 228, 263–​64 Mikhailovsky, Nikolay 148–​49

Index Mikhailovsky Theatre, St Petersburg 143–​44 Milestone, Lewis 271 Milhaud, Albert 241 Milhaud, Darius 239 Millöcker, Karl 92 Mindre Teatern, Stockholm 167 Minkowski, Marc 298 Miracle, The, pantomime (K. Vollmoeller, music E. Humperdinck, 1912) 202–​203, 205, 260 Miró, Joan 287 Misfortune (Neschast’e), A, short story (A. P. Chekhov, 1886) 158–​59 Mistinguett (Jeanne Bourgeois) 27, 238 Mogador Music Hall, Paris 240, 249 Moholy-​Nagy, László 211 Moissi, Alexander 205 Moix, Yann 32 Mokuami Kawatake 194–​95 Molière, Jean-​Baptiste 14, 16, 50, 250 Mon Homme, song (J. Charles, A. Willemetz and M. Yvain, 1920) 27 Monde, Le, Paris, periodical 250 Money, play (E. Bulwer-​Lytton, 1840) 195 Monnier, Henri 8 Monsieur Choufleuri restera chez lui le…, opéra bouffe (M. de St Rémy [Duc de Morny], E. L’Épine, H.-​J. Crémieux and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1861) 35, 41, 191, 234, 286 Monsieur de Chimpanzé, opera comique (J. Verne, music A. Hignard 1858) 55 Montaland, Céline 187 Monteux, Pierre 268 Montherlant, Henri de 247 Monty Python’s Flying Circus 23, 51 Moore, Grace 262, 265–​66 Moray Minstrels 102 Morel, Jean 268 Moréno, Henri 56 Morgan, John Oliver 131 Morita Kan-​ya XII 195 Morny, Charles, Comte, later Duc, de 8, 35, 301 Moross, Jerome 207 morte d’Orfeo, La, opera (S. Landi, 1619) 39 Mortier, Arnold 57 Morton, Charles 106 Morton, John Maddison 102 Moscow Art Theatre 213, 221, 224, 233, 274 Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio 224–​21, 255 Moscow Central Worker’s Cooperative 225 Moscow Theatre for the Young Spectator 233 Moser, Hans 209–​10 Moulin Rouge, film (B. Luhrman, 2001) 1 Moulin Rouge, film (J. Huston, 1954) 1 Moulin Rouge, Paris 1

345

Mousmé, La, musical comedy (M. Ambient and A. M. Thompson, music L. Monckton and L. Talbot, 1909) 120 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 28, 35, 49, 54, 58, 64, 74, 85, 128, 140, 198–​99, 226, 230, 287 muette de Portici, La, opera (D. Auber, 1828) 40, 166 Muhammed Ali, Khedive of Egypt 187 Mülle, Ida 138 Munby, Arthur J. 101 n.9 Munsel, Patrice 269 Mürger, Henri 32 Musée d’Orsay, Paris 298 Musgrove, George 192–​93 Music in the Tuileries Gardens, painting (É. Manet, 1862) 9 Musset, Alfred de 20, 32, 54 Musorgsky, Modest 146–​47 My Fair Lady, musical comedy (A. J. Lerner and F. Loewe from G. B. Shaw, 1956) 248, 269 My Guide to Housekeeping, short story (A. P. Chekhov, 1886) 154 My Wives, short story (A. P. Chekhov, 1885) 155 Myers, Henry 267 Mystères de Paris, Les, novel (E. Sue) 50 Nadar (Gaspard-​Félix Tournachon) 8, 37 Nana, novel (É. Zola, 1880) 45–​47, 98 Napoleon Bonaparte 50 Napoléon III (Louis-​Napoléon Bonaparte) 4, 7–​8, 19, 32–​33, 39, 41, 46, 65, 84, 90, 179, 255, 300 Nash, Jolly John 100 Nathan, George Jean 265 n.17 National Reform Movement 130 National Theatre, London 119 National Theatre, Prague 218–​19 Nechaev, Sergey 150 Neher, Caspar 272 Nemirovich-​Danchenko,Vladimir 202, 224–​31 Nerval, Gérard de 261 Nestroy, Johann 43, 67, 85–​87, 89–​92 Neue Berliner Musikzeitung, Berlin, periodical 89 Neues Deutsches Theater, Prague 290 Neues Theater, Berlin 203 Neuestes Allerneustes, revue (J. Freund, 1903) 204 Neumann, Vacláv 280 New Babylon, The, film (G. Kozintsev and L. Trauberg, 1928) 232–​33, 243 New Economic Policy (NEP) 229 New Opera Company, New York 264–​65 New Royalty Theatre, London 99 New Stagecraft 252 New York City Opera 266, 296 New York Herald, periodical 135, 140

