The Magic of Operetta

This recording is a joyous waltz through some of the world’s best-loved operetta repertoire – a selection to lift the heart and set everyone humming, and a nostalgic glance back at dashing heroes and women swept off their feet by romance and passion.

Among other awards, Louise won the inaugural Mietta’s Song Recital competition in 1995 and in December 2007 was named the Canberra Times Artist of the Year.

The Magic of Operetta began as a cabaret show commissioned by Canberra’s Bill Stephens for the National Press Club’s Cabaret Headliners series in 2004. It has since been performed many times, and those performances prompted repeated requests for this recording.

Operetta as we know it began in the 1850s with Hervé and, more successfully, Offenbach (for example Orphée aux enfers (1858) and La belle Hélène (1864)). These short, one-act works stood apart from the longer, more formal and increasingly serious style of opéra comique. Spoken rather than sung dialogue, and a frivolous, risqué tone, marked them out further – it was in Orpheus in the Underworld that the can-can was immortalised.

French success soon carried operetta abroad, most notably to Vienna, where the one-act works of Suppé and the lavish spectacles of Johann Strauss Jnr appeared in the 1870s, followed later by Lehár. Viennese operetta often turned on dance forms, especially the waltz, and on exotic settings, though it rarely matched the wit of its French counterpart.

By the 1880s Gilbert and Sullivan had established the form in England. Around the turn of the century Americans such as Victor Herbert and Reginald de Koven were writing their own versions, increasingly chaste and wholesome, and aimed at a different public from the original French model. After the Second World War, operetta became known as the musical.