EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY EUROPE

In Operetta: A Theatrical History, the author Richard Traubner quotes from historian Edward Taylor's The Fall of the Dynasties: 1905 - 1993. "In retrospect we tend to see the carefree social life of prewar Europe as a kind of death waltz on the brink of doom, but to those who took part in it, it was not that at all. People did not throw themselves into a rout of pleasures to forget their worries; they simply joined in the dance to express their sense of well-being and to manifest their solidarity." Traubner goes on to say: "Between 1905 and the 1914 assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo*, people needed no excuse to sing and dance to the music of Franz Lehár and his disciples, Leo Fall, Oscar Straus, Emmerich Kálmán and several others. Viennese operetta then had an internationals vogue and Hanna Glavari set the fashion.

The Merry Widow is often accused of depicting its time as one of great balls, lavish parties, and political intrigue, The Edwardian Era, but to the rest of Europe it was a time of flux. The Hapsburg Empire was in the process of dissolving, There was Marshall law in Moscow and other parts of Russia, and the Czar was more and more under the control of 'The mad monk 'Rasputin, and Russia met defeats in the Russo-Japanese War. The Dreyfus Affair shook France. Richard Strauss's Salome shocked the public but enabled him to build his villa in Garmisch. It was also the age of Einstein and the Wright brothers and a general explosion of scientific thought.

In Vienna, nevertheless, the emperor led a Spartan life. There were no bathrooms in either of his palaces, Schönbrun or The Hofburg, he never read a book and he disliked motor cars and other new inventions.

*Franz Ferdinand was the heir apparent but he had a morganic marriage, and his children were excluded frm the succession leaving no obvious heirs to the Empire.