When The Merry Widow opened in Vienna on New Year's Eve 1905, the world was given an "operetta" which launched a century of musical plays and, more than any other of its predecessors, gave rise to the modern musical. Performed countless times (it had already played more than ten thousand performances in its first five years of existence) in dozens of languages in theatres across the world, it belongs to that very small and select body of works of which it can be claimed that, at any given time, someone is performing it somewhere. But its success was far from instantaneous and its production something that had been carefully planned and anxiously awaited for a number of years.

Its composer – Franz Lehár – was already thirty five and moderately successful when he approached the managers of the Theater an der Wien with the operetta. Hungarian by birth, he had spent most of his life in a military environment. His father was an army bandmaster and Franz joined him – as well as various uncles – in what amounted to a family business. But Franz's talents far outstripped the musical requirements of even the Imperial Army. A first-rate violinist, he began composing at an early age and gained some recognition in Vienna, both as a performer and with his dance music. His abilities assured him promotion and he had attained the rank of Lieutenant by his twenties. He was also extremely ambitious and was determined to concentrate full-time on composition – despite his mother's objections. An early success was his operetta Kukuschka which was premiered in Leipzig in 1896. "Now you'll see I'm right and you'll have to agree that this is what I'm destined to do”, he wrote to his mother. She was less impressed. "He's earned fifty one gulden in royalties from Kukuschka– which wouldn't have been bad, if he hadn't spent three times that living it up when he was rehearsing it. This is what he calls 'the life of an artist." Franz went back to Hungary and to the army for another five years, but the lure of the stage was too great. "I can no longer serve His Imperial Majesty with all that my duty requires." He resigned his commission and headed for Vienna.

Vienna, at the turn of the last century, was the capital of a vast empire embracing literally dozens of languages, cultures and traditions. As such, it was a place of contradictions. Rapidly expanding - like every other metropolis – it clung to old ideas of what it meant to be Viennese. Similarly, a rigid caste system applied while the very cosmopolitan qualities of the burgeoning city and its many contributing ethnic groups made for social and cultural mobility to an extraordinary degree. It was - at once – progressive and reactionary, "fast" and sedate, internationalist and isolationist. It embraced fantastic wealth and grotesque poverty, extraordinary privilege and conditions of near slavery. Religion – practised to an almost superstitious degree – still held enormous sway but other creeds – particularly the new sciences connected with the body, the mind and the general business of living – were beginning to steal the march. It was the city of Johann Strauss and Alban Berg, of Nestroy and Schnitzler, Catholicism and Freud.

Vienna, which clung to the old, also loved the shock of the new and Lehár arrived in the city with the reputation of being the "next great thing". He had already created songs and dances which the pleasure-loving Viennese had turned into hits, but he understood that the real path to recognition and enduring success lay in writing operettas. He knew that a good operetta needs a first-class libretto - "The music's just the sauce, it's the book that's the lobster" – and he sought out the two acknowledged masters of the form – Victor Leon and Leo Stein to bring his plans to fruition. Bringing with him sketches of another work, he effectively auditioned for Leon who realised that Lehár was a force to be reckoned with. All three were eager for a success, but all three had equally a greater ambition: that of reviving – literally breathing new life into – the somewhat moribund form of the operetta.

The Viennese operetta has its origins in a variety of forms and entertainments, some going back into the sixteenth century. The Viennese public had always relished entertainment involving both songs and dialogues and while increasingly the French and English schools used the mixed medium for comical and satirical purposes, the Viennese still considered that these singing plays were capable of dealing with serious and sentimental subjects. The middle years of the nineteenth century, particularly, had produced an overwhelming variety of operettas, culminating in Die Fledermaus, but recent years had seen a decline. Plots were becoming increasingly far-fetched and preposterous, with story lines relegated to second-place beneath "novelty" numbers. Worse still, no really worthy successor to Johann Strauss had emerged since his retirement in the 1890s and the run of new composers seemed content to come up with imitations of his work. Music – both "serious" and "entertaining" – was moving on and operetta needed to catch up, if it was to survive.

