Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow): Folk Dance and Viljalied (Vilja Song)

The most successful of all Lehár’s operettas – the most successful of all Viennese operettas next to Strauss’s Die Fledermaus – was, and still is, Die lustige    Witwe    (“The Merry Widow”), which was first performed in Vienna in 1905. Set partly in the Paris embassy of an imaginary, impoverished Balkan state, it skilfully exploits both the sophisticated amusements of the great city and the sentiment associated with the backward way of life in “Pontevedro.”    The most treasured Pontevedran asset is the merry widow herself, Hanna Glawari, who is not only beautiful but also so rich that the loss of her personal fortune through marriage to any but another Pontevedran would sink the the country’s whole economy. Her most popular number, which she sings at a glamorous party in her Parisian residence, is Lehár’s clever and highly attractive idea of what a Pontevedran folk song would sound like: it tells the story of    Vilja, an irresistible wood nymph who allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . . Hanna proves to be similarly irresistible – to the one Pontevedran she fancies – and finally, unlike Vilja, commits herself to him.

The Vilja Song is preceded here, as it is in the operetta, by a kolo, a vigorous dance popular in several Balkan countries, evidently not excluding Pontevedro.