Franz Lehár

Background

Lehár was born in the northern part of Komárom, Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary (now Komárno, Slovakia). The son of a military bandmaster, he showed a marked aptitude for music at an early age.

Education

In 1882 he received a scholarship to the Prague Conservatory and became a pupil of Antonin Bennewitz (violin), Joseph Bohuslav Forster (harmony) and Antonin Dvocrak (composition).

Career

A short interlude as orchestra leader in Barmen-Elberfeld was followed by ten years service in the Austro-Hungarian armed forces as one of their most popular bandmasters. It was during this time that Lehar's first compositions were published: pieces for the violin, songs, marches, waltzes (among them the perennial Gold and Silver in 1899) and the opera Kukuschka (Leipzig, 1896).

His great chance came when Victor Leon, at that time Vienna's foremost librettist, chose him to write the music for his operetta The Tinker. Produced in 1902, it established Lehar as the coming man. Three years later he achieved world fame with The Merry Widow, the work which, thanks to its freshness, imagination, and extraordinary musical score, instituted a new era of Viennese operetta. At the Theater an der Wien it was played 483 times, and it is reputed to have reached up to 60, 000 performances all over the world during the first 50 years of its existence.

In the following 30 years Lehar wrote 19 operettas, among them The Count of Luxemburg (1909), Gypsy Love (1910), Eva (1911), Where the Lark Sings (1918), and Frasquita (1922), which contains the exquisite "Serenade" made famous by Fritz Kreisler. Lehar was over 50 when his partnership with Richard Tauber, Germany's most celebrated tenor, began. Its fruits were such successful works as Paganini (1925), Zarewitsch (1927), Friederike (1928), Land of Smiles (1929), Fair Is the World (1931), and Lehar's last opus, Giuditta, performed in 1934 at the Vienna State Opera. Of the four masters of the later Viennese operetta (Oskar Straus, Leo Fall, and Emerich Kalman being the others) Lehar was the most salient, owing to the inexhaustible wealth of his melodic invention, his rhythmic and harmonic multiformity, and the superiority of his craftsmanship. In addition to Viennese and Hungarian elements Lehar's musical palette contained Parisian, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and even Chinese colors. Although he was blamed for strengthening pseudo-drama at the expense of comedy in his works - thus leading the genre away from the dreams of Jacques Offenbach and Johann Strauss - there is no doubt that he also lifted it to an international significance it never before possessed.

After having lived quietly in retirement in Austria all through World War II, Lehar went to Switzerland in 1946. Two years later he returned to his house at Bad Ischl.

Achievements

• His most successful and best known work is The Merry Widow. There is a street in Vienna named after him. Additionally, several towns in the Netherlands have named streets after him

Works

More photos

• book

  • Lehár: Waltzes
  • Franz Lehar: Immer nur lacheln... Original Operetta Highlights

Religion

Lehár was Roman Catholic, his wife, Sophie (née Paschkis) had been Jewish before her conversion to Catholicism upon marriage.

Politics

Lehár's relationship with the Nazi regime was