346

Index

New York Herald Tribune, periodical 229 New York Opera Company 189 New York Times, periodical 269 New York Tribune, periodical 125 Newly-​weds, The, play (B. Bjørnson, 1866) 169 Nietzsche, Friedrich 68, 198, 200 appreciation of Offenbach 76–​79 critique of Wagner 79–​81 on Jews 77–​78 Night at the Opera, A, film (S. Wood, 1935) 12 Nijinska, Bronisŀawa 213 Ningen Baji Kane no Yokonaka, play (K. Mokuami 1879) 194–​95 No, No, Nanette!, musical comedy 240 Nordau, Max 74, 198–​99 Norman, Jessye 298 Normance, novel (L.-​F. Céline, 1954) 244 Norton, Frederick 119 Nose, The, opera (D. Shostakovich from N. V. Gogol, 1928) 232 Notes d’un musicien en voyage, travel book (J. Offenbach, 1877) 136 Notes of the Fatherland, St Petersburg, periodical 148 Nouveau Théâtre Mouffetard, Paris 299 Nouvelles littéraires, Paris, periodical 250 Novosti dnya (News of the Day), Moscow, periodical 155 Novotná, Jarmila 209, 212, 265 Noyes, Alfred 119 Nozze de Figaro, Le, opera (W. A. Mozart, 1786) 48, 273 Nuitter, Charles 42, 51, 65, 87 n.7 Odéon, Théâtre de l’, Paris 247 Oedipus the King, tragedy (Sophocles, 414–​411 B.C.E.) 221 Oeser, Fritz 296–​97 Œil crevé, L’, comic opera (Hervé, 1867) 187 Of Thee I Sing, musical comedy (I. Gershwin, G. S. Kaufman and M. Ryskind, music G. Gershwin, 1931) 266 Offenbach, Isaac, see Eberst, Isaac Juda OFFENBACH, JACQUES, originally JAKOB works: see individual entries by title and Jules Verne 54–​57 appearance 10, 52 as a character in film 245–​46, 300–​302 attacked for immorality 12, 45–​47, 49–​50, 66–​ 67, 103, 106–​107, 116, 122, 125–​27, 129–​33, 141, 148–​49, 171–​72, 192–​93, 215–​17 attitude to Wagner 63–​64, 74, 81 at the Bouffes-​Parisiens 11–​15, 34–​38 clichés about 2–​4 compared with Darwin 148

compared with Frank Zappa 32 compared with Gilbert and Sullivan 108, 110–​13 compared with Heine 8–​9 death 60 early musical education 30 early operatic work 31 family background 28–​29 Frankfurt School on 5–​7, 214 French citizenship 29, 53, 64 identified with Second Empire 4–​8, 69–​70 Jewishness 29, 68–​69, 72, 77–​78, 96, 116, 200, 215–​18, 233, 235–​36, 258–​59, 300–​301 nationality problems 28–​29, 50, 52–​53, 55, 64, 71–​72 obituaries 16, 60, 116 on modernity 9–​10, 17–​19 on the Opéra-​Comique 30–​31, 37 on Wagner 74, 81 Parisianness 19–​20, 28, 164 visits London 98–​99, 101 visits the United States 135–​37 visits Vienna 67, 84–​91 Offenbach, Jules/​Juda (brother) 99, 300–​301 Offenbachs Geheimnis (Offenbach’s Secret), film (I. Szabó, 1996) 300–​302 Old Curosity Shop, The, novel (Ch. Dickens, 1840–​41) 134 n.7 Olympia, London 256 Olympic Theatre, London 101, 104 Olympian Devils, or Orpheus and Eurydice, burlesque (J. R. Planché, 1832) 99 One Touch of Venus, musical comedy (S. J. Perelman and O. Nash, music K. Weill, 1943) 266 opéra bouffe 5, 7, 10–​14, 20–​21, 42, 7–​88, 101–​ 102, 106–​107, 111, 148, 151, 176–​77 Opera Colorado, Denver 285 Opera Comique, London 106, 110 Opéra-​comique, Théâtre de l’, Paris 15, 30–​31, 35, 38, 49, 51, 60, 108, 211, 237, 240 Opera Company of Boston 56 n.68 Opéra Français de Montréal 122 Opera North 298 Opéra, Théâtre de l’, Paris 10–​11, 17, 35, 46, 64, 81, 276 “Operatic Ideal of Press and Peoples, The” (W. A. Abendroth, 1936) 216 Orfeo ed Euridice, opera (C. W. Gluck, 1779) 39 Orfeu na cidade, parody (A. de Azevedo, 1870) 184 Orfeu na roça, parody (F. Correa Vasques, 1867) 183–​84 Orff, Carl 274 Orlova, Lyubov 230 n.28

