Word: operetta
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Alles aus Naturverstand (meaning "Everything by Common Sense"). Americans in the audience recognized it as Doin' What Comes Natur'lly. Annie Get Your Gun had settled down in Vienna, and its arrival had precipitated another battle in the running musical war between partisans of old-fashioned Viennese operetta and fans of new-style American musical comedy...
...virtue of their Merry Widows, the dignity of their Countess Maritzas and the artistic solvency of their Gypsy Barons. American musicals, said critics, were "pornographic" and not fit for "Kulturstaaten." Furthermore, the government-subsidized Volksoper should be playing native Austrian composers. (Annie's defenders pointed out that native operetta composers have not written a note worth hearing for decades...
...richole, never before done at the Met and rarely seen in the U.S. anywhere, replaced Die Fledermaus as the Met's showpiece operetta and special New Year's Eve attraction. The score is second-rate Offenbach, first performed in 1868, well after the glories of La Belle Helens (1864) and Orpheus (1858); but it is still the work of a master in his field. The libretto is by two hacks of genius, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, who vaguely based it (as they did their celebrated book for Carmen) on a work by Prosper...
...Atlantic City, NJ.; the Belmont Plaza in Manhattan), the Americana offers such inducements as a huge, cone-shaped $300,000 terrarium in the center of the lobby (filled with orchids and rare fungi) and four restaurants with the help dressed to fit the decor, e.g., waitresses in Rose Marie operetta costumes for the Dominion of Canada Coffee House, waiters in Argentine cowboy pants for the Gaucho Steak House...
...over the crucial blending and balancing of libretto and score that difficulties arise, partly from differences in tempo and tone, partly from the operetta medium itself. What is most inspired and Voltairian about Candide must plague operetta writing. Voltaire's book is much better suited to a film, which could approximate the breakneck pace and have a field day with the calamities; or to pure opera, which wholly through music could catch the book's speed, glancing wit and mocking elan...