CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 "When the world comes to an end," Viennese writer Karl Kraus lamented in 1908, "all the big city orchestras will still be playing-The Merry Widow." Viennese operettas like Franz Lehár's-The Merry Widow-were preeminent cultural texts during the Austro-Hungarian Empire's final years. Alternately hopeful and nihilistic, operetta staged contemporary debates about gender, nationality, and labor. The Operetta Empire delves into-this vibrant theatrical culture, whose-creators simultaneously sought the respectability of high art and the popularity of low entertainment.-Case studies examine works by Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, Oscar Straus, and Leo Fall in light of current musicological conversations about hybridity and middlebrow culture. Demonstrating a thorough mastery of the complex early twentieth-century Viennese cultural scene, and a sympathetic and redemptive critique of a neglected popular genre, Micaela Baranello-establishes operetta as an important