Index Orphée aux enfers, opéra bouffe (H. Crémieux and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1858, 1874) (also see Orpheus and Eurydice) 1–​2, 7, 10, 20, 38–​41, 49, 54, 60, 63, 75–​76, 94, 109, 114, 155, 197, 200, 218, 229, 232, 240, 243, 251–​52, 266, 285, 298, 300, 302 as classical burlesque 18–​19, 39 contemporary reviews 41–​42 Felsenstein’s production 273, 276 first revival 105 Franciscque Sarcey on 4 n.3, 19, 38, 44 in London 99–​101 in Madrid 172 in Melbourne 190 in New York 123, 126, 137 in Prague 170 in Rio de Janeiro 181–​83, 185 in St Petersburg 143, 152–​53, 200–​21 in Vienna 86, 89 premiere 38–​39 Reinhardt’s productions 202–​206, 212 Tree’s production 118–​21 Orphéé, see Orfeo ed Euridice Orpheus and Eurydice, operetta (M. Freeman from J. Offenbach, 1883) 37–​38 Orpheus in der Unterwelt, operetta (M. Kalisch from H. Crémieux), see Orphée aux enfers Orpheus in the Haymarket!, opera buffo (J. R. Planché, music J. Offenbach, 1866) 100–​101 Orpheus in the Underworld, see Orphée aux enfers Ostrovsky, Aleksandr 148, 226 Othello, the Moor of Venice, tragedy (Wm Shakespeare, 1604) 155 Our American Cousin, play (T. Taylor, 1858) 100 Overture for Full Orchestra (J. Offenbach, 1843) 32 Oxford Music Hall, London 99–​100 Oxygen, or Gas in burlesque metre, burlesque (R. Reece and H. B. Farnie, music J. Offenbach, 1877) 57–​58 Oyaye, ou la reine des îles, anthropophagie musicale (J. Moineux, music J. Offenbach, 1855) 34 Paganini, Nicoló 52 Palais Royale, Théâtre de, Paris 15, 19, 33, 42, 48, 249 Palha, Francisco 175–​76 Pallenberg, Max 205–​206 Panorama, Paris 34 Pantry Ballet (for Jacques Offenbach), construction (J. Cornell, 1942) 260–​61

347

Papillon, Le, ballet-​fantastique (choreography M. Taglioni, libretto J.-​H. Vernay de Saint-​Georges, music J. Offenbach, 1860) 37, 65 n.8 Pappenheim, Leo 219 Paris and Helen, or The Grecian Elopement, burlesque (M. St John) 128–​29 Paris Commune 232, 235 Paris, die Haupstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts (W. Benjamin, 1921–​40) 5 Paris-​Murcie, Paris, periodical (1879) 81 Parker, H. T. 254 Parsifal, film (H.-​J. Syberberg, 1982) 289 Parsifal, opera (R. Wagner, 1882) 77 Pasdeloup, Jules 71 Patience, or Bunthorne’s Bride, comic opera (W. S. Gilbert, music A. S. Sullivan, 1881) 111 Paul et Virginie, novel (J.-​H. Bernardin de Saint-​ Pierre, 1788) 13 Paul, Mrs Howard 104 Pauspertl, Karl 93 Pearl, Cora 48, 300 Peck, Harry Thurston 141 Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil 182 Peer Gynt, opera (W. Egk, 1938) 216 Peer Gynt, play (H. Ibsen, 1867) 32, 216 Pellar, Rudolf 294 Pelly, Laurent 298 Pensionnat, Das, comic opera (F. von Suppé, 1860) 87 Pépito, opera comique (L. Battu and J. Moinaux, music J. Offenbach, 1853) 34 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista 35 Périchole, La, opéra bouffe (L. Halévy and H. Meilhac from P. Mérimée, music J. Offenbach, 1868, rev.1874) 52, 54, 60, 78, 94, 96, 105, 109, 112, 117, 126, 128, 139–​40, 146, 151, 157, 191, 194, 200, 220, 225, 244, 246, 268, 285, 296 analysis of heroine 26–​27 Céline on 244 compared with The Gondoliers 112–​13 in Madrid 122 in Montreal 122 Metropolitan Opera production 268–​69 Moscow Art Musical Theatre production 224–​29, 255 Premiere 51 Perrault, Charles 39, 48 Peter Pan, musical comedy (M. Charlap, from J. M. Barrie, 1954) 267 Peters, Roberta 268 petit Faust, Le, opéra comique (Hervé, 1869) 155 petite Molière, La, play (J. Anouilh and R. Laudenbauch, 1959) 247

348

Index

petites Danaïdes, Les, ou Quatre-​vingt-​dix-​neuf victimes, imitation-​burlesco-​tragi-​comi-​ diabolico féerie (M. J. de Chavagnes, music Gentil and M. A. Desaugiers, 1819) 39 Phantasiestücke in Callots Manier, tales (E. T. A. Hoffmann, 1814–​15) 276 Phenix Dramatica, Rio de Janeiro 180, 183 Philharmonic Theatre, Islington, London 114 Picasso, Pablo 28 Pickwick Papers, The, novel (Ch. Dickens, 1836–​37) 108 Pierrot le clown, pantomime 34 Pike’s Opera House, New York 126 Pina y Bohiga, Mariano 172 Pinkie and the Fairies, musical comedy (W. G. Robertson, music F. Norton, 1908) 119 Pirates of Penzance, or The Slave of Duty, comic opera (Gilbert and Sullivan, 1874) 108, 111, 298 Pius XI, Pope of Rome 18, 165 Planché, James Robinson 99–​101 Planquette, Robert 59, 295 Platen, August von 67 Poe, Edgar Allan 57 Poelzig, Hans 215 Poetenleben, short stories (R. Walser, 1918) 280 n.17 Poincaré, Raymond 230 Pokorny, Alois 85 Polichinelle, see La Vie de Polichinelle Pollock, Jackson 287 Ponelle, Jean-​Pierre 296 Ponkin, Vladimir 234 Ponsard, François 10 n.29 pont des soupirs, Le, opéra bouffon (H. Crémieux and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1861) 9, 41, 51, 223, 286 Porte-​St-​Martin, Théâtre de la, Paris 30 Pour la musique française, essays (C. Debussy, 1917) 238 Pourvoyeur, Robert 297 Powell, Michael 287–​89 Power, Harold 102 Power, Tyrone 102 Prager Theater 170 Preface to Cromwell, manifesto (V. Hugo, 1828) 35 Pressburger, Emmerich 287–​89 “Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green,” song (H. Clifton, 1864) 101 Preussische Zeitung, Berlin, periodical 35 Price Brothers, John, William, Adolphe and Ferdinand 176 Primadonna, operetta 234 Prince of Wales’s Opera House, Melbourne 190

