Offenbach, Kracauer, and Ethical Frivolity

And to this day, the controversy about the true meaning and true value of the Offenbachiade continues.

—Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his Time (1937)

I will devote my first lecture to the opposition between lightness and weight, and will uphold the values of lightness.

—Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium (1988)

The precise historical time and place: The earlier 1930s in Germany, when German operetta films with sound were first made, and when they became a favored genre for gleeful experiments in sound filmmaking. Operetta films, as well as operettas from this era, have been alternately condemned, or praised, for their frivolity, a word that, especially in German aesthetic philosophy, is neither merely dismissive nor entirely noble. What Siegfried Kracauer and Friedrich Nietzsche had to say about frivolity can tell us something about the twists and turns in strategies that recuperate operetta. And operetta has perennially demanded recuperation: "Too light, too ridiculous, too kitschy, and above all, too superficial," are words that cling to it, and "put it in second place" within academic domains like theater and opera studies.¹

This essay therefore has a twofold aim. One is to touch upon attributes associated well before the 1930s with "operetta" and to trace the after-burn of these features in operetta film. The other is to investigate both the impulse to rescue operetta and operetta film from disdain, and the means by which such rescues are accomplished. But one pivot point between these involves seizing upon verbal leitmotifs from Kracauer's 1937 book on Jacques Offenbach, specifically on words that appear in the English edition in Chapter 7, "Two Types of Frivolity."²

"Two Types of Frivolity" is the translation invented by Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher for a chapter entitled "Zwischen zwei Paradiesen" in the original, "Between Two Forms of Paradise." This chapter divides into three parts: the first considers Richard Wagner's opinions of Offenbach and Offenbach's stance towards Wagner. The second part juxtaposes two Second Empire personalities, both involved with Offenbach and his work: Charles Auguste Louis Joseph, Duc de Morny (1811–1865), Napoléon III's stepbrother, a high-ranking politician who dabbled in libretto writing, versus Ludovic Halévy (1834–1908), the librettist of Orphée aux enfers and other Offenbach classics. The third part chronicles operetta events from 1860–61, including the premiere of Monsieur Choufleuri (whose libretto was by Morny, under the pseudonym "M. de St.-Rémy") in 1861.

Why, though, does "between two forms of paradise" become "two types of frivolity"? Maybe that makes sense, as an option. The entire discussion of Morny and Halévy is framed in terms of their competing frivolities, and the word "frivolity" (Frivolität) recurs throughout: "The real Offenbachiade was based not on Morny's type of frivolity, but on Halévy's, which was fundamentally different."³ Paradise, on the other hand is at first only implied allusively by the repertory cited within the chapter. Kracauer mentions the Paris Tannhäuser production of 1861 in his analysis of Offenbach and Wagner – and to name Tannhäuser evokes the overheated and demonized Paradise of the Venusberg. He also discusses the Wagner parody "Le Musicien de l'avenir," which Offenbach wrote in 1860. In this satire, the scene is set in "Elysium" where Wagner is confronted by a small bevy of past composers, and ends up being thrown out of Paradise, a "Champs-Élysées" where Elysium is policed by musical judgements.⁴

Kracauer's explicit references to paradise are clustered closely within the chapter, into a mysterious peroration about Morny and Halévy: "[Halévy's] skepticism, which necessitated his frivolity, was itself supported by the consciousness that Paradise was lost" (paradise here being the years of Halévy's childhood, and the supposed glories of the July Monarchy).⁵ In the end, we will return to the problem of unpacking Kracauer's competing paradises and frivolities – to put pressure on his statement that determining "the nature of operetta's inherent frivolity" is what the Morny/Halévy comparison has done.⁶ But we will do this...