Ronald Hynd trained at the Rambert School, becoming a principal dancer in Ballet Rambert before joining The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in 1954, where he rose through the ranks to principal. As a dancer, Hynd performed all the leading roles in the classical repertoire, most often with the British ballerina Annette Page, to whom he was married for 60 years.

Hynd’s most famous ballet, The Merry Widow, has been performed by 21 of the world’s most prestigious ballet companies since its creation for The Australian Ballet in 1975. It has enchanted audiences in great opera houses across the globe and has been performed on every continent.

Hynd has created many original full-length works including Rosalinda, Papillon, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ludwig II, and Le Diable a Quatre. He has also made his own productions of The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, and Coppélia.

Hynd was Ballet Director at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich from 1970 to 1973, and again from 1984 to 1986. In 1991, he devised and choreographed a special production of Sylvia for ‘Serenade to a Princess’ to celebrate the 30th birthday of Diana, Princess of Wales.

In 2020, Hynd was presented with The Royal Ballet Governors’ Award for services to British Ballet. In 2022, he won the Dance Critics’ Award for lifetime achievement. Hynd was created an Officer of the British Empire in the 2025 Birthday Honours for services to ballet.

Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár was the son of a bandleader. He deferred his aspirations to compose until after he had completed his degree in violin at the Prague Conservatory. Lehár moved to Vienna in 1902 where he launched his career as a composer of operetta and his first and greatest success came in 1905 with The Merry Widow. Many other operettas followed, including The Man with Three Wives, The Count of Luxembourg, Gypsy Love, and The Land of Smiles. In the 1930’s, Lehár and his music became a favorite of Adolf Hitler; his Viennese waltzes were included in propagandistic concerts performed in occupied Paris. Lehár’s wife and many of his librettists were Jewish and while Mrs. Lehár was saved from the concentration camps, Lehár’s other colleagues were not.

John Lanchbery was a composer, conductor and orchestrator. He composed new works for ballet, but his greatest contribution to the ballet repertoire is that he restored old ballets that might have been lost and created new ballets from music from outside the ballet repertoire; he was the first arranger to transform operas into ballets. Lanchbery was born in London, where he began violin lessons and composition at a young age. Soon after completing his musical studies, he was appointed conductor of the Metropolitan Ballet and then of Sadler’s Wells, where he orchestrated his first works for ballet. In 1959, Lanchbery joined the Royal Ballet, where he orchestrated the music for La Fille mal Gardée, La Baydère, and Don Quixote, which he reorchestrated for Rudolph Nureyev. Lanchbery conducted at the Australian ballet from 1972-1977, where he arranged the music for MacMillan’s Mayerling and Hynd’s The Merry Widow. In the late 70’s Lanchbery became Music Director at American Ballet theater, where he conducted and orchestrated works for Natalia Makarova and Nureyev.