Princess Ida, or Castle Adamant, comic opera (W. S. Gilbert, music A. S. Sullivan, 1884) 111 Princess Toto, comic opera (W. S. Gilbert, music F. Clay, 1876) 111–​112 Princesse de Trébizonde, La, opéra bouffe (Ch. Nuitter and E. Tréfeu, music J. Offenbach, 1869) 52, 91, 96, 119, 122, 139, 152, 191, 286 in London 113 in Prague 170–​71 Princess’s Theatre, Melbourne 189 Printemps, Yvonne 245–​46 Proletkult Theatre, Moscow 224 Prophète, Le, opera (G. Meyerbeer, 1849) 40 Protée, play (P. Claudel, 1914) 239 Proust, Marcel 85 Provisional Theatre, Prague 170–​71 Psalm of Montreal, poem (S. Butler, 1878) 122 Puck, Leipzig, periodical 69 Punch, London, periodical 101 Pushkin, Aleksandr 224 Puss in petticoats, comic opera (music J. Offenbach, 1867) 103 Putin, Vladimir 234 Pye, Oliver 302 quadrille 2, 4 n.3 Queiros (Queiroz), Eça de 177–​78, 198 Quijote sin mancha, Un, film (M. M. Delgado, 1969) 1 Quinlan, Thomas 193 n.38 Rabelais, François 14 Racine, Jean 141, 248, 250 Radok, Alfred 290–​93 Ranchos Carnavalescos, Rio de Janeiro 182 Ravel, Maurice 239 Ravensbrück prison camp 218 Rée, Max 204 Red Shoes, The, film (M. Powell and E. Pressburger, 1948) 287 Reece, Robert 57 Reinhardt, Gottfried 262, 265 Reinhardt, Max 79, 120, 201–​14, 271–​72, 286 in America 261–​63, 265–​66 Karl Kraus’s opinion of 94–​95, 207 production of Les Contes d’Hoffmann 211–​15 production of Helen! 255–​60 productions of La Belle Hélène 206–​10, 250, 255 productions of Orphée aux enfers 202–​206 reliquia, A, novel (Eça de Queiróz, 1887) 177 Renaud, Madeleine 247–​50 Renaud, Maurice 249 n.42, 252 Renoir, Jean 1, 45

Index Renoir, Pierre 45 Requiem Mass in D Minor (W. A. Mozart, 1791) 58, 77 Rethburg, Elisabeth 205 Revue critique des idées et des livres, Paris, periodical 239 Revue et gazette musicale, Paris, periodical XIV 15 Rheingold, Das, music drama (R. Wagner, 1876) 40 Rheinnixen, Die (Les Fées du Rhin), opéra romantique (Ch. Nuitter, trans. A. von Wolzogen, music J. Offenbach, 1864) 42, 67, 87, 297 Rhinoceros, play (E. Ionesco, 1959) 250 Rice, E. E. 135 Richard Wagner und Jacob Offenbach. Ein Wort in Harnisch, pamphlet (1871) 73–​74 Richardson, Joanna 4 Richepin, Jean 61 Richter, Hans 64 Riding, Alan 243 Riehle, Jürgen 275 Rilla, Paul 274 Rindskopf, Moses 28 Ring des Nibelungen, Die, music-​drama cycle (R. Wagner, 1876) 77, 213 Ringtheater, Vienna 52 Rio de Carvalho 176 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, opera (B. Brecht and K. Weill, 1930) 96 Riskin, Leo 264 Risley, Professor (Richard Carlisle) 194 Rissin, David 143, 156 Ristori, Adelaide 134 Ritchard, Cyril 267–​70 Ritter Blaubart, see Barbe-​bleue Rivollet, André 242 Robert-​Houdin, Jean Eugène 56 Robey, George 256–​57 Robin Hood, see The Adventures of Robin Hood Robinson Crusoe, opéra comique (H.-​J. Crémieux, music J. Offenbach, 1867) 31, 51, 92, 108, 132, 173 Rochefort, Henri 149 Rocky Horror Show, The, musical (R. O’Brien, 1973) 299 Rodgers, Richard 266, 270 Rogel, José 173 Roger, Louis 9 Roi Carotte, Le, opéra bouffe (V. Sardou from E. T. A. Hoffmann, music J. Offenbach, 1872) 53–​54, 281 Romberg, Sigmund 265 Rommel, Otto 89 Roquebrune, Fernand-​Georges 239

