Sigmund Romberg (review)

William Everett’s Sigmund Romberg is an important addition to Yale’s Broadway Masters series and provides a much-needed examination of the career and output of a composer whose work helped shape the growth of American musical theater in the early twentieth century. This book is the first monograph-length academic discussion of Romberg’s life, serving to remind us of the contributions of foreign-born composers to American musical theater, as well as the cultural importance of operettas in the American context. Romberg’s significance in musical theater has been eclipsed by popular American composers such as Gershwin, who wrote in a jazz-influenced style, and Everett does a masterful job of showing the many ways in which Romberg’s works were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the next generation of musicals, including works like Oklahoma!

Moving chronologically, Everett provides a thorough analysis of Romberg’s works and their genesis, as well as some discussion of the broader theatrical context in which they were created. His starting point is the biopic, Deep in My Heart, which was based loosely on a popular press “pseudo-biography” with the same title.¹ Both the film and the book have influenced perceptions of Romberg, although much of the information in both sources is inaccurate. Everett’s opening chapter is dedicated to sorting out fact from fiction in these sources and to correcting their many misconceptions, addressing the nostalgia, the exaggerations, and the errors in the film and providing a more accurate biographical sketch of the composer. He also discusses Romberg in relation to other European composers active in Vienna and the United States in the same period, including Victor Herbert and Rudolf Friml, both of whom also helped shape American operetta. This opening is at times dense and may be confusing to readers unfamiliar with the film biography, but it does serve to highlight many of the themes that play out in subsequent chapters.

Once these corrections have been made, Everett embarks on a discussion of the composer’s early life and musical training in Vienna, as well as his early work in the United States. Romberg’s earliest association with Broadway was as a house composer for the Shubert brothers, and he contributed songs to a number of their revues and music theatrical pieces staged during the 1910s. Everett shows the ways that Romberg’s early work for the Shuberts demonstrates an increasing understanding of American musical vocabulary, even as it also established the composer’s reputation for writing sentimental songs that blended influences from both the old and new world.

In examining Romberg’s training and early career, Everett, like any other scholar dealing with this period, must cope with the almost complete lack of scholarly work on nineteenth-century theater, and there are moments when this paucity of material causes him to assume some facts about the music-theatrical scene in the United States, and probably also Vienna, that are problematic. Relying heavily on Lawrence Levine’s work, Highbrow/Lowbrow, which highlights the tension between elite art forms and the more popular commercial forms that proliferated during the second half of the nineteenth century,² Everett consequently frames Romberg’s contribution as a unique ability to bridge the divide between high and low, and, in fact, this is one of the central themes through the rest of the book. However, this perspective does not take into account the many genres of commercial theater that had begun to constitute a lively and diverse middlebrow theatrical scene in the years following the Civil War, as well as the complex relationship between high, middle, and low forms of theater.³ By the end of the nineteenth century, middlebrow forms increasingly employed performers from variety, vaudeville, and minstrelsy, and Romberg’s mixing of high and low was, if anything, typical rather than exceptional. Similarly, Everett views the singing character actor as a new development of the early twentieth century, but this phenomenon also dates from the mid-nineteenth...