Komm mit nach Varasdin (Gräfin Mariza)

Gräfin Mariza opened at the Theater an der Wien on 28 February 1924 and ran close to four hundred performances. Julius Brammer and Alfred Grünwald set it on a Hungarian estate: a countess invents a fiancé to keep suitors away, and her steward turns out to be a ruined count working under another name. Kálmán wrote it when Viennese operetta was already looking back at itself, and the score puts csárdás and Gypsy-band colour beside the newer rhythms of shimmy and foxtrot. It reached New York in 1926 and stayed in German-language houses when much else did not.