349

Roqueplan, Nestor 16 Rosalinda, operetta (G. Reinhardt and J. Meehan Jr from C. Haffner and R. Genée, music E. M. Korngold from J. Strauss, 1942) 240 Rose of Auvergne, comic opera (H. B. Farnie, music J. Offenbach, 1869) [from Rose de St Flour] 113 rose de Saint-​Flour, La, opérette (M. Carré, music J. Offenbach, 1856) 99, 123, 195 Rosenkavalier, Der, opera (H. von Hofmannsthal, music R. Strauss, 1911) 193, 202 Rosenthal, Manuel 243 Rosenthal, Maurice 298 Rossini, Gioacchino 28, 35, 75, 111, 133, 177, 222, 254, 270 Rounseville, Robert 287 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques 35 Royal Adelphi Theatre, London 259 Royal Dutch Theatre, The Hague 167 n.7 Royal English Opera Company 195–​96 Royal Italian Opera House, London, see Covent Garden Royal Olympic Theatre, Yokohama 194 Royal Opera House, Berlin 212 Royal Opera House, London 117 Royal Theatre, Stockholm, see Dramaten Royalty Theatre, London 109, 117 Rudel, Julius 266 Ruddigore, or The Witch’s Curse, comic opera (W. S. Gilbert, music A. S. Sullivan, 1887) 112 Rue de la Gaité Offenbach, revue (M. Frantz, music J. Offenbach, 1993) 299–​300 Russell, Lillian 138–​41 Russian Theatrical Society 220 Sacre du printemps, ballet (V. Nijinsky, music I. Stravinsky, 1913) 31 Sadler’s Wells, London 296 Sadová, Battle of 48, 71 Sadovsky, Prov 145 n.5 Sahl, Mort 277 n.18 Šahrazād, musical comedy ((S. Darwīš, 1921) 188–​89 Saidy, Fred 287 Saint-​Beuve, Charles Augustin 8 St George’s Opera House, London 103 St James’s Theatre, London 99, 104, 106, 111 St John, Florence 111, 117 St John, Molyneux 128 Saint Petersburg Vedemosti (Intelligencer), periodical 149 Saint-​Saëns, Camille 11, 44, 237–​38 Saki (H. H. Munro) 14

350

Index

Saladin, sultan of Egypt and Syria 41 Salieri, Antonio 74 Salle Comte, Paris 35 Salle Favart, Paris 51 Salle Herz, Paris 34 Salon Pritzelberger, comic opera (Conradi, music J. Offenbach, 1862) 41 Saltykov-​Shchedrin, Mikhail 151 Salvi, Matteo 67 Salzburg Festival 273 Šamberk, František 170 Samia, James 188 San Francisco Bulletin, periodical 128 San Francisco Chronicle, periodical 138 Sandmann, Der, tale (E. T. A. Hoffmann, 1816) 276 São Januario Hall, Rio de Janeiro 180 Sarauw, Paul 204 Sarcey, Francisque 4 n.3, 19, 38, 44 Sardou, Victorien 8, 53, 150, 255 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 247 Sassmann, Hans 208–​209, 211 Satie, Erik 236 Saturday Review, The, London, periodical 107 Saturday Review, The, New York, periodical 269 Savary, Jérôme 28 Savoy Theatre, London 56, 110–​11 Scarron, Paul 39 Schall und Rauch, Berlin 201 Schauspieldirektor, Der, comic opera (G. Stephanie, music W. A. Mozart, 1786) 35 Scher, Peter 94 Schiaparelli, Elsa 261 n.28 Schiffer, Marcellus 210 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 278 Schirach, Baldur von 217 Schliemann, Heinrich 164 Schmid, Patric 299 Schmidt, Theresa 191 Schneider, Hortense 17 n.42, 35, 45, 48, 51, 52, 101, 114, 167, 186, 188, 191, 234, 300 as a character in film 244–​46 in La Belle Hélène 42, 167 in La Grande Duchesse 104, 149–​50 in London 104 in St Petersburg 146, 149–​50 Zola on 47 Schoenberg, Arnold 275 Schreiner in seiner Werkstatt, Der, operetta (I. Eberst, 1811) 29 Schörghofer, Hartmut 234 Schubert, Franz 255, 265 Schumann, Robert 73, 128 Schuster, Friedel 209, 212

Schütte, Ernst 209 Schwarze Korsar, Der/​Le Corsair noir, opéra comique (C . Nuitter from E. T. A. Hoffmann, music J. Offenbach, 1872) 54 Scorcese, Martin 289 Screen Writers Guild 271 Scribe, Eugène 31, 87 n.7 Scudo, Paul 68 Sedan, Battle of 5, 91, 239 Seeger, Horst 281 Señor Alan Escapes from the Fires of Hell, play (S. Lopez) 218 Serapionsbrūder, Die, tale (E. T. A. Hoffmann, 1818) 276 Seventh Symphony (L. von Beethoven, 1811–​12) 50 Shakespeare, William 58, 115, 156, 189, 191, 196, 208, 212, 248, 266 Shaw, George Bernard 108, 112–​13, 117–​18, 120 Schchepkin, Mitrofan 148 Shearer, Moira 287 Shengold, David 296 Sher, Bartlett 269 Shintomi-​za, Yokohama 195–​96 Shostakovich, Dmitry 232–​33, 243 Showboat, musical (O. Hammerstein II from E. Ferber, music J. Kern, 1927) 27 Shubert Brothers, Lee, Sam S. and Jacob J. 210, 255 Signor Bruschino, Il, ossia Il figlio per azzardo, comic opera (G. Rossini, 1813) 35 Signoret, Simone 250 Silly, Léa 48, 128, 146 Silva, Florinda Joaquim da 180 Silver Threads among the Gold, song (E. C. Rexford & H. P. Danks, 1873) 192 Simonsen, Fanny 190 Sinclair, Upton 251 n.3 Skulnik, Menasha 266 Slezak, Leo 210, 281 Smetana, Bedřich 170–​71 Smetana Theatre, Prague 219 Smith, Harry B. 140, 155 Smith, Matthew W. 75–​76 Snowden, Lady Ethel 255 Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques 34 Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents 135 Society for the Suppression of Vice 131 Södra teatern, Stockholm 167 66, Les, opérette (Ph.-​A. Pittaud de Forges and P.-​A. Chapelle-​Laurencin, music J. Offenbach, 1856) 114, 268 Sokoloff, Vladimir 213

