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Reconstructing a Broadway Operetta: The Case of Kurt Weill's Firebrand of Florence

1999; Music Library Association; Volume: 56; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/899993

1534-150X

Joel Galand,

Music History and Culture

THE QUESTION OF GENRE Adorno once described Kurt Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper as [that] has quite simply been exalted. [1] This characterization may be as good as any for a work so resistant to generic classification. But the fact remains that only twice did Weill compose a work that can unequivocally be called an operetta, if by that term we denote the Offenbachian model first disseminated in central Europe by the likes Franz von Suppe, Johann Strauss Jr., and Carl Millocker. Indeed, Weill, who in the 1920s had so admired Karl Kraus's production Offenbach's Verbesserungen when they were staged at Kiemperer's Kroll Oper, saw himself as something an heir to the operetta tradition the Second Empire. Yet his two works belonging most self-consciously to that tradition, Der Kuhhandel (1935) and The Firebrand Florence (1945), were staggeringly unsuccessful. The reasons for their failure are complicated and owe a good deal to technical and artistic circumstances surrounding their original productions. Part the problem, though, stemmed from Weill's very choice genre. In 1935, a West End audience would have anticipated a leggy Cochran-style revue or perhaps a romantic musical comedy in the vein Ivor Novello. Der Kuhhandel, an operetta about an arms race between two Caribbean dictatorships, far darker in tone than the political satire Savoy opera, did not enter their horizon expectations, despite the extra love songs Weill interpolated at the last minute. On the other hand, The Firebrand Florence, loosely based on episodes from the memoirs Benvenuto Cellini, [2] largely eschews Offenbachian political satire, even though the lyricist, Ira Gershwin, had collaborated on several projects in that vein with his brother and the writers Morris Ryskind and George Kaufmann (the Pulitizer-prize-winning Of Thee I Sing being a prime example). Humor in The Firebrand derives largely from the deliberate anachronisms that Gershwin's lyrics and Edwin Mayer's book introduce into their tale the Medicis. Critics--and presumably audiences as well--were confused by the juxtaposition an operatically styled score, a historical book, and humor that ranged from subtle allusion to near slapstick. In the earlier Broadway costume operettas that Firebrand superficially resembles, such as Rio Rita (1927) and The Vagabond King (1925), the principal romantic plot was kept rigorously separate from those elements comic relief furnished by the secondary dancing couple. The Firebra nd subverts the generic expectations an operetta audience. That may have contributed to its swift demise, although Mayer's adaptation his 1924 comedy, despite some charming moments, proved a weak libretto. One expected better from the screenwriter for many a Lubitsch film. PRODUCTION HISTORY The philological problems that a critical edition The Firebrand Florence entails are intimately bound with the fact its failure. Although the challenges, principles, and solutions that Stephen Hinton enumerates in connection with his edition Die Dreigroschenoper (see pp. 319-30 above) pertain as well to the present instance, there remains a crucial difference. The extended production history the earlier work; the publication its vocal score, orchestral parts, and libretto; and the revision its holograph full score for eventual, if posthumous, publication--all these factors evince specific authorial intentions towards a transmission the work capable, as Hinton puts it, of transcending [its] original theatrical incarnation. [3] In contrast, there was never time for The Firebrand to settle into anything more than a provisional form; the distinction between text and script, work and event, here risks near obliteration. Three months before the Boston tryout February 1945, Weill and Gershwin had yet to write several large-scale numbers. Weill scarcely had time to produce the orchestral score, the longest his career up to that time and surpassed only by Love Life (1948). …