Immediately after its world premiere in 1874, The Bat became a byword for operetta genre. Operetta in Vienna was made after the French model of the popular works by Meilhac and Halevy, who remain famous as the librettists of Bizet’s Carmen. Strauss adjusted the French nature of their comedies to Vienna, just as one century earlier Mozart transformed Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro into his opera. In most people, Johann Strauss and The Bat evoke joy and solemn endless balls. However, this mother of all operettas has a lot of melancholy and longing for the ideal of happyness which, once we
know it, can never again be attained. The Bat begins as an invitation to a feast, and it ends with the awareness of the common human qualities. Operetta deservedly returns to the biggest stage in Zagreb in a grand manner.