Because this appears in Decca’s Entartete Musik series you might approach it earnestly, expecting a significant document of its time. Please don’t: The Duchess of Chicago is Viennese whipped cream laced with Prohibition bathtub gin; it skirts the very brink of high camp, and has a plot too silly to summarize (well, I’ll try: impoverished Ruritanian Crown Prince loves the waltz and the csardas, hates jazz; American heiress vows to get him to dance the Charleston; after a feeble attempt at a sub-plot she succeeds, and marries him). Of course the Nazis banned it: Kalman and his librettists were all Jewish (which didn’t stop them, rather chillingly, including a couple of mild anti-Semitic jokes – Strauss is damned as a crypto-Nazi to this day for a similar lapse of taste in Intermezzo), and besides, there are all those Charlestons, foxtrots and black bottoms. But there are also waltzes and csardas and plentiful gipsy fiddlers of the kind that had made Kalman’s Gipsy Princess, Circus Princess and Countess Maritza famous. Was he trying to have the best of both worlds, to season the tried and tested with the new and catchily syncopated fashion from America (Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf was premiered the year before Kalman’s operetta and Weill’s Dreigroschenoper appeared four months after it)? Of course he was, and a very shrewd exercise in having your cake and eating it it proved.
Kalman’s ‘jazz’ tunes are just as catchy as his Viennese and Hungarian ones (both are sometimes agreeably brash, disarmingly vulgar), and the clash between cultures is made the most of by a libretto that includes a good deal of American English (to say nothing of untranslated Hungarian and a song in which the Crown Prince’s father, who fancies the millionairess himself, runs out of courtly French after two verses and has to resort to ‘fromage de Brie, o quel malheur!’). It is as thoroughly entertaining as it is thoroughly daft, in short, and you will be humming the saucy ‘Wir Ladies aus Amerika’ and the hit number ‘Ein kleiner Slow-fox mit Mary’ for days.
But I am a serious critic, too. I review Pfitzner and Zemlinsky and such, so I’m bound to say that Kalman’s scoring is often coarsely noisy, and his tendency to repeat himself is barefaced: each of the finales and almost the whole of the epilogue is made up of endless reprises. I could have done with a touch more charm from Endrik Wottrich’s Crown Prince (he’s throaty, rather baritonal and in the dialogue scenes a woodenly careful actor). Deborah Riedel’s Mary has a nice line in American German, and she sings prettily; Monica Groop is even better, though since the main point of her character is that she lisps it’s a pity she doesn’t try to. There is of course no justification whatsoever for including this whimsical tosh in the Entartete Musik series, save that its producer Michael Haas obviously dotes on it. So, more to the point, does Richard Bonynge, and he doesn’t make the mistake of toning down its blush-making but insidiously enjoyable crudities. Did I mention the Beethoven-foxtrot? '