‘Popular Musical Theatre, Cultural Transfer, Modernities — London/Berlin, 1890-1930

3RSXODU0XVLFDO7KHDWUH&XOWXUDO7UDQVIHU0RGHUQLWLHV /RQGRQ%HUOLQ૱ Len Platt, Tobias Becker

Theatre Journal, Volume 65, Number 1, March 2013, pp. 1-18 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/tj.2013.0026

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Popular Musical Theatre, Cultural Transfer, Modernities: London/Berlin, 1890–1930 Len Platt and Tobias Becker Musical theatre was one of the most important popular cultures of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Representing a key stage in the modernization of the theatre, it had a major impact on theatre aesthetics: it made substantial claims for itself as a characteristically modern cultural form, in the case of the revue producing challenging alternatives to the conservative progressivism of the book musical; it also engaged in complex ways with ideas about the modern world, registering and shaping contemporary attitudes to class, gender, and national identities and articulating with mainstream political issues. Musical theatre was entertainment, but, far from being an innocent diversion, it was also a key constituent of everyday culture. In the United States, which was traditionally more accepting of popular culture than Europe, the musical has a high cultural status that often appears closely connected to the formation of national identities. More than just a simple celebration, it has embodied America’s mastery over modernity in particularly amiable ways—as entertainment. It is hardly surprising that this potent combination has rendered the musical the subject of serious research in the American academy. Traditional modes of musicological analysis have been translated from one field to another, the aim being not just to construct a canon within music theatre history, but also to position musical theatre alongside other celebrated and prestigious cultural forms. Outside the United States, however, popular musical theatre has remained on the margins of the academy. Here, it has enjoyed some impact in relation to cultural history and debates that continue to take place around ideas of theatre as agency and the politics of performance, especially where these invoke working-class and otherwise exoticized or “outsiderly” cultures. Since the 1970s and ’80s, figures like Jacky Bratton, Dagmar Kift, Thomas Postlewait, Maria Shevtsova, and Erika Fischer-Lichte have engaged in a wide-ranging intervention that elevates the dynamism of performance over Len Platt is a professor of modern literatures at Goldsmiths University of London. His research interests include modern European literature, James Joyce, and popular musical theatre, and his publications include Aristocracies of Fiction (2003); Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890–1939 (2004); Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake (2006); Modernism and Race (2010); and James Joyce: Texts and Contexts (2011). Tobias Becker is a research assistant in modern European history at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin and a postdoctoral researcher in the DFG/AHRC project “West End and Friedrichstraße: Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin, 1890–1939.” His research interests include urban, cultural, and theatre history. He has coedited a book on European entertainment culture around 1900 titled Die Stadt der tausend Freuden. Vergnügungskultur um 1900 (2011). Theatre Journal 65 (2013) 1–18 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

2 / Len Platt and Tobias Becker conservative notions of “static” theatre. Moving away from the primacy of the canonical text, their work has developed our understanding of the politics of performance. Genres like music hall and cabaret have taken on some importance against this background—the former articulated as a working-class culture, and the latter, following Walter Benjamin, understood as a version of bohemianism mediating between “the mindlessness of popular variety shows and the incomprehensible esotericism of the avant-garde.”1 Such forms of musical theatre have often been seen as illustrations of an intervention theorized in the 1970s and ’80s as the “carnivalesque,” or now, more soberly, as what some historians have been calling “an alternative public sphere.” As distinct from the more familiar formations described by Jürgen Habermas—the “rational discourse” of middle-class men in “voluntary associations”—popular theatre here evokes a parallel site, a “redefined public sphere in the first decade of the twentieth century”2 that becomes an essential part of the decentred politics of the conservative modern. The genres most associated with the commercialization and industrialization of music theatre at the end of the long turn of century (1880–1930) have until recently remained largely outside this zone of interest, for reasons that must have once seemed convincing enough. The idea of theatre as agency works best in the contexts of theatres self-consciously designed in terms of radical social and political engagement, as many were. But musical comedy, revue, and operetta, and all the endless variations in between, operated for the most part in a very different domain. Although these theatres have often been associated with aristocratic glamour, the general audiences of both British and German capitals were, in fact, much more ordinary—middle-class men and women and, seasonally, their children enjoying institutionalized forms of public performance. The productions to which they flocked at the turn of the last century were designed as commercial entertainment. Success was measured not least according to the extent that these shows made financial profits. The pleasure they generated was contingent on the delights of familiarity and recognition, as well as on escapism, fantasy, and spectacle. This was a culture seemingly removed from the challenges of an art theatre that appealed mostly to intellectuals and was often outspokenly anti-popular, although in reality there were more crossovers in this respect than is usually acknowledged. Sometimes teasingly associated with the dangerous glamour of the demimonde, musical theatre was, in fact, defined much more typically by its formalizing the limits of the acceptable, and this is a central part of its fascination and significance. Only since the late 1990s have scholars, often influenced by cultural studies and the theoretical work of such figures as Stuart Hall and Richard Dyer, turned their attention to this bourgeois entertainment. Peter Bailey’s groundbreaking work has been significantly developed, for example, by Erika Rappaport, Len Platt, Marline Otte, and Derek Scott. Peter Jelavich’s early work in Berlin Cabaret (1993), a study that includes substantial material on revue, has had a particular influence on methodologies developed by historians in this field. In analyzing the wider political, social, and cultural developments prior to World War I through a study of popular theatre, Martin Baumeister’s Kriegstheater: Großstadt, Front und Massenkultu (2005), for instance, follows Jelavich in Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 26. Marline Otte, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 13. 1  2 

