The Merry Widow
Met Opera Live
‘Even today, at 75, the waltz from The Merry Widow sends me into a fit of rage,’ wrote Richard Strauss to his close collaborator Clemens Krauss in 1940. In a brilliant piece in his book Essays and Diversions Robin Holloway discusses why that waltz, and indeed the whole of Lehar’s masterpiece infuriated Strauss so much, and mainly concludes that Strauss was jealous of the man who could write the ‘deathless’ tunes of The Merry Widow. Five years before, Strauss had complained ‘to think that one must get to be 70 years old to discover that one’s best gift is for kitsch!’But that only shows that there is kitsch and kitsch.
The worse kind is that which takes itself seriously, claiming to be expressing truths about the Human Condition when it is merely titillating: Rosenkavalier.
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