Kálmán’s Die Herzogin von Chicago: a transnational vision for Inter-war Central Europe
Kálmán’s Die Herzogin von Chicago: a transnational vision for Inter-war Central Europe

Summary/Abstract: During its first run in Vienna, Emmerich Kálmán’s (1882–1953) Die Herzogin von Chicago (1928) had 301 consecutive performances and then toured internationally, yet it remains relatively unrecognized in operetta scholarship today. With this story of a rich American woman who falls in love with a Hungarian prince, Kálmán treats the AmericanEuropean encounter as a clash of American jazz and Charleston rhythms with Central European classical music such as the Viennese waltz and stylized Hungarian folk idioms. I argue that Kálmán’s Jewish identity functioned as a survival strategy enabling him to explore the porousness between the vernaculars of American jazz and the Viennese waltz because he did not identify with the Austrian majority. By combining jazz and the waltz in Herzogin, Kálmán offers an alternative national identity to the growing hegemonic doctrine of National Socialism in the form of a culturally inclusive (transnational) vision of Central Europe.

• Details
• Contents