Explore the vast range of titles available.

This article examines the ‘operetta crisis’ that blighted the Italian operetta industry in the 1920s. Little has been written about the crisi dell’operetta in scholarship on Italian operetta to date, despite extensive coverage in contemporary sources. I attribute this neglect to the contested legacy of the composer, impresario and publisher Carlo Lombardo, at the height of his influence in the 1920s and responsible for most of the best-known Italian operettas today. Lombardo’s works embodied critical anxieties about operetta’s perceived artistic degradation, thanks to their overt sexuality and embrace of popular music (i.e. jazz). However, as I argue with reference to the 1925 operetta Cin-ci-là , narratives of artistic decline may miss the true significance of the crisis. Operetta, striving to be a ‘light’ form of opera but never fully accepted as such by the Italian establishment, was ultimately ill-equipped to survive in an entertainment landscape reshaping itself around popular music.

This article explores the importance of the Casa Sonzogno publishing house for the Italian operetta market from the second half of the nineteenth century until the eve of the First World War, including its offshoot company Casa musicale Lorenzo Sonzogno. The article focuses particularly on Casa Sonzogno’s policies of importation, translation and intermedial adaptation of foreign (mainly French) light music-theatre works, especially in the context of the wider social, economic and technological environment of Milan at the turn of the twentieth century, and considers Sonzogno’s concorsi for young composers. The article then addresses the experimental activities of the Casa musicale Lorenzo Sonzogno (1909–15), notably across opera, operetta and cinema. Casa Sonzogno’s centrality to the establishment of an Italian operetta market, I argue, both highlights the crucial role of publishers in the Italian operetta industry, and offers an alternative theatrical history to familiar narratives focused on Casa Ricordi and Italian opera.

The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project.

The aim of the Hungarian state socialist regime to renew the operetta art manifested in the transformation of operetta-playing via the setting of its main cultural objectives. Once private theatre organizations were disbanded in 1949, newly written and composed operetta pieces had to be adjusted to meet the expectations cultivated by those responsible for the drawing up of the contemporary cultural policies, not only in terms of theme, subject, and dramaturgy but also, as productions designed for stage performance. At that time, questions regarding the realm of operetta dance and choreography arose as significant professional issues. The remarkable case of operetta dance was brought to the notice of the larger professional community by an article written by choreographer Ágnes Roboz, which was published in 1952 in the Táncművészet magazine (1951). Due to its professional nature, this magazine served as a suitable platform for the discussion of the operetta dance genre. The present study reflects upon its publications from the period between 1952 and 1956. Throughout these years, 16 articles discussing the categorization of operettas were published. I aimed to analyze these primary sources according to their genre before presenting, juxtaposing, and contextualizing them. Thus, my objective is to gain a thorough understanding and comprehensive overview of professional discussions and arguments over 1950s operetta dances and choreographies.

The aim of the Hungarian state socialist regime to renew the operetta art manifested in the transformation of operetta-playing via the setting of its main cultural objectives. Once private theatre organizations were disbanded in 1949, newly written and composed operetta pieces had to be adjusted to meet the expectations cultivated by those responsible for the drawing up of the contemporary cultural policies, not only in terms of theme, subject, and dramaturgy but also, as productions designed for stage performance. At that time, questions regarding the realm of operetta dance and choreography arose as significant professional issues. The remarkable case of operetta dance was brought to the notice of the larger professional community by an article written by choreographer Ágnes Roboz, which was published in 1952 in the Táncművészet magazine (1951). Due to its professional nature, this magazine served as a suitable platform for the discussion of the operetta dance genre. The present study reflects upon its publications from the period between 1952 and 1956. Throughout these years, 16 articles discussing the categorization of operettas were published. I aimed to analyze these primary sources according to their genre before presenting, juxtaposing, and contextualizing them. Thus, my objective is to gain a thorough understanding and comprehensive overview of professional discussions and arguments over 1950s operetta dances and choreographies.

