Music: Franz Lehar
Written in: Authored Date:
Background
It is 1995 and in the tiny Balkan Dukedom of Pontevedro panic reigns. Almost all the country's limited resources of capital had found their way into the hands of the old Court Banker, Stefan Glavari. He has done two unforgivable things: firstly, he has married a penniless beauty, young enough to be his daughter; and secondly (8 days later) he has died, leaving her his entire fortune. Now she is on her way to Paris, to live it up a bit, and the Pontevedrian Ambassador, Baron Zeta, has been informed by the Duke of Pontevedro that his head will be on the block unless he prevents the Merry Widow from marrying a foreigner, thereby bankrupting her native land. The day of Anna Glavari's arrival in Paris happens to be the Duke's birthday, so the Ambassador arranges a party to celebrate the occasion, with Anna as Guest of Honour. What no one knows is that Anna had only married the old Banker to spite the man who had broken her heart - a young lover who gave in to his aristocratic family's refusal to allow him to marry the poor mill girl so far below his social station. Bitterly heartbroken by both his family's attitude and by Anna's sudden marriage, the young man has left his homeland to drown his sorrows in a whirlwind of parties, alcohol and the arms of as many young women as he can find.
Act I The Pontevedrian Embassy, Paris
It is the height of summer and Baron Zeta has arranged a lavish ball in a marquee in the Embassy grounds for the birthday celebrations. The party is in progress, and the dramatis personnae are introduced: Zeta's French wife, Valencienne, young, vivacious and flirtatious, previously on the Paris stage - she is on the brink of an affair with her compatriot Camille de Rossillon, who rashly writes the words "I love you" on her fan; Njegus an unconventional First Secretary to the Ambassador; Cascada and St Brioche, impoverished French noblemen anxious to marry money; various key members of Zeta's staff and their discontented wives; and finally Count Danilo, four months at the Embassy, but more often to be found at the nightclub Maxim's than in the office. Zeta feels this is the man who will save the day for Pontevedro, but we soon learn that back in the old country, in their youth, Anna and Danilo had trodden hard on each other's toes. Now, remarks Anna, whenever a man says "I love you" it is her millions he is talking to. Danilo is needled into declaring that he will never use those words. Anna spends the rest of the piece trying to make him do so; and Danilo, not entirely selflessly, promises Zeta that he will preserve her from prowling Parisians. Meanwhile Valencienne has determined that, to keep Camille at arm's length, he should be married off and that Anna would be the perfect match for the romantic Frenchman.
Act II The following day in the garden of Anna's country mansion
Anna throws a party for all the Pontevedrians. Very much in love, but both with deeply wounded feelings, she and Danilo continue to skirmish. Zeta is under fierce pressure from Pontevedro to get the Widow paired off with a compatriot. Valencienne's fan with its compromising message is causing chaos, and she and de Rossillon are all but caught in flagrante in the summerhouse. Njegus saves the day and Anna tries to turn the situation to her own advantage, but the pressure which she puts on Danilo backfires and he storms off to the welcoming arms of the ladies of Maxims. However, the manner of his departure convinces Anna that he is still in love with her.
Act III Later that evening in the garden of Anna's country house
Anna has engaged Njegus to create a replica of Maxim's in the garden and all of her guests have entered into the spirit of the party with great gusto. She has borrowed "the Grisettes" for the evening, and a riotous cabaret is in progress, with Valencienne offering one of her old routines. Danilo is brought back blindfolded from Maxim's and rejoins the party. He is deputed to issue an ultimatum to Anna to marry a Pontevedrian, or see her country ruined. She is longing to marry a Pontevedrian - Danilo - but cannot make him say the forbidden words "I love you". Not even Lehar's most famous waltz tune does the trick.
But don't worry, the new atmosphere brings reconciliation to the satisfaction of all parties - to Anna, to Danilo, even to those still trying to unravel the messages on Valencienne's fan. And as the strains of the glorious waltz music fade away, we discover that universal truth, that women invariably triumph over men!
With thanks to Welsh National Opera. This synopsis may not be reproduced without permission.
