The Merry Widow – Live in HD (Blu-ray) – Met Opera

The great Renée Fleming stars as the beguiling femme fatale who captivates all Paris in Lehár’s enchanting operetta, seen in a new staging by Broadway virtuoso director and choreographer Susan Stroman (The Producers, Oklahoma!, Contact).

Stroman and her design team have created an art-nouveau setting that climaxes with singing and dancing grisettes at the legendary Maxim’s. Nathan Gunn co-stars as Danilo with Kelli O’Hara as Valencienne and Alek Shrader as Camille. Andrew Davis conducts.

The Merry Widow
Lehár’s captivating romantic comedy was the biggest success of the composer’s career and, along with Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, represents the most enduringly popular example of the operetta genre. Set in Paris, the story centers on Hanna Glawari, a fabulously wealthy young widow from a fictional Eastern European country and the attempts of its ambassador to find her a new husband in order to keep her fortune in the country and save it from bankruptcy. Mixed in with this are Hanna’s unexpected reunion with a former admirer and the flirtation of the ambassador’s wife with a young Frenchman. The plentiful opportunities for a wide range of romantic and humorous stage magic are obvious, particularly within the operetta format of musical numbers interspersed with spoken dialogue. Premiere: Theater an der Wien, Vienna, 1905.

Composer
Franz Lehár (1870–1948)

Setting
The Merry Widow takes place amid the vibrant artistic, diplomatic, and social worlds of Paris in the early 20th century and in the expatriate community of Pontevedro, a fictional Balkan country that bears some resemblance to Montenegro.