About the work
Operetta in a prologue and three acts by Paul Abraham to a libretto by Alfred Grünwald and Fritz Löhner-Beda. It premiered on 23 December 1932 at Berlin's Großes Schauspielhaus, with Gitta Alpár, Rosy Barsony and Oskar Dénes in the leading roles.
Plot
A newly married aristocratic couple spend their honeymoon in Nice when the husband's earlier affair resurfaces. At the titular ball at the Hotel Savoy, mistaken identities cause confusion, among them businesswoman Madeleine de Faublas, who insists on equal terms in her marriage contract; in the end the couples are reconciled.
Cultural significance
The score blends Berlin jazz, Hungarian Gypsy tunes, Viennese melody and Yiddish klezmer, and is considered a high point of Abraham's operetta output. Only weeks after its acclaimed premiere, the show was pulled from the repertoire in April 1933 because the composer and librettists were Jewish – Löhner-Beda later died in a concentration camp; a 2013 reconstructed version at Berlin's Komische Oper brought it back to the stage.