Index Soldene, Emily (Miss FitzHenry) 100, 109, 114–​ 15, 131, 192, 194 as Drogan 114–​15, 138 Soldene Opéra-​Bouffe Company 115 Solodovnikov Theatre, Moscow 147 Sologub, Fyodor 223 Solweg, Maria 215 Son of a Servant, fictional memoir (A. Strindberg, 1886) 168 Song Birds, see Périchole, La Song of Norway, musical comedy (M. Lazarus from H. Curran, music R. Wright and G. Forrest from E. Grieg, 1945) 265 Sorcerer, The, comic opera (W. S. Gilbert and A. S. Sullivan, 1877) 138 soulier de satin, Le, ou Le pire n’est pas toujours sûr, play (P. Claudel, 1919–​24) 247, 249 Sousa, John Philip 136, 138, 142 Spectator, The, London, periodical 116 Speer, Albert 244 Spirit of the Times, The, New York, periodical 123 Staatsoper, Berlin 215 Stade, Frederica von 298 Stadttheater, New York 123 Stalin, Josef 229, 233 Stallich, Jan 294 Standard Theatre, London 103 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 211, 224, 228, 274 Stanislavsky-​Nemirovich-​Danchenko Musical Theatre, Moscow 231 Stedingk, Eugène von 167–​68 Sterk, Wilhelm 93 Stern, Ernst 203 Stevens, Risë 268 Stewart, Nellie 190 n.26 Strandberg, Charlotte 167 Strasfogel, Ignace 268 Strauss, Johann, the younger 82, 91–​92, 117, 133, 203, 208, 275 Strauss, Richard 199, 202 Strindberg, August 168–​69, 205, 214 Strindberg, Oscar 168 Strnad, Oskar 212–​13 Strong, George Templeton 123–​25, 131 Sue, Eugène 50 Sullivan, Sir Arthur Seymour 25–​26, 56, 77, 133, 138, 191, 194, 216, 251, 263, 269 collaboration with W. S. Gilbert 109–​13, 116–​18 ventures into comic opera 102–​103 Sumurûn, pantomime (F. Freksa, music V. Holländer, 1910) 120, 207, 260 Sunshine, film (I. Szábo, 1999) 301 Suppé, Franz von 82, 87, 92 Suvorin, Aleksey 149–​50, 157–​58

351

Svoboda, Josef 290–​95 Swansong (Lebedinaya pesna), play (A. P. Chekhov, 1887) 155–​56 Swing Mikado, The, musical comedy (H. Minturn from W. S. Gilbert, music C. Levy and G. Warden from A. S. Sullivan, 1939) 263 Syberberg, Hans-​Jürgen 289 Sydney Mail, periodical 193 “Symphony of the Future,” farce (E. Grangé and P. Gille, 1860) 65–​67 Szábó, István 300–​301 Taganrog Civic Theatre 152 Tairov, Aleksandr 272 Takarazuka troupe, Osaka and Tokyo 197, 300 Taking Sides, film (I. Szabó, 2001) 300 Tales of Hoffmann in Offenbach’s Themes, The, essay (Th. Adorno, 1932) Ṭahṭawī, Rifā’a Ráfi, al-​ 187 Tani Masazumi 300 n.35 Tannhäuser, oder Der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg, opera (R. Wagner, 1845–​61) 43, 63–​65, 70, 74–​75, 300 Tautin, Lise 42, 114 Taylor, Sue 215 Tchernina, Liudmila 287 Teatr, Moscow, periodical 233 Teatro de Gimnasio, Rio de Janeiro 180, 183 Teatro de Ginásio, Lisbon 175 Teatro de la Zarzuela, Madrid 171, 174 Teatro de los Bufos Madrileños, Madrid 173 Teatro de los Variedades, Madrid 173 Teatro de Trinidade, Lisbon 176–​77 Teatro del Circo, Madrid 173 Teatro do Principe Reale, Lisbon 176 Teatro Fenice, Venice 262 Teatro São Carlos, Lisbon 175–​77 Teatro São Pedro, Rio de Janeiro 180 Teatro Villanueva, Havana 179 Telyakovsky, Vladimir 220 Tempest, The, play (W. Shakespeare, 1611) 58 Terada Takio 300 Terezin/​Theresienstadt concentration camp 218–​19 Teufel lacht dazu, Der, revue (J. Freund, 1906) 204 Tewfiq Pasha, Khedive of Egypt 187–​88 Thackeray, William Makepeace 37–​38 That Heavenly Helen, operetta (G. Dunn, music J. Offenbach, 1977) 266, 296 Thatcher, Margaret 288–​89 Theater am Franz-​Josefs-​Kai, Vienna 87, 90 Theater am Kurfürstendamm, Berlin 209 Theater an der Wien, Vienna 54, 84, 87–​88, 93

