As if he had been plucked out of thin air, the young Hungarian Jewish composer Paul Ábrahám burst onto the Berlin music scene in 1930 and changed the course of operetta forever.
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Director Gerald Frantzen presents a glamorous (if melodramatic) window into early 20th century Viennese high society, with a crew whose craftsmanship cannot be denied. Their rich talents coalesce to tell the complicated love affair between provincial nightingale Silva Varescu and lovelorn scion Edwin Weylersheim.
A romantic comedy laced with all the prejudices of class consciousness and snobbery of the pre-World War I era, “The Csardas Princess” (the most successful of Kalman’s many works, which takes its name from the traditional Hungarian folk dance) is about Sylva Varescu (Katherine Petersen, a sparking dark-eyed soprano with a face as expressive as her lush soprano), a small town factory worker with a captivating voice who is determined to become a cabaret star in Berlin.
Writing in the program notes to its production of Emmerich Kalman’s “The Csardas Princess,” artistic director Gerald Frantzen observed: “Over the past 13 years, it was impossible to ignore that almost all of the operettas we had translated and reconstructed were created by Jewish composers or librettists.”…
In Act I though, which is staged in the courtyard outside the Weylersheim factory, the waltz beats are upstaged, at least for this writer, by rhythms and clarinet sirens that sound like Emmerich Kálmán used a heavy Klezmer spicing as he cooked his score. One might think of it as a bread crumb trail tracing musical theater and this operetta in specific back to Yiddish Theater traditions.
One of the most popular operettas of all time, The Csárdás Princess, was composed by Hungarian Emmerich Kálmán. It premiered in Vienna in 1915, and since, has been performed all over the world. In 1917, it opened on Broadway, where it played for 78 shows. Before coming to Chicago to see a production of The Csárdás Princess with Folks Operetta, Kálmán’s daughter, Yvonne, spoke about her father’s incredible life and career…
Emmerich Kálmán was born on 24 October 1882 in the Hungarian town of Siofok. His father was a well-to-do businessman but was reduced to bankruptcy during Kálmán’s childhood, an experience which left a lasting mark on young Kálmán’s imagination. The family moved to Budapest, then one of the twin capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire…
The year 2017 was the 100th Anniversary of the U.S. entry into the First World War, or, as it is commonly known in Europe, The Great War. The effect of the war upon artists, musicians and writers and the subsequent effect it had upon their artistic output has long fascinated me.
Our Reclaimed Voices Concerts highlight the work of Jewish composers and librettists who were silenced or exiled during the Second World War. The multi-media concerts tell the stories of these artists and showcase their work through live performances of their music. The concerts were created with the purpose of educating the public and presenting in-depth looks at the lives of these composers. Folks Operetta has written and performed five different concerts over the past five years highlighting artists from the 1920s and 1930s.
As our company finds itself in the position of reviving and reclaiming forgotten works of Jewish Operetta composers, it only makes sense that we turn our lens to the world of Opera, which suffered a similar fate at the hands of The Third Reich. One of the most unjustly neglected composers was Erich Korngold. Despite his successful film scores in his time of exile, Korngold, the master orche…
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