Fatinitza
| Fatinitza | |
|---|---|
| Operetta by Franz von Suppé | |
Poster, c. 1879
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| Librettist | |
| Language | German |
| Based on | Eugène Scribe's libretto to La circassienne |
| Premiere | January 5, 1876 Carltheater, Vienna |
Fatinitza was the first full-length, three-act operetta by Franz von Suppé. The libretto by F. Zell (a pseudonym for Camillo Walzel) and Richard Genée was based on the libretto to La circassienne by Eugène Scribe (which had been set to music by Daniel Auber in 1861), but with the lead role of Wladimir, a young Russian lieutenant who has to disguise himself as a woman, changed to a trousers role; in other words, a woman played the part of the man who pretended to be a woman.
It premièred on 5 January 1876, at the Carltheater Vienna, and proved a huge success, running for more than a hundred performances, with the march "Vorwärts mit frischem Muth", proving a particular hit. The opera as a whole is no longer in the popular repertory, but the overture is performed as a stand-alone piece.
Viennese operetta sprang out of an attempt by Viennese composers to imitate Jacques Offenbach's works, after the highly successful performance of Le mariage aux lanternes at the Carltheater in 1858. Franz von Suppé was the most notable of these early composers, and proved instrumental in defining the new subgenre.Grove Music Online names Suppé's Das Pensionat (1860) as "the first successful attempt at a genuine Viennese operetta", and this was followed by several more successes, for Suppé, including Flotte Bursche (1863) and Die schöne Galathée (1865). However, until Fatinitza in 1876, Suppé did not write a full-length operetta, and, despite the successes of his shorter works, neither he, nor other Viennese composers such as Giovanni von Zaytz, were able to compete with Offenbach for popularity throughout the 1860s.
Offenbach's dominance was finally challenged with the arrival of Johann Strauss II upon the scene in the 1870s, with works such as Indigo und die vierzig Räuber, Der Karneval in Rom, Die Fledermaus, and others serving to develop and codify the genre Suppé had begun laying out.
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