News Fritzi Massary

[…] California, we have no desire to repeat history’s mistakes: the shame of Japanese internment camps and of having turned our backs on many fleeing Europe during World War II. In fact, our own Los Angeles musical community was shaped by the émigrés and exiles who escaped the threat of oppressive regimes in Germany, Austria and Russia: Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Erich Korngold, Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, Ernst Toch, Max Steiner, Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky, Fritzi Massary and Sergei Rachmaninoff among others. Together, these musicians and composers advanced American music, contributed to our film industry and taught the next generation of musical creators. Like many “foreign” artists who preceded and followed them, their contributions to American culture, from the Tin Pan Alley songbook to film scoring, have been so profound and lasting that we have come to think of those ideas as wholly indigenous, forgetting the far-flung origins of their creators. […]

Barrie Kosky Talks About Bringing Weimar Operetta Back to Berlin 

[…] concert of Yiddish songs on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. “Farges Mikh Nit: Jiddische Operettenlieder von Warschau zum Broadway” featured two sopranos singing standards by Abraham Ellstein, Molly Picon (including several songs from “Mameleh”), Abraham Goldfaden, Sholom Secunda and Joseph Rumshinsky. Kosky’s “Eine Frau” was the first production of that work at the Komische since its premiere in September 1932, with operetta legend Fritzi Massary in the lead role. It was her last appearance at the Metropol-Theater. Several months later, the Nazis took power and Massary found herself an exile, first in Austria and then in America, where she landed in 1939, a year before Oscar Straus arrived in Hollywood… Read more at Forward.com

“To play La Pompadour—what a delightful task! To be La Pompadour—what a gruesome fate!” Thus spoke operetta superstar Fritzi Massary after researching her role as Louis XV’s official mistress in the Leo Fall operetta Madame Pompadour, which was written as a star vehicle for “die Massary” and had its first, hugely successful, performance in Berlin in 1922, followed by runs in Vienna and London. Fall wrote a series of operettas in the later Viennese style, following the pattern of Die lustige Witwe. Madame Pompadour was his last, he died shortly afterwards; in fact the careers of the major participants in this piece’s creation were sadly curtailed. “Die Massary” had to flee to the US in the 1930′s because of her Jewish heritage and did not continue as a performer. One of the librettists, Rudolph Schanzer, who wrote the German text in collaboration with Ernst Welisch, committed suicide while under arrest […]