“Old Man Danube: Viennese Operetta’s Broadway Exile, 1941-46”

In the early 1940s, the bright lights of Broadway beckoned to the Viennese operetta artists who had fled the Third Reich. Many had imported hits a decade or more earlier, but during World War II they struggled to adapt to changing fashions and wartime politics. In this project, I recover the lost final acts of a group of composers and writers whose international fame had not prepared them for exile, including Emmerich Kálmán, Alfred Grünwald, and Karl Farkas. Using archival materials rarely considered by prior scholars, I consider them as a network: artists in conversation and collaboration with each other and with the New York theater world of their time, creating a series of strange (and mostly commercially catastrophic) musicals. This odd series of Broadway flops, such as Stolz’s Mr. Strauss Goes to Boston and Kálmán and Lorenz Hart’s unfinished Paris resistance circus musical Miss Underground, encapsulate their displacement.

This event is free and open to the public.