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this respect, as does Otte’s work on circus, jargon theatre, and, to some extent, revue. Almost all of this work focuses on the pre-1914 period and has been deeply shaped by the attempt to understand musical theatre in terms of the material making of the modern city and the construction of conservative and popular modernisms. In 2011, two research teams based, respectively, in London and Berlin were funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutche Forschungsgemeinschaft to examine these popular forms of musical theatre in relation to cultural transfer between Britain and Germany in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and extending beyond the prewar period to the 1920s and ’30s.3 This Anglo-German dimension, formulated more specifically here in terms of the metropolitan centers of London and Berlin, responds to a number of important issues both in relation to theatre history and a more wide-ranging culturalism. In terms of the former, the enduring operettas of Jacques Offenbach and Johann Strauss have led popular musical theatre in Europe to be mainly associated with the cities of Paris and Vienna. Particularly focused in such early texts as Siegfried Kracauer’s magisterial Offenbach and the Paris of His Time (1938), the operettas of both composers and their influence on the musical theatre of other nations are now established in the contexts of urbanization and modernity. By comparison, London and Berlin have been neglected, despite the fact that both cities developed their own brands of musical theatre from the 1880s in all the most popular forms—operetta, musical comedy, and revue—with Berlin in particular gaining in reputation as “one of the most vibrant entertainment centres in turn-of-the-century Europe.”4 Both were also sites where a rapidly accelerating version of modernity was being experienced in all its contradictions. Cosmopolitanism, dazzling new inventions, the commercialization of fashion, and the emerging leisure and entertainment industries all developed more or less simultaneously in these cities around 1900 in a process that took place not in isolation, but in growing relatedness and interconnection. As well as deepening our knowledge of the theatre history of this period, then, a study from the perspective of cultural transfer and exchange would also add to our understanding of the cultural histories of metropolitan Germany and Britain, shedding important new light not only on the highly contested concept of modernism, but also on European cultural relations. The relations between Britain and Germany in the “Age of Empire” have long been viewed in terms of an essential and almost unbridgeable Anglo-German antagonism. Only recently have scholars begun to reconsider this relationship, placing the undeniably deteriorating public political context against a more everyday reality, where things were more ambiguous and nuanced. As Dominik Geppert and Robert Gerwarth point out in their introduction to a 2008 collection of transcultural essays titled Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain, “intense feelings of cultural proximity” between Britain and Germany seemed to go hand in hand with “widespread antagonism,” certainly at the broader cultural level.5 To put it rather differently, musical theatre in London and Berlin was a compelling example of what anthropologist Marie Louise Pratt has

3  Frank E. Washburn Freund, “The Theatrical Year in Germany,” in The Stage Yearbook, 1914 (London, 1914), 81–96. 4  Otte, Jewish Identities, 4. 5  Dominik Geppert and Robert Gerwarth, eds., Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain: Essays on Cultural Affinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2.

4 / Len Platt and Tobias Becker termed a “contact zone,”6 predicated, in part, on the business cultures and structures that facilitated the transfer industry, but also, especially in the earlier part of the period, on an aspirational sense of metropolitan-style culture—except that here, suggestively, the dynamic was established not across an advancing center and retreating periphery, as in the familiar anthropological model, but instead across centers competing for authority in, if not ascendancy over, the modern. To take London and Berlin as examples of cultural exchange, then, seems important, in part because it reintroduces two neglected sites into the transnational network of popular theatre, but also because it seems highly likely to contribute to our understanding of how this popular culture operated in relation to the modern world. This present essay, produced half-way through a research project, illustrates our methods and profiles some of the outcomes of our work so far, albeit in a provisional state. The first part, a case study of how the West End hit show The Arcadians became the Berlin show Schwindelmeier & Co., highlights the mechanics of textual adaptation, showing how, again in the early years, these shows signed up to an upbeat and accommodating vision of modernity while at the same time responding to more local dimensions. The following sections work differently to construct a largely unexplored narrative of exchange during the period from 1914 to 1930. Between these years, exchange cultures across these two sites went through substantial shifts. Broadly, the imperative to engage with and accommodate modernity was displaced by a marked retreat from the modern, indicated not least by the emphatic popularity of “historical” musicals. At the same time, the direction of travel between these sites became almost exclusively one way and adaptation styles shifted substantially, as did the musical theatre forms now considered suitable for exchange. Our sense is that the significance of these shifts goes far beyond the traditional domains of musical theatre history to engage with wider histories, which is why the later sections of this essay have a particular focus on how we might read the history of transfer during this period.

Cosmopolite Nation: The Arcadians and Schwindelmeier & Co. The earlier part of this period, 1890–1914, was initially characterized by the export of highly successful West End musical comedies to Berlin and many other metropolises, including Vienna, Paris, Hamburg, Budapest, and New York, as well as an empire circuit that featured such places as Johannesburg, Cape Town, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Dublin, Singapore, Bombay, and Allabad. The transfers to Berlin included hit shows like A Gaiety Girl (1893), The Geisha (1896), A Greek Slave (1898), A Runaway Girl (1898), San Toy (1899), A Chinese Honeymoon (1899), and The Silver Slipper (1901). Berlin’s version of the West End brio that so shaped popular theatre during this period included Jean Gilbert’s highly successful work as the composer of Berlin operettas: Die keusche Susanne (1911), Autoliebchen (1912), and Die Kino-Königin (1913). All of these Gilbert shows played in the West End (as, respectively, Joy Ride Lady, The Girl in the Taxi, and The Cinema Star) and elsewhere to considerable acclaim. The Girl in the Taxi, for example, was received in London on the brink of World War I as a particularly fine example of a still new and specifically urban culture: “this class of piece seems to suit the taste of the ‘big’ city public, and is also cheaper to put on because only a small orchestra is required and no first-class singers.”7 6  7 

See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Washburn Freund, “The Theatrical Year in Germany.”

