The Merry Widow

Music: Franz Lehar
Choreography: Ronald Hynd
Scenario: Robert Helpmann and Ronald Hynd
Original Book: Victor Leon and Leo Stein
Musical Adaptation: John Lanchbery
Scenic and Costume Design: Roberta Guidi di Bagno
Lighting Design: Randall G. Chiarelli
Assistant to Mr. Hynd: Annette Page
Duration: 2 hours and 30 minutes
Premiere: November 13, 1975; Australian Ballet
Pacific Northwest Ballet Premiere: September 26, 2002

Louise Nadeau and Olivier Wevers in The Merry Widow.
Photo © Rex Tranter

Immortality is often an accident. Franz Lehar was a second choice composer of Die Lustige Witwe, which had a moderate success at its premiere in Vienna on December 30, 1905. Based on a French comedy by Henri Meilhac called L’Attache, the operetta was a precarious investment for its producers for several weeks until the music began to be heard in park concerts and cafes throughout town. They transferred it with a new decor to another theatre at the end of its run. By then everyone in Vienna was humming its tunes and it played to full houses for the next 16 months. By 1907, it had been performed 400 times in Vienna, and productions were offered in the major Austrian cities. Theatres in Berlin and Hamburg, Moscow and Milan soon staged their own versions of what is now considered the quintessential Viennese operetta.

The production that opened at Daly’s Theatre in London in 1907 became The Merry Widow. Comedy was broadened, and robust humor was added in keeping with the British requirements for the popular theatre. On October 21, 1907, a production opened in New York’s New Amsterdam Theatre. Within weeks it had captivated the public, inspiring a surge of Merry Widow paraphernalia in the shape of cartwheel hats, shoes, cigars, corsets, perfumes, cakes, escalopes, and liqueurs. Sales of piano scores, sheet music, and arrangements for every sized instrumental ensemble earned publishers nearly $30 million, while gramophone record sales soared to $40 million. When the era of the long-playing record arrived, the operetta had been recorded 25 times in seven languages.

The operetta was made into a silent film in 1925, with John Gilbert and Mae Murray. When sound arrived, Jeanette Macdonald and Maurice Chevalier graced a production made in 1934. In 1952, Lana Turner and Fernando Lamas were the stars of a remake. No brilliant singers appear to have been required for the cinema, but on the European stages the role of Hanna Glawari attracted the more elevated talents of Kirsten Flagstad and Maria Jeritza.

A ballet version was choreographed by Ruth Page for London Festival Ballet in 1953 with the title Vilia. Ronald Hynd’s adaptation was realized in 1975 at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne, Australia on November 13, with Marilyn Rowe and John Meehan in the principal roles. The Australian Ballet subsequently toured with the ballet to the United States and Great Britain with Margot Fonteyn, where it had enormous success. Later it was mounted for the National Ballet of Canada, the Vienna State Opera Ballet, the Ballet of La Scala, the Royal Danish Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Houston Ballet, The State Ballet of Pretoria South Africa, and Teatro Municipal, Santiago, Chile.

Set in the elegant embassies and cafes of Paris in 1905, the ballet tells of Hanna Glawari, a peasant girl from Pontevedro, an imaginary Balkan kingdom in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A childhood sweetheart of the dashing Count Danilo, who could not marry beneath his station, Hanna became the wife of the wealthiest man in the land and was shortly widowed. Her visit to Paris creates anxiety among the staff of the Ponteverdian Embassy who fear that her vast wealth may be the target of a fortune hunter.

Danilo, who now lives in Paris and has become a playboy and a womanizer, is recruited by the embassy staff to woo the widow and assist in saving the national wealth. When the couple meets, old flames are rekindled. But it is not until a series of diplomatic intrigues are resolved that Danilo is prepared to reform and assume both romantic and fiscal responsibilities.

Notes by Leland Windreich.