Kitsch and the Ballet Schlagobers

Kitsch and the Ballet Schlagobers

The conception of a dance that is truly artistic requires creative talent, strong musicality, imagination and good taste.

—Dancer-choreographer Heinrich Kröller¹

This whipped-cream morsel is, however, not so easy to digest.

—Viennese critic Heinrich Kralik²

Smitten with the pre–World War I Ballets Russes, Richard Strauss set out to emulate Diaghilev's enterprise while serving as co-director of the Vienna Staatsoper (with Franz Schalk) from 1919–24.³ Hoping to revamp the Vienna Opera Ballet, which, like many European cultural institutions at the time, was struggling financially and artistically following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Strauss recruited dancer-choreographer Heinrich Kröller from his post as ballet master of the Berlin Staatsoper to the Austrian capital. From 1922 to 1924, Strauss and Kröller collaborated on a series of dance productions. Arguably the most ambitious and provocative of these was Schlagobers (Viennese dialect for "Whipped Cream"), which received its premiere on May 9, 1924.⁴ In this ballet's scenario, penned by Strauss and summarized pictorially by an illustrator identified as "Muszynski" in a contemporary publication (see Fig. 1), a group of children celebrate Confirmation by consuming sweets at a local Konditorei, a stand-in for the real-life Viennese establishment known as "Der Demel."⁵ There, various confections come to life (Fig. 1, upper right): marzipan, gingerbread, and sugarplum men engage in militaristic exercises and tea, coffee, cocoa, and sugar have exoticized character dances. Having overindulged, one boy falls ill (see Fig. 1, lower right and upper left) and hallucinates a rebellion against the court of Princess Praline (center), which is carried out by such lowly baked goods as pound cakes (Gugelhupfe), Christmas cookies (Baumkuchen), fruit cakes (Stollen), pretzels (Hefenbretzeln), donuts (Schmalznudeln), and cream horns (Schillerlocken). As depicted in Muszynski's illustration, the revolution is drowned out by an oversized barrel of beer—a "Hofbrau Vollbier" from Richard Strauss's hometown of Munich.⁶

For the most part, both music and dance historians have dismissed Schlagobers as a belated knockoff of the Marius Petipa and Tchaikovsky Nutcracker ballet, an attitude that is consistent with the general disparagement of Strauss's dance scores as outmoded novelties that reveal a misconception of what ballet music should sound like in terms of melodic and rhythmic gesture, small- and large-scale form.⁷ The virtually unanimous stance taken by posthumous writers has a precedent with contemporaneous commentators on Strauss and ballet, who heaped scorn on Schlagobers. As early as two years prior to its premiere, Max Terpis, Kröller's successor as ballet master at the Berlin Staatsoper from 1923 to 1930, criticized the scenario as "banal" and plagued by "feeble symbolism."⁸ Terpis obviously knew that ballet plots often serve as mere scaffolds for physical display, but he found Schlagobers to be particularly vacuous. Following the ballet's premiere, the Viennese critic Karl Kraus also derided it as "the venture of a no longer entirely vigorous impresario of taste who can still permit himself to offer pure idiocy as a special treat for the holidays to a rabble that falls for anything sensational . . ."⁹ The "holidays" to which Krauss referred were the festivities commemorating Strauss's sixtieth birthday, during which Schlagobers was performed at the Vienna Staatsoper three times.

Derivative, banal, derisory, inartistic, appealing to the masses, in poor taste; it is difficult to suppress the word kitsch when evaluating Strauss's and Kröller's theatricalized Viennese Konditorei. Emerging in Germany in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and entering international parlance in the twentieth, the term kitsch—literally "rubbish" or "trash"—refers to...