A Note from the Guest Editors

Que le lecteur ne se scandalise pas de cette gravité dans le frivole.

—Charles Baudelaire

Operetta! Flowing champagne, ceaseless waltzing, risqué couplets, Graustarkian uniforms and glittering ballgowns, romancing and dancing! Gaiety and lightheartedness, sentiment and Schmalz.

—Richard Traubner

What does it mean to take operetta seriously? To scrutinize the diminutive, lowering suffix (the "etta" or "ette," the "bouffe," the perennial grey aria of the "comique") that continues so often to separate it from a mainstream of twenty-first-century opera studies? To acknowledge and engage with not only operetta's proximity to opera but also its differences from it; or even to approach operetta on its own terms—and this is a radical gesture—with opera consigned self-consciously to the margins? To what extent is it possible to weigh operetta's intellectual impact and to excavate its significant footprint in historical grand narratives while making sense of its supposedly characteristic levity and kitsch? The latter term has been a frequent point of contention in reception theory, as something never transcending the "horizon of expectations" assumed to be typical of an audience lacking hauteur or sophistication.¹ That is to say: we must contend with the fact that, for as long as it has existed, operetta has been understood by the vast majority of its producers, consumers, and critics as a type of musical theater that is merely "basically entertaining."²

These are some of the questions underpinning this special issue on "operetta." It is the first dedicated wholly to the genre in the history of Opera Quarterly—a journal that aspires to be "the definitive publication for anyone serious about opera" (our italics). We might note that even when dealing with opera—certainly most Italian and much French opera—seriousness has become de rigueur only since the theoretical turns and disciplinary upheavals of the later twentieth century. But although such developments repositioned opera somewhere close to musicology's inner sanctum—a newly emerged "opera studies" seemed for a time to constitute a disciplinary vanguard—operetta has remained out in the cold. Thus, nearly thirty-five years after its first appearance, Richard Traubner's Operetta: A Theatrical History remains the standard English-language account of the genre. We take its very beginning as our second epigraph: opening lines in which Traubner reproduces a venerable image of operetta as naughty-but-nice, champagne-fuelled frivolity. Traubner's project was, as he put it, to "resurrect appreciation" for so many forgotten operettas; but he also bemoaned the fact that what he calls the genre's "commercial unpretentiousness" has "given operetta a bad name in the highest circles of musical art," where it is considered "unworthy of serious recognition."³

That Traubner produced a history of the genre at all in such circumstances was already to approach operetta with almost unprecedentedly earnest scholarly intent. And things had barely changed, he suggested, since the operetta librettist Alfred Grünwald had begun writing (though never finished) a History of Operetta in 1938. In it, Grünwald thundered that:

Serious writers on music, the "superior" critics, all those music esthetes who prowl about the sacred halls of music with dead-earnest faces as self-appointed guardians of the sacred Forms and Traditions, look upon operetta as something highly distasteful. They never gave it much attention, whenever possible they have tried to stifle it by a conspiracy of silence, and if they do speak of it they are always careful to express their great disdain. …⁴

One might ponder the political undertow of such words produced by an Austrian exile in France and then the United States in the late 1930s. Yet a still stranger friction emerges if one considers that what was and remains one of the most influential books ever published on operetta had appeared in German, English, and French the previous year, in early summer 1937—a book which took operetta so seriously that it sought to sketch the entire "biography of a city" via the genre's early career in Second Empire Paris. That book was, of course, Siegfried Kracauer's Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of...