Report of Monthly Regular Meeting April 2023 (The 209th Meeting of Opera Research Group)
Waseda Institute for Research in Opera and Music Theatre (WIROM), Comprehensive Research Organization, Waseda University
- Time and Date: April 8th (Sat.) 2023, 16:30 – 18:00 (JST)
- Format: Online meeting (Zoom)
- Presenter: OGAWA, Sawako
- Affiliation, Position: Hokkaido University, Associate Professor
- Title:“Exaggerating utopia, wandering nostalgia: Emmerich Kálmán’s operettas and the First World War”
- Language: Japanese
- Abstract:
During the First World War, soldiers were sent to the front lines to face death as military bands played popular operettas by Franz Lehár and Johann Strauss II. Consequently, reality became a ‘theatre of horror’ (Joseph Roth, Radetzky March, 1932), full of destruction and barbarism, inevitably leading to a tragic end. Against this reality, operetta continued to provide the public with banal happy endings. However, the dystopia brought about by the war invaded the world of operetta as well.
First, in Emmerich Kálmán’s Ein Herbstmanöver (1909) and Die Csárdásfürstin (1915), the meaning of the war was transformed from ‘peacetime’ military exercises to ‘emergency’ call-ups. In operettas performed during the war, the utopia of the Habsburg monarchy was exaggerated, contrary to reality, as Leo Fall’s Die Rose von Stambul (1916) shows. Following the war, works such as Kármán’s Gräfin Mariza (1924) and Die Zirkusprinzessin (1926) premiered successively, overflowing with nostalgia for the collapsed Empire. This nostalgia was followed by Die Herzogin von Chicago (1928)—which depicted the cultural conflict between the new world, America, and the old world, Europe—and Marinka (1945), which was performed in the USA as a cultural residue of the Empire.
This presentation focuses on Kármán’s operettas from the First World War period—which marked the transition from the Habsburg Imperial period to the interwar period—to reveal how the utopia of ‘national reconciliation,’ which was the imperial ideal, the nostalgia associated with the loss of the Empire, and the dystopian reality of war were represented.
- Profile of Presenter:
Dr. Sawako OGAWA is an associate professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Human Sciences at Hokkaido University. She received her Ph.D. in 2012 from Waseda University, Graduate School of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. Her research interests include silent film history and the cultural history of Operetta. She has published a monograph about the comparative film history of European and Japanese early cinema (Eiga no Taidō, Jinbun Shoin, 2016), an article “The First World War and Japanese Cinema: From Actuality to Propaganda” in Jan Schmidt and Katja Schmidtpott (eds.), The East Asian Dimension of the First World War. Global Entanglements and Japan, China and Korea, 1914-1919 (Campus, 2020), and co-edited Genealogy of Shimpa film (Shinwasha, 2023).
- Moderator: ISHII, Michiko
＊Comment: There were 27 participants.
