Operetta Books

“The operetta was the product of a world of ‘laissez faire, laissez passer’, that is, a world of economic, social and moral liberalism, a world in which everyone was able to do what he liked, so long as he abstained from questioning the system itself. This limitation meant, on the one hand, very wide, on the other, very narrow frontiers. The same government that summoned Flaubert and Baudelaire to a court of law tolerated the most insolent social satire, the most disrespectful ridiculing of the authoritarian régime, the court, the army and the bureaucracy, in the works of Offenbach. But it tolerated his frolics only because they were not or did not seem to be dangerous, because he confined himself to a public whose loyalty was beyond doubt and needed no other safety-valve, in order to be quite happy, than this apparently harmless banter. The joke seems mischievous only to us; the contemporary public missed the sinister undertone which we can hear in the frantic rhythm of Offenbach’s galops and cancans. The entertainment was, however, not quite so harmless. The operetta demoralized people, not because it scoffed at everything ‘venerable’, not because its deriding of antiquity, of classical tragedy, of romantic opera was only criticism of society in disguise, but because it shattered the belief in authority without denying it in principle. The immorality of the operetta consisted in the thoughtless tolerance with which it conducted its criticism of the corrupt system of government and the depraved society of the time, in the appearance of harmlessness which it gave to the frivolity of the little prostitutes, the extravagant gallants and the lovable old ‘viveurs’. Its lukewarm, hesitant criticism merely encouraged corruption. One could, however, expect nothing else but an ambiguous attitude from artists who were successful, who loved success more than anything and whose success was bound up with the continuance of this indolent and pleasure-seeking society.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age