It was exciting, no doubt, to watch silent films to the accompaniment of musical excerpts played by cinema orchestras, but the 1930s gave audiences the chance to see stars sing and act. That decade consequently offers valuable historical insight into vocal practice and performance technique. This chapter begins with an overview of freshly created screen operettas and of films adapting stage operettas. It briefly examines Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930) and other German films, before moving to British and American films. The demands of film are contrasted with techniques required in the theatre. The chapter then looks at the practice of adaptation in Hollywood, and it ends with a discussion of the operetta Heimat film in Germany.

This introduction serves as an overview of the development of operetta and points to the neglect of operetta by many scholars of music and theatre. The editors begin by defining this genre, which is multi-faceted and often difficult to categorize. The introduction sets the stage for the following chapters by guiding the reader towards the important landmarks in the historical developments of operetta, such as those that occurred in France, Austria and London, and, in the twentieth century, in Berlin. In doing so, it also comments on notable composers and works. It concludes with some reflections on operetta reception in the twenty-first century.

It is clear that the productions in the West End and on Broadway of The Merry Widow marked a distinctive new phase in operetta reception. The massive success of The Merry Widow opened up a flourishing market for operettas from Vienna and Berlin. This was confirmed by the huge success of Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier in New York (1909) and London (1910). The Berlin operettas of Jean Gilbert were soon in demand in the West End and on Broadway. Continental European operetta entered a marketplace dominated by musical comedy. The first major blow to the operetta market, especially in the UK, was the outbreak of the First World War. After the war, many creators of operetta were eager to escape to the comfort of historical romances. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, many people were prepared to pay for operetta, and an assortment of theatres and ticket prices enabled a broad social mixture to do so. In addition to critical-aesthetic reception, theatrical productions were open to moral concerns. The chapter ends with reflections on the reasons for the decline in productions on Broadway and in the West End post-1933.

Cosmopolitanism involves a taste for cultural products of other countries and requires a disposition of openness towards new cultural experience. Like jazz, operetta appealed to people from different cultural backgrounds. This chapter examines operetta from the perspective of both the social and the aesthetic. It explores the social conditions that allowed operetta and its cultural networks to flourish, but also seeks to explain what is cosmopolitan about the stage works themselves, in their musical style and dramatic content. A cosmopolitan genre is one that is open to international musical influences, as European operetta demonstrated when responding to jazz and dance band music. A diasporic cosmopolitanism forms another dimension of the art world of operetta. A diaspora may make great efforts to retain cultural traditions but can also assimilate other cultural knowledge and practices. Operetta involved a large number of Jews working in all aspects of its production. By engaging with culture across borders of all kinds, cosmopolitanism challenges ideas of Self and Other. To be cosmopolitan is to recognize a common humanity in the world’s diverse cultural artefacts.