‘Les filles mal tournées’ dell’offenbachiade, ovvero fisionomia e caratteri dell’operetta francese post-Sedan

Until now, scholars have predominantly devoted their interests to the French operetta of the Second Empire, indeed to such an extent that they have left unexplored an equally important part of the genre’s history. With the exception of Offenbach’s works, long at the center of a wide array of studies largely carried out by French and German musicologists, we know little of the fate of the operetta following the defeat of Sedan. The present contribution seeks to reconstruct the major trends in Parisian operetta from 1870 through the onstage debut of Hervé’s Mam’zelle Nitouche (1883), a work which together with Charles Lecocq’s La fille de madame Angot (1872) marks a decisive turning point in the evolution of the genre. In tracing the morphological developments of the post-Sedan operetta three strands will be focused on in particular: the opérette-féerie, the operetta of the “comique” variety and finally the opérette-vaudeville.