Globalizing Operetta before the First World War

This essay brings together the history of operetta and the history of globalization. It argues that we cannot understand operetta without taking into account the theater industry, and—since this industry became increasingly more international at the turn of the twentieth century—without its international and transnational dimensions. At the same time, operetta's internationalism can contribute to our understanding of the history of globalization. After all, scholarship on this latter concept has often concentrated more on people, goods, migration, and trade than it has on culture.

The opening sections of this essay investigate the global trade routes of operetta and the mechanics of trade between the middle of the nineteenth century and the First World War by looking at two of the most widely travelled and successful works of the pre-First World War period: the Viennese operetta The Merry Widow by Franz Lehár and the Berlin operetta The Girl in the Taxi by Jean Gilbert. My focus then shifts from trade to representation, studying how operettas were adapted abroad and how they were transformed in the process. In contrast to operas—which were, at this historical moment, either performed in their original language or translated as literally as possible—operettas, as commodities geared toward a paying mass audience, were fair game for translators who changed their texts in far more radical ways. Finally, I conclude by looking at how the world—from European cities and countries to more "exotic" locales—was represented on the operetta stage. Throughout the essay, the term "globalization" will be used to discuss operetta's cross-national mobility, its geographical spread, and the interventions required to make it a transposable commodity. In contrast, "cosmopolitanism" will refer to operetta's representation of encounters with the foreign, in both its plots and musical numbers, to its attempts to put an Other on the stage.

Theater and Globalization

On first glance "theater" and "globalization" might seem to be mutually exclusive. Globalization is often described as a compression of space, and as a process of standardization and homogenization—but, importantly, also of resistance against these dynamics.¹ Theater, on the other hand, is one of the most spatially localized cultural forms, bringing together producers and consumers in one specific place at one specific time. Where a theater is located and how it is designed influence audience composition, the productions a theater shows, and how it stages them, as well as how audiences make meaning of them.² And theater also resists uniformity and standardization: every production, and every performance, differs from every other.

Nonetheless, globalization has hardly bypassed theatrical production. In the existing literature, the globalization of theater has often been equated with the megamusical since the 1980s.³ Yet although the megamusical unquestionably marked a new level, commercialization and globalization in musical theater did not began with it. Opera had been a global commodity since the late eighteenth century.⁴ A hundred years on, the most global "operatic" genre was European operetta, in many senses a direct predecessor of the megamusical. Its heyday between the middle of the nineteenth century and the 1930s coincided with an era historians have described as the "first age of globalization."⁵ Innovations in communication and mobility—trains and steams ships—allowed people and goods to travel much more easily, cheaply, widely, and, ultimately, quickly than ever before. Operetta was drawn powerfully into this process.

The globalization of operetta was, first of all, directly connected to urbanization. The second half of the nineteenth century, we should recall, was an era of tremendous urban growth. London grew from 2.6 million inhabitants in 1850 to 6.5 million in 1900; Paris from one million in 1850 to 2.7 million in 1900; Vienna and Berlin from less than half a million in 1850 to 1.6 million and 1.8 million in 1900, respectively.⁶ These new urban populations were not only looking for work and accommodation, they also wanted to be entertained. New spaces for entertainment were built, while old ones—among them theaters—proliferated. As private, commercial institutions without public funding, these new theaters were...