The musicologist Micaela Baranello, in The Operetta Empire: Music Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna, focuses on the particular theatrical setting of the late Habsburg monarchy to understand how The Merry Widow launched a new “Silver Age” of Viennese operetta, following the “Golden Age” of Johann Strauss Jr. From 1934 to 1943 Lehár also racked up royalties in Nazi Germany, where The Merry Widow was Hitler’s favorite operetta-even as the Jewish tenor Louis Treumann, who had created the lead role of Count Danilo, died at Theresienstadt, and one of the Jewish librettists, Victor Léon, starved to death while hiding in Vienna. The silent film versions by Michael Curtiz in 1918 and Erich von Stroheim in 1925 were followed by Ernst Lubitsch’s Hollywood musical in 1934, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, while Alfred Hitchcock, in 1943, used the tune of the “Merry Widow Waltz” to creepy effect in Shadow of a Doubt as a leitmotif for the killer.

The Merry Widow, however, was an instant hummable triumph, full of reassuringly sentimental charms that have made it an international favorite ever since. Salome offered the shock of the modern in biblical dress (and undress)-it was banned from the Metropolitan Opera after its first performance there in 1907. In December 1905 Richard Strauss’s opera Salome-blasphemous and obscene in its libretto, fiercely dissonant in its music-had its scandalous premiere in Dresden, and Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow ( Die lustige Witwe) was first performed in Vienna.

Lily Elsie and Joseph Coyne in the first London production of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, 1907

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