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1 Introduction

Im weißen Rößl (English title: White Horse Inn or The White Horse Inn) is a musical comedy set in the picturesque Salzkammergut region of Upper Austria. It is about the head waiter of the White Horse Inn in St. Wolfgang who is desperately in love with the owner of the inn, a resolute young woman who seemingly only has eyes for one of her regular guests. Sometimes classified as an operetta, the show enjoyed huge successes both on Broadway and in the West End (651 performances at the Coliseum starting April 8, 1931) and was filmed several times. In a way similar to The Sound of Music and the three Sissi movies, the play and its film versions have contributed to the saccharine image of Austria as an alpine idyllAn idyll is a short poem, descriptive of rustic life, written in the style of Theocritus's short pastoral poems, the Idylls''. Later imitators included the Roman poets Virgil and Catullus, and the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.—the kind of idyll touristsTourism can be defined as the act of travel for the purpose of recreation, and the provision of services for this act. A tourist is someone who travels at least fifty miles from home, as defined by the World Tourism Organization (a United Nations body). have been seeking for almost a century now. Today, Im weißen Rößl is mainly remembered for its songs, many of which have become popular classics.

2 Genesis of the play

The White Horse Inn in the 1960sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Years: 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change aroundIn the last decade of the 19th centuryAlternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical ( 18th century — 19th century — 20th century — more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 19th century was that century which lasted from 1801- 1900. Events The Little Ice Age ended, Oscar Blumenthal , a theatre director from BerlinBerlin [ bɛrˈliːn ] is the national capital of Germany and its largest city, with 3,387,404 inhabitants (as of September 2004); down from 4. 5 million before World War II. Berlin is located on the rivers Spree and Havel in the northea, GermanyThe Federal Republic of Germany ( German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland is one of the world's leading industrialized countries, located in the middle of the European Union. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark and the Baltic Sea, to the east, was vacationing in Lauffen , a small town in the vicinity of St. Wolfgang. There, at the inn where he was staying, Blumenthal willy-nilly witnessed the head waiter's painful wooing of his widowed boss. Amused, Blumenthal used the story as the basis of a comedyComedy is the use of humor in the performing arts. It also means a performance that relies heavily on humor. The term originally comes from theater, where it simply referred to a play with a happy ending, in contrast to a tragedy. The humor, once an incid—without music—which he co-authored with actor Gustav Kadelburg . However, Blumenthal and Kadelburg relocated the action from Lauffen to the much more prominent St. Wolfgang, where the Gasthof Weißes Rößl had actually existed since 1878Events January Cleopatra's Needle arrives in London January 9 Humbert I becomes King of Italy January 23 Disraeli orders British fleet to Dardanelles January 28 The Yale News becomes the first daily, college newspaper in the United States. January 31 Turk. Having thus chanced upon a suitable title, the authors went to work, and Im weißen Rößl eventually premiered in Berlin in 1897.

The White Horse Inn in 2004The play was an immediate success. The Berlin audience would laugh at the comic portrayal of well-to-do city dwellers such as Wilhelm Giesecke, a producer of underwear, and his daughter Ottilie, who have travelled all the way from Berlin to St. Wolfgang and now, on holiday, cannot help displaying many of the characteristics of the nouveaux-riches. "Wär' ick bloß nach Ahlbeck jefahren"—"If only I had gone to Ahlbeck", Giesecke sighs as he considers his unfamiliar surroundings and the strange dialect spoken by the wild mountain people that inhabits the Salzkammergut. At the same time the play promoted tourism in Austria, especially in and around St. Wolfgang, with a contemporary edition of the Baedeker praising the natural beauty of the region and describing the White Horse Inn as nicely situated at the lakefront next to where the steamboat can be taken for a romantic trip across the Wolfgangsee . The White Horse Inn was even awarded a Baedeker star.

Just as the play was about to be forgotten—a silent movie starring Liane Haid had been made in Germany in 1926—it was revived, again in Berlin, and this time as a musical comedy. During a visit to the Salzkammergut, the actor Emil Jannings told Berlin theatre manager Erik Charell about the comedy. Charell was interested and commissioned a group of prominent authors and composers to come up with a musical show based on Blumenthal and Kadelburg's libretto. They were Ralph Benatzky and Robert Stolz (music), Robert Gilbert (lyrics), Hans Müller and Charell himself. The show premiered in Berlin on November 8, 1930. Immediately afterwards it became a success around the world, with long runs in cities like London, Paris, Vienna, Munich and New York.

During the Third Reich the comedy was marginalized and not performed ( Goebbels called it "eine Revue, die uns heute zum Hals heraushängt"—"the kind of entertainment we find boring today"), whereas people in the 1950s, keen on harmony and shallow pleasures, eagerly greeted revivals of the show. German language films based on the musical comedy were made in 1935, 1952 and 1960 respectively.