Vienna revives November 1938 operetta
NewsThey were due to show a piece of froth titled ‘Greetings and Kisses from the Wachau’ at the Volksoper the night the Nazis took control of Vienna. The operetta was instantly condemned as degenerate because its authors – Jara Beneš, Hugo Wiener, Kurt Breuer and Fritz Löhner-Beda – were mostly Jews. Löhner-Beda was murdered three years later in Auschwitz.
Now, as part of it 125th anniversary year, the Volksoper has reconstructed the banned operetta and will present it in a 1938 historical context in a December premiere. The score has been restored by the Volksoper’s conducting assistant, Keren Kagarlitsky, who is Israeli.
Do we know that it’s a “piece of froth”? If it hasn’t been staged since 1938, it’d be interesting to know how. Or is this just snobbery aimed at the genre in general?
Karl Kraus went in for that sort of thing; he blamed operetta for the First World War. It’s since been established that he’d never been to one.
It is not a presentation of „Gruß und Kuss aus der Wachau“.
According to Volksoper’s website, it is a new theatre piece entitled „Lass uns die Welt vergessen – Volksoper 1938“ which tells the story of how the Nazis invaded Wien on 12 March 1938 and began attacking and disbanding our cultural institutions.
Here is the explanation from the Volksoper website:
Operetta was always escapism, an escape from everyday life into another world, a dream world. But what if this everyday life can no longer be ignored? What if what’s going on in the world is so terrible that you can’t forget it? In the first months of 1938, current political life invaded the Volksoper during rehearsals for the operetta Greetings and Kisses from the Wachau. What do intolerance, discrimination and fascism do to the employees of the Volksoper? During the course of the rehearsals, the National Socialists’ seizure of power brought about serious changes for the Volksoper: layoffs at all levels of the house followed. A captivating look into the mirror of the past can also mean a confrontation with a painful period in the history of the Volksoper. We don’t want to avoid that. By telling the story of the Volksoper employees, we preserve the memory of ALL victims. At the same time, we do not ignore the actions of the perpetrators, which could happen again at any time, but we also remember the countless people who did not raise their voices.
In Let’s Forget the World, director Theu Boermans brings the beautiful, cheerful entertainment of the Beneš operetta back to the Volksoper stage and juxtaposes it with the cold political reality of the Nazi era. Conductor Keren Kagarlitsky reconstructed the score of Greetings and Kisses from the Wachau by Jara Beneš from the little surviving material.
Thank you. Please keep us abreast of how this production goes, onstage and with audience. You seem to be fully informed.