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| Sheet music cover page for Rudolf Friml's "You're in Love," and Jeanette MacDonald. |
But, as patriotic passions cooled in the 1920s, there was a resurgence of the operetta, and several new players entered the game. Rudolf Friml was a piano virtuoso from Prague who immigrated to New York in 1906, and Sigmund Romberg, a disaffected architectural engineer, arrived from Bucharest in 1909. Despite their nobler callings, both men were quickly swept along in the currents of musical theater, crafting sweeping melodies for various interpolations and operettas for producers like the Shuberts and Arthur Hammerstein. As the 1920s began, both men had already had several hits under their belt, but their luck came through when they started working with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, the grandson of the man who created the theater district, who was given a job by his Uncle Arthur stage managing one of his operettas. As Oscar worked his way through the Hammerstein organization, he learned about craft, lyric writing, construction, and the general architecture that goes into creating a piece for the stage.
Hammerstein began his collaboration with Friml in 1924 (Uncle Arthur had given Friml his big break with "The Firefly" in 1912) on "Rose-Marie," an elaborate operetta set in the Canadian Rockies. In all of his collaborations with Friml and Romberg, Hammerstein brought something new to the party, some aspect of construction, plot, or setting that gently nudged the operetta form into being more poignant or more pertinent. "Rose-Marie" (1924), better known to audiences through the oft-parodied Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy movie of the same name (where he's "calling yoo-oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oooo"), had a uniquely North American setting and managed to weave murder and revenge into its plot.
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| The story of a nobleman on the lamb in the guise of a commoner is at the heart of "The New Moon." |
Hammerstein crafted even more sophisticated successes with Romberg later in the decade. "The Desert Song" (1926) parlayed the contemporary fascination with Rudolph Valentino's sheik and Lawrence of Arabia into a Moroccan romance featuring a masked marauder and his emotionally ravished fair lady. They followed that up with 1928's "The New Moon," an 18th-century swashbuckler set in New Orleans that interjected a subplot about class warfare and utopian social experiments into a good deal of requisite bosom-heaving. This last show contained some of operetta's most sweeping melodies: "Stouthearted Men," "Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise," and "Lover, Come Back to Me."
Romberg and Friml had their share of other hits ("The Student Prince," "The Vagabond King") with other lyricists, but the shows with Hammerstein can be seen, apart from their pure rhapsodic pleasure, as early experiments in expanding the conceits of the romantic musical -- as opposed to the musical comedy -- form. The librettos themselves do not quite stand the test of time; they tend to overdose on injections of testosterone, and modern audiences prefer their heroism less on the nose and their romantic episodes with more psychological complexity.
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| Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in "My Fair Lady," and Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman in "The Phantom of the Opera." |
Although the Great Depression effectively killed any further interest in the operetta, the form was immensely influential. Although it is, ironically, less sexy to talk about the influence of romance than the influence of comedy or dance on the musical, love stories have clearly been at the center of the vast majority of musical theater shows for the last century. Hammerstein and Kern's "Show Boat" (1927) displays a strong operetta structure, and later musicals like "Kismet" (1953) and even "My Fair Lady" (1956) have embraced the operetta's romantic and exotic appeal. In fact, perhaps the most romantic musical of all time -- still packing them in at the Majestic Theatre -- is "The Phantom of the Opera." It might be better retitled "The Phantom of the Operetta."
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photo credits: Photofest; Historic American Sheet Music, "He Will Understand," Music A-5969, Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library; the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization; and the New York Public Library
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Theater historian Dwight Bowers discusses the appeal of operetta and impact of Victor Herbert on musical theater. Writer Philip Furia on how the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan were Americanized by Kern and Wodehouse in their Princess shows.
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