Emmerich Kálmán’s Gräfin Mariza is celebrating her 90th birthday this year, but just like my slightly younger great-aunts, who introduced me to this operetta at the tender age of five, she is far from ready for a care home. Thomas Enzinger and set/costume designer Toto have come up with another imaginative response to the question of why and how the bygone genre of operetta should be produced today.
Along with Die Fledermaus and Der Zigeunerbaron, Wiener Blut is generally considered to be Johann Strauss’s most popular operetta, although it is really a pasticcio for which Adolf Müller recycled parts of 31 popular dance pieces, artistically weaving various motifs into a new score.
