5 things to know about Roxy und ihr Wunderteam
1. Between stocks and notes
Paul Abraham was born in 1892 in Apatin, today part of Serbia but then part of Kingdom of Hungary. His father was a merchant while his mother encouraged his musical talent and gave him his first piano lessons. Abraham could not decide for a long time whether he should pursue a musical or commercial career, so for a while he followed both paths in parallel. After the First World War, he relied on his commercial talent. He tried to make it as a speculator but lost his stakes during the unceasing inflation of 1924. Due to insolvency, he even had to serve a prison sentence. Legend has it that the idea for Viktoria und ihr Husar came to him in his prison cell.
2. Finding his language
In 1927, Abraham took up the post of Kapellmeister at the Budapest Operetta Theatre. He contributed to the music of various works and gave the world premiere of his first operetta. Although Der Gatte des Fräuleins was only moderately successful, the work already exhibited the typical characteristics of an Abraham operetta: a mixture of jazz and Hungarian folk music. However, the ironic wink to be found in his later operettas was missing. Three years later, his operetta Viktória was given its premiere in Budapest. In order to be able to bring it to the German market, it not only had to be translated, but also adapted to the sophisticated tastes of the big cities. Viktoria und ihr Husar was celebrated at the Neues Theater in Leipzig and later triumphed at the Metropol-Theater in Berlin, in the building of what is today the Komische Oper Berlin.
3. Success in Berlin
Quitting his position in Budapest, Abraham moved with his wife Sarolta Feszelyi to Berlin, the centre of operetta and revue productions. Die Blume von Hawaii followed in 1931, with the premiere taking place at the Neues Theater in Leipzig before heading to the Metropol-Theater. The third operetta in this successful trilogy was Ball im Savoy, which was premiered in 1932 at the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin. The three works catapulted Abraham to the top of European entertainment theatre in no time. Only a few weeks after the celebrated premiere of Ball im Savoy, the National Socialists in Berlin took over the government. Little by little, operettas by Jewish authors or composers disappeared from the repertoire – almost all of them.
4. The ‘Wunderteam’
Abraham first fled to Vienna. In 1934 his Märchen im Grand-Hotel premiered at the Theater an der Wien followed a year-and-a-half later by Dschainah – Das Mädchen aus dem Tanzhaus, but neither was as successful as his earlier works had been in Berlin. So he turned to a topic that the Viennese audience couldn’t resist: football. Vienna was the centre of professional football in Europe in the 1920s and early 1930s. The highlight of Austrian football is the years of the ‘Wunderteam’. The birth of the legendary team is commonly dated to May 1931, when the Austrian players beat favourites Scotland 5-0. The European football world took notice. When the team also gave Germany a 6-0 home defeat a little later, it became clear that this was an exceptional team.
5. Abraham scores
Abraham took his Hungarian operetta 3:1 a szerelem javara, which celebrated the Hungarian water polo team that had surprisingly won gold at the 1936 Olympic Games, and adapted it into a German operetta about football. In March 1937 the world premiere of Roxy und ihr Wunderteam took place at the Theater an der Wien. A review in Der Wiener Tag the next day reported the enthusiastic response: ‘The audience filled the Stadium an der Wien to the last seat and went along with the lively game of the operetta team. The applause was sometimes as loud as it would be during an international football match.’ Roxy was supposed to move with the same cast to the Vienna Volksoper after the 75th performance, but this plan could not be realised because of the tense political situation. Many members of the ensemble had to leave Vienna. Following the Anschluss, Abraham returned briefly to Budapest before fleeing first to Paris and then to Cuba, where he earned a modest living as a pianist. He later emigrated to New York City then to Hamburg, where he died in 1960 at the age of 67. As far as is known, Roxy und ihr Wunderteam was not performed on stage after the opening run in Vienna until the German premiere at Opernhaus Dortmund in 2014.
