Buried: Bad Ischl cemetery, Bad Ischl, Austria.įranz Lehár was an Austro-Hungarian composer. The diverse perspectives that your students bring to opera make the art form infinitely richer, and we hope that your students will experience opera as a space where their confidence can grow and their curiosity can flourish. These materials can be used in classrooms and/or via remote-learning platforms, and they can be mixed and matched to suit your students’ individual academic needs.Ībove all, this guide is intended to help students to explore The Merry Widow through their own experiences and ideas. On the following pages, you’ll find an array of materials designed to encourage critical thinking, deepen background knowledge, and empower students to engage with The Merry Widow’s story, music, and themes. Designed to complement existing classroom curricula in music, the humanities, STEM fields, and the arts, these guides will help young viewers confidently engage with opera whether or not they have prior experience with the art form. The Metropolitan Opera Educator Guides offer a creative, interdisciplinary introduction to opera. Yet above all, The Merry Widow is meant to be enjoyed, and this guide aims to help students come away from it with a sense of joy-and a sense of appreciation for the work’s clever comedy, tender romance, and enduring charm. By engaging with Lehár’s operetta as a socio-historical document, students may find a deeper understanding of contemporary works of music, literature, and art that they know. The following pages include a selection of both primary and secondary sources that will serve as a road map to this 19th-century world. As Hanna dances her way through the halls of the Pontevedrian embassy, students may enjoy exploring the broader socio-political landscape in which a woman like Hanna would have lived. More than simply serving up laughs, Lehár’s work unveils many of the social and legal challenges that women have faced for centuries. This guide invites students to examine the world of The Merry Widow through Hanna’s eyes. And she’s strong, smart, and has grace in spades, ably emerging from her fellow Pontevedrians’ madcap schemes with her fortune, her independence, and her heart still very much intact. Wily, resourceful, and savvy enough to surmount both romantic mishaps and diplomatic entanglements, Hanna is a woman unwilling to let societal expectations dampen her joie-de-vivre. Yet in a broader sense, too, Hanna occupies a sphere few women in the 19th century would have had the opportunity to enter: that of financial and social independence. In director Susan Stroman's hands, The Merry Widow is also a story of self-discovery, as its title heroine endeavors to make sense of her changing social status. A woman raised in the Pontevedrian countryside and now comfortably ensconced in the richest echelons of Parisian society, Hanna has learned to navigate a country and culture not her own. Based on a French play from the mid-19th century, The Merry Widow is one of the most successful romances ever written for the operatic stage, a delightful concoction of elegant romance, screwball comedy, and biting social critique, all wrapped up in infinitely hummable melodies and unforgettable dance tunes. What’s a girl to do? Such is the conundrum facing Hanna Glawari, the “merry widow” at the heart of Franz Lehár’s effervescent operetta. And your old boyfriend just appeared out of nowhere. The Pontevedrian ambassador in Paris wants to be your matchmaker. Your wealthy husband just died, leaving you piles of money.
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