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The Arcadians (1909), one of the most successful musicals of the early twentieth century, illustrates what was invested in the processes of translating and adapting these shows. With lyrics by Arthur Wimperis and music composed by Lionel Monckton and Howard Talbot, The Arcadians was produced at the Shaftesbury Theatre by Robert Courtneidge, premiering on 28 April 1909. The libretto was written by Mark Ambient and Alexander Thompson—the former, like Courtneidge, a socialist, although it is difficult to find signs of such affiliations anywhere in The Arcadians or, indeed, any of their other plays. Julius Freund’s adaptation for the Berlin stage, incidentally, is specifically anti-socialist to the extent that not only do Berliners live in “cages,” but there is an especially large cage, called the “Reichstag,” in which their representatives quarrel all day long. In it, politicians are grouped by colors, the most dangerous group being the “reds.”8 Indeed, it was an indication of the largely conservative preferences of Freund’s audience that almost every revue and operetta staged at the Metropol-Theater contained an allusion mocking or criticizing the Social Democratic Party of Germany and its best-known politician, August Bebel. Parallel references to figures on the British Left, like Ramsey McDonald and Keir Hardie, did appear on the London stage, but not with any regularity until a little later. Such references were especially stimulated by the outbreak of war and a perceived lack of patriotism on the part of the Left. The Arcadians enacted the story of James Smith, a London restaurateur with a passion for aeroplanes. He crash-lands in faraway Arcadia, a fairyland completely removed from civilization and inhabited by prelapsarian innocents. Scarcely arrived, Smith tries to seduce one of them, named Sombra, by lying. The Arcadians are so outraged that they throw him into the “well of truth,” from which Smith emerges apparently purified as “Simplicitas.” His modern clothes transformed into shepherd’s dress, he is now younger, sports fine blonde curls, and seems converted to a new moral order. Sombra and her sister Chrysea decide to take Smith back to London on a mission: “To all and each, / Where sin is rife, / We go to teach / The simple life.”9 Transported to London by Father Time, they arrive in a sudden burst of rain and thunder at Askwood Races on Cup Day, where the second act takes place. Smith/Simplicitas here encounters his wife who, not recognizing him, flirts and falls in love with the supposed stranger. After hearing about Arcadia, she also persuades him to cooperate in the venture of opening an Arcadian-styled restaurant. Sombra convinces Simplicitas (who now, like all Arcadians, is able to speak to animals) to replace a jockey who has been incapacitated by a horse bite, not least to assist the romantic lead Jack Meadows, who stands to lose £5,000 if a new rider cannot be found. The horse wins the cup easily, with Simplicitas fast asleep on its back. The third act is set in Smith’s Arcadian-themed restaurant, which has become a great success with fashionable London. The simple life—signified here by vegetarian food—has become the latest consumerist fad, and all well-to-do London is flocking to the restaurant, which is a modern simulacra of the “real” place. Instead of actually promoting rural innocence, however, Simplicitas makes use of his newly regained youth to enjoy city pleasures, which arouses Mrs. Smith’s suspicions. Cornered by his wife, Simplicitas tells a lie and falls into the ornamental well in the 8  Julius Freund, Schwindelmeier & Co., act 1, scene 3 (n.p.). The only surviving manuscript is in the Theaterhistorische Sammlung der Freie Universität Berlin, Nachlass Julius Freund, 97/02/w163. All references to the Berlin text are from this version. 9  Mark Ambient and Alexander M. Thompson, The Arcadians, act 1 (n.p.). British Library manuscript, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1909.

6 / Len Platt and Tobias Becker restaurant, reemerging as his old self. Now bald and bewhiskered, he returns to his true age—in more senses than one. Sombra and Chrysea realize that their mission to convert the modern world cannot succeed and consequently leave for Arcadia, although not without the latter confessing that, for all its wickedness, she has completely fallen for the delights of modern London. The Arcadians ran for three years and 809 performances in the West End, becoming the quintessential Edwardian musical play. Unsurprisingly, managers abroad soon became interested. The Arcadians was produced at the Liberty Theatre in New York in 1910 with an entirely new cast, where it was likened to “a morning out of doors in a very pleasant sunshiny land peopled by graceful figures.”10 In March 1910, the show came to the Theatre Royal in Melbourne; in February 1911, to the Etablissement Ronacher in Vienna, as Die Arkadier; and finally in April 1912, to the Metropol-Theater in Berlin, where it was adapted by Freund as Schwindelmeier & Co., with additional music by Rudolf Nelson. It is not clear whether the play was translated into German before Freund’s adaptation; since no other name appears on the script or program, the usual assumption has been that this was the case, although more typically, adaptations were collaborative. The first musical comedy to be translated into German, for example, The Geisha (1897), was initially translated by Curt Roehr, who was something of a linguistic genius, studying eight languages, including Chinese, after finishing grammar school. He then lived for several years in England where he worked as a journalist, theatre critic, and author, returning to Berlin in 1894 and founding a publishing house for music. The first item he published was his translation of The Geisha,11 thus making it quite possible that Roehr started the musical comedy fashion in Berlin, perhaps having seen The Geisha in London. This translation, however, did not produce a viable play-text. As with A Greek Slave—the West End play that followed The Geisha to Berlin—a literal German version was made first. The text was then handed over to an experienced playwright like Freund, who was the author of many revues and operettas staged at the Metropol-Theater. Typically, “translations” at this time were often radical, involving interpolations of songs, complete script rewrites, the dropping of whole acts, and so on. The transformation of The Arcadians into a Berlin show was rather less disruptive. The English version, unusually, was in three acts rather than the standard two and remained so for the Berlin stage. Much of the general plot also remained the same. At many points in the play, dialogue transferred over without too much interference. The original, for example, begins with Sombra telling her fellow Arcadians about a strange land named “England” and an even stranger city named “London,” where people crowd together in vast numbers and live in cages of brick and stone. Freund retained this scene, the only difference being the renaming of Sombra as Serena and the significant transposition of Berlin for London.12 The chorus in act 1, where the Arcadians express their fear about the descent of Smith/Meier on his aeroplane, is almost identical in both versions:

“‘The Arcadians’ Charm at Liberty,” New York Times, 18 January 1910 (n.p.). Cf. Reichshandbuch der deutschen Gesellschaft: das Handbuch der Persönlichkeiten in Wort und Bild, vol. 2: L–Z (Berlin: Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, 1931), 2:398. 12  Ambient and Thompson, The Arcadians, act 1 (n.p.). 10  11 

POPULAR MUSICAL THEATRE, CULTURAL TRANSFER, mODERNITIES / 7 Look, what hovers there above us, Hanging on gigantic wing! Oh, eternal gods who love us, Save us from that awful thing! Hark, it’s coming, humming, thrumming. Wheeling, reeling, in its flight, Looping, drooping, swooping, whooping, Like a harpy of the night! See, upon its back is riding Something in no mortal shape, Mopping, mowing, creeping, leaping, Frisking like a frenzied ape! It’s upon us! It’s upon us! Ah!13

Seht hoch über Wald und Hügel, Kommt ein Untier auf uns her, Mächtig steuern seine Flügel Durch der Wolken brandend Meer! Seht nur wie es sausend brausend Pfeilschnell durch den Aether schiesst, Wie es fauchend, Unheil hauchend, Immer eng’re Kreise schließt! Schauder jagt uns durchs Gebein! Ihr Götter mögt uns gnädig sein! Praseln, rasseln—ratternd, knatternd Will’s uns ins Verderben zieh’n! Laßt uns flieh’n, laßt uns flieh’n!14