Surprisingly, then, Stein offered a fifty-year old libretto which he had been trying - unsuccessfully - to place for some years. Based on a French text by Henri Meilhac, it was a light-hearted story of "goings-on" in a third division embassy. Stein could see its potential, and, considerably revised, it took the shape of the present Merry Widow. Meihlac's embassy had represented a twopenny-halfpenny German state in Paris but, with Austro-German relations about to reach an all-time low, it was considered that the potential for comedy was somewhat inhibited. Stein then hit on the idea of making the "Fatherland" a small Balkan state – part of the vast Habsburg Empire. Pontevedro – which was openly acknowledged to be Montenegro – was founded, and its motley crew of ambassadors, embassy wives and diplomats posted to Paris.

As the operetta went into rehearsal, rumours began to circulate. The directors of the theatre were apparently opposed to the piece. "That isn't music!" one of them is supposed to have pronounced when the composer "played through" for them, and several leading artists were engaged only to "give back the part" after a few days' rehearsal. When the premiere was finally announced it was postponed and the eventual performance took place, it was whispered, only with the generous financial support of the composer himself, the directors having refused to pay for new props. The Foreign News for that New Year's Day was able to report that "the new operetta was received with the greatest conceivable enthusiasm" but Lehαr later begged to differ. "It didn't really take in Vienna at first and we only managed forty or fifty performances in the first season. But then it went to Frankfurt and Berlin – and in 1907 to London, where it was simply sensational. And it was only then, really, that Vienna decided it was a hit."

Vienna's misgivings can be explained by a couple of factors. On the one side, the Pontevedrian/Montenegro element proved to be more problematical than was first thought (Bernard Shaw encountered exactly the same problem with Arms and the Man when it was played in Vienna). Montenegro's political situation was precarious and its survival in question, so jokes about its dependency on the Glawari millions were considered to be in particularly poor taste. The Montenegrans also objected to being represented by Baron Zeta and his staff and particular offence was created by the depiction of Count Danilo as a "boozer and serial skirt-chaser". In the sensitive climate of the times (midway between the Balkan Wars and the assassination at Sarajevo), the whole joke was considered rather "off'.

More unsettling, however, was the suggestion that the work was improper, even indecent. Awash with the eroticism that currently characterised Vienna's literature, fashion, art – even its plumbing – it drew disapproval for its frank treatment of sex and its apparent indifference to the sanctity of marriage. The play begins with extra-marital affaires going on right, left and centre and never settles down to any particularly positive view of matrimony. Marriage is seen as a social and political arrangement, a financial transaction in which it would be absurd to consider that love plays a part.

This was all very well in the plays of Ibsen and Schnitzler and Shaw, but most definitely not the stuff of operetta where, until now, marriage had always been sacrosanct. Of course people flirted in operetta, even had liaisons, but things were never allowed to get too serious and the denouement always showed the characters seeing the error of their ways and rejuvenating their marriage vows. In The Merry Widow, the passions are real. There's disappointment and rejection, as well as a "happy end" and, with typically Viennese irony, this whole affirmation of love and life is only made possible by a death – the offstage death of a nearly anonymous man whom nobody seems to have cared about or loved.

The Merry Widow is a joyous work, a carnival of the senses in which the pleasure principle holds dominion over everything else. Equally, it doesn't shirk from the idea that all of it comes at a price and that one day, it may all have to end. And that's what gives it a particular edge, absent in the vast majority of everything that preceded it. All of its characters are "real" and the whole is permeated with that same sense of "atmosphere" that characterises Chekov. Everyone's "grown up", for the first time on the musical stage and that, together with simply one of the best scores ever written for the stage, is what makes it, perhaps, the first great music theatre piece of the twentieth century.

Michael McCaffery
Director