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Professor Csáky's cultural-historical tour de force describes the role of operetta in the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in an era that began with frothy euphoria and ended with collapse and humiliation. If the "Golden Age" of operetta (to about 1900) and its "Silver Age" (from 1900 to about 1915-16, when Kálmán's Csárdásfürstin and Leo Fall's Rose von Stambul were premiered) can be said to chart the demand for entertaining distraction of an increasingly mass audience through years of turbulent transition, the following Bronze Age points towards the triumph of the American musical, itself so often the product of the descendants of Central European exiles. Indeed there is an almost seamless continuity between Vienna/Budapest and New York: to take one example, Frederic Loewe, composer of one of the most successful musicals of all time (My Fair Lady) was the son of a tenor at the Theater an der Wien. But continuity is also evident in respect of certain ideological contours, most importantly the way in which, in their different contexts, both operetta and musical had a role in the construction of collective identities from heterogeneous ethnic elements.
Chapter 1 of Csáky's long and richly allusive essay deals with conflicting aesthetic evaluations of operetta; Chapters 2 to 4 discuss its formal characteristics and examine the ingredients stirred into it (irony, social and political comment, exotic ethnicity, romanticism, escapism and so forth); Chapter 5 (perhaps the most interesting and controversial) presents operetta as a vehicle for modernism and changing social attitudes; Chapters 6-8 deal with a topic that the author has made his own, namely pluralistic culture in Central Europe, and show to what extent operetta reflected and promoted this phenomenon. The final chapter charts the decline of the operetta, insofar as it began to lose its raison d'étre under the pressure of political collapse and the gradual dissolution of its liberal, mostly well-to do, middle-class audience.
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The Gypsy was a useful figure, in that both Austrians and Hungarians could afford to patronise him, although one sometimes gets the impression that the Austrian mind regarded him as a sort of colorful extension of Hungarian ethnicity (an attitude that becomes more understandable given the confusion between "Gypsy music" and "Hungarian music" that exists to this day). It is therefore not so surprising that The Gypsy Baron became the quintessential "Austro-Hungarian" operetta, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Schnitzer's libretto was, according to Csáky, a travesty of Jókai's originally differentiated portrait of the Gypsy, from which it was drawn. It triggered a fashion for exotically represented Zigeuner which continued into the next century with such popular offerings as Lehár's Zigeunerliebe (1910) or Kálmán's Zigeunerprimas (1912).
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One might mention here the notable absence of anti-Semitism in operetta, notwithstanding some jokes at Jewish expense often inserted by Jewish libretto writers. There is indeed a markedly sympathetic portrayal of Jewish characters in two operettas (Der Rastelbinder and Rosenstock und Edelweiß) by Franz Lehár, himself one of the few non-Jews among the operetta-writing fraternity of the Silver Age. The assumptions of both the operetta writers of Jewish origin, and of the same category of persons among their audiences, were fundamentally those of the completely assimilated Jew. Nevertheless in treating of other, clearly defined ethnic groups, the tendency is towards stereotypical pasteurisation of characteristics that might otherwise be hard to sell on the stage. Nor should it be forgotten that an ethnic minority, from a variety of motives, may itself play along with the invented image to some degree or in specific circumstances, hence the resentment against "Uncle Toms" in America or the ridicule that "professional Welshmen" rightly attract in Britain.
Non-European races were even more likely to be subjected to standardisation in terms of "the exotic". At the turn of the century, Puccini, Illica and Giacosa stand out for the integrity of their depiction of a clash of cultures in Madame Butterfly, and even Lehár's The Land of Smiles allows a real pathos and dignity in the characterisation of orientals. Gilbert and Sullivan, however, simply use the exotic as a satirical or pantomimic prop for local allusion in The Mikado, and their work is elsewhere spattered with references and innuendoes which reflected the complacently racist assumptions of their society and class. The tradition of exoticism, however, continues almost up to the present through varying degrees of stereotypical exploitation (Die Rose von Stambul, Die Blume von Hawaii etc.), although generally a well-observed clash of cultures is the most productive of dramatic integrity (as in The King and I or West Side Story, with its unusually sharp and ironic social critique expressed in numbers such as "I like to be in America"). At its best, the American musical develops and refines the integrative function of its operetta predecessors, for example in the sympathetic depiction of the American negro (and some other ethnic groups), and despite the fact that it was primarily addressing a white audience. The latter was persuaded to identify and empathise with the passions and tribulations of black people, not least (for example in Porgy and Bess) with the aid of a brilliant score involving inter alia the "black genres" of music (spirituals, jazz, blues etc.).
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It was perhaps the subversive element in operetta that such an unlikely admirer as that angry critic of his times, the poet Endre Ady, had in mind when he said that a good example of the genre "can destroy more of this rotten world than five protests in Parliament". "Can" is the operative word here - the success of an operetta depended upon it hitting exactly the right note with its audience, and a miss was as good as a mile. The history of the genre is one of gigantic successes and abysmal flops. The greatest skill and musical versatility was required to create an artefact that was, to a degree, all things to all people. The völkisch element, as previously remarked, had to be watered down for mass consumption - but not too much, lest it lose its savour. This process carried within itself an inherent contradiction. In the age of Historicism, the art of the people (the vernacular) was plundered to bolster national identity; inevitably this was an exercise in Abgrenzung from other national traditions, yet the entire raison d'étre of operetta (and later of the musical) was to bring together differing ethnicities in the formation of a new collective identity. What Bartók and Kodály saw as native artistic genius was certainly grist to the operetta mill, but its use in this medium implied an inevitable degeneration in its power of ethnic expression, so that it should be made schmackhaft for a metropolitan audience.
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2 * Franz Endler, Vienna - A Guide to its Music and Musicians, Vienna: J & V Edition, 1989, p. 84.
3 * Otto Friedrich, op cit., p.110.
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