This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
As the dreaded attempts to make Holy Art all open-armed and welcoming — with soft play areas, face-painting, greeters in clown-suits, the force-feeding of infantile pseudo-information, plus all the droning on about how anything worthwhile was only ever made by ladies or black people — proliferate, the poor old Art has to find its own way of fighting back.
This requires semaphoring its essentially limited appeal, making the point that it genuinely isn’t for everybody, clinging desperately on to an ever-shrinking calm, adult, elitist space.
I was pleasantly reminded of this earlier this year at a thoroughly abstruse Barbican show which might have been specially devised to convey to non-initiates that their presence wasn’t required: a “concert performance” — i.e., a non-acting line-up of pasty-faced singers in evening dress — of Leos Janáček’s already impenetrable 1921 opera Vĕc Makropulos.
Essentially, it involved minute details of a century-long Austro-Hungarian Chancery case being barked at us in Czech by several singers (all singing different words simultaneously) over some notably spiky modernist music. Take that, inclusivity Nazis!
Opera has an armoury of such inbuilt skunk-like defence mechanisms to keep the unwashed at bay, the chief one being of course the subliminal message that it is basically only available to people like Jacob Rees-Mogg, who will treat with due contempt any interloper found skulking around at Covent Garden or Glyndebourne.
Another image we like to project is that the whole thing is unutterably foolish, with no conceivable relation to useful reality — Egyptians marching around with spears, old-time Parisian prostitutes pretending to be all posh at parties, fatties in winged hats and the rest of it. The message is: don’t bother! You won’t like it! This attains camp nirvana in the world of operetta — itself a word specially devised to sound mimsy and emetic, used to hide the fact that these are simply musicals avant la lettre.
If the imagery of opera — those half-naked spear-carriers, alcoholics in big dresses, gypsies with terrific embonpoint, ranks of galligaskins and other foolish bits of clothing — isn’t ridiculous enough, operetta turbo-charges the absurdity with phalanxes of befrogged soldiers, mediaeval students and everyone dressing up as mysterious masked Hungarians the whole time.
What non-adept could suspect, behind this disguise of complete fatuity, that operetta is in fact the documentary, social-realist cousin of opera?
Whilst the latter aims to be mythic and metaphorical (clue: it’s not really about those Parisian tarts, not trying to tell you anything worthwhile about old Egypt), operetta, behind its literally comic-opera costumes, Ruritanian fooflah, jokey mediaeval pastiches, is engaged in clear-eyed societal commentary: a sarcastic Ibsen masquerading as escapist fantasy.
Thus, for example, Johann Strauss’s Fledermaus (1874) is really a pointed satire on escapism itself, as the Viennese resort to a neurotic brew of alcoholism and adultery to avoid having to think about their Empire’s audible crumbling, following the military catastrophes of Magenta, Solferino and Königgrätz.
Puccini’s La rondine of 1917 — commissioned and scripted as an operetta — is a nuts-and-bolts working diagram of the world of Verdi’s Traviata, except this time there’s no dying for love or any of that nonsense, just some very candid business arrangements that see ageing poule de luxe Magda sensibly returning to her old finance bro (well, uncle, really) rather than gallivanting off with the (broke) young Ruggiero.
This is why operetta thrives in edgy end-of-empire or eve-of-war periods, notably with Jacques Offenbach (the inventor of the whole thing) chronicling the entertaining tawdriness of Napoleon III’s merry-go-round, with Bismarck patiently twiddling his thumbs in the wings.
Entirely suitable, therefore, that Bernard Shaw’s prescient anti-militarist play Arms and the Man — written in 1894 — should have been the basis of a forgotten (and now happily revived) operetta composed a bit later by a guy so keen to distance himself from the Strauss gang (to wit, the unrelated Oscar, also rather eclipsed, but right up there with your Lehárs and Kálmáns) that he removed one of the esses.
Shaw’s play is a perfect fit: set amidst some idiotic Bulgarian/Serbian shindy, it’s already bursting with half-witted soldiers in fabulous Balkan uniforms, upstairs-downstairs love-plots, etc. Plus, this being Shaw, a nice big message (of the kind that endears him to GCSE drones), conveyed through the sensible Swiss mercenary Captain Bluntschli, eager to avoid all heroic situations, who carries chocolates in his ammo pouch rather than bullets.
Approached for the rights to turn his play into Der tapfere Soldat (usually called The Chocolate Soldier in English), GBS primly refused to let them use his title, names or words — costing him a packet in royalties when it swept the world.
But the dear high-minded fellow disapproved of comic opera (he called Straus’s show “a putrid opéra-bouffe in the worst taste of 1860”) and would have cut his throat if you’d told him he would be remembered only for writing the Urtext of My Fair Lady.
Now he’s finally out of copyright, Jeff Clarke of Opera della Luna has rewritten the script and reinjected GBS (with intent) into the operetta. This company, for 30 years the beacon of comic opera in the UK, has turned many a suicide-mission reviewing date into sheer joy, always generously spiced with cheery vulgarity.
Forget the ponderous summer japes in rainy gardens: this is June’s hot ticket. Were any needed, an extra recommendation is that Shaw would definitely still hate it.
The Chocolate Soldier by Oscar Straus is at Wilton’s Music Hall, London E1, from 23 to 27 June, and at IF Opera, Church Farm, Wingfield, Bradford-on-Avon, in August
