Vienna once exported a type of musical comedy which brought the world much pleasure and had many virtues. Realism was not one of the virtues. Yet in the whirl of ravishing gypsies disguised as archdukes and ravishing archdukes disguised as gypsies there usually appeared a suggestion, not of life, but of how a generation thought life ought to be.
Such an operetta was The Dollar Princess (1907) which, sensitive to the march of history, turned its back on gypsies and archdukes and instead examined the American millionaire. Today, few people remember it except music publishers, sentimentalists, and the...
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