"Operettendämmerung": Die lustigen Nibelungen and the Failures of Wagnerian Operetta

On October 1, 1908, the Stadttheater Graz opened their season with a local premiere: Oscar Straus's "operetta burlesque" Die lustigen Nibelungen (The Merry Nibelungs). The composer's Ein Walzertraum (A Waltz Dream, 1907) had been a smash hit in Graz the previous season, and following this triumph the theater had duly rummaged through Straus's back catalog and found Nibelungen, whose first performance had been in Vienna in 1904. But Die lustigen Nibelungen was hardly a sentimental crowd-pleaser like Walzertraum. On the day of the premiere, the patriotic association "Verein Südmark"—dedicated to the nationalist promotion of German language and culture in border regions—issued a call to arms in the evening papers: "To the German people of the provincial capital of Graz! In a time when the lives of our countrymen in the north and south are threatened by Slavic hordes, do you know what is happening in the Grazer Stadttheater, which should be a place for German art? They are showing the people nothing less than ridicule of the most magnificent thing our people possess, our Nibelungenlied, the most towering achievement of all world literature."¹ Members of the Verein dutifully assembled in the theater's standing-room section, and what followed was described in the Grazer Volksblatt as the biggest theatrical scandal in Graz for decades. Despite a plea for peace by the intendant before the performance—he said that the impending operetta was "a harmless burlesque that could not be further from a profanation of German-ness"—the ensuing circus of yelling, stamping, and heckling ended with the mayor of Graz rising from his box to implore the protestors for their silence, and the police clearing the standing area.²

Why a protest? As Jews, Oscar Straus and librettist Fritz Oliven (credited under his pen name of "Rideamus") were obvious targets for German nationalists, since such nationalism had ever gone hand in hand with anti-Semitism. Still, that an operetta could be offensive enough to spark a small riot may appear unusual. Critics' signature complaint against twentieth-century operetta has been that it is too reluctant to take a political side and offend, but instead offers something sentimental and escapist. But Die lustigen Nibelungen is the critics' friend and the nationalists' bugbear: a rare satiric operetta, rejecting piety and romantic plots in favor of absurdism and mockery. As the Graz call to arms suggests, that "most towering achievement of all world literature," the Nibelungenlied, is spoofed through the world of bourgeois Wilhelmine Germany and its technology, hypocrisy, and hungry capitalism.

Yet the fabled Middle High German poem is not its only target. Straus's score is also unmistakably a parody of Götterdämmerung and other Wagnerian tropes. It recalls, yet surpasses in length and ambition, the Wagner parody in Offenbach's Le Carnaval des revues of 1860, "Le musician de l'avenir."³ Siegfried Kracauer's description of Offenbach's anti-Wagnerian enterprise captures equally well the spirit of Oscar Straus's parallel effort:

Wagner sought to lay his audience under a fervent spell, clothing his music in a mantle of asceticism, whereas Offenbach was the quintessence of tenderness and gaiety. Wagner used mythology and saga to create musical dramas that in spite of, or because of, their pessimism in the last resort aggravated the political impotence of the German bourgeoisie, whereas Offenbach exploited the same or similar raw material to make satires in which he playfully put topsy-turvy political conditions to rights. The former used the heavy rumblings of metaphysics to lull people to sleep; the latter chased away all metaphysical fogs that interfered with ecstatic, delirious enjoyment, the object of which was by no means to dull the senses only.⁴

For Kracauer, satire's unmasking of Wagnerian hypnosis gave it a kind of high cultural credibility, a recurring theme in operetta reception.

But in 1908, Die lustigen Nibelungen was an anomaly, even a dead end. It hinted at a path that Viennese operetta would not dare to follow, whatever its critical prestige. In this article, I will consider both Die lustigen...