Karl Kraus und Felix Salten haben 1909 bzw. 1906 Diagnosen zur Situation des musikalischen Unterhaltungstheaters und seiner Rezeption in Wien
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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 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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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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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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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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When I lived in St Paul de Vence, my partner Ian and I took a weekly bus jaunt down to
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An interview with Felicitas Wetzel, a German sound artist who created a concert performance with Offenbach music and quotes called
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Jeff Clarke has been the Artistic Director of UK’s Opera della Luna since 1994. With that company, he has made
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Jean-François Philibert Berthelier (b Panissières, Loire, 14 December 1828; d Paris, 29 September 1888) was a comic actor and singer
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The genre operetta was invented around 1850 in Paris, as a new and independent musical theater form in the modern
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Hervé’s second attempt, after Les Chevaliers de la table ronde (1866), to produce a full-length burlesque opérette to challenge the
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Of the great opéras-bouffes of Offenbach’s early years, the one which has suffered the most inexplicable eclipse in the 20th
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Even after the success of his full-length opéras-bouffes and the disappearance of the constrictions which had limited him in earlier
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Jacques Offenbach’s La Princesse de Trébizonde premiered in 1869 in the fashionable spa town of Baden Baden – in their
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Do you know Phi-Phi? Unless you are French or Hungarian and over 90 years of age, you won’t ever have
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Zulma Bouffar (b Nérac, 24 May 1841) made her first appearance on the stage at the age of six, at
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She was the six-year shooting star of Offenbach’s Théâtre des Variétés series whose dazzling career declined at the same time
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Lydia Thompson [Eliza Hodges Thompson] is one of the theatre’s ‘legends’, and as in the case of other such legendary
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Marie Desclauzas was a buxom and eventually hefty star of the opérette stage who became the most admired musical character
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Florimond Ronger, known to the musical and theatrical world simply as Hervé, was one of the great characters in,
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The son of a German bookbinder, music-teacher and cantor called Eberst, but known as Offenbach, the young Jacob was given
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Orphée aux enfers was Offenbach’s first venture into mounting a full-scale opéra-bouffe at his blossoming little Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, where
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Gehört Offenbach nicht allen? Auch Jean-Christophe Kecks Offenbach-Edition lässt Fragen offen. Ein Versuch, einige zu klären. Die Offenbach-Philologie ist eine
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The fourth of Offenbach’s great opéras-bouffes burlesqueing ancient historical legend or mythology (after Orphée aux enfers, Geneviève de Brabant and
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The brightest musical star of the postwar years in France, whose output frittered away into embarrassing imitations of himself after
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In 1867, the year of the extravagant Paris Exposition Universelle , Offenbach’s success reached its apogee. His new opera bouffes,
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