Merry Widow Waltz: A Song History

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The "Merry Widow Waltz" comes from Franz Lehár's operetta Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow), which opened at Vienna's Theater an der Wien on December 30, 1905, with Lehár conducting.[1] Victor Léon and Leo Stein wrote the libretto. They based it on Henri Meilhac's 1861 comedy L'attaché d'ambassade and moved the story to Pontevedro, a made-up Balkan principality. Lehár composed the score over the summer of 1905, after the theater gave up on its first choice of composer, Richard Heuberger.[2] The management had been nervous enough to keep Viennese reporters out of the dress rehearsals, and accounts of the first night differ: one calls the debut lukewarm, another describes a warm audience but mixed reviews.[1][2] The show grew by word of mouth as people began humming its tunes, and within a year it was a hit all over Europe.[1][2]

Black-and-white portrait photograph of the composer Franz Lehár

Bain News Service, portrait of Franz Lehár, photograph, between about 1915 and 1920. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The waltz is the melody of "Lippen schweigen," the third-act duet in which the widow Hanna and Danilo at last voice their feelings, and it became one of the best-known numbers in a score full of catchy tunes.[3] Louis Treumann introduced it at the 1905 premiere. He later died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942.[1]

Henry W. Savage brought the operetta to Broadway with English lyrics by Adrian Ross. It opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre on October 21, 1907, with Donald Brian and Ethel Jackson in the leads, and ran for 416 performances.[4] A craze followed. By the end of 1907 the American production was said to be on track to earn a million dollars, and by 1908 three road companies were touring the country. Women took up the large "Merry Widow hat," which turned up in newspaper cartoons, while sheet music and picture postcards carried the show beyond the theater.[5] More widely, Lehár's biographer Bernard Grun noted Merry Widow shoes, cigars, chocolates and perfumes, along with dance contests for the best Hanna and Danilo.[2]

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Sources

  1. YourClassical (American Public Media), Composers Datebook: "A Lehar premiere in Vienna".
  2. Playbill: "The Rise of The Merry Widow".
  3. Opera Online: "The Merry Widow (Work - Franz Lehár/Leo Stein)".
  4. Internet Broadway Database: "The Merry Widow" (1907).
  5. Marlis Schweitzer, Theatre Survey (Cambridge University Press, 2009): "‘Darn That Merry Widow Hat’: The On- and Offstage Life of a Theatrical Commodity, circa 1907–1908".