Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840-1940 (review)

The title of John Koegel's monumental study indicates exactly what its subject matter is. What the title doesn't tell is that this work is a stunning model of empirical research. Its considerable heft may be extraordinary in an age of publishing cutbacks; but more importantly, its wealth of detail will offer scholars an invaluable resource for many years to come. Music in German Immigrant Theater treats an important and heretofore overlooked chapter in the trans-atlantic exchange that shaped American cultural life.

As Koegel indicates in the preface, this book is the product of nearly twenty-five years of investigation, collection, and interpretation. Intrigued by a chance encounter with Adolf Philipp's 1894 musical, Der Pawnbroker von der East Side, he began looking for traces of this and similar works in New York archives. He soon realized that these productions had hardly been documented, falling as they do between the disciplines of theater, music, and immigrant history. While "most writers on the American musical theater have ignored the German American stage," he points out, most German American theater history has ignored the musical component of its productions (p. 8). This book draws on an extraordinarily wide range of sources to bridge that gap. It is richly illustrated with over ninety plates—many from the author's own collection—reproducing sheet music, broadsides, and programs; photographs of performers, sets, and buildings; and much more. The accompanying compact disc has twenty newly-recorded selections, sixteen of which are numbers from Philipp's most successful shows.

The text is divided into three large parts supplemented by thirteen appendices. The shorter middle section includes profiles of notable male and female performers and a discussion of the "Dutch" Act, the humorous but stereotyped depiction of German Americans aimed at both immigrant and mainstream audiences. Such characterizations proliferated on stage and in print in tandem with the mass immigration that began in the mid-nineteenth century. They often featured dialect and pseudo-dialect songs, such as "Dot Leedle German Band," by the German American comedian Gus Williams (born Gustav Wilhelm Leweck) and "Captain Schmidt." The latter appeared in the popular 1870 musical play, Fritz, Our Cousin German. The song depicts a common theatrical type, the "fun-loving German who would rather dance and drink than fulfill his duty, in this case, in the army" (p. 185). Koegel shows continuities between such songs and other forms of German dialect literature, as well as the perpetuation of stereotypes in Hollywood's bumbling "German professor" and the strongman duo of Saturday Night Live, Hans and Franz.

The larger outer sections provide a survey of "Musical Theater in Little Germany" from 1840 through World War I and the lengthy, prolific career of Philipp respectively. Koegel discusses, in roughly chronological order, the most important theatrical venues for New York's Klein Deutschland community (which by the late nineteenth century was the largest German-speaking enclave outside of Berlin and Vienna), as well as theatrical entertainments that took place on alternative stages, such as beer gardens and concert halls.

Although the major venues typically offered a range of works that included conventional drama and comedy, they tended to specialize in specific music theater genres. Initially, the works performed were European exports. German opera, and operas in German translation, were a specialty of the two Stadttheaters run by Otto Hoym during the 1850s and 1860s. The lighter genres of Posse (farce) and Volksstück (folk play) dominated Adolf Neuendorff's Germania Theater during the 1870s. Although most of these works were European in form and content, Neuendorff was among the first to adapt these genres to local settings and situations reflecting the immigrant perspective, as he did in the Jules Verne parody, Die Reise durch New York in 80 Stunden (The Trip through New York in 80 Hours) and Onkel Knusperich, oder eine Nacht...