THE MERRY WIDOW

Director: Jan Ježek
Conductor: František Babický
Choirmaster: Martin Veselý
Choreography: 
Assistant of the director: Alena Žaloudková
Musical training: Maxim Biriucov, Tatiana Drybas, Elena Nagyová

What happens, when the head representatives of an impoverished state Pontevedro try, at any cost, to marry their compatriotic woman, a rich widow of a French banker, to a man also from Pontevedro, so that her inheritance could stay in the country?
The authors of the libretto, Victor Léon and Leo Stein, adapted a comedy by Henri Meilhac (co-author of Bizet's Carmen), L'attache d´Ambassade in The Merry Widow. They offered the completed libretto for setting to music to the famous operetta composer of that time, Richard Heuberger. He refused it, however, and that is why the authors addressed then thirty-five years old and still unknown Franz Lehár, who liked the story. The premiere of the operetta, which took place in Vienna on 30th December 1905, aroused a sensation.
The Merry Widow has become Lehár´s first international success, and it remains a masterpiece of the operetta genre up to this day. It is full of beautiful melodies, which haven´t lost anything of their inventiveness and lightness. Compared to all older operettas by even such masters as Suppe, Johann Strauss or Millöcker, Lehár never stops to amaze by the exquisiteness, with which he musically expressed each situation, each character, and its way of acting, even the smallest detail of the plot. He proved in The Merry Widow, that operetta can keep the firmest artistic standards.