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The operetta Die Fledermaus falls somewhere between opera and musical theater.
By JOHN FLEMING
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 29, 2001
One of the ways Opera Tampa is promoting this weekend's production of Johann Strauss' operettaDie Fledermaus is by appealing to the large audience for Broadway musicals at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, which is the home of the opera company. At performances last month of South Pacific, for example, members of the opera guild staffed a table in the lobby during intermission.
"These people seemed to be afraid of opera," said guild member Joseph Meyers, a voice coach in Tampa. "We talked to them about how the musical came from the influence of operetta and how similar the two forms are."
That's true enough, considering that the operetta, like the musical, includes spoken dialogue rather than being all sung like most operas. The operetta is about light, humorous subject matter of the sort that used to be the stuff of musical comedy until the form turned serious. Fledermaus never gets weightier than mistaken identities at a masked ball.
"The content of an operetta is light and frothy and not as serious as dramatic opera, like an Othello orTristan und Isolde or Aida," said Anton Coppola, who is conducting Fledermaus, which will be performed in an English translation of the original German.
"Therefore, the treatment, from the interpreters' viewpoint, has got to keep it as giddy as possible, without ignoring the musical content. After all, these were written by seriously trained composers like Strauss, Victor Herbert and Jerome Kern."
The early days of Broadway were full of operettas such as The Merry Widow, The Student Prince, Blossom Time and Naughty Marietta. Even as ambitious a musical as Show Boat is sometimes called an operetta.
Fledermaus itself was once a Broadway hit, enjoying a long run in the 1940s in a version called Rosalinda (the English spelling of Rosalinde, the name of the leading lady), with choreography by George Balanchine. In 1933, there was an Americanized version of the Strauss operetta called Champagne Sec. (Trivia note: Kitty Carlisle made her Broadway debut in it in the pants role of Prince Orlofsky).
For Coppola, the most operatic of all Broadway musicals is Frank Loesser's The Most Happy Fella, whose leading role was originated by Metropolitan Opera baritone Robert Weede.
Another example of the blurred boundaries between the opera, the operetta and the musical is on view this weekend in a USF Opera Workshop production featuring excerpts from Kurt Weill's Street Scene, which had a Broadway run in 1947.
"Street Scene sits on the fence between opera and musical," said Theresa D'Aiuto Andrasy, the workshop director. "It's a pure transitional piece because it requires operatic singing and, at the same time, musical comedy techniques and talents in terms of dialogue and the presentation of Broadway-style numbers."
Coppola has an excellent, perhaps unique, perspective on the differences and similarities between opera and musical theater because he has conducted so much of both in his long career. He was in the pit for the Broadway debut of one of musical comedy's greatest singers, Julie Andrews, in The Boy Friend.
Could Andrews, a soprano who originated Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, sing the part of Rosalinde in Fledermaus?
"Eliza is a very demanding part, and Julie Andrews was a highly skilled singer," said Coppola, who conducted the first national tour of My Fair Lady.
"However, I think she would have a problem with some areas of the Fledermaus score. A number like Csardas, the Hungarian piece, requires an operatically trained singer to bring it off. When we're talking about Rosalinde, we're talking about a soprano who can sing Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor and Adina in L'Elisir d'Amore. I don't imagine Julie Andrews would have been equipped to do things like that. She had other gifts."
For Opera Tampa, Rosalinde will be sung by Amy Johnson, whose previous appearance with the company was in the title role of Tosca. The production will also include a reprise from Coppola's own opera, Sacco & Vanzetti, which premiered last season.
"When Prince Orlofsky gives this party, you have the freedom to interpolate anything you like," Coppola said. "Originally, the entertainment at the party was a ballet, but we're not doing that."
Instead, Coppola and conductor James Lucas are including in the party scene the romantic ballad Antico Amor, sung by tenor Raul Melo with accordionist Nina Slyusar Wegmann, as they did to great acclaim in Sacco & Vanzetti. Melo plays Alfred, a jailed tenor, in Fledermaus.
Musical theater has become more like opera in the hands of contemporary composers such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim, in the opinion of Meyers, who, with his wife, Violette Vernaud-Meyers, presented a lecture-demonstration at the performing arts center called "Kissing Cousins: Broadway and Opera."
"In general, an operetta has to be better sung than a musical," he said. "But if you're talking about, say, Phantom of the Opera, that's a different ballgame. You have to have a good vocal technique and a wide range. But most musicals do not require a range of more than an octave, especially for women. Someone like Mary Martin couldn't sing any higher than a D or an E on the staff."
Today, a key difference between the musical and opera involves technology. Broadway performers are miked; opera singers, for the most part, are not. Amplification makes it possible to give eight shows a week on Broadway or on tour, while opera singers perform only a few times a week so as to maintain the stamina to project their voices unaided in large theaters.
Another difference is the orchestration of scores. In opera, the composer does his or her own orchestrations -- that is, writes the music for each instrumental part. In the Broadway musical, the composer, after writing the basic song, turns the part-writing over to an orchestrator, some of whom, such as Robert Russell Bennett (My Fair Lady), put their own elegant stamp on scores.
"I don't know why that happened," Coppola said. "Kurt Weill was certainly capable of doing his orchestrations. Jerome Kern would have been able to do it. Irving Berlin would not have been equipped to do it. I don't know if Cole Porter would have been able to do it. Richard Rodgers probably could have been trained to do it, but he thought, "Why should I do it when there are men who are very skilled at this sort of thing, like Bennett? Let them do it, and I don't have to bother with it.' "
PREVIEW: Die Fledermaus by Opera Tampa, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. $19.50-$56.60. (813) 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045. Web site: www.tbpac.org. Excerpts from Orfeo ed Euridice and Street Scene, USF Opera Workshop, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Theatre 2, University of South Florida, Tampa. $4 and $6. (813) 974-2323.