About the work
An operetta ("Lebensbild mit Gesang", a scene of life with song) by Jean Gilbert to a text by Jean Kren with lyrics by Alfred Schönfeld, after a story by Carl Görlitz. It premiered in Berlin in 1915.
Plot
The tradeswoman Lenchen dreams of high society. When her husband, the shoe merchant Lorenz Flink, sends her to deliver three pairs of shoes to wealthy customers, she gets a glimpse behind the scenes of different worlds - a rich friend, an operetta singer, a cabaret - full of mix-ups, affairs and jealousy, before realising that her husband and home are worth more than social glamour.
Cultural significance
The work is one of roughly fifty stage works with which Jean Gilbert shaped the Berlin operetta of the 1910s; it is distinct from an earlier, unrelated work of the same title by Carl Millöcker (Theater an der Wien, 1871).