In both versions, the metaphor of the airplane as modernity was maintained, as were the central thematic dynamics of the show. The general idea of playing off big-city fashion and morality against an initially attractive idyll remained fundamental to both, as did the ambiguities around whether the upsurge of the fashionable, modern metropolis needed to be checked by a return to rural innocence. Like some of the novelistic versions of Arcadia published around the same time—H. C. Minchin’s The Arcadians (1899), for example, and J. S. Fletcher’s The Arcadians: A Whimsicality (1903)—the classic musical theatre version, although not indifferent to the immoralities and perceived superficialities of urban contemporaneity, took an upbeat response to what in more intellectual circles was one of the defining issues of fin-de-siècle Europe: the perceived threat of decadence and degeneration. This show laughed at the fantasy of a pure and simple life; at the same time, it was a celebration of consumerism and devoted a great deal of energy towards reproducing contemporary modernity as exciting spectacle.15 For all the talk of fog and homes like cages, the London of The Arcadians was represented not by the dirt and squalor of the East End, but by streets representing the fashionable retail world: Regent Street, Oxford Street, and Bond Street, all shopping areas since the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century, established next door to exclusive tailors and dressmakers, department stores like Selfridges had opened their doors to a more diverse clientele.16 Thus when Smith is asked about the strange place where he comes from, it is precisely the Arcadians’ ignorance of these fashionable districts, and of the concept of shopping, that marks the distance between the modern world and Arcadia: Smith: Yes, you’ve heard of Bond Street? Piccadilly? (All look blank) Then you’ve never heard of Smith & Co., the leviathan caterers? No? Oxford Street? Regent Street? A woman and never heard of Regent Street! Why, you don’t know what shops are? Sombra: No, what are shops? Smith: Shops? Well, er shops are—er—Well er—shops! Where they Selfridges—sell things!17

Transposing this urban center as Berlin was not simply a natural byproduct of translating the show—indeed, a purist translation would have retained the London Ibid. Freund, Schwindelmeier & Co., act 1, scene 3 (n.p.). 15  See Len Platt, Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890–1939 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), 49–54. 16  See Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 16–40. 17  Ambient and Thompson, The Arcadians, act 1 (n.p.). 13  14 

8 / Len Platt and Tobias Becker setting—but rather a precise geographic remapping that entirely characterized the Berlin show, rendering it fully as adaptation. In Schwindelmeier & Co., Regent Street became Unter den Linden, Berlin’s fashionable boulevard; Piccadilly became Friedrichstraße, Berlin’s theatre district; and Oxford Street became the Tauentzienstraße to the west of the city and the Tiergarten—it was here, along Tauentzienstraße and Kurfürstendamm, that soon after 1900 a new shopping district emerged with the opening of the Kaufhaus des Westens (popularly known as KdW) in 1907. References to locations like Mayfair and Rotten Row, amusements like Cup Day at Ascot, and to shops, fashion designers, and so on gave Freund the opportunity for a radical reinscription that positioned Berlin, as opposed to London, at the very center of the modern world. In this way, the British capital city, far from being a Berlin equivalent, was displaced by an alternative metropolis that possessed all the dimensions of its prototype—and perhaps a bit extra. Although The Arcadians did not feature a department store scene, its second act, with its racecourse setting, offered ample opportunity for a celebration of consumerism. “Askwood” stood in for the Ascot and Goodwood racecourses, just as “Garrods,” the setting for another Edwardian blockbuster, Our Miss Gibbs, did for Harrods. The two sites were distinct in some ways though in other ways complemented each other. According to Rappaport, Gordon Selfridges “designed and publicized the department store . . . as a blend of elite and mass culture, mirroring the world of Ascot and the amusement park.”18 Just as Our Miss Gibbs featured a mother and a daughter buying clothes for Ascot, so too did The Arcadians use the racecourse setting for a dazzling display of fashionability. Both shows registered the parallelism in an opening number featuring the “well-dressed crowd of race-goers,” which functioned as a hymn to consumerism: Ladies:

We bow at the altar of fashion, We’re vowed to the vogue of the hour, The Rite of the Robe is our passion, The Might of the Mode is our pow’r! Leave dowdies their homespun and “Harris,” Your Venus of breeding and birth Defers to the judgment of Paris, A mixture of beauty and Worth!19

Schwindelmeier & Co., however, probed more suggestively into the extent that consumerism penetrated the everyday. It shared the essential joie de vie of its prototype, but was also more interrogative in its handling of the impact of consumerist culture. In a highly sexualized scene for which there was no real equivalent in the original, Meier, in his Arcadian avatar, encounters his daughter, Trude, on the racecourse. To Meier’s discomfort, Trude begins to flirt with him in order to arouse the jealousy of her fiancé. Not realizing that she is actually addressing her own father, Trude provides the strange Arcadian with a frank account of the more intimate social life of a “real girl from Berlin West”—the district in which Berlin’s upper middle and upper class lived. In an exchange that would certainly have been censored by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office in London, Trude tells her shocked father that a girl “doesn’t get a child from a kiss” and expresses her willingness to gamble everything on the unlikelihood Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 166. Ambient and Thompson, The Arcadians, act 2 (n.p.). “Worth” alludes to Charles Frederick Worth, a fashion designer who catered mainly for the haute bourgeoisie of Europe. See Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans, eds., Fashion and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 28–34. 18  19 

