Strauss's champagne-soaked operetta is really one long revenge prank
Die Fledermaus, Johann Strauss II's 1874 operetta, turns on a grudge. Years earlier Gabriel von Eisenstein left his drunken friend Falke asleep in the middle of town dressed as a bat, to be laughed at next morning. Falke answers with a masked ball where everyone lies about who they are, and the husband flirts with his own disguised wife.
The plot passed through three countries before reaching Vienna. It began as Das Gefängnis, a Berlin farce by Julius Roderich Benedix from 1851. Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, librettists for Offenbach, loosely reworked it into the French comedy Le Réveillon in 1872. Karl Haffner translated that into German, but Viennese tastes did not suit a French New Year's Eve supper, so the setting became a ball, and Richard Genée finished the libretto.
The farce runs on disguise. Eisenstein, due to serve eight days in jail for insulting an official, sneaks off to Prince Orlofsky's party as 'Marquis Renard'. The prison governor arrives as 'Chevalier Chagrin', and since neither man speaks French, they fool each other by trading stock French phrases. His maid Adele poses as an actress in a borrowed dress, while his wife Rosalinde convinces the room she is a Hungarian countess by singing a czardas and pockets her husband's watch as proof of his flirting. Meanwhile her old admirer Alfred has been hauled off to prison in Eisenstein's place.
Everything unravels the next morning at the jail, where the jailer Frosch is gloriously drunk. Eisenstein, raging that Alfred has been with his wife, is confronted with the watch. He blames the champagne, Rosalinde forgives him, and the company reprises the song praising the drink.
Premiered at the Theater an der Wien in April 1874, the operetta has stayed in the repertoire ever since, though Paris resisted until 1904. Gustav Mahler raised its standing by staging it at the Hamburg opera, and major houses followed. Its roles bend easily: Eisenstein, written for tenor, is often sung by a baritone, and Orlofsky is a trouser role usually taken by a mezzo-soprano. Productions often slip extra acts into the party scene.
Source: Die Fledermaus
