Jaromír Weinberger, Spring Storms (1933)

Hey everybody, let's watch a Weimar-era operetta! The last Weimar-era operetta, in fact: it debuted just as the nazis were taking power and was quickly shut down. This is apparently partially a reconstruction, per operavision:

The original full score as well as most orchestral parts are lost. Only the piano reduction, the bass drum part and a detailed prompt book with the libretto remained unscathed. The pianist and arranger Norbert Biermann used these as well as the gramophone recordings to reconstruct the missing orchestration and compose new extracts for the Komische Oper Berlin’s production.

All right. I'll take it.

Operetta sort of confuses me. What is it? Is it more like an opera, or more like a musical? I think the latter when I hear Gilbert and Sullivan but the former when I hear French or German operetta, but is that really just a language thing? Hard to say. I probably haven't seen enough of it to have a clear picture. But I'd like to fix that problem! I would, but it's easier said than done; Weinberger, for instance, was famous in his time, but you sure can't find videos of much or any of his stuff.

Well, we have this, anyway. It's an unusual setting: it takes place in Manchura during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. The Russian general, Katschalow, has his problems: Japanese spies have infiltrated his headquarters; his strong-willed teenage daughter Tatiana is carrying on with a fast-talking German journalist, Zirbitz; and to top it off, he's in unrequited love with an archduke's widowed daughter, Lydia--who herself is in love with and loved by Ito, one of the aforementioned Japanese spies. What will happen?

I sort of wasn't loving this at first. Part of that's just endemic to the genre: operettas generally have a way higher dialogue-to-singing ratio than I care for (the most famous German-language operetta, Die Fledermaus, has the same problem). But I was also comparing it in my head to another obscure operetta of the time that was on Operavision, Paul Abraham's Roxy und ihr Wunderteam. That one is much more immediate that this, and the music, really, is considerably more memorable.

Still! I did ultimately get into this. It's an unexpected (at least by me) mixture of comedy and pathos, both of which ramp up in the final act, in a way that's a little tonally weird but still basically works. I'm not really familiar enough with the sensibilities of the time to know whether a romance between a Japanese man and a European woman would've ruffled anyone's feathers, but it's interesting in either case. Tatiana and Zirbitz also make a charming couple (the Operavision description characterizes him as "nauseating," which seems bizarrely judgmental to me--he's a comic character, and I suppose a little obnoxious, but that makes it sound like he's a villain, when he isn't in any sense). Possibly because I'm not more familiar with operetta, all I can think to compare it to is Puccini's La rondine, which was originally meant to be an operetta itself and has a similarly bittersweet tone. And you know, the music isn't bad: in particular, Ito's aria of regret at the end is legit devastating.

What's not so great here are the subtitles: they don't even try to translate all the dialogue; it's really just enough to understand what's going on, leaving out a lot of the comedy. There's one moment that stood out where Zirbitz distinctly says "Sherlock Holmes," but what the context for this is shall remain forever mysterious to non-German-speakers. I hate to sound ungrateful, given all the enjoyment I get out of Operavision, but boy. Not their finest moment. I hope they bring us more operettas, but I also hope they do a better job of subtitling them.