The silent film versions by Michael Curtiz in 1918 and Erich von Stroheim in 1925 were followed by Ernst Lubitsch’s Hollywood musical in 1934, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, while Alfred Hitchcock, in 1943, used the tune of the “Merry Widow Waltz” to creepy effect in Shadow of a Doubt as a leitmotif for the killer. The Merry Widow, however, was an instant hummable triumph, full of reassuringly sentimental charms that have made it an international favorite ever since. Salome offered the shock of the modern in biblical dress (and undress)-it was banned from the Metropolitan Opera after its first performance there in 1907. In December 1905 Richard Strauss’s opera Salome-blasphemous and obscene in its libretto, fiercely dissonant in its music-had its scandalous premiere in Dresden, and Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow ( Die lustige Witwe) was first performed in Vienna. Lily Elsie and Joseph Coyne in the first London production of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, 1907

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