With "Operetta in Exile," Chicago Folks Operetta celebrates composers and librettists whose livelihoods—and lives—were threatened by Nazism.
by Albert Williams
In the first two decades of the 20th century, operetta was a popular musical theater form in Germany and Austria. Audiences in the early years of modernism, nostalgic for the imagined well-ordered world of the 1880s and '90s, embraced its schmaltzy romantic plots, retro sentimentality, and lyrical, often ravishing music.…[ Read more ]