Music Professor Publishes Book on Viennese Operetta

A new book by Micaela Baranello, assistant professor in the Department of Music, explores musical theater of early 20th-century Vienna.

Recently published by the University of California Press, The Operetta Empire examines how operetta, a popular form of middlebrow entertainment, staged identity at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including issues of nationalism, gender and labor.

While operettas such as The Merry Widow remain popular on stages worldwide, this is one of the first scholarly books to analyze them in English.

Focusing on the sphere of commercial theater (akin to modern Broadway) and composers such as Franz Lehár and Emmerich Kálmán, The Operetta Empire considers a range of social issues and audiences who are often neglected in musicology.

Derek B. Scott, author of German Operetta on Broadway and in the West End, called the book "a pioneering study of 20th-century Viennese operetta that shows the limits of, and presents a much-needed challenge to, the musicological fixation on high-status musical modernism in Vienna."

The Operetta Empire also introduces readers to the world of operetta stories. These works are full of colorful and problematic exoticisms, such as composer Leo Fall's attempt to reconcile the Viennese to a World War I-era alliance with the Ottoman Empire by staging an operetta about Turkish feminists, The Rose of Stambul. Or, in Emmerich Kálmán's Die Herzogin von Chicago, a robber baron's heiress tries to buy a kingdom but cannot convince its prince to learn to dance the Charleston.

The book was the recipient of a subvention from the American Musicological Society's 75 PAYS first book fund.

Baranello joined the U of A faculty in 2017. She teaches various courses in music history, including graduate research methods and opera history. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Opera Quarterly, The New York Times and the Financial Times. She is also president of Opera Fayetteville and a member of the AMS Council.