352 Theater der Dichtung, Vienna 93–​97 Theater in der Josefstadt, Vienna 84 Theater in der Leopoldstadt, Vienna 84 Théâtre-​Bouffe, St Petersburg 146–​47, 149, 153 Théâtre de la Comédie, Cairo 186–​88 Théâtre de la Croix Rouge, Lyon 47 Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels 166 Théâtre de l’Athénée, Paris 302 Théâtre Français, New York 123, 126 Théâtre Khédivial de l’Opéra, Cairo 185 n.11 Théâtre-​Lyrique, Paris 33, 55 Théâtre Marigny, Paris 247 Théâtre National des Mi-​Pyrénées 298 Théâtre National Populaire 248 Theatre Royal, Melbourne 190–​92 Theatre, The, London, periodical 115, 118, 120 Theilade, Nini 213 Thein, Hanuš 218 “Then You’ll Remember Me,” song (A. Bunn, music M. W. Balfle, 1843) 105 Thérésa (Emma Valadon) 11, 48, 53–​54 Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old, comic opera (W. S. Gilbert, music A. S. Sullivan, 1871) 108 Thillion, Germaine 218 Thimig, Helena 263 Thimig, Hermann 213 Thomas, Ambroise 115 Thomas, Theodore 137 Thompson, Clara 191 Thompson, Julian 266 Thompson, Lydia 57, 133, 135 Three Stooges 14 Times of London, periodical 118–​19 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) 295 Titus, Joan 232–​33 Tivoli, San Francisco 138 Todd, Mike 265–​66 Tolstoy, Lev 151 Tom Thumb the Great, burlesque (H. Fielding, 1731) 125 Toole, John Lawrence 113 Too Many Cooks, burletta (T. German Reed, music J. Offenbach, 1869) 99 Torch, The, Vienna, see Die Fackel Torloff, Frank 261 Tostée, Lucille 123, 125, 128, 133–​34 Tote Stadt, Die, opera (P. Schott [J. Korngold] from G. Rodenbach, music E. M. Korngold, 1920) 208 Town Topics, New York, periodical 139 Traga-​moças, parody (A. de Azevedo, 1869) 184 Tragédia da Rua das Flores, novel (Eça de Queiróz, 1877) 177–​78 Trauberg, Aleksandr 233

Index Trauberg, Leonid 232–​33 Traviata, La, opera (G. Verdi, 1853) 48 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm 118–​20 Tree, Viola 118 Trésor à Mathurin, Le, tableau villageois (L. Battu, music J. Offenbach, 1853) 34 Treumann, Carl 85, 87–​88, 93 Trial by Jury, dramatic cantata (W. S. Gilbert and A. S. Sullivan, 1875) 109–​10, 191 Trip to the Moon, A, film (G. Méliès, 1902) 56 Tristan und Isolde, opera (R. Wagner, 1856–​59) 66–​67, 75 Troilus and Cressida, play (W. Shakespeare, 1602–​03) 156 Trom-​bal-​ca-​zar, ou Les criminels dramatiques, bouffonerie musicale (C. D. Dupeuty and E. Bourget, music J. Offenbach, 1856) 12–​13, 123, 179 Troyens, Les, opera (H. Berlioz, 1856–​59) 45 Truex, Ernest 266 Trotsky, Leon 226 Tucker, Richard 262 Turgenev, Ivan 150 Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) 14, 136 Tzigane, La, opéra comique (A. Delacour and V. Wilder, music J. Strauss, Jr, 1877) 140 Ueda Shinji 300 Ulitsky, Mikhail 230 Ulysse, play (F. Ponsard, 1852) 10 n.29 Uncle Vanya (Dyadya Vanya), play (A. P. Chekhov, 1897) 159–​62 Uppmann, Theodor 268 Urban, Joseph 252–​55, 286 U.S. Marine Corps 142 Vacquerie, August 150 Vaillancourt, student 122 Valency, Maurice 268 Vallès, Jules 61 valse de Paris, La, film (M. Achard, 1950) 244–​46 Valyanov, Grigory Stavovich 152 Vanity Fair, London, periodical 107 Vanoni, Mme 138 Variétés, Théâtre des, Paris 15, 17–​18, 34, 42, 48, 51–​52, 237 Variety, New York, periodical 170 Varney, Alphonse 41 Vaudeville, Théâtre du, Paris 30 Venedey, Jakob 30 Vent du Soir, ou l’Horrible festin , opérette bouffe (Ph. Gilles, music J. Offenbach, 1857) 13, 89 Nestroy’s adaptation 89–​91

