Sissy in Vienna

At the proud old Theater an der Wien last week a story was enacted which every good Viennese knows: the courtship of young Emperor Franz Josef and Elizabeth, 16-year-old, harum-scarum daughter of Bavaria's Duke Max. Elizabeth, whose nickname was Sissy, was the favorite of her father who roved the forests with woodcutter friends, played the zither, behaved more like a peasant than a duke. Sissy's shrewish mother intended the elder daughter Helene to be Franz Josef's wife. Sissy went along with them when the Bavarian duchess took Helene to Ischl to meet the young Emperor, came near being sent home when she soaked herself in Rosenheim watering the horses. But in the play last week, adapted by Ernst and Hubert Mareschka from a comedy by Ernst Deosy and Gustav Holm, Sissy tagged along afterwards with the incorrigible duke. Their journey in a post-chaise was silhouetted against a screen while the orchestra played an amusing accompaniment. In Ischl the Sissy of the play disguised herself as a midinette, became betrothed to the Emperor in the room where 61 years later he signed the declaration of war against Serbia.

The Herr Professor who wrote the music for last week's operetta and stood in the pit to conduct it was just as familiar to the Viennese audience as the romantic Viennese story. He was Violinist Fritz Kreisler, born and brought up in Vienna, son of a Viennese doctor, soldier in a Viennese regiment, sole support in dark post-War days of many a Viennese orphan. For Sissy, his second operetta since the War, Kreisler wrote charming, familiar music. He used themes from his "Caprice Viennois" and from "Liebes-freud," violin pieces so fluent and lilting that longest-faced critics have not fussed at their lack of profundity. "Wine Is My Weakness" and "With Eyes Like Thine, 'Tis Sin to Weep" are two new pieces the Viennese relished. If Sissy visits the U. S., Kreisler will take out tunes he has borrowed from Apple Blossoms, the operetta which he wrote in collaboration with Composer Victor Jacobi 13 years ago. Apple Blossoms never saw Vienna but it made Kreisler a tidy sum in its long Broadway run. Kreisler wrote Sissy frankly hoping that it too would make him money, a fact which would have surprised last week's audience far more than the music did or the sentimental enthusiasm with which Vienna Socialists reacted to the old Habsburg tale.

Early last summer Kreisler thought he would have to part with some of the rare books and manuscripts which he has stored in his house near Berlin but he and Mrs. Kreisler (the former Harriet Lies, daughter of a U. S. tobacco merchant) went to Monte Carlo, won $10.000 which tided them over.

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