The Reconstruction of American Light Music
New York Classical Review
A new retrospective of Victor Herbert’s light concert music attempts to recover the operetta (a short opera, usually on a light or humorous theme) aesthetic that bridged the gap between 19th-century European craftsmanship and the American musical theater tradition. Herbert, a cellist trained at the Stuttgart Conservatory, applied an orchestration (the study or practice of writing music for an orchestra) rigor to popular forms that influenced the development of the Broadway pit orchestra. The collection highlights works like Babes in Toyland, where the leitmotif (a recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation) technique is deployed with a harmonic sophistication often erased by later revivals. Score on IMSLP. This recovery illustrates how the American sound was built on the migration of specific European symphonic mechanisms.