ABSTRACT
Public interest in Viennese comic opera had declined to so low an ebb in the early years of the twentieth century that Henry W. Savage watched the inordinate success of The Merry Widow in Vienna and Berlin and London for two years before risking an American production of it, even though he had obtained the rights many months before. There was, after all, no reason to be sure that this piece with a score by an unknown young Hungarian named Franz Lehár would succeed with a public that had recently spurned so established a master as Johann Strauss. Savage had seen The Merry Widow in Hamburg and Vienna, and had been enchanted by what he called its “essence of youthfulness”; but perhaps it would look and sound different in English, on the other side of the Atlantic.
