Die lustige Witwe (Merry Widow): Overture

On its first performance in 1905 The Merry Widow had no overture and it survived happily without one for thirty-five years. The overture Lehár finally got round to writing in 1940 could almost be by a different composer. Certainly, with Austria at war and now incorporated into Germany, the times were very different indeed. If Lehár regretted the passing of the passing of Vienna under alien control he could at least console himself with the thought that he was one of Hitler’s favourite composers and that The Merry Widow was one of his favourite works - which is probably why he dedicated the newly written Overture to the Führer. It was a tribute which later - as he began to realise the full horror of Nazi politics and as he and his Jewish wife had to leave Austria to fin refuge in Switzerland - he had ample cause to regret.

Music had changed too during those thirty-five years and, although Lehár was by no means a progressive composer, the harmonic and orchestral treatment he applies to the old Merry Widow material in the new overture he would never even have contemplated in 1905. It is a strange work, a contrapuntal rhapsody on familiar themes from the opera and at the same time a cleverly sustained tease which withholds from the public what it most wanted. The universal favourite, the so-called “Merry Widow Waltz” which finally unites Hanna and Danilo in the last act of the operetta, is there much of the time but in more or less hidden allusions, as on its first appearance on lower strings under a violin solo in the introduction. It never rises to the surface for the full-scale romantic treatment. The composer seems to prefer an earlier, livelier and less sentimental waltz danced and sung by Hanna and Danilo at the end of the first act. Other tunes which emerge more or less intact are Hanna’s “Vilja” ballad, a vigorous discussion of women by the men in the cast and, after an unexpected orchestral crisis, Danilo’s famously charming song in praise of Maxim’s and the congenial feminine company he finds there.