Emmerich Kálmáns Graf Tassilo (Gräfin Mariza, Buch Julius Brammer / Alfred Grünwald) verkörpert einen Typus, den das Publikum der Uraufführung
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The folk who created the musical works of Meilhac, Halévy, Crémieux, Hervé and their colleagues, and of the parallel composers,
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The team responsible for that overwhelming hit of 1926, The Desert Song, mined a similar vein for their next collaboration,
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The small theater in Zwickau-Plauen (Germany) presented Victor Herbert’s much-loved Babes in Toyland as their Christmas spectacle and gave the
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How many female operetta composers can you name? Here is one who was also a baroness, no less. Her operetta
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I first came seriously in contact with F. C. Burnand’s burlesque, Ixion, when working on my biography of burlesque megastar,
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The one-act l‘île de Tulipatan, written by Jacques Offenbach with his librettists Henri Chivot and Alfred Duru in 1868 for
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Jacques Offenbach could not have asked for a better way to curry favour for theatre priveleges than by publishing a
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The Queen of Offenbach’s Bouffes? Oh, yes, I hear the unenlightened nod. ‘Hortense Schneider. We’ve all heard of her’. I:
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Monsieur Marius (Claude Marius Duplany, b Paris, 18 February 1850) was a ‘Frenchman, play producer, actor, raconteur, and optimist’ (they
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Édouard Théodore Nicole, better known as Léonce (b Paris, 12 January 1820) was a slim, bespectacled (off-stage) low comedian with
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In 1847 the young comedian known as Désiré asked Hervé for a two-handed musical sketch to play at his benefit.
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Franz von Suppé – das sind ein paar wenige Ouverturen, die man heute noch spielt, seltener in Konzerten, wo leider
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Imagine a world that persistently rewards the rich and powerful while immiserating the masses. Imagine an international paternalist cartel that
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The Operetta Research Centre was, this week, undergoing technical maintenance, in the course of which supremo Kevin Clarke came up
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Ivor Novello’s World War 2 hit The Dancing Years has finally been made available in a ‘first complete recording’ by
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Mind the apostrophes! The recent revival of Paul Lincke’s Frau Luna at Tipi am Kanzleramt is a firm reference point
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Originally produced at Baden-Baden during the 1869 summer season, with the young Mdlle Périer in its principal travesty rôle, La
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Sometimes you read an operetta essay that deeply disturbs you – not because it is badly written or full of
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To say precisely who were the first English dancers to perform the cancan in the English-language theatre is pretty impossible.
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Eine der bekanntesten und weit verbreiteten Gavotten ist die „Stephanie-Gavotte“, op. 312 von Alfons Czibulka. Diese wurde 1880 der Prinzessin
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In his 2 volume biography Emily Soldene: In Search of a Singer Kurt Gänzl chronicles the initial success of opéra
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In 1980, the classical music world marked the 100th anniversary of Jacques Offenbach’s death. And for this greatest of ‘life
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My last post and its original five pictures, borrowed from the gold mines of Blois, included four taken from the
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Amy Sheridan was something of a phenomenon. When she died, in 1878, at a Brighton boarding house, aged 39, of
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The overwhelming and instant success of Erik Charell’s operetta spectacle Im weißen Rössl at Berlin’s Großes Schauspielhaus (the so-called “Theater
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Kurt Gänzl is no stranger to readers of these pages. As the author of The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre
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Theatrical mythology has been curiously and undeservedly kind to some folk. Miss Tucker from Ohio went from failure to failure
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Daniel Defoe’s shipwrecked hero (1719) and his man Friday seem to have made their first appearance on the musical stage
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Nach der Uraufführung von Fürstin Ninetta am 10. Jänner 1893 schrieb die Tageszeitung Die Presse: „Die Musik der Operette ist
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A fortunate series of simultaneous anniversaries—the 300th of the founding of New Orleans, the 75th of the New Orleans Opera,
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Back in June 2012, Marion Linhardt from the University of Bayreuth presented a paper on the Eysler operetta Künstlerblut in
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Musical comedy in 2 acts by Owen Hall. Lyrics by Harry Greenbank and Adrian Ross. Music by Sidney Jones. Additional
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Although they worked together as a trio on only five shows over seven years, the influence of “Bolton, Wodehouse, and
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When I lived in St Paul de Vence, my partner Ian and I took a weekly bus jaunt down to
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Il n’est guère de compositeur du vingtième siècle qui ait été jadis aussi fêté de part et d’autre de l’Atlantique
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