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La Périchole
Program Notes
Die Fledermaus, The Pirates of Penzance, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, Phantom of the Opera and Rent all have something in common. They are all artistic descendants of French operetta. Operetta can be defined as a type of light opera with a frivolous, sentimental story, often employing parody and satire and containing both spoken dialogue and much light, pleasant music.
Jacques Offenbach created the operetta genre in the mid-nineteenth century when the opéra comique offerings became more like their grand opera cousins. Offenbach expressly gave his most important works the title "opéra-bouffe" to emphasize both their musical ambitions and their satirical side. This is the case with La Périchole. Offenbach was joined in his efforts by the widely renowned librettists, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. La Périchole contains some caricature, as in the character of the viceroy. It also contains parody, which is musical in nature, with undisguised allusions (recognizable to all at the time) to Donizetti's La Favorite, and in the famous "letter-songs" to Massenet's Manon. In contrast, the atmosphere of La Périchole is tinged with seriousness (since the heroes are poor, misunderstood street singers dying of hunger), and with tenderness (for they adore each other, an amorous couple in times of trial). So, is it an opéra-bouffe? It's much more. It's a step towards Offenbach's final masterpiece, The Tales of Hoffmann. -- So writes Michael Parouty in his compact disc notes.
Altogether, Offenbach eventually composed over 100 operettas. Translated into various languages and produced all over Europe and America, these works offered a rich vein of political satire and catchy melodies that delighted people of every class. They also made Offenbach a global celebrity. When he toured Britain and the United States, he was greeted as a popular hero by people of all classes.
The French operettas of Offenbach and his contemporaries were the most frequently performed musicals from the 1850s to the early 1880s. Aside from triumphant receptions in London, these musicals were frequently revived on Broadway, some a dozen times or more. Through the 1870s, French operetta accounted for up to half of the offerings in a typical New York theatre season. So the effect of French operetta on the taste and artistic expectations of Viennese, British and American audiences was tremendous. Viennese audiences embraced the works of Offenbach with extraordinary enthusiasm, and it wasn't long before their native composers began writing opéra-bouffes of their own.
Johann Strauss II was the most popular musician of his time; his waltzes and polkas were heard everywhere from Moscow to Boston. He admired Offenbach's operettas and made no secret his desire to write one of his own. When Offenbach's librettists Meilhac and Halévy brought Strauss a script, he set to work. The result was Die Fledermaus. It would not be until the early twentieth century that Vienna would give the world another mega-hit with Franz Lehár's Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow).
In England, the influence of French and Viennese operetta appeared in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan as well as in American operettas by Victor Herbert, John Phillip Sousa and others at the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1920s, operettas began to be replaced by the musical comedy.
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