By Jessica Duchen
June 10, 2024 1:16 pm

The festival’s first-ever staging of this funny operetta is made magical by John Wilson’s conducting and Danielle de Niese as the title diva

“What are you going to do with all those millions, Frau Glawari? Build an opera house?”

The in-jokes come thick and fast in Glyndebourne’s first-ever staging of Franz Lehár’s operetta, The Merry Widow. Everything has been thrown at this snazzy, frothy tunefest; direction by comedy king Cal McCrystal, conducting by the multiple award-winning John Wilson, and utterly glorious designs by Gary McCann, who must have seen the date 1905 and decided to have the most fun one can have with silk and scissors. Oh, the gowns! The hats! And in the title role Danielle de Niese, the chatelaine of Glyndebourne, bravely dons a can-can costume alongside the troupe of Maxim’s high-kicking Grisettes.

Our heroine, Hanna Glawari, is a simple country girl from the fictional Balkan land of Pontevedro; she married money, inherited the lot, and is now the most eligible woman in her country’s Paris embassy – but she only wants Danilo, the man she lost long ago…

The premise is simple, but staging it is a taller order than it sounds, and not just because social mores and humour have changed in the intervening 119 years. It’s more that a light piece needs to be light, and British opera houses sometimes have a funny way of showing it. A London staging a few years back thumped us over the head with Hanna being “common as muck”. At Glyndebourne, the jokes are about financial crashes, tax havens and horseradish.

Inside this very good show, an excellent one is desperately trying to get out. The new English-language version by Stephen Plaice and Marcia Bellamy is occasionally wordy, but great fun. Some gags are a tad overstated; Act I could use tightening up.

But the magic comes from Wilson’s conducting. He really does “get it”: Lehár’s score, played by the London Philharmonic, floats up silky, seductive and sophisticated, the textures transparent and the tempi spot-on, crowned by the ear-worm waltz. And yes, it is “light”.

De Niese brings Hanna irresistible charisma and a bright-glinting voice – and it’s not every diva who could or would do that dancing (with demanding choreography from Carrie-Anne Ingrouille). As her dissolute Danilo, Germán Olvera sings and dances remarkably well, especially after his first entry has him tumbling down a very long staircase.

There are fine supporting performances from Soraya Mafi and Michael McDermott as the illicit lovers Valencienne and Camille, comedy actor Tom Edden as Njegus and Glyndebourne’s super chorus. But it’s the veteran baritone Thomas Allen as Zeta, the ambassador, who seems to be having the time of his life. You could almost wish Hanna would go off with him instead.

It’s not perfect – and there are a few tweaks to be made. But Glyndebourne has here the making of a classic.