Bild 18 2019

In 1915 the Hungarian composer Emmerich Kálmán celebrated what certainly qualifies as his greatest pubic success in the operetta metropolis of Vienna with Die Csárdásfürstin. For his next operetta, which beheld the light of the stage world at the Johann Strauß Theater in Vienna on 21 September 1917, Kálmán and his librettists Alfred Maria Willner and Rudolf Österreicher drew on a work that had already been presented with success in Budapest and had even conquered New Yorks Broadway: it was thus that Zsuzsi kisasszony (Miss Susi) or Miss Springtime (Fräulein Frühling) became Die Faschingsfee (The Carnival Fairy) for the Viennese public of the war years. For it the three authors came up with a plot that is set in Munich during the Carnival season and in the twilight years of the monarchies in Bavaria and Austria-Hungary issued its appeal for the elimination of social strictures and the guarantee of the right to follow ones own heart.