Background to the opera
By the turn of the century, the Golden Age of Viennese operetta was at an end. Strauss, Suppe, Millocker - all had written their last. Though their waltzes played on, something was needed to put new bounce into its step.
It was the librettist Stein who in 1905 first spotted the musical potential of L'Attache' d'Ambassade, a 40-year old French comedy by Henri Meilhac, co-librettist of Bizet's Carmen. An innocent intrigue about a young embassy attache in Paris cajoled by his ambassador into marrying a wealthy widow in order to secure her fortune for their impoverished fatherland, L'Attache' opened in Paris in 1861, reached Vienna in 1863 and had chalked up over 100 performances by 1905, when Leon and Stein set about refashioning it for the purposes of operetta.
Paris remained the scene of the action, but by reassigning he embassy staff from Meilhac's bankrupt German duchy to the mythical Balkan state of Pontevedro, the librettists provided their prospective composer with ample opportunities for the colourful national dances beloved by operetta audiences in the cosmopolitan capital of an empire that encompassed not just Germans but Magyars, Poles and Czechs, Italians and Serbs. More importantly, they provided Meilhac's reluctant couple with a shared past - and the still rankling memories of a recent unhappy 'affaire'.
Thus, Anna, the wealthy young widow (her late unlamented husband, the Pontevedrian Court Banker, having apparently misappropriated all the nation's cash), and Danilo, the aristocratic young roue (who can be found more often under the table at Maxim's than behind his desk at the Pontevedrian Embassy), meet not as strangers, but as sometime lovers. But he, previously too proud to wed a commoner, is now too proud to woo a millionairess: though still in love he vows never to speak the words "I love you".
But though their verbal exchanges are restricted to swapping veiled parables of unrequited passion, the lovers are nevertheless drawn inexorably together by the irresistible force of their mutual attraction; Danilo may persist in his stubborn refusal to voice his true feelings and words may fail him, but his steps never falter as, in a series of passionate waltzes, he repeatedly sweeps Anna off her feet, makes her surrender to the music and lets his feet do all the talking.
But if the brilliance of Leon and Stein consisted in finding a plot where the music of the waltz was no mere musical window-dressing but the very stuff and driving force of the drama itself, the genius of Lehar lay in the uniquely erotic power which he brought to operetta, thanks to a rich palette of exotic colours drawn more from Richard than Johann Strauss. There is even something faintly voyeuristic about many of the scenes in The Merry Widow, so seductive are Lehar's harmonies in evoking the heady intoxication of intimate physical contact - whether in the wave of masculine adulation that first sweeps Anna into the heart of Parisian society or in the swooning breathlessness of the Tristanesque love-duet with which the importunate Camille inveigles Valencienne, the Ambassador's "respectable wife", into the summerhouse (sending almost tangible shivers up her spine). Above all in the languorous 3/4 lilt of the famous waltz, where, in a comment attributed to a member of the Austrian Royal household when she saw the first waltzes, "in my day, we left that kind of thing for the bedroom". Small wonder that attempts were made to have the work banned or that Girardi, retired leading man of the Golden Age, irritably dismissed the new genre as "Ibsen dramas with a hop, skip and jump". As for Richard Strauss, though he may have repaid Lehar's lifelong admiration with little but contempt, his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, was much more appreciative: "If only Lehar had set Rosenkavalier to music", Mahler's widow Alma reports him as saying, "then what a masterpiece it would have been!"
And so The Merry Widow waltz ushered in a new age of the "dance operetta" for Vienna, city of Freud's dreams. Significantly though, Lehar was not in fact the librettists' first choice for composer. That had fallen upon Richard Heuberger, whose Der Opernball of 1898 had been the first of the new breed of "intimate" operettas. But Heuberger was fired because of a weak Act I draft and Lehar invited to audition instead. He was given the job after composing the Act II duet Riding in the Park in a single day and playing the result down the telephone to Leon that same evening.
Ironically, it had been Heuberger, some four years earlier, who had rejected Lehar's application for a conductorship with the Vlenna Concert Society on the grounds that he had no feel for the modern waltz. But, to paraphrase the message of The Merry Widow - music speaks louder than words.
Mark Pappenheim - with grateful thanks to Welsh National Opera for permitting the reproduction of this article.