Directed by Loren Meeker Conducted by Marta Johnson
Clo-Clo, a Follies Beregere revue star, has a coterie of suitors who will do anything for her. Her favourite, Maxime, has youth but no money, while Severin (the Mayor of Perpignan), is the opposite, and provides her with financial backing. Severin’s wife intercepts a begging letter from Clo-Clo calling him Papa, believes her to be his love-child, and decides to mother her. Later on, Clo-Clo is arrested for punching a policeman, and escapes to the provincial town of Perpignan with the help of the Severin and his wife, but things quickly unravel as the law is hot on her trail. All ends well, however, and Clo-Clo is happily united with Maxime.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow (1905) took the world by storm. Within two years of its Vienna premiere, it had become a colossal hit, not just in the German-speaking world, but in London, Paris, New York, and Buenos Aires as well. The success of the work changed the course of operetta, setting it on a path toward a greater emphasis on the romantic story-line. The next quarter-century came to be known as the “Silver Age” of operetta. (The “Golden Age” was the era of Johann Strauss II and his contemporaries, a generation earlier.) The Merry Widow, and Lehár’s other major works that followed it, were characterized by the composer’s gift for lyricism. Love duets in waltz-tempo were plentiful, while large, comic ensemble pieces were much less frequent. The accent was on romance and soaring melody, in which Lehár, an admirer of Puccini, excelled. This tendency became even more pronounced in the 1920s, when Lehár began composing operettas with the great tenor Richard Tauber in mind. In these “romantic operettas,” the sentimentality of the music and the plot eclipsed the comedic elements that had once been so central to the genre.
Lehár’s Cloclo (1924) stands apart from this trend. It was adapted by librettist
Bela Jenbach from a 1914 farce titled Der Schrei nach dem Kinde (“The Urge for a Child”) by Julius Horst and Alexander Engel. The new title, Cloclo, would have been familiar to fans of The Merry Widow as the name of one of the dancing girls from that operetta. Similarly, the setting of the final act, jail, would have been familiar to fans of Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. In terms of plot, Cloclo is more of a farce than anything else. Yet, as Volker Klotz points out in his book on operetta, Cloclo‘s plot reverses some of the time-worn conventions of farce. For example, instead of the more traditional scenario of the country bumpkin who goes up to the big city and, bruised, retreats to his rural idyll, in Cloclo we have the sophisticated, modern city-slicker – and a self-possessed young woman, at that – who, forced to flee the city, proceeds to wreak havoc in the small town where she finds herself. There is, of course, a love interest; but, even in her romantic moments, Cloclo maintains her distance – after all, she’s not convinced that her beau, Maxime, is mature enough to be a one-woman man, or even that he has any visible means of support. Furthermore, whereas the traditional farce ends with order safely restored and everyone in his or her proper place, it is difficult to imagine a character as energetic and strong-willed as Cloclo staying put for long even after the “resolution” at the end of the operetta.
Cloclo is also notable for its use of the popular dance forms of the time, including fox trot, tango, java, blues, and one-step. (The java, which originated in France in the early part of the twentieth century, is a faster, more lascivious version of the waltz. Cloclo and Severin perform a “java duet” in Act II.) All of these dances would have been recognizable to contemporary audiences, though they also bear the distinctive stamp of Lehár’s musical personality. While the composer was no stranger to vernacular dance forms, Cloclo is the only operetta in which he uses these popular dances so frequently. For theater-goers in the 1920s, their inclusion could only have added to the light-hearted, irreverent quality of the piece. The waltz and the march, more traditional Lehár staples, turn up here as well.
The overall tone is one of exuberance, in marked contrast to the sentimental, at times even somber mood of the works that were still to come. Volker Klotz observes that Cloclo precedes the first of the Tauber-operettas by only a year. He continues: “With hindsight, one has the impression that Lehár wanted, one last time, to make an unpretentious piece of musical theater that simply played for laughs, and to do so all the more boisterously for its being the very last time – like a man at his bachelor party, before things get serious.”