Broadway MusicalComic Opera And Operetta

Week 6段馨君 Iris Hsin-chun Tuan

Associate ProfessorDepartment of Humanities and Social

SciencesNCTU

• Minstrelsy, burlesque, extravaganza, vaudeville, and revue burst onto the American theater without forcing the contemporary European forms out of the entertainment market.

• A renaissance of European influence on the American musical theater.

• The popular French comic opera known as the opera bouffe.

• Gave the comic operas a twenty-year success the English comic opera.

English comic opera

• The American premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore at the Boston Museum, November 25, 1878, created a sensation.

• By 1916, Vanity Fair reported a “fever” in New York.

HMS Pinafore — Season: Autumn 1991

HMS Pinafore - We Sail the Ocean Bluehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCHy0XXHknw

• All Manhattan was comic opera mad.

• Joining comic opera on the scene was a similar, even more influential from---operetta.

• Like comic opera, operetta employs music, spoken dialogue, light subject matte, comedy elements, and romance.

The picture about operetta.

• The difference is one of emphasis and tone.

• Life imitates an all-consuming romantic fantasy.

Emmerich Kalman operetta "Bajadera"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZUK6mNtFFM

operetta

Comic opera

• Where comic opera exploits plausible situations, farce, or verbal wit, operetta abandons everything to unfettered imagination.

• The form originated and developed in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the final quarter of the 19thC. the Mad Comic Opera finale.

Victor Herbert

• Operettas like Victor Herbert’s Babes in Toyland constitute the earliest major achievement of twentieth-century American music for the theater.

Victor Herbert

• Victor Herbert’s operettas gave the audience music, not theater. In Mlle. Modest, character, dialogue, plot, and situation existed only as accessories to song.

• Herbert preferred tuneful music; he loved the lilt, the verve, and the harmonies.

BABES IN TOYLAND - 1934http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i7YGHCKPyg

• Herbert’s destiny was to popularize the American operetta, consolidate its musical resources, influence the craft and instruction of musical theater orchestration, and reorganize the American theater orchestra for improved sound performance.

William Norris as a "toy soldier", 1903

Sigmund Romberg

• When American operetta reached the peak of critical and popular acclaim in the 1920s, the shows of Sigmund Romberg epitomized the form.

Sigmund Romberg. -He died on Nov/09/1951, was born on Jul/29/1887

• “he understood the stage”. Where Herbert showcased marketable songs, Romberg marketed dramatic emotion through song.

• Romberg’s concern for the text enriched his compositions.

Sigmund Romberg sheet music

• Sigmund Romberg so extended the musical and dramatic possibilities of the operetta form that little soon remained to be said, sung, or explored.

• American audiences abandoned operetta in the 1930s.

Deep In My Heart (1954) TrailerBiopic of composer Sigmund Romberg with Adolph Deutsch in charge of the music. Carole Richards dubbed Cyd Charisse's singing voice.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2vxMDpnHLg&feature=related

Rudolf Friml

• The last of the “Big Three” operetta composers was a serious musician.

• Renowned pianist, and the composer of thirty-three operettas. A spectacular talent for musical improvisation. 1879 - (Charles) Rudolf Friml,

composer, concert pianist, born in Prague.

• Friml’s musical composition and improvisations never departed from the tradition that was his European musical heritage.

• In the style of Viennese operetta as “Indian Love Call ” and “Only a Rose.”

Indian Love Call, Jeannette MacDonald, Nelson Eddie, StewartJeannette MacDonald sings Indian Love Call to Nelson Eddie, with James Stewart, in Rose-Marie (1936)://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87bUBB-rwFc

• The model for operetta devised by the “Big Three” offered a wholesome story accompanied by melodic music, romantic settings, sentimental situations, and clean comedy--- all wrapped attractively in a sumptuous production.

"I Fratelli Mario" follows the basic story line of the Super Mario Brothers video game but with some twists.

• Music was and is the greatest factor in operetta.

• When the librettist serves the musician, character, plot, dialogue, lyrics, situation, production concept, and humor suffer.

• If you’ve never encountered an operetta plot, you’ve never encountered plot at all!

Decline

• The Depression, which began in the late 1920s, brought rapid and enormous changes in American life and with them the end of operetta.

• The American musical theater tradition had embraced opera, ballad opera, pasticcio, puppet shows, pantomime, minstrelsy, burlesque, spectacular, extravaganza, revue, comic opera, operetta, and an adolescent musical comedy.