Mlle. Modiste - Background

Background

Viennese soprano Fritzi Scheff had already built a following at the Metropolitan Opera when Victor Herbert engaged her to appear in his operettas for an astonishing $1,000 a week. She starred in four of his operettas, beginning with Babette (1903). Mlle. Modiste was the most successful of these. During the curtain calls of Babette, she pulled Herbert on stage and planted a big, sexy kiss on his cheek. "The Kiss" generated considerable comment, and when Herbert wrote Mlle. Modiste, two years later, he wrote one of his most famous melodies for her, "Kiss Me Again". After Modiste closed, Scheff toured it for years.

Henry Blossom and Herbert collaborated on several more operettas, including The Red Mill (1906), The Princess Pat (1915), and Eileen (1917). Modiste is typical of their proto-feminist plotlines involving an orphaned young woman, exploited by her employer, but whose feisty spirit leads her to success.

After the original production, the piece returned to Broadway at the Knickerbocker briefly in 1906, and, in between national tours, at both the original Academy of Music and the Knickerbocker in 1907, at the Globe Theatre in 1913 and at Jolson's 59th Street Theatre in 1929, among many other revivals and tours through the early 20th century. Later revivals have included several revivals by the Light Opera of Manhattan in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and a production by Ohio Light Opera in 2009. A 1926 silent film version starring Corinne Griffith was broadly adapted, but well received. A "talking" film version called Kiss Me Again was made later in the late 1920s by First National.