A Special Cineclub Presentation by Brendan G Carroll

When sound came to motion pictures in the late 1920s, as Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer, a new genre – the Hollywood musical – came to dominate American cinema. In Austria and Germany however, filmmakers preferred to create original screen operettas and to make film versions of operetta classics, often under the supervision of their composers – the masters of operetta’s Silver Age. Composers such as Franz Lehár, Robert Stolz, and Paul Abraham saw the ‘talkies’ as their opportunity to bring their greatest stage successes to a huge new audience – and to create original works for the screen. 

Showing rare clips from these unique films, writer, musicologist and film historian Brendan G Carroll tells the story of a largely forgotten part of cinema history, when for a brief period operetta reigned supreme on the European screen.