Overview
Johan Strauss II’s operetta Die Fledermaus was an instant hit at its premiere in 1874, and has never left the repertoire since. Virtually all other operettas from this era have faded into oblivion, so why has this one survived?
Most obviously of course, we can credit the astonishing score, carried by a never ending stream of superbly catchy melodies, served up on a ravishingly refined orchestral canvas and deliciously piquant harmonies, that add just enough spice and musical zest to the slightly conservative world of the waltz tune. There’s no dead wood either - every number either furthers the plot, develops characters and relationships, or offers moments for vocal display (and usually all three at once!). It’s all just so much better than it needs to be, for what could easily have been a throwaway entertainment to fill another gap in another Vienna opera season.
However, musical refinement and quality is a feature of much of Johann Strauss II’s oeuvre, and so it is perhaps the piece’s dramatic and comic values that set this operetta most apart from its contemporaries. Famously, comedy very often dates badly, especially when it is very topical in its references or parodic of a particular time and place. Die Fledermaus has not suffered this fate because it deals with timeless themes. While on the surface much of the piece is farcical and absurd, because the characters are so strongly drawn, sympathetic, and recognisable, and the situations are so astutely observed psychologically, there’s real life that animates the confection and artifice and touches on deep archetypal truths hiding just behind the frothy surface fun.
Themes
Hugely beneficial to Die Fledermaus’ success is that the piece is sex obsessed (what could be more timelessly audience pleasing than this?!) though without ever lapsing into obscenity, brilliantly treading the tightrope between surface respectability and scandal, naughty but nice, guilt free thrills for a high brow audience seeking a little saucy entertainment on a night off from the exalted peaks of Wagner, and Verdi.
Not coincidentally, this temporary lapse into frivolity and excess is also a main theme of the operetta as a whole: while the plot flirts constantly with infidelity, it never actually crosses the line. So despite the fact that consciously Eisenstein has every intention of being unfaithful to his wife, in actual fact, the central image of the plot is that of the husband aroused by and seducing his own wife in unfamiliar dress up clothes - an unconscious example of how to keep a bourgeois marriage interesting, without the associated scandal and heartbreak that a real infidelity would bring. The fact that Rosalinde forgives her husband at the end might seem implausible, until we realise that she has also actually enjoyed and benefited from the process of reinventing herself. She has gained more pleasure from it than she had from her almost affair with her tenor.
That renewal gained by a night of exotic fun, is mirrored in the structure of the piece as a whole - from bourgeois conformity in Act I, to excess and intoxication in artificial high society in Act II, followed by the hard yet oddly reassuring hangover of real life the next day in the prison of Act III. This is no different from the renewal and refreshment we get from going on holiday to a far off country, or from the Christmas period at the end of the year, or even a trip to the opera house - a short period of indulgence and novelty, where the normal rules don’t apply, before returning to our little lives, reinvigorated and revitalised, but also gently relieved to be back home with our familiar routines and burdens!
The dangers of always living in the luxurious, the extreme, the unusual, are depicted most acutely in the alarming character of Prince Orlofsky (made more uncanny by his part being sung by a woman, a man in arrested development who sings in the vocal register of a young boy). He has seen everything, tried everything, and for all his fabulous wealth, he is utterly bored by and disenchanted with life, his pitch-black depression punctuated only by episodes of extreme violence towards his guests. He teams up with Falke to aid and enable the latter’s revenge plot on his friend Eisenstein, served up as an entertainment for the prince. Like us, Orlofsky is genuinely entertained by the suffering of Eisenstein, and the multiple instances of other characters donning various costumes, pretensions, and social masks to get what they think they want. This entertainment seems genuinely curative for him, a curious mix of sadism, and genuine catharsis brought about by the little social drama that is unfurling in his house, and he is finally able to laugh again. And so it is for us too!
Parody of our Favourite Artform
Another key to this work is the games it plays with the genre - the piece constantly parodies and skewers the operatic world itself. This happens most obviously in the character of Alfred, a brilliantly funny portrait of a narcissistic and supremely self confident tenor. Rosalinde only truly finds him enticing when he sings, the domain in which he is truly competent, and from which he generalises hs general brilliance, though of course in his profession he is only impersonating a heroic male ideal. Clearly our own culture’s confusion about the status and worth of celebrities and entertainers is not at all a new phenomenon…
Adele of course wants to escape her humdrum life as a servant, and join her sister Ida in the operatic and theatrical world, and her act II aria becomes a sort of audition piece for finding the financial backing that this will require. Elsewhere, the conventions of 19th century operatic form are ably parodied in the music, where the overwrought pathos of the farewell trio in Act I, incongruously flips to manic jollity and back again, while the libretto doesn’t seem to notice these changes at all.
The Production
All this is a rich brew that provides a satisfying undergirding to what is above all hilarious and farcical comedy. Without wanting to over explain the present production, by setting it in the 1920s, an era that felt a keen tension between the last vestiges of Edwardian propriety and morals, and the need for carefree revelry and excess in the wake of the First World War, we hope to create a fun and cogent setting for this brilliant piece, that encompasses the concerns of the libretto, elucidates the characters, tells the story, without giving it a heavy handed “concept” that would interfere with the sheer joy of the piece, which is its ultimate meaning.
Above all then: please enjoy!