Im weißen Rössl

In the beautiful Salzkammergut region, head waiter Leopold is heavy-hearted: He has fallen for his boss, the feisty owner of the White Horse Inn. But it takes the Emperor to bring about the happy ending!

»If you want to travel, ask everything from the region to which you're travelling.« Perhaps director and producer Erik Charell was familiar with Kurt Tucholsky's quote from »Die Kunst, falsch zu reisen« [The Art of Travelling Wrongly] when, at the end of the 1920s, he commissioned the adaptation of the old-fashioned Berlin comedy of the same name into a mixture of farce, operetta and revue for the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin. He and Ralph Benatzky put together a colourful score for it, made up of their own and historical material and musical numbers by famous contemporary composers of popular hits including songs such as »Mein Liebeslied muss ein Walzer sein« [My song of love must be a waltz], »Die ganze Welt ist himmelblau« [The whole world is sky blue] and »Was kann der Sigismund dafür, dass er so schön ist« [Is it Sigismund's fault that he is so lovely]. The first performance on 8 November 1930 was a sensational success, and this early form of the German musical had soon travelled the world. In 1951, Charell had the music and lyrics for his staging of the work in the Gärtnerplatz Theatre revised in the style of an operetta, and this continued to be the work's predominant style until the original version of the musical was rediscovered in Zagreb in 2008. This is far more cheeky, fast-paced and satirical than the »down-home«, trivialised post-War version, and is a wonderful example of the legendary theatrical entertainment of the Weimar Republic.

IM WEISSEN RÖSSL programme reading sample