The Love Song (operetta)

The Love Song is an operetta in three acts with a libretto by Harry B. Smith that fictionalized the life of composer Jacques Offenbach. The score was arranged by Edward Künneke, who utilized and sometimes pastiched music composed by Offenbach from a variety of his compositions. It also contained original music composed by Künneke.^[1] The operetta was adapted from the Hungarian language operetta Offenbach (1920) by composer Mihály Nádor [eo] and librettist Jenõ Faragó,^[2][3] and its German language adaptation, Meister von Montmartre (1922), by James Klein and Karl Bretschneider.^[2]

The show was commissioned and produced by the Shubert brothers as a follow up to Blossom Time, another biographical operetta, based on the life of Franz Schubert.^[1] The production had an unusually large cast with lavish sets designed by Watson Barratt and costumes designed by Ernest Schrapps and Hubert of Paris. Directed by Fred G. Latham, the operetta premiered on Broadway at the Century Theatre on January 13, 1925.^[4] It ran there for 157 performances; closing on June 6, 1925.^[1] The production starred Allan Prior as Offenbach, Evelyn Herbert as Herminie, Dorothy Francis as Eugenie de Montijo, Odette Myrtil as Hortense, Harry Kennedy Morton as Petipas, and Zella Russell as Lizette.^[4]

The New York Times stated that the story's plot was in reality "more fantasy than fact" as it related to Offenbach's actual life, but praised the work as "by all odds the best thing of its kind since The Merry Widow.^[4] Don Carle Gillette, reviewing the show in Billboard, found it overblown and humorless, thought the libretto was weak and the music an inconsistent hodgpodge with few opportunities for good choral singing, though he liked some of the performances.^[5]