PhilPaine.com

It’s pret­ty obvi­ous that the Amer­i­can musi­cal come­dies, on stage and film, owed a lot to the Aus­tro-Hun­gar­i­an operettas. But the influ­ence also moved in the oth­er direc­tion. I have an old vinyl with high­lights of two operettas by Paul Abra­ham, Vik­to­ria und ihr Husar (1930) and Die Blume von Hawaii (1931), and they dis­play a strong influ­ence from Jazz and Broad­way. They were very pop­u­lar in their day, but are now rather obscure. The sec­ond even has an Amer­i­can set­ting (Hawaii) and fea­tures songs sung in Ger­man with a com­i­cal­ly intend­ed Amer­i­can accent, and has Eng­lish phras­es scat­tered about in the lyrics. Abra­ham, a Jew, fled Europe short­ly after these suc­cess­es, only to wind up in a New York men­tal hos­pi­tal in 1946. He recov­ered, and lived until 1960. Both are pleas­ant lis­ten­ing, with the added inter­est of demon­strat­ing the cross-fer­til­iza­tion of pop­u­lar music between Europe and Amer­i­ca between the two wars.