Overview

""When the world comes to an end,"" Viennese writer Karl Kraus lamented in 1908, ""all the big city orchestras will still be playing The Merry Widow."" Viennese operettas like Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow were preeminent cultural texts during the Austro-Hungarian Empire's final years. Alternately hopeful and nihilistic, operetta staged contemporary debates about gender, nationality, and labor. The Operetta Empire delves into this vibrant theatrical culture, whose creators simultaneously sought the respectability of high art and the popularity of low entertainment. Case studies examine works by Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, Oscar Straus, and Leo Fall in light of current musicological conversations about hybridity and middlebrow culture. Demonstrating a thorough mastery of the complex early twentieth-century Viennese cultural scene, and a sympathetic and redemptive critique of a neglected popular genre, Micaela Baranello establishes operetta as an important element of Viennese cultural life—one whose transgressions helped define the musical hierarchies of its day.

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Reviews

Ultimately, The Operetta Empire makes a powerful case for us to engage with operetta afresh with a new awareness of its complicated ambitions, the ambivalent mixture of emotions it conveys, and its difficult reception in history. . . . It all adds up to a deeply satisfying and fascinating book that no one interested in operetta-or this period of Vienna's musical history-will want to miss. * Opera Magazine * This is an excellent study of the musical, historical, economic, social, and political background of the Silver Age Viennese operetta, which is generally supposed to have begun with Franz Lehar's composition The Merry Widow in 1905. Baranello brings operetta into the mainstream of musicological studies, continuing a trend toward scholarly consideration of popular forms of music theater, such as the American musical. * CHOICE *

"“Ultimately, The Operetta Empire makes a powerful case for us to engage with operetta afresh with a new awareness of its complicated ambitions, the ambivalent mixture of emotions it conveys, and its difficult reception in history. . . . It all adds up to a deeply satisfying and fascinating book that no one interested in operetta—or this period of Vienna’s musical history—will want to miss.” * Opera Magazine * ""This is an excellent study of the musical, historical, economic, social, and political background of the Silver Age Viennese operetta, which is generally supposed to have begun with Franz Lehár’s composition The Merry Widow in 1905. Baranello brings operetta into the mainstream of musicological studies, continuing a trend toward scholarly consideration of popular forms of music theater, such as the American musical."" * CHOICE *"

Ultimately, The Operetta Empire makes a powerful case for us to engage with operetta afresh with a new awareness of its complicated ambitions, the ambivalent mixture of emotions it conveys, and its difficult reception in history. . . . It all adds up to a deeply satisfying and fascinating book that no one interested in operetta-or this period of Vienna's musical history-will want to miss. * Opera Magazine *

Author Information

Micaela Baranello is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Arkansas. Her publications include articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Cambridge Opera Journal, Opera Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and the New York Times.

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