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The Gustav Lewy collection (ZPM 953) kept in the Vienna City Library contains a letter written by Richard Genée on 30 December 1890 to Johann Strauss’s school friend Gustav Lewy in his position as the holder of the stage rights of Die Fledermaus. It clearly deals among other matters with the proceeds from the printing of the libretto. Genée makes it clear that:
My contract with M. St. [Maximilian Steiner, co-director of the Theater an der Wien when the operetta was created] states that I would receive 100 florins [=Austro-Hungarian gulden] for each act that I dealt with. After that I was paid 300 florins for the Fledermaus libretto; of course that paid only the stage fee, valid for all the stages in the world – a sum that is enough – dreadfully so. In addition I received from Strauss or his wife 300 florins for the musical support – apart from that never one kreuzer!
It is not clear which of Strauss’s three wives is meant. Nevertheless this statement confirms that Genée’s musical co-operation in Die Fledermaus was acknowledged by Strauss. The amount of the financial remuneration indicated in this statement, equivalent to that for drawing up the libretto, is evidence that this ‘support’ cannot have been limited to just basic work.
The letter quoted above is one a number of other long since known documents that prove or at least hint at Genée’s co-operation in Strauss’s early operettas. The considerable amount of Genée’s handwriting, for example in the original score of Die Fledermaus, was first dealt with by Fritz Racek. It then struck Norbert Linke that the new distribution of the stage royalties demanded by Genée one year after the above letter had been written could be based on more than his activity as a librettist, and in this connection Norbert Rubey points to the congratulatory wishes that Genée wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of Strauss’s musical career in which he reminds Strauss of the “fine days when we informed each other of musical [!] ideas, looked for the right words for them, systematised them, divided them up, characterised them and polished them up”.
Now there really ought to be no more doubt even about the musical co-author of Strauss’s early operettas.
Thomas Aigner
English translation: Leigh Bailey
