Page 323 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2021. Opereta med obema svetovnima vojnama ▪︎ Operetta between the Two World Wars. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 5
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oi: https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-293-055-4.321-338

Operetta between the Two World Wars
at the Opera of the National Theatre in
Maribor

Jernej Weiss
Univerza v Ljubljani / Univerza v Mariboru
University of Ljubljana / University of Maribor

Just as in other provincial theatres, the musical-dramatic repertoire of the
Maribor theatre in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first
half of the twentieth consisted largely of operettas, alongside rare perfor-
mances of opera and ballet. The operettas of Offenbach, Suppé, Strauss,
Millöcker, Zeller and other composers from the “Golden Age” of operetta,
which had accounted for almost the entirety of musical-dramatic perfor-
mance in Maribor in the second half of the nineteenth century, were joined
at the turn of the century by those of Franz Lehár, Leo Fall, Oskar Ned-
bal, Emmerich Kálmán, Robert Stolz1 and others, and together constituted
practically the whole repertoire of the city’s permanent professional Ger-
man theatre. While Viennese operetta predominated, the repertoire of the
National Theatre Opera in Maribor also included operettas by Arthur Sul-
livan and Sidney Jones, which were relatively rare for the provincial thea-
tres of the Habsburg Monarchy.2

It is worth mentioning that whereas the popular operettas of Jacques
Offenbach, which dominated the operetta repertoire from the early 1860s
to the late 1870s, arrived in Maribor with around a five-year delay; Mari-
bor audiences were able to hear the latest Viennese operettas on average just

1 Stoltz was appointed second conductor at the Maribor theatre in the 1898/99 season
and remained for three seasons – until 1901. It was also in Maribor that he compo-
sed his first musical-dramatic work, Studentenulke.

2 Dušan Moravec, ed., Repertoar slovenskih gledališč 1867–1967 (Ljubljana: Slovenski
gledališki muzej, 1967).

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