The Bat’s Revenge (Die Fledermaus) by Johann Strauss

At the turn of the new and old year, the Wrocław Opera invites you to a unique event – Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus in a semi-staged version. This hilarious, most famous operetta is sure to provide everyone with a lot of humour and unforgettable musical experiences. 

Lucjan Kydryński, an operetta expert, said this about Die Fledermaus:

“Jan Strauss did not intend to write operettas. He was already in his fifties and was fully satisfied with his position as the King of Waltzes – he had no greater ambitions, but his first wife, Jetty, did. She did not want to remain the wife of a bandmaster of garden orchestras; she dreamed of a career for her husband like that of Offenbach in Vienna. So she made a deal with the new director of the Theater an der Wien, Steiner, and together they persuaded Strauss to take an interest in operetta. Although he wrote Revenge in no time at all, the path taken by the text itself before it reached him in the form of a finished libretto was much longer.

It began when Director Steiner, looking for new material for his stage in Europe (especially in Paris, of course), heard about the great success of the comedy by librettists Offenbach, Melihac and Halev, Revellion, on the Paris stage and, without seeing it, paid a lot of money for the rights to its German translation. However, when the text landed on his desk, Steiner was very disappointed. He failed to see that it was the staging, not the literary material, that had determined the Parisian success, and that the material turned out to be simply an adaptation of a German play from twenty years earlier entitled The Prison. Furious, Steiner tried to foist the text on the rival Carl Theater, and when it was rejected there too, he came up with the desperate idea of reworking Revellion into a libretto for Strauss. The translation by Haffner, a staff writer and bandmaster at the Theater an der Wien, was handed over to Richard Genee, who, as a skilled professional, gave it the right shape. Strauss was tasked with combining it into a coherent whole. Of course, the binding factors were music and dance, with a special role for the waltz. The effect was dazzling – Die Fledermaus unfolds before us like a colourful ribbon, full of melodies that still delight us today. (Lucjan Kydryński, Operetta Guide)

There will be English subtitles.