On Mar 11, 2005, at 12:53 PM, John Howell wrote:
European operetta did not come to North America until the 1890s or later [...]
Not even in New Orleans? I know there was an awful lot of French opera comique there throughout the 19th century. I'm surprised if that didn't include operetta as well. Admittedly, French New Orleans was somewhat isolated from the larger musical culture in the United States.
Even for the rest of the country, I think you're off by a decade or two. In 1879, D'Oyly Carte presented Pinafore in New York, and later that year Pirates of Penzance opened simultaneously in New York and England. The decision to produce in America was partly in response to small-scale pirated productions already happening in America.
According to Kobb�, Strauss's Fledermaus also premiered in New York in 1879, and Zigeunerbaron in 1886.
The Levy sheet music collection, catalogued online <http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/>, shows several songs from Offenbach operettas published in America in the 1860s. The same collection shows a few more excerpts from operettas by Lecocq, Waldteufel, etc., published in the 1870s. It seems odd -- though not impossible -- that such songs would be published locally if there weren't at least some performance of the pieces. If you read the notes on the songs, you'll see the arrangement is sometimes credited to the musical director of some named theater company, which strongly suggests to me that said musical director had a copy of the score and adapted it for American performance. Even if the operettas themselves weren't being performed, you can hardly argue that European operetta wasn't influencing America if American publishers were selling the sheet music to operetta songs.
mdl
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