About the work
Märchen im Grand-Hotel is a jazz operetta in two acts with a prologue and epilogue by Paul Abraham, with a libretto by Alfred Grünwald and Fritz Löhner-Beda loosely based on Alfred Savoir's comedy The Grand Duchess and the Waiter (1924). It premiered on 29 March 1934 at the Theater an der Wien, staged by Otto Preminger.
Plot
The determined film producer Marylou is scouting a grand hotel on the Côte d'Azur for unusual material for her next film and decides to cast the exiled aristocrats staying there. At the centre of the mix-ups is Albert, the hotel's heir, who works incognito as a waiter and falls for a Spanish infanta, while her vain fiancé also competes for attention. In the end all the couples come together: the infanta becomes a film star, and the waiter buys his way into the nobility.
Cultural significance
The operetta stayed in the repertoire of the Theater an der Wien for only about two months and, unlike Abraham's earlier hits, was not performed in Germany during the 1930s; its German premiere did not take place until 2018. Musically it blends jazz, tango, foxtrot and waltz and stands as a typical example of the Weimar-era operettas by Jewish authors that the Nazis pushed out of the repertoire and that have been rediscovered since the 2010s, including at the Komische Oper Berlin.