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Thursday, April 21, 2016

The Merry Widow Waltz Is Everywhere

By John Conklin

The MERRY WIDOW waltz is...

...played everywhere...in every culture...in every clime:



...here, played by the man himself, Lehár (taken from a piano roll):



...heard here in a dance hall version from 1928...one can imagine Gatsby and Daisy twirling about in a moonlit garden:



...inevitably, conceived as a ballet:



...here, as it might have been heard in a gilded ballroom on the Titanic (the sinking in 1912 of that "latest marvel of Western technology" has, in retrospect, been seen a potent augury for the "sinking" of Western culture itself two years later, in 1914):



...a lush kaleidoscope from the Lubitsch film:



...sung by the Three Tenors:



...yes, everywhere! A huge international success directly following its premiere in 1905 and forever more:

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