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of Simplicitas ever being able to find a “Tautenzienmädel” (Tautenzien girl) over the age of 17 who has not yet been kissed.20 Asked where young Berliners rendezvous for romantic encounters, Trude, in a song, tells her father about the KdW—the Kaufhaus des Westens on Tauentzienstraße. The song narrates the story of a mother and her daughter on an innocent visit to the department store together. Soon, however, the mother finds herself alone because her daughter sets off for the refreshment room where she keeps a rendezvous. Here, Freund was relatively explicit in the recognition of the department store as a sexualized space offering the opportunity for men and women to mingle relatively freely. Against the complaints of critics of the new department stores, who frequently highlighted their corrupting effects (invariably on women), the German version of The Arcadians allowed for a celebration of these shopping cathedrals as a new heterosocial space, although not without some nuanced regret at the advanced knowingness of the Tautenzienmädel. Most of this adaptation, however, was broadly compatible with the London version. The Arcadians, like many musical comedies before it, revolved around what contemporaneous sociologist Thorstein Veblen called the leisure class and a culture based on consumption, which took dress “as an expression of the pecuniary culture.”21 The German version entirely bought into such ideas, with the crucial difference that here they became centered on the Berlin metropolis and where they circulated in a rather more risqué environment and one more deeply engaged with the transforming nature of consumer society. Thus in the Berlin version, Freund builds ambivalent jokes around brand-name department stores that are no longer nouns referring to material objects in reality, but verbs: “gewertheimt, getiezt, gejandorft, gegersont”—signifiers, that is, of nothing less than being and doing in the modern mechanizing world.22 At the same time, the adaptation of Schwindelmeier & Co. emphatically laid claim to the modern metropolis. Indeed, shifting the title to the name of a consumerist emporium as the antithesis of Arcadia may have made a subtle registration of its interest, and loyalties, in this respect. One of the more obvious indicators, however, of its adaptive instinct involved redrawing the dimensions of the central character of the show, Smith, to make him consistent with a version of racialized social modernity already familiar to audiences at the Metropol-Theater, but quite absent from the West End stage. The Metropol-Theater of 1912 was, to a significant degree, the invention of Freund. Of Jewish background though entirely assimilated into urban Berlin culture, he frequently included Jewish characters in his revues, operettas, and other entertainments. One standard incarnation was the “comically unattractive Jewish man who, through a mixture of brave cleverness and naïve ignorance, surmounted the trials and tribulations of his attempt to assimilate into middle-class Berlin.”23 Actor Guido Thielscher, a Gentile comedian who often played this kind of stereotype in shows staged at the Metropol-Theater, was cast in Schwindelmeier & Co. as Meier. In the Berlin version, Meier became a character of this same type—a comedy Jew, laughed at not least for his attempts at assimilation, but also for his comic engagement with the stereotype itself. For, as Otte has shown, the Metropol’s revues, by “overstating the image of a ‘Jew’ Freund, Schwindelmeier & Co., act 2, scene 11 (n.p.). Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; reprint, New York: Prometheus, 1998), 167–87. 22  Schwindelmeier & Co., act 2, scene 6 (n.p.). 23  Otte, Jewish Identities, 241. 20  21 

10 / Len Platt and Tobias Becker . . . ridiculed the image itself.”24 It is precisely such an overstatement that shapes the Meier character: a clumsy figure always seeking his own advantage, but at the same time humorous, likable, and crucially positioned at the very center of things. Flirting with Serena after his crash-landing, Meier tells her initially that he is a 35-year-old, unmarried Roman Catholic—a lie immediately exposed when Meier’s passport slides out of his pocket: Meier: Mein Pass! Oi weh—jetzt geht’s schief! (My passport! Now there’ll be trouble!) Serena: (liest) Louis Meier, Berlin. Verheiratet. 55 Jahre alt—Glaube mosaisch. Und eben, eben hast Du mir erst gesagt . . . ([Reads] Louis Meier, Berlin. Married. 55 years old—faith—Jewish. But you just told me . . .) Meier: Was hab’ ich schon gross gesagt? Heutzutage macht sich jeder gern so jung und germanisch wie möglich. (So what’s the big deal? Everyone likes to look as young and Germanic as possible nowadays.)25

Serena discovers that Meier is married, age 55, and Jewish, to which Meier responds by remarking on the imperatives forcing everyone to pass as young “these days” and as traditionally Germanic as possible. From the very beginning of Schwindelmeier & Co., then, a local and heavily racialized dynamic emerges, which positions the role of the outsider attempting to assimilate at the center of the metropolitan experience—a move, again, having no parallel in the English version. Indeed, by comparison, the outsider in The Arcadians (fantasy Arcadians apart) is treated crudely as the racialized butt of standard jokes. At the beginning of the show, for example, when Smith discovers that the Arcadians have no knowledge of money and do not pay rent, he concludes that they “must be Irish.”26 Whatever the realities outside the Berlin theatre, it seems that the Metropol worked to a more sophisticated understanding of the city as Israel Zangwill’s “melting pot.” For all these distinctions, however, both the London and Berlin versions of the show were produced in a common framework that appeared to embrace change and modernity—a quality that characterized musical comedy and Germen operetta and revue at this time as an urban entertainment, as well as throwing it into conflict with more high-brow cultures. While intellectual elites typically mourned what was perceived as a loss of hierarchy and distinction in the modern world, musical theatre celebrated the inventive consumerism of mass culture, becoming the twice-daily demonstration of a technological authority that could reproduce the twentieth-century city through spectacular staging and effects. The upbeat dispensation of gaiety was immanent in the narratologies of hundreds of shows across the period, which time and again reproduced for their audiences an energizing experience of living in contemporaneity (fig. 1). Musical theatre reflected the modern urban experience back to its urban and suburban audiences in very particular ways, constructing a version of modernity as much at odds with the prestigious intellectual cultures of the day as it was with many realities of modern life. For reasons like these, it has been widely understood as a generic culture of the metropolis, a status that our examination of transfer culture has confirmed—up to a point and with some qualifications—at least during this early period of transfer. Ibid., 263. Schwindelmeier & Co., act 1, scene 7 (n.p.). 26  See Ambient and Thompson, The Arcadians, act 1 (n.p.). 24  25 

POPULAR MUSICAL THEATRE, CULTURAL TRANSFER, mODERNITIES / 11

Figure 1. Die Kino-Königin (1913). “The upbeat dispensation of gaiety.” (Reproduced by permission of Alan L. Rebbeck.)

Wartime Musicals This lively transfer culture was wrecked by the outbreak of World War I. After a brief period of complete closure, theatre land in both sites reopened. In the early part of the hostilities, inward-looking patriotism became the new fashion. Jingoistic revues, such as Business as Usual at the Hippodrome, Kam’rad Männe at the Thalia-Theater, Immer feste druff at the Berliner, Odds and Ends at the Ambassadors, Woran wir denken: Bilder aus großer Zeit at the Metropol, and a string of others opening in 1914 became the standard fare. As several historians have indicated, however, audiences soon tired of this kind of show, especially after it became clear that the war would not be over in a matter of weeks, as many had predicted. Musical theatres, again in both sites, reverted to more traditional, romantic, and sentimental fare. With the odd exception—The Better ’Ole (1917), for example, which, uniquely for a West End musical of the time, was set