Index ventre de Paris, Le, novel (É. Zola, 1873) 47 Verdi, Giuseppe 21, 55, 62, 68, 125, 133, 180, 185, 189 Verfugbar aux enfers, Le, revue (1946) 218 Verne, Jules 19, 54–​57 Verneuil, Louis 264 Vernon, Howard 195–​96 Veronese, Paolo 295 Vert-​Vert, opéra comique (H. Meilhac and C. Nuitter, music J. Offenbach, 1869) 31, 51, 94, 106–​107 Vian, Boris 14 Viardot-​Garcia, Pauline 39, 150 Victoria Alexandrina, Queen of Great Britain 98 Victoria Theatre, Singapore 302 vida Madrileña, La, comic opera (F. Arderíus, 1870) 173 Vie, La, musical comedy (A. P. Herbert and A. D. Adams, 1929) 256, 266 vie de Polichinelle, La, pantomime (Ch. de Livry and Ambroise, 1842) 34 vie parisienne, La, opéra bouffe (H. Meilhac and L. Halévy, music J. Offenbach, 1866) 2, 6, 9, 54, 60, 92, 94–​95, 113, 126, 136, 161, 184, 207, 210, 225, 234, 238, 240, 246, 261, 284–​85 as sign of modernity 19–​20 Barrault’s production 247–​50 Felsenstein’s production 275–​76 in London 117, 299 in Madrid 175 in Prague 170 in Stockholm 169 premiere 48–​50 vie parisienne, La, Paris, periodical 18 Viera da Carvalho, Mário 177 Vigny, Alfred de 50 Vilar, Jean 248 Vilinsky, A. B. 229 Villemessant, Hippolyte 31 n.10 Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Auguste 57 Villon, François 14 Vilyams, Pyotr 230 violoneux, Le, légende bretonne (E. Mestépès and É. Chevallet, music J. Offenbach, 1855) 35, 87, 12, 179, 194 Virgil 153, 168 Virgile travesti, poem (P. Scarron, 1648–​53) 39 Visitandines, Les, comic opera (F. Devienne, 1825) 87 vita è bella, La, film (R. Benigni, 1997) 2 Vizentini, Albert 55 Voigtmann, Karl-​Fritz 276 Volksoper, Vienna 207 Volkstheater, Munich 66

353

voyage dans la lune, Le, novel (J. Verne, 1875) 55–​56 voyage dans la lune, Le, opéra féerie (Leterrier, A. Vanloo and A. Mortier from J. Verne, music J. Offenbach, 1875) 55–​57, 96, 138, 153–​54, 286 Wadepuhl, Heinz 297 Wādī al-​Nīl, Cairo, periodical 187 Wagner, Cosima 62, 73 Wagner, Richard 5, 17, 43, 55, 92, 198–​200, 213, 216, 239, 254 attacks on Offenbach 69–​74 attitude to Offenbach 62–​68, 85 “Jewishness in Music” 68–​69 Offenbach’s comments on 17, 74, 81 work in Paris 63–​65 Walch, Garnet 190 Wallmark, E. 167 Walser, Robert 280 Warner Brothers 243, 261 Warner, Charles Dudley 136 Warrior’s Husband, The, play (J. Thompson, 1924) 266 Wãscher, Aribert 276 Watteau, Jean-​Antoine 48, 55, 120, 208 Waxworks Museum, The, novella (G. Meyrinck, 1907) 279 Weber, Carl Maria von 64, 133 Weber, Ernst von 63 Wechsler, Judith 10 Wedding, The, play (A. P. Chekhov, 1889) 163 Wedekind, Frank 92 Weill, Kurt 263, 266, 274 Werfel, Franz 262 Westminster Gazette, London, periodical 119 Westport County Playhouse, Conn. 263 White Fawn, The, extravaganza (J. Mortimer, 1868) 132 White, John 299 White, Richard Grant 130, 132 Wiener Werkstãtte 252 Wilder, Thornton 262 Willemetz, Albert 241 Williamson, James 191 n.29 Willy (Henry Gauthier-​Villars) 236 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 68 Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma), comedy (A. S. Griboedov, 1831) 146 Wolzogen, Albert von 42, 64, 87 n.7 Wood and Co., music publishers 105 Wood Goblin, The (Leshy), comedy (A. P. Chekhov, 1889) 156–​61 World of Art 223 World Zionist Organization 198

354 Worrell Sisters, Jennie, Irene and Sophie 128–​29 Worth, Charles Frederick 45 Yanovskaya, Genrietta 233 Yon, Jean-​Claude 297 Yoshida Yūko 300 Young, Brigham 138 Young Men’s Christian Association 130–​31 Zak, Vitaly 230 Zangiri theatre 194 Zappa, Frank 32

Index Zarzuela 172–​74 Zauberflöte, Die, Zauberstück (E. Schikaneder, music W. A. Mozart, 1791) 123 Zé Pereira, Rio de Janeiro 182 Zemlinsky, Alexander 206, 211 Ziegfeld, Florenz 204, 210 Zimin’s Opera, Moscow 221 Zola, Émile 10, 25, 45–​47, 98, 232 attack on Carpeaux 46 attacks on Offenbach 45–​47, 187 n.18 Zoo, The, musical absurdity (B. C. Stephenson, music A. S. Sullivan, 1875) 110 Zurich Stadttheater 273