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The White Horse Inn -
- For other White Horse Inns see the White Horse disambiguation page.
Im weien Rl (English title: White Horse Inn or The White Horse Inn) is a musical comedy set in the picturesque Salzkammergut region of Upper Austria. It is about the head waiter of the White Horse Inn in St. Wolfgang who is desperately in love with the owner of the inn, a resolute young woman who seemingly only has eyes for one of her regular guests. Sometimes classified as an operetta, the show enjoyed huge successes both on Broadway and in the West End (651 performances at the Coliseum starting April 8, 1931) and was filmed several times. In a way similar to The Sound of Music and the three Sissi movies, the play and its film versions have contributed to the saccharine image of Austria as an alpine idyll—the kind of idyll tourists have been seeking for almost a century now. Today, Im weien Rl is mainly remembered for its songs, many of which have become popular classics. Genesis of the play the last decade of the 19th century, Oscar Blumenthal, a theatre director from Berlin, Germany, was vacationing in Lauffen, a small town in the vicinity of St. Wolfgang. There, at the inn where he was staying, Blumenthal willy-nilly witnessed the head waiter's painful wooing of his widowed boss. Amused, Blumenthal used the story as the basis of a comedy—without music—which he co-authored with actor Gustav Kadelburg. However, Blumenthal and Kadelburg relocated the action from Lauffen to the much more prominent St. Wolfgang, where the Gasthof Weies Rl had actually existed since 1878. Having thus chanced upon a suitable title, the authors went to work, and Im weien Rl eventually premiered in Berlin in 1897. play was an immediate success. The Berlin audience would laugh at the comic portrayal of well-to-do city dwellers such as Wilhelm Giesecke, a producer of underwear, and his daughter Ottilie, who have travelled all the way from Berlin to St. Wolfgang and now, on holiday, cannot help displaying many of the characteristics of the nouveaux-riches. "Wr' ick blo nach Ahlbeck jefahren"—"If only I had gone to Ahlbeck", Giesecke sighs as he considers his unfamiliar surroundings and the strange dialect spoken by the wild mountain people that inhabits the Salzkammergut. At the same time the play promoted tourism in Austria, especially in and around St. Wolfgang, with a contemporary edition of the Baedeker praising the natural beauty of the region and describing the White Horse Inn as nicely situated at the lakefront next to where the steamboat can be taken for a romantic trip across the Wolfgangsee. The White Horse Inn was even awarded a Baedeker star. Waltraut Haas and Peter Alexander in the 1960 movie version Just as the play was about to be forgotten—a silent movie starring Liane Haid had been made in Germany in 1926—it was revived, again in Berlin, and this time as a musical comedy. During a visit to the Salzkammergut, the actor Emil Jannings told Berlin theatre manager Erik Charell about the comedy. Charell was interested and commissioned a group of prominent authors and composers to come up with a musical show based on Blumenthal and Kadelburg's libretto. They were Ralph Benatzky and Robert Stolz (music), Robert Gilbert (lyrics), Hans Mller and Charell himself. The show premiered in Berlin on November 8, 1930. Immediately afterwards it became a success around the world, with long runs in cities like London, Paris, Vienna, Munich and New York. During the Third Reich the comedy was marginalized and not performed (Goebbels called it "eine Revue, die uns heute zum Hals heraushngt"—"the kind of entertainment we find boring today"), whereas people in the 1950s, keen on harmony and shallow pleasures, eagerly greeted revivals of the show. German language films based on the musical comedy were made in 1935, 1952 and 1960 respectively. Musical numbers - "Im weien Rssl am Wolfgangsee"
- "Was kann der Sigismund dafr, dass er so schn ist"
- "Im Salzkammergut, da kann man gut lustig sein"
- "Es muss was Wunderbares sein"
- "Mein Liebeslied muss ein Walzer sein"
- "Zuschaun kann i net"
- "Die ganze Welt ist himmelblau"
Film adaptations | ermany, 1926 (silent movie) | Austria, 1935 | West Germany, 1952 | West Germany / Austria, 1960 | Germany, 1994 (entitled Im weien Rl am Wolfgangsee) | | i>directed by | Richard Oswald | Carl Lamac | Willi Forst | Werner Jacobs | Ursli Pfister | | osepha Vogelhuber | Liane Haid | Christl Mardayn | Johanna Matz | Waltraut Haas | Frulein Schneider | | eopold Brandmeyer, head waiter | -?- | Hermann Thimig | Walter Mller | Peter Alexander | Toni Pfister | | ilhelm Giesecke, industrialist from Berlin | Henry Bender | Willi Schaeffers | Paul Westermeier | Erik Jelde | Gerd Wameling | | ttilie Giesecke, his daughter | Maly Delschaft | Anni Markart | Marianne Wischmann | Karin Dor (playing "Brigitte Giesecke") | Lilo Pfister | | r Siedler, lawyer | -?- | Fritz Odemar | Johannes Heesters | Adrian Hoven | Max Raabe | | rofessor Hinzelmann | Hermann Picha | Theo Lingen (playing "Kommerzienrat Frst") | Sepp Nigg | Werner Finck | Otto Sander | | lrchen Hinzelmann, his daughter | -?- | Marianne Stanior | Ingrid Pan | -?- | Meret Becker | | igismund Slzheimer | -?- | -?- | Ulrich Beiger | Gunther Philipp | Ursli Pfister | | a href="/encyclopedia/Franz-Joseph-of-Austria" title="Franz Joseph of Austria">Emperor Francis Joseph | -?- | -?- | Rudolf Forster | -?- | Walter Schmidinger |
A scene from the 1994 alternative version A post-war Argentinian movie in Spanish, La Hostera del caballito blanco, was directed by Benito Perojo and released in 1948. In addition, the musical triggered a number of spin-offs such as the 1961 Austrian comedy film Im schwarzen Rl (The Black Horse Inn), directed by Franz Antel, about a young woman (surprisingly, it was Karin Dor again, who had just played Giesecke's daughter in the 1960 version) who inherits a dilapidated hotel on the shores of the Wolfgangsee. As a matter of fact, a number of hotels in St. Wolfgang do use similar names (Black Horse, White Stag, etc.). A note on the spelling According to the German spelling reform of the 1990s, which curbed the use of the letter , Rl, which has a diminutive suffix added to the noun Ro ("horse", "steed"), now has to be spelt Rssl (just as it is Ross now instead of Ro). Understandably, both Rl and Rssl can be seen simultaneously nowadays, depending on when a particular text was written. External link White Horse Inn, The White Horse Inn, The
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