12 / Len Platt and Tobias Becker at the front—entertainment distracted by being removed from the war zone and was expected to operate as “a good sound tonic.”27 As opposed to embracing modernity, musicals now often took the form of exotic spectacles set in faraway places. Daly Theatre’s spectacular productions of The Maid of the Mountains (1917) and A Southern Maid (1917) were symptomatic here, as was the pantomime orientalism of Chu Chin Chow (1917), a classic piece of wartime escapism. In the Berlin counterpart, a distinctly nostalgic operetta almost entirely displaced the fashion for contemporaneity previously evident in operettas and prewar revues. The latter fell into sharp decline, both at the Metropol and elsewhere. Fritzi Massary, once a star of Schulz’s famous prewar revues, continued to reign supreme though under a very different regime that was now characterized by the huge success of such shows as Leo Fall’s Die Kaiserin (1915), Offenbach’s Grande-Duchess (1916), Emmerich Kálmán’s Die Csárdásfüstin (1915), and the immensely popular Die Rose von Stambul (1916), also by Fall. Even composers usually considered modernizers of operetta returned to more traditional forms, which were retrospective and nostalgic. In a dynamic that continued well after hostilities had ceased, Berlin became a focal point for this development. Through an orientation either glossed or ignored in cultural histories focused on the more risqué nightlife entertainments of the Weimar Republic, Berlin audiences became even more appreciative of this romantic fare than those in Vienna. In the 1920s and beyond, alongside the infamous avant-gardism and nude stages, a much more sedate Berlin operetta continued to flourish as the staple of popular musical theatre. If “the left, the intellectuals, and the cabaret crowd” mocked it, “middle-of-the-road and lowbrow tastes” embraced the return to an “aristocratic” prettification of the nineteenth century.28 Indeed, operetta was creating a new traditionalist school of which Berlin was becoming the principal exponent. There is a sense, then, in which commercial musical theatres in London and Berlin, for all the appearance of being at war, responded in parallel ways. The operetta so popular in Germany may have produced a national and racial identification that rendered it unthinkable for London audiences in wartime, just as the identification between the increasingly outmoded musical comedy and Englishness rendered the former impossible in Berlin. Yet both theatres were, in fact, responding similarly by retreating to safer ground, not least by displacing the social engagement and energetic modernism of an earlier musical theatre culture with escapism and fantasy of another order.

“From Austria”: Postwar Rapprochement Producers were wary about reintroducing German-style musical theatre into the West End after the war. While British stages were closed to the likes of Lehár, Fall, and Kálmán, their operettas had “raged in Vienna and Berlin”29 as popular diversion certainly, but also as manifestations of popular national taste and style. Indeed, operetta was so closely identified with conservative notions of Germany between the wars that it later became one of the few versions of popular musical entertainment sponsored and celebrated by National Socialism—once “cleansed” of Jewish personnel. Lehár’s works, for example, were continually performed under the Third Reich, and he accepted awards like the Ring of Honour and Hitler’s Goethe-Medallion. The Era, 26 September 1919 (n.p.). Richard Traubner, Operetta: A Theatrical History (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 259. 29  Ibid., 254. 27  28 

POPULAR MUSICAL THEATRE, CULTURAL TRANSFER, mODERNITIES / 13

It was similarly because of the potential identifications with race and nation that the reemergence of operetta in the West End became such an important signifier of rapprochement. In April 1920, producer Albert De Courville wrote to The Times asking who would be “the first manager . . . to take the plunge and return to the conditions prevailing in pre-war days.”30 Eager to reassure that he would not be taking on this responsibility personally, De Courville went on to point out some of the anomalies of the continuing embargo. He was hearing, he wrote, “reports daily of the production of brilliant musical plays in Berlin, Vienna, and other cities of the Central States.”31 Other rumors were in circulation: “Franz Lehár has, I understand, lately written a comic opera generally admitted to be better even than his Merry Widow, and other ‘enemy’ composers—some quite unknown—are also said to be doing brilliant work.” There were signs, De Courville continued, of a shift in public attitudes. At “a recent concert in London . . . a few members of the audience who were hostile to German music, were shouted down by an overwhelming majority.”32 De Courville pointed to the paradox of the “undiminished enthusiasm of English audiences for Wagnerian opera” and posed the central question frankly: Are we still at war with Germany or not? America evidently thinks not. I am told that Lehár is going over, and Reinhardt has been invited. Are we in the theatrical world free to buy plays from the late enemy in the same way as we buy razors? Are we at liberty to reawaken public interest in a class of show highly delectable before the war? And in what manner should the movement be begun? Will it be a gradual process, starting with a production of a Lithuanian show, followed by one from Czecho-Slovakia, and proceeding to a Hungarian and thence to a purely Teutonic production? Perhaps this will be the solution of the difficulty.33

In the event, De Courville was not far wrong. The return of Berlin operetta to London in the early 1920s was characterized by advanced forms of amelioration and subterfuge, in some ways suggestive of the kind of creeping Germanicization half-jokingly visualized by the West End producer. As had been the case in the prewar years though only more so, these 1920s exports, especially to Britain, remained contingent on elaborate disguise. Künneke’s Der Vetter aus Dingsda (The Cousin from Nowhere), for example, a Berlin show in most material respects, was presented in London not as German, but as Continental, written by “Continental writers and a Continental composer.”34 Other musical plays were internationalized. For example, Wenn Liebe erwacht (Love’s Awakening) became “an Italian story . . . set to music by a German . . . [with] the chief male role [being] acted by a Turk.”35 The designation “from Austria” became an especially important product-marker for the new transfer market, for obvious reasons. The central priority was to establish distance between the shows and modern industrial Germany—still the new power in central Europe, although now struggling under the severe constraints of postwar treaties. Through association with the “golden age” of Strauss, the Austrian tag associated Berlin operetta with romantic escapism and invoked a more neutral, much less threatening version of Germany. Reduced from its once vast territories to the much smaller Alpine state we know today, Austria in its stage version could be rendered palatable to British theatregoers. Thus Gilbert’s show The Times (London), 8 April 1920, 8. Ibid. 32  Ibid. 33  Ibid. 34  The Times (London), 26 February 1923, 8. 35  The Stage, 22 April 1922, 14. 30  31 

