For the love of operetta

It’s the lederhosen that grabs you first. Two gents were walking down the street ahead of us in full Alpine rig: long socks, collarless loden jackets, and hunting hats decorated with what looked like shaving brushes. Among the flowerbeds and fountains that surround the main theatre of the Bad Ischl Lehar Festival a posse of young women crossed our path, all wearing embroidered dirndls and laughing. By the time we took our seats in the auditorium, we were grappling with a deeply un-British notion: that none of this was ironic. We weren’t at Glyndebourne any more.

But if you love the much-mocked art of Viennese operetta, a forgotten spa town at the far end of the Salzkammergut is exactly where you want to be. The genre is almost extinct in the UK: you can go years without encountering anything by Johann Strauss other than Die Fledermaus, anything by Lehar apart from The Merry Widow or anything at all by Kalman, Suppe or Leo Fall. Yet according to Operabase (and to the indignation of opera bores) Lehar and Kalman are currently the world’s most-performed 20th-century opera composers after Puccini and Richard Strauss, easily outstripping Britten, Janacek and poor old Alban Berg. You can’t keep a good tune down, and even in Britain folk who’ve never seen Lehar’s Das Land des Lächelns or Paganini can still hum ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’ or ‘Girls Were Made to Love and Kiss’.

To experience the shows themselves, though, you’ve got two options. You can listen to badly presented recordings on niche labels, often without librettos or translations (operetta lyrics are routinely deemed too trivial to matter). Or you can travel. As the holiday residence of the Emperor Franz Joseph, Bad Ischl was the most fashionable resort in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and in summer seasons before the Great War its cafés and hotels became what the operetta historian Richard Traubner called ‘the Tin Pan Alley of Viennese operetta’.