Csárdás (Zigeunerliebe)

Zigeunerliebe opened at the Carltheater in Vienna on 8 January 1910, three years after Die lustige Witwe had made Lehár rich. A. M. Willner and Robert Bodanzky wrote a libretto in which most of the action is a dream: a Romanian landowner's daughter, on the eve of her wedding, imagines the life she would have running off with a Gypsy violinist, and wakes in time to choose otherwise. Lehár called it a romantic operetta and wrote it closer to opera than to Viennese comedy. He later reworked it in Hungarian, as Garabonciás diák.