Bücher der Reihe Elements in Musical Theatre

This Element focuses on American sung-through musicals composed and premiered between 1980 and 2019 and explores how creative teams employed compositional techniques through which music establishes characterization and expression. This Element also enumerates how the musical reinvented itself toward and in the twenty-first century.

As a legacy of the Habsburg Empire, performances of Jacques Offenbach's musical stage works played an important role in Budapest musico-theatrical life in the twentieth century. However, between the collapse of the Empire and the 1956 anti-Soviet revolution, political ideologies strongly influenced the character of these productions, when they took place. Public performances of Offenbach's works were prohibited between 1938 and 1945 and they became the bases for propagandadistic adaptations in the 1950s. This element explores how the local operetta tradition and the vogue of operettas featuring composers as characters during the interwar period were also important factors in how Offenbach's stage works were performed in mid-twentieth century Budapest in versions that sometimes bore little resemblance to the originals.