Die lustige Witwe

First performed at the Theater an der Wien on 30 December 1905, to a libretto by Victor Léon and Leo Stein after Henri Meilhac's comedy L'attaché d'ambassade. The theatre had little faith in it: the budget was cut, sets and costumes were reused, and the management is said to have offered Lehár money to withdraw the score. It ran for more than four hundred performances in Vienna, then travelled round the world, generating a wave of merchandise — hats, corsets, cocktails — and fixing the pattern of the silver-age Viennese operetta for the next twenty years.