Lischen et Fritzchen

First performed in French (or just about) in the German town of Bad Ems, the operetta in one act Lischen et Fritzchen was an immediate public success which its revival at the Bouffes Parisiens did not contradict. It enabled M^lle Zulma Bouffar to launch her career and to begin a collaboration with Offenbach which afterwards associated her with a dozen works (of which La Vie parisienne, in which she created the role of Gabrielle). The choice of a couple of Alsatian characters was no doubt linked to the context of its first performance: European tourists coming during the summer to enjoy the waters of Bad Ems must have been amused to hear the French and German languages joyfully mixed up; they might even have imagined that the farce was aimed at them. Fortunately, the librettist who took the pseudonym of Paul Dubois – placed a clear social barrier between the protagonists and the audience of persons of high social rank: the stage brings together a recently dismissed domestic servant and a broom saleswoman looking for customers. The respective degradation of these two Alsatians with their very strong accents has obliged them to return home: it is on the way back that they meet up and start to appreciate one another. A romantic idyll starts to take form up until the moment that in the course of the conversation they realise that they are brother and sister… Without a clear connection being specified, we may note that this piece uses several elements from a musical buffoonery by Hervé of ten years earlier: La Perle de l’Alsace, which had already included a broom saleswoman and a stream of jokes about the Strasburg accent.