The Chocolate Soldier

“My hero”

Far from being an ‘s’ short of a Strauss, Oscar Straus was a highly accomplished composer of Viennese operettas – dozens of them – in his own rather shorter name. Although his most familiar piece is probably the fairground-waltz theme tune for the 1950 Max Ophuls film La Ronde, his earliest international success was the operetta Der tapfere Soldat (The Brave Soldier) which achieved enormous popularity in the United States as The Chocolate Soldier. Based on Shaw’s play Arms and the Man and set during the Serbo-Bulgarian War in 1885, it is about the inevitably complex love affair between Nadina, daughter of the Colonel of the Bulgarian army, and Lieutenant Bumerli, a Swiss officer attached to the Serbian forces.

Before Nadina meets Bumerli she is engaged to the supposed hero of the Bulgarian army, Major Spiridoff. Fleeing from the Bulgarians and taking refuge, as luck would have it, in Nadina’s bedroom, the very charming Bumerli reveals to her not only his love for chocolate drops but also the decidedly non-heroic status of her fiancé. Her delightfully melodious waltz-song “My hero” is addressed not to Bumerli, however – he has not yet climbed through her bedroom window – but to her absent and, as far as she knows at this point, heroic fiancé.