operetta,

musical-dramatic production similar in structure to an opera but characteristically having a romantically sentimental plot interspersed with songs, orchestral music, and rather elaborate dancing scenes, along with the spoken dialogue. The operetta originated in part with the tradition of popular theatrical genres such as the commedia dell'arte that flourished in Italy from the 16th to the 18th century and the vaudeville of France. In the 19th century the term operetta came to designate stage plays with music that were generally of a farcical and satiric nature. The most successful practitioner of this art was Jacques Offenbach, whose Orphée aux enfers (1858; Orpheus in the Underworld) and La Belle Hélène (1864) used the guise of Greek mythology to express a satiric commentary on contemporary Parisian life and mores. In England, from the late 1870s, the team of Sir William S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, influenced by Offenbach's works, established their own part in the genre with such familiar works as H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), The Mikado (1885), and Iolanthe (1882), among many others.

In Vienna, about 1870, Johann Strauss the Younger was producing operettas of a more romantic and melodious type, such as Die Fledermaus (1874; The Bat), which in many respects reconciled the differences between operetta and opera. Toward the end of the 19th century, perhaps influenced by the gentler quality of Viennese operetta, the French style became more sentimental and less satiric, stressing elegance over parodic bite. Viennese successors to Strauss, such as Franz Lehár (Hungarian by birth), Oscar Straus, and Leo Fall, and French composers such as André Messager contributed to the evolution of operetta into what is now called musical comedy.

The operetta traditions of Austria, France, Italy, and England began to wane in the early 20th century but found new life in the United States. Victor Herbert, Reginald De Koven, and Sigmund Romberg were all significant transitional figures, adding to American musical life with such operettas as, respectively, Babes in Toyland (1903), Robin Hood (1890), and The Student Prince (1924) and The Desert Song (1926).

In the United States, works that might be regarded as just short of serious opera and hardly recognizable as comedy are George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935), Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera (1928), Jerome Kern's Show Boat (1927), Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957), and Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (1979). See also musical.

operetta,

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