14 / Len Platt and Tobias Becker Die Frau im Hermelin (The Lady of the Rose) was adapted in 1922 not from German at all, but “from the Austrian by Mr. Frederick Lonsdale.”36 Fall’s Madame Pompadour, first performed at the Berliner Theater in 1922, became a “Viennese musical comedy” at Daly’s.37 Articles on “The Berlin Stage,” at one time regular features in The Stage Year Book, became displaced by articles on “The Vienna Stage,” which made reference to such figures as Max Reinhardt and all the operetta writers now established in Berlin as being “Viennese.” In this way, the very existence of Berlin as a theatre site was substantially cloaked.38 Through such strategies, West End producers and the theatre press made postwar German operettas acceptable to British taste. What made them hugely popular, however, was another question, one ultimately connected to the particular narratologies and the compositional, performance, and production styles deployed in these musicals. In all these respects and more, the postwar shows were typically conservative. They may have emanated from the modern, industrial capital that was now the primary producer and exporter of operettas, as well as the base for its key composers and writers, but Berlin operettas, in marked contrast to prewar shows, were in other respects indifferent to most versions of modernity. However much it was a German product, 1920s and ’30s operetta stood well clear of collapsing economic conditions and the ideological conflicts of the era. It operated most typically as an ersatz fantasy, a romantic symbol of “the fin-de-siècle, pre–World War era” representing a mythical historical age “with its uniforms, its balls, its political intrigue, and its intoxicating glamour,” which had strong appeal in the wider world.39 In much the same way that, say, the American Western in the 1950s and ’60s became a global commodity signifying “universal” values, so also these musicals, established as Austrian during the volatile period between the wars, became a brand of much wider range. As De Courville insisted, this return to a mythical aristocratic culture represented something “delectable” at a time of conflict and upheaval, a sumptuous and comforting indulgence in a daydream of glamour and order.

The New Transfer Market Under these conditions, musical theatre exchange did eventually restart in the early 1920s, but with very clear divergences from the prewar period. In the first place, although musicals returned to the transfer market, they now travelled almost exclusively in one direction of the London/Berlin axis. Although demand for “German” operetta, on the ascendancy just before the war, was very much restored; West End musical comedies were no longer exportable to Berlin, and they vanished completely from Broadway. The all-important empire networks were also breaking up. This decline reflected postwar conditions. The jubilant embracing of contemporaneity as gaiety, so much the stock-in-trade of West End musical comedies and earlier German operettas, was no longer viable. The war had rendered their particular variety of naïve and cheerful optimism obsolete in the face of the modern world, not to say tasteless. At the same time, the musical was becoming more strongly identified with the stylish and sophisticated innovations of an American stage now strongly competing for authorThe Times (London), 22 February 1922, 10. Louis Henry Jacobsen, “The Drama of the Year,” in The Stage Year Book, 1921–25, 7. 38  Ibid., 37–40. 39  Traubner, Operetta, 249. 36  37 

POPULAR MUSICAL THEATRE, CULTURAL TRANSFER, mODERNITIES / 15

ity. In these circumstances, the traditional West End product became more insular; it persevered with a now outmoded version of things right through to 1939, when a show like Me and My Girl could still attract large domestic audiences and became the curious exception that proved the rule. Just one West End musical comedy, Mr Cinders, did eventually make it to Berlin, in 1929. But there was nothing like the popularity and authority enjoyed from the mid-1890s to around 1912. Other forms of West End musical theatre, notably revue, may have flourished in the 1920s, but these did not penetrate the overseas market in the same way as early musical comedy had. Even the so-called intimate revues devised by such figures as Noel Coward and Ronald Jeans and exported to Broadway were so much rooted in the local that they were often perceived to be untranslatable in Continental terms. Second, the shows in this new wave of operetta were not the same products as they once had been. While prewar Berlin musical theatre shared with the West End a distinctly modern stylization, its postwar productions, as we have seen, returned to the security of more conventional Viennese forms. Here, the once characteristic mix of localism and cosmopolitanism firmly positioned in terms of a confident negotiation of the modern gave way to spectacles of a different kind: historical romances like Madame Pompadour and Die Dubarry, both of which were set in pre-revolutionary France; or else, like Lehár’s Die Blaue Mazur (1920), which played in London in 1927 as The Blue Mazurka, and Wenn Liebe erwacht, they existed in a mythic no-time and fairytale no-place. Here, contemporary complexities were displaced by a return to the safeties and securities of aristocratic order, traditional romance, and waltzes, the standard components of a Viennese musical theatre now being virtually mass-produced in Berlin, the new center for this kind of product and the principal exporter of operetta after World War I (fig. 2). Play after play during this period followed the same design, often after an initial nod to the contemporary condition then back-pedaling into less controversial territory. Die Frau im Hermelin, for example, notionally a historical musical, nevertheless pointed to potential contemporary conflict because, produced just a few years after a real European revolution, it was set in the days of the Risorgimento. Within a short time, however, the show had become a romantic Gothic romance, its terms of reference shifting from revolution to the more domestic domain of a lady’s honor. Der Vetter aus Dingsda, on the other hand, began with contemporary dialogue and potential conflict between age and youth. But what starts as the modern story of a young woman coming of age and exerting authority over her guardian quickly shifts gear when a modern house is transformed into “a castle in Faeryland / As in the tales of the days that have been.” Here, the real 1920s and the notoriously unstable flapper identity are ceremoniously whisked off to make way for the return of a traditionalist cousin singing “a yodelling song.”40 In this respect, The Land of Smiles, a Richard Tauber vehicle, was highly suggestive, not least because at first sight it seemed to run against the narrative implied above where a modern and modernizing musical theatre became conservative and backward-looking. Originally produced at the Metropol-Theatre in 1929, it was popular in Budapest, Paris, and Vienna, becoming a repertoire piece in all four venues before it arrived in London 40  Fred Thompson, The Cousin from Nowhere. British Library manuscript, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1923, 4, 5.

16 / Len Platt and Tobias Becker

Figure 2. Madame Pompadour (1922). “The securities of aristocratic order, traditional romance and waltzes.” (Reproduced by permission of Alan L. Rebbeck.)

in 1931. Here, it was adapted by Harry Graham, who worked on a number of translations during this period, including The Lady of the Rose, Madame Pompadour, The Blue Mazurka, and The White Horse Inn. Set in prewar 1912, it is aristocratic in setting and traditional in terms of music and dance, but it does not, unlike many of the 1920s and ’30s operettas, use recitative to any effect. On the contrary, it seems a modern operetta in the formal sense that it inserts songs into contemporary dialogue. More than that, it begins with a modern, liberalizing narratology where a young modern European, Lisa, rejects the advances of her childhood friend Gustl for the attractions of an exotic Chinese aristocrat Prince Sou-Choung—an attraction that Gustl, now a dashing young soldier, regards as nothing less than horrible. Lisa responds with customary vigor: Lisa: Oh, you silly soldiers! You’re so conventional, narrow! Hasn’t a Chinaman got a soul just like yours? Isn’t he a man, just as you are? Gustl: Not where white women are concerned, no!

