The year 2005 marks the centenary of the première of The Merry Widow. The most popular operetta ever written, it has since been filmed, recorded, made into a full-length ballet, even an ice show. This famous 1953 recording, featuring internationally renowned singers, a symphony orchestra of the highest quality and a conductor who really understood the idiom, was the first to show the true quality of the work. ‘To praise the performance, the recording … of the opera, as they deserve would exhaust the limited stock of laudatory adjectives in our language. Emmy Loose is exactly right, Nicolai Gedda is a superb Camille, Schwarzkopf sings Hanna so radiantly and exquisitely, and Otto Ackermann conducts with complete understanding and the Philharmonia Orchestra plays like angels for him’ (Alec Robertson, The Gramophone, July 1953).