Franz Lehár’s operetta Die lustige Witwe opened at the Theater an der Wien on December 30th, 1905, and stayed open. The show was so immediately and immensely popular that instead of concluding at the end of the season for the customary summer hiatus, it simply kept running: by April 1907 it had been performed 400 times and foreign producers had already begun to mount their own versions. The original German libretto by Victor Léon and Leo Stein was translated into Hungarian, Czech, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, Croatian and Italian and there were several slightly (and some very) different English treatments.
Publication history is a characteristic strength of the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection of the Harvard Theatre Collection, and the Ward Collection includes examples of nearly every permutation of Die lustige Witwe. There are vocal scores in several languages, sheet music arrangements of the whole work and of particular songs and waltzes, potpourris of themes arranged for solo piano. The success of Die lustige Witwe also led to parodies: Der lustiger Witwer, Die lustige Witwe in zweite Ehe, La veuve soyeuse, Moins veuve que joyeuse, Ni veuve ni joyeuse, Courting the Merry Widow, etc. The Evening American lampooned this trend in a 1908 cartoon (this reproduction is taken from the preliminaries of a 1978 Lehár anthology in the Ward Collection).
The Ward Collection contains three sheet music selections drawn from The Merry Widow and the Devil, first performed at New York’s West End Theatre in November 1908 and by this point only loosely related to the Lehár work as several numbers were added with music newly composed by Silvio Hein. One of these pieces of sheet music was enjoyed by a reader of the Boston Sunday American, to whose doorstep a number from the Broadway show was delivered with, or rather within, the December 13, 1908 issue. “The Devil” is arranged for solo voice, with the orchestral accompaniment reduced for piano.
Harvard Library’s Resource Sharing Services located the original newspaper sheet so that we could see the score in situ, before it was cut out and folded. The reader was expected to put in some effort, as the owner of the Ward Collection copy clearly did, carefully snipping along the outer edges and sewing together the newly created spine with fine white thread.
[Thanks to Christina Linklater, Project Music Cataloger, for contributing this post.]