A century ago the world went Merry Widow mad. Decades before today's marketing of musicals on an industrial scale, Franz Lehár's 1905 Viennese operetta about the rekindling of romance between former lovers separated by money had legendary runs in Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris, New York and just about every centre where a theatre was to be hired. On one Saturday in Buenos Aires in 1907 it played in five theatres in as many languages. In its first 60 years, The Merry Widow garnered half a million performances, while Hollywood revamped it in glamorous cinematic treatments. The classic version, directed by Ernst Lubitsch in 1934 with Jeanette Macdonald and Maurice Chevalier singing lyrics by Lorenz Hart, is far superior to the 1952 Technicolor remake with Lana Turner and Fernando Lamas. All make significant alterations to the original plot and cut a good deal of the score. Ingmar Bergman, who directed it on stage, wanted to film it again in the 1970s, but he and his intended star, Barbra Streisand, couldn't agree on the screenplay.
In its original form, The Merry Widow stands at the pinnacle of the silver age of Viennese operetta. The genre itself was created in Paris where, in 1855, composer Jacques Offenbach established a tiny theatre, the Bouffes-Parisiens, offering small, witty musical pieces with spoken dialogue, eventually graduating to larger venues with full-length shows, such as Orpheus in the Underworld (1858) and La Vie Parisienne (1866), that were chic, satirical and sometimes scandalous. His success led the Austrian waltz king Johann Strauss II to try his hand at something similar; dance rhythms permeate his wry look at the low morals of high society in Die Fledermaus (1874), though he would later inject more romantic elements and local colour into the impoverished-aristocrat-meets-Gypsy-girl story of The Gypsy Baron (1885). Meanwhile, in London, Offenbach's example was not lost on WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, whose sequence of works provided the foundation of another distinctive tradition.Lehár took over where Strauss left off, his first operettas coming shortly after the older composer's death in 1899. By now operetta's satirical and scandalous elements had dropped away, leaving a concentration on romance, pure and simple - a vein Lehár continued to mine into the 1930s in a sequence of works, some of which are surprisingly serious, even tragic. But he never found a text as good as the one provided for him by Victor Léon and Leo Stein for The Merry Widow, itself borrowed from a play by Henri Meilhac, one of Offenbach's collaborators.Lehár died in 1948, and operetta, as a living form, did not long survive him. The focus of the popular musical theatre moved to the burgeoning American musical, whose vital scores began to sweep the globe in exactly the way The Merry Widow had done 50 years before. These days, outside the specialist operetta theatres on the continent, Lehár's masterpiece has migrated to the opera house, where its unusually sophisticated score fits nicely. All of the UK's major companies have presented it, and now John Copley is staging a new version for English National Opera, with Amanda Roocroft and John Graham-Hall as the sparring Hanna Glawari and Count Danilo.The two former lovers meet many years after he broke off their relationship. Hanna is now a rich widow, and the minor Pontevedrin diplomat Danilo has been ordered to woo her once again to stop her fortune falling into foreign hands - a potential disaster for his tiny country. Too proud to be thought a fortune hunter, he is as reluctant as she is, and the two circle each other warily - almost literally, as much of their relationship is charted on the dance floor - until their mutual attraction becomes irresistible.In a genre that has a long history but relatively few permanent successes, what is it that has kept The Merry Widow fresh and alive after more than a century? For Copley, it's "because it has such a fantastic score. But the main thing is the relationship between Hanna and Danilo. She's a simple girl, a farmer's daughter, who's married a billionaire and become super-rich. But all this money puts them both in a difficult position."The score has its own special character. Written in the dying days of the Hapsburg Empire, The Merry Widow is a product of the cultural diversity of central and eastern Europe. The overall location may be belle époque Paris, but the first act is set in the legation of the fictional country of Pontevedro (a thinly disguised Montenegro), and the second in Hanna's palatial Parisian home, where the national costumes and folk music of her homeland are fully on display.Lehár spent his childhood in various towns where his father was stationed as a military bandmaster. His main formal musical education was at the Prague Conservatory, after which he began his own career as an itinerant military musician, which ended in 1902 after his attempts to break through as a composer in Vienna began to reap rewards.Lehár's years as a military bandmaster gave him an intimate knowledge of the capabilities of woodwind and brass, which he deployed to great effect. The Merry Widow's frequent woodwind solos are deliciously written, the brass used with subtlety, never bombast. But it's perhaps the string writing that is the chief orchestral glory of the piece, divided into multiple parts and taking the violins soaring up to the heights, as in Brahms or even Janácek's music. Unlike many of his operetta colleagues, Lehár had a complete technical armoury. As with Hollywood film scores or Broadway musicals, it was standard practice for Viennese operetta composers to hand their songs over to a professional orchestrator. Arnold Schoenberg earned his living for a decade in this way. But Lehár orchestrated every bar of his works with loving expertise.He also expanded the genre's emotional range, most tellingly in the big duet for the traditional second couple, usually consigned to lightweight sweet nothings. Lehár's second-act duet for Camille and Valencienne contains instead a heady erotic charge, its delicately perfumed orchestral writing and swooning harmonies making it the operetta equivalent to the Tristan love duet. It's easy to hear what a close ear Lehár kept on his major contemporaries such as Debussy, Richard Strauss and Puccini - the last of whom relished his operettas.But above all, it's the central relationship - between the wealthy Hanna and the unwilling diplomat and general wastrel Danilo- that holds a lasting fascination. Neither are in the first flush of youth, and their renewed courtship contains a hint of genuine bitterness in its suspicion and game-playing. "It's raillery", says Copley, "like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. Though you know they're going to get together, it's ambiguous until the last 10 minutes."The famous waltz in which they finally reunite is perfectly integrated into the Viennese operetta scheme, a belated and poignant mutual acceptance in three-four time, to a melody that drips with nostalgia, regret, even loss. It's a fitting climax to the most sophisticated of all Viennese operettas.· The Merry Widow is in rep at the London Coliseum until May 30. Box office: 0870 145 0200
