Franz Lehar: Die Lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow)
November 2005 Reviewed by: Wes Marshall Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Franz Lehar came of age at a time when the opera world was dominated by Verdi and Wagner. Composers writing for Germanic audiences were expected to be profound, and for Italian, lyrical. Lehar was the wrong combination. Though he wanted to be a serious opera composer, he slummed in the world of operetta in order to keep food on the table. There he soon followed Johann Strauss, Jr. to become one of the world’s most famous operetta proponents.

Die Lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) was his third and most successful stab at operetta. Tuneful to a fault, it’s aimed at pleasing the wealthy audience of Vienna, where it premiered in 1905. It did so by offering lots of rich people behaving stupidly but being rescued by love and fate.

The stars are all nice to look at (for once), especially Ute Gfrerer, a pleasingly zaftig confection. Sadly, she has the most awful caterwaul in her upper range and is the first singer to get any real time on the disc. Stick with the production, however, and you’ll find a number of excellent singers, especially Dagmar Schellenberger, Rodney Gilfry and Herbert Prikopa. Franz Welser-Möst is a natural for this format, and his orchestra plays with assurance.

Shame on those stuffy Swiss for not giving the sets and costumes a big round of applause when the lights go on. This is a magnificent production worthy of the term Grand Opera. It is surely one of the most beautiful productions I’ve had the opportunity to review in quite a while.

The camera work is unobtrusive, and the lighting makes for an overall look that is quite clear. The sound engineers have done a good job at reproducing the orchestra, but the soundstage is flat, even in DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 formats. The singers' perspective changes as they move around the stage, but not naturally, and their sound is always much more distant than that of the orchestra, not at all like the sound in an actual theater.

There are no extras on the DVD, but the packaging is quite luxurious, with a booklet containing a six-page essay.

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