In the first two decades of the 20th century, operetta was a popular musical theater form in Germany and Austria. Audiences in the early years of modernism, nostalgic for the imagined well-ordered world of the 1880s and ’90s, embraced its schmaltzy romantic plots, retro sentimentality, and lyrical, often ravishing music. But as economic and political instability meshed with right-wing nationalism after World War I, many major operetta composers and librettists found their livelihoods—and their lives—threatened by the rise of Nazism. The best-remembered is probably Franz Lehar (The Merry Widow), a Catholic who was one of Hitler’s favorite composers; he received the Goethe Medal for Art and Science, but still was unable to keep his Jewish collaborator Fritz Lohner-Beda from death in Poland’s Auschwitz III death camp. Lehar’s other Jewish colleagues in the “silver age” of Viennese operetta included Fritz Grunbaum, who was killed in Dachau; Julius Brammer, remembered for his song “Just a Gigolo,” who took refuge in free southern France; Leon Jessel, who died after being tortured by the Gestapo; Hungarian composer Emmerich Kalman (The Duchess of Chicago), another fuhrer fave, who rejected his admirer’s offer to make him an honorary Aryan and came to the U.S; and Alfred Grunwald, who also emigrated to America, where his son Henry became editor of Time magazine. These men’s careers were cut short, their work blacklisted; thus, they’re now often unknown even to fans of light opera.
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Sun 9/8, 2 PM Illinois Holocaust Museum 9603 Woods Dr., Skokie, 708-383-2742chicagofolksoperetta.org $30.
