Fairy tales stand for miracles

TH: You call your piece a “fairy-tale operetta.” What exactly is that?

AR: “Fairy tale” stands for miracles. It allows timelines to blur, lets a long-deceased female librettist play an air violin with the gilded statue of a composer in the attic, and two young people dance a waltz in sneakers without having to decide who they are, while still knowing exactly whom they love. In a fairy tale, the world is enchanted and what is heavy becomes light, because it doesn’t have to be justified — it’s allowed to be believed. Operetta, on the other hand, stands for playfulness and a joy in form, for the ironic wink that makes pain more bearable and breaks open social conventions. In short: the fairy tale brings the magic, and the operetta brings the courage to surrender to it.

Do you actually believe in fairy tales?

Absolutely! I turn the world into a fairy tale for myself. Otherwise it would be hard to bear.

But behind Cinderella’s Dream there is also a true story. Who exactly was Ida Grünwald?

She was a real Viennese “typewriter.” Around 1900 she ran her own typing office in Vienna and worked with writers such as Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal — always punctual, precise, and proud of her craft. On the title page of the original Cinderella libretto, her name stands out: Ida Grünwald, Typewriterin, Glasergasse 7 — clear and bold, like a secret authorship note. Did she write anything herself? We don’t know. But that’s how we imagined it. We wanted to give her a voice — not as a muse or a machine, but as a narrator with her own imagination. She doesn’t just type the fairy tale, she lives and steers it as well. And that’s exactly why Aschenbrödels Traum (Cinderella’s Dream) begins with her.

Johann Strauss — those are big shoes to fill. How much Strauss is in your operetta, and how much Martina Eisenreich?

Well, we went to the Stadtpark and asked the Johann Strauss monument — it nodded enthusiastically and granted us its most beautiful melodies for inspiration. Martina blew through them, twisted them, caressed them, distorted them, and added her own melodies. That’s how an entirely new work came into being.