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Dance Signals 2009

The Strauss Operetta Factory
Topicality – Social Criticism – Censorship – Music Workshop – Kitsch

19 – 22 March 2009

Even though Viennese operetta had come into existence some years earlier, the two men who made the most important contribution to developing and popularising the genre were Johann Strauss II and Richard Genée, a composer, librettist, and conductor with long practical experience in the theatre. Born in Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland) in 1823, he held appointments at various German-speaking theatres before eventually being engaged at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna in the autumn of 1868. It was above all Genée who influenced Viennese operetta decisively in the 1870s and 1880s – as librettist, composer and composer-cum-ghostwriter.
During the lifetimes of Suppè, Millöcker and Strauss there was already much more or less emotionally charged discussion of the operetta’s balancing act between tightly controlled mass production and the genre’s claim to be art. When musicologists nowadays deal with operetta, this does not represent an attempt to blur the aesthetic distinctions between a form of music theatre that is in some cases utterly trivial and ‘high-quality’ products. It is rather a case of defining the sociological position of a phenomenon which reflects the taste, preferences, longings and ultimately the mentality of large segments of the public. It is a fact that the popularity of the operetta has always exceeded that of its ‘serious’ sister, the opera. This is made clear by audience statistics alone.
The aim of the symposium, the workshop concerts and the final round-table discussion, in which theatre directors, conductors, producers and musicologists will take part, is to analyse the operettas which resulted from the close co-operation between Strauss and Genée in the years between 1870 and 1883 – as it were as representative of the whole genre – as regards the discrepancies they show, on the one hand between success and failure, and on the other between being a transitory phenomenon of their time and their claim to the status of classics. Starting with various aspects of the genesis of these operettas (the French texts on which they are based, the dialogues which anticipate cabaret, the ambivalent position of the music between ballroom dance and grand opera, the role of teamwork in their composition, critical references to topical political and social matters of local interest, state censorship and how it was circumvented, business interests, and the need to entertain the public), an attempt will be made to define the sense of and the scope for the present-day reception of operetta.

Norbert Rubey
(Translation: Leigh Bailey)

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