The Librettists

Julius Brammer (1877 -1943)
Austrian librettist Julius Brammer started as an actor. In fact, he was a member of the company of the Theater an der Wien the site of the prèmiere's of so many of the operettas of Emmerich Kálmán, Franz Lehár, Oscar Straus and Johann Strauss II, including Countess Maritza. With Alfred Grünwald he produced many libretti for Oscar Straus, Franz Lehár and Emmerich Kálmán. He left Austria with the advent of the Nazis and died in France.

Alfred Grünwald (1884 - 1951)
Alfred Grünwald was born in Vienna, Austria, one of the great cultural centers of Europe at the time. As a footnote, he went to school with, and had a crush on, the granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. His Hungarian father had come to Vienna from Budapest and became a hat manufacturer. Alfred later went to work booking performances for a theatrical agency. At the same time he started writing lyrics for revues, cabaret skits and musical comedies, some with pretty silly lines. He married in 1908. (His wife became a disciple of Freud and went to an analyst.)

Grünwald served at the front in World War I. While there, he contracted pneumonia and, against regulations, his wife travelled to the war zone to bring him back to Vienna. He teamed with Julius Brammer to write libretti and they were partners for most of their lives. Their plots obeyed the rules for the "well-made play" with conflict, surprise and resolution, and they were full of mistaken identities, lovers' misunderstandings and other standard cliches of operetta.

He was a gourmand who decreed Viennese pancakes should be thin enough to read the paper through. Like Kálmán and Brammer, the family left Vienna after the rise of Nazis, and he died in New York in 1951. His son, Henry, became the editor-in-chief of Time Magazine and later the US ambassador to Austria.

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Revised 2005
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