\"When the world comes to an end,\" Viennese writer Karl Kraus lamented in 1908, \"all the big city orchestras will still be playing The Merry Widow .\" Viennese operettas like Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow were preeminent cultural texts during the Austro-Hungarian Empire's final years. Alternately hopeful and nihilistic, operetta staged contemporary debates about gender, nationality, and labor. The Operetta Empire delves into this vibrant theatrical culture, whose creators simultaneously sought the respectability of high art and the popularity of low entertainment. Case studies examine works by Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, Oscar Straus, and Leo Fall in light of current musicological conversations about hybridity and middlebrow culture. Demonstrating a thorough mastery of the complex early twentieth-century Viennese cultural scene, and a sympathetic and redemptive critique of a neglected popular genre, Micaela Baranello establishes operetta as an important element of Viennese cultural life-one whose transgressions helped define the musical hierarchies of its day.

It was during the communist regime of the post-war years that Romanian composer Gherase Dendrino wrote an operetta in celebration of the centenary of Ciprian Porumbescu’s birth, named [Let me sing!]. It revolves around the figure of Porumbescu himself, as the first Romanian composer to have ever written an operetta that would be performed and published, named [New Moon]. [Let me sing!] tells the story of the making of the first Romanian operetta and was revived during the spring of 2018 at the Cluj-Napoca Romanian National Opera House, as part of the festivities related to the Centenary of the Great Union. The present research highlights three aspects of Dendrino’s operetta: firstly, the one related to the values, epitomized in the libretto by the main character, Ciprian, who, along with his friends, achieves the greatest task of the birth of the Romanian operetta, in spite of all opposition and pitfalls; secondly, the , regarding de musical language of the work, opposing the world of the Romanian provincial town to the Viennese ; thirdly, the aspect, encompassing the subtext of the and the message of the work, which underwent continuous changes over the decades and social and political contexts up to the present day. Thus, the analysis takes into account both the sound and the word.

\"Operetta: A Theatrical History\" is considered the classic history of this important musical theater form. Traubner's book, first published in 1983, is still recognized as the key history of the people and productions that made operetta a worldwide phenomenon. Beginning in mid-19th century Europe, the book covers all of the key developments in the form, including the landmark works by Strauss and his followers, Gilbert & Sullivan, Franz Lehar, Rudolf Friml, Victor Herbert, and many more. The book perfectly captures the champagne-and-ballroom atmosphere of the greatest works in the genre. It will appeal to all fans of musical theatre history. Richard Traubner is a well-known history of operetta, thanks to this book, and his articles in the New York Times, Opera News, program notes, and notes for recordings. He lives in New York City.

Musical-theatrical pieces of the nineteenth century, propagated by Italian, French and German troops, were an inspiration for Romanian composers. They will create similar fashionable musical theatre genres, in Romanian, for entertainment purposes. Works placed on the border between vaudeville and the lyrical genre can be identified in the creation of the newly emerging genre of operetta: such pieces are the compositions of Alexandru Flechtenmacher, Eduard Wachmann, Eduard Caudella. In the cultural atmosphere of the time, patriotic musician Ciprian Porumbescu (1853-1883) would find the perfect way to put a longstanding artistic wish into practice: to compose an operetta, following the success of his humorous musical-theatre pieces and [Candidate Linte]. A multifarious personality, a lover of folklore and of his nation, Ciprian Porumbescu – one of the founders of the national school of music – contributed to the authenticity and identity of the Romanian musical language through his extensive works; one important contribution is the composition of the first Romanian cultivated operetta [New Moon] (1882). As a tribute to his art, on the centenary of his birth, the of the operetta becomes the of the operetta [Let me sing] (1954) by Gherase Dendrino, set during the time of the staging of Porumbescuʼs musical-dramatic work. and are highlights of the Romanian lyrical theatre, from the artistic past and present, and hold their position as musical pieces frequently performed and received with interest and enthusiasm.

This article examines the ‘operetta crisis’ that blighted the Italian operetta industry in the 1920s. Little has been written about the crisi dell’operetta in scholarship on Italian operetta to date, despite extensive coverage in contemporary sources. I attribute this neglect to the contested legacy of the composer, impresario and publisher Carlo Lombardo, at the height of his influence in the 1920s and responsible for most of the best-known Italian operettas today. Lombardo’s works embodied critical anxieties about operetta’s perceived artistic degradation, thanks to their overt sexuality and embrace of popular music (i.e. jazz). However, as I argue with reference to the 1925 operetta Cin-ci-là, narratives of artistic decline may miss the true significance of the crisis. Operetta, striving to be a ‘light’ form of opera but never fully accepted as such by the Italian establishment, was ultimately ill-equipped to survive in an entertainment landscape reshaping itself around popular music.