Franz Lehár

Franz Lehár was an Austro-Hungarian composer and Broadway contributor born in the northern part of Komárom, Kingdom of Hungary, now Komárno, Slovakia. The eldest son of Franz Lehár Sr., an Austrian bandmaster in Infantry Regiment No. 50 of the Austro-Hungarian Army, and Christine Neubrandt, a Hungarian woman of German descent, he grew up speaking only Hungarian until the age of twelve. He later added an acute accent to his father's surname Lehar to reflect the Hungarian orthographic pronunciation of the vowel as /aː/.

Lehár studied violin at the Prague Conservatory under Antonín Bennewitz, though Antonín Dvořák advised him to pursue composition. The Conservatory's rules at the time prohibited students from studying both performance and composition simultaneously, and pressure from Bennewitz and his father led Lehár to complete his violin degree against his own wishes. Apart from a small number of private lessons with Zdeněk Fibich, he developed his compositional skills independently. Following his graduation in 1888, he joined his father's band in Vienna as assistant bandmaster. He subsequently became bandmaster at Losonc, today Lučenec in Slovakia, making him the youngest bandmaster in the Austro-Hungarian Army at that time. He later left the army for the navy, serving as Kapellmeister at Pola, present-day Pula, from 1894 to 1896. His first opera, Kukuschka, premiered in Leipzig in 1896 and achieved only moderate success; it was later reworked as Tatjana in 1906. Lehár eventually returned to army service, stationed in Trieste, Budapest in 1898, and Vienna from 1899 to 1902. In 1902 he became conductor at the Vienna Theater an der Wien, where his operetta Wiener Frauen was performed in November of that year.

Lehár is most widely recognized for his operettas, the most celebrated of which is The Merry Widow, known in German as Die lustige Witwe. Beyond operettas, his output included sonatas, symphonic poems, marches, and waltzes, among them Gold und Silber, composed for Princess Pauline von Metternich's Gold and Silver Ball in January 1902. Individual songs from his operettas became standards, notably Vilja from The Merry Widow and You Are My Heart's Delight, originally Dein ist mein ganzes Herz, from The Land of Smiles. His most ambitious work, Giuditta, composed in 1934, is considered closer to opera than operetta and contains the aria Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiß.

A significant professional relationship developed between Lehár and the operatic tenor Richard Tauber, beginning with a revival of Lehár's 1910 operetta Zigeunerliebe in 1920, followed by Frasquita in 1922. Between 1925 and 1934, Lehár composed six operettas specifically for Tauber's voice. Lehár also made a brief appearance in the 1930 film adaptation of The Land of Smiles, in which Tauber starred. In 1935, Lehár established his own publishing house, Glocken-Verlag, to maintain direct control over performance rights to his works.

His Broadway credits as composer and book writer include Frederika, Alone at Last, the musical Eva, Charlot Revue, and the musical The Count of Luxembourg, among other productions.

Lehár's relationship with the Nazi regime was complicated. His wife Sophie, née Paschkis, had been Jewish before converting to Catholicism upon their marriage, which generated hostility toward both of them and toward his work. Hitler was a personal admirer of Lehár's music, and after Joseph Goebbels intervened on Lehár's behalf, hostility toward him diminished across Germany. In 1938, Sophie Lehár was granted the status of Ehrenarierin, meaning honorary Aryan by marriage, though attempts were made at least once to have her deported. Lehár had consistently worked with Jewish librettists and was part of Vienna's culturally Jewish milieu. He reportedly attempted personally to secure Hitler's guarantee of safety for his librettist Fritz Löhner-Beda, but was unable to prevent Beda's murder at Auschwitz-III. He also tried to prevent the arrest of Louis Treumann, the first performer to play Danilo in The Merry Widow, but Treumann and his wife Stefanie were sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp on 28 July 1942. Stefanie died there in September of that year and Louis died on 5 March 1943. On 12 January 1939 and 30 April 1940, Lehár received awards from Hitler in Berlin and Vienna, including the Goethe Medal. In 1940 he was also elected an honorary citizen of Sopron.

Among his recording activities, Deutsche Grammophon issued twelve extracts from his operetta Der Mann mit den drei Frauen in 1908, with Lehár conducting. In 1929 and 1934 he conducted recordings of The Land of Smiles and Giuditta for Odeon Records, featuring Tauber, Vera Schwarz, and Jarmila Novotná. In 1947, he conducted the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich in a series of 78-rpm recordings for English Decca, produced using Decca's Full Frequency Range Recording process. These recordings were later reissued on LP and CD. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a recording of a 1939 Saarbrücken concert of Lehár's works, conducted by the composer himself, was discovered in East German state archives and released on CD by Classic Produktion Osnabrück in 2000.

Asteroid 85317 Lehár, discovered by German astronomer Freimut Börngen in 1995, was named in his memory, with the official naming citation published by the Minor Planet Center on 23 May 2005. Streets in Vienna, several Dutch cities including The Hague and Eindhoven, as well as Sarajevo, Pula, and Prague bear his name. Lehár died in 1948 at the age of 78 in Bad Ischl, near Salzburg, where he was buried. His younger brother Anton subsequently administered his estate and worked to promote his music.