Julius Brammer

After World War I, a war hero returns to Berlin to find that there's no place for him--he has no skills other than what he learned in the army, and can only find menial, low-paying jobs. He decides to become a gigolo to lonely rich women.

Count Tasziló Endrődy-Wittenberg, who has stepped on the back of his own family fortune, takes a job as a farmhand on the ancient Decsényiek estate in Transylvania, under the pseudonym Béla Török. Knowing nothing of all this, the mistress of the estate, Marica, arrives home from Vienna, distraught by a love disappointment, to bury herself in the quiet solitude of the countryside. And since she sees every suitor as a dowry hunter, she announces that she has become engaged to a baron named Zsupán Kálmán. The two mentally damaged young people love each other with an unquenchable passion... In the meantime, of course, Zsupán, whom Marica believes to be an invented person, appears. He is a good friend of Tasziló and takes on the disguise for his sake, but in this "costume" he falls in love with his friend's sister, who of course understands nothing of it all.

A Hungarian countess, wanting to dissuade unwanted suitors, announces her engagement to a fictional count Zsupán. Things go awry when a count Zsupán shows up, having heard of his engagement in the papers.

Paying a rare visit to her estate, a countess clashes with the man she hired to manage it.

The young musician and composer Josef lives with Beethoven's music copyist in Grinzing. In the evenings, he plays for dances in the Prater, often his own melodies, although he doesn't make much effort to spread them, as they're almost all waltzes, a dance not well-regarded in high society because they're too sweaty. When one evening a lively princess—fresh from the convent—mingles incognito with the Prater crowd and falls in love with the dashing conductor Josef, an entire cultural system of values ​​begins to crumble.

In this three-act operetta by Hungarian composer Emmerich Kálmán, a dashing and mysterious circus performer is hired by a disappointed suitor of Princess Fedora Palinska to pose as a nobleman and marry her. This 1969 performance was produced for West German television.