POPULAR MUSICAL THEATRE, CULTURAL TRANSFER, mODERNITIES / 17 Lisa: Weren’t his countrymen civilised centuries before ours had begun to be savages? You make me tired!41

By act 2, Sou-Choung and Lisa are married, at least by European law. They return to China where the former ambassador now sits in state as the governor of Shantung province. They are a modern, young, tennis-playing couple, although Sou-Choung must negotiate the forces of tradition that require him to marry the four wives picked by his family for him. Reluctantly, he agrees to proceed with these formal requirements, but insists that he will change the ancient laws that prevent him making Lisa his “true” wife, rather than the mere mistress that ill-wishers claim her to be. But Sou-Choung has not reckoned with the forcefulness of his European wife, who refuses to allow this ceremony of marriage to take place under any circumstances and threatens to leave. At this point, The Land of Smiles takes an astonishing turn. The charming, romantic leading man Sou-Choung undergoes a virtually complete transformation. He imprisons his wife, and in an offstage scene has the tongue ripped out of the mouth of a servant, Chi-Fu. By act 3, what began as a liberalizing narrative sharply reverses as Gustl turns up to rescue Lisa from the clutches of a now disconcertingly alien Other. The romance that promised to challenge the conventional barriers of race and culture, like an early twentieth-century version of West Side Story, transmutes into a warning parable as the story now frantically reinforces those barriers. In this sense, The Land of Smiles not only confirms that operettas of the 1920s and ’30s were a commodity situated in particularly conservative ways, but it also mirrors a wider historical narrative in which the traditional nature of musical theatre becomes much less compromised by its attraction to, and attempted assimilation of, the modern. As the standard narrative dynamic shifted, so too did the nature of translation. The extreme versions of adaptation where songs were routinely cut and/or inserted and dialogue radically rewritten, which were typical of the 1890s and 1900s, was displaced during the 1920s and ’30s. Now, the task facing producers wishing to transfer successful shows was no longer how to reinterpret them for local audiences, but rather how to reproduce the original in as pure a form as possible. Thus in the later period, when Berlin operettas were specifically marketed for their high-status classiness, the original texts, which were previously subjected to significant interference, were now treated more cautiously—in the case of the musical text and its arrangement, with something approaching reverence. So much so was this true, that even quite small divergences now required explanations. The West End production of The Dubarry (1932), for example, was close to the German version in almost all respects. The libretto copy in the Lord Chamberlain’s collection contains a note providing the raison d’etre for a relatively minor change: “in the German version Jeanne sang a few words of her song at the end of this scene but it is much more effective dramatically if the only music comes from the orchestra.”42 Shows were now imported with minimal interference, often coming over with their star performers intact, Tauber being the obvious example of an operetta singer who could be marketed internationally in this way. Sometimes, shows were bought as a complete package. After it had played to packed houses for five months at the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin, for example, music-hall impresario Oswald Stoll brought Im Weißen Rössl (1930) to the Coliseum Theatre in London, where it opened in 1932 as The White Horse Inn. After several months of twice-daily shows, 41  42 

The Land of Smiles. British Library manuscript, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1931, 1:15. Eric Maschwitz, The Dubarry. British Library manuscript, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1900, 1:99.

18 / Len Platt and Tobias Becker Stoll sent a smaller production on tour to Birmingham, Manchester, and many other cities. In transfer terms, however, the point about The White Horse Inn was not just the extent of its travel, but also its consistency and faithfulness to the original. Indeed, it was bought and sold complete with book, music, stage design, Tyrolese singers and dancers, Bavarian zither players, and its own continental version of a jazz band, the White Horse Syncopators. Only the main cast was changed, in part because German and Austrian actors were unable to perform in English, but also because the reality of German accents was not acceptable to postwar British audiences, even in the context of a play set in the Alps near Salzburg. In the main, however, the ruralist fantasy of this singspiel proved eminently marketable outside of Germany and, after its success in London, the show moved on in this form to Paris, Vienna, New York, and many other cities. It was a virtually complete touring product, a forerunner in many ways of the modern mega-musical—the late modern digitized version of musical theatre that can be reproduced anywhere as part of the general globalization of cultural production.43 In sharp contrast to the earlier period then, the 1920s and ’30s saw much greater conservatism and product stability in cultural transfer, as well as a taste for history and pageantry that Berlin seemed particularly skilled at repeatedly satisfying. What did these shifts mean? There are a number of possibilities here. It could be that the unwillingness to interfere with the prototype text was a consequence of the special reverence held for German musical products as high-status works of art, reinforced by the continued influence of Wagner. It should be noted, however, that this kind of Germanophilism had been just as strong in the Victorian and Edwardian periods and yet had not prevented major tampering with, for example, Lehár’s The Merry Widow. In its first West End production in 1907, this now classic text suffered the usual dropping of scenes, interpolations of new songs, the use of modern singers with limited vocal ranges (much to Lehár’s initial regret), and the sheer humiliation of an added comic sketch featuring Hetty the Hen. Even if popular operetta was becoming more elevated by the 1920s and ’30s, it would not explain the shift away from contemporaneity that is so characteristic of the shows that worked the Berlin/London transfer route during this period. It is possible, of course, that there is no singular dynamic behind these multiple shifts, just as there may be no single explanation for what are clearly complex cultural histories. In our view, however, and it is a provisional one, it does seem that there is some kind of consistency involved here. The displacement of a lively, competitive, and contemporary cosmopolitanism by the narrative and stylistic securities of postwar operetta is of a piece with the shift from a fluid, appropriating, hybridizing adaptation culture to the conservatism in which the prototype show is reproduced in almost perfect likeness. There is a strong sense here of an asserting, advancing, and genuinely cosmopolitan popular culture being transformed by global war, economic upheavals, and new levels of social and political bifurcation into something more retrospective and retreatist. In this case, transfer history leads to a substantial revision of our sense of the engagement between musical theatre and the multiple modernities of the long turn of century.

43  See J. Burston, “The Megamusical: New Forms and Relations in Global Production” (PhD diss., University of London, 1998).