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The most brilliant of Austrian operettas takes us to the outskirts of romantic Old Vienna. It’s New Year Eve and we are in the company of Caroline, who is determined to teach her philandering husband Gaillardin a lesson, even while she is being pursued by her former beau, the operatic tenor Alfred. At the centre of the action is the extremely wealthy, eternally bored Prince Orlofsky, whose lavish masked ball brings everything to a most delicious boil. But what if the whole plot has been a cunning plan masterminded by someone just to get back at Eisenstein? Die Fledermaus, Johann Strauss II’s comic operetta in three acts which premiered in 1874, has become a synonym of the operetta genre. In only six years, the operetta was staged in more than 170 theatres in the German-speaking regions and, by the 1890s, was performed all over the world. The libretto was written by Richard Genée and Karl Haffner after the burlesque The Prison by Julius Roderich Benedix and vaudeville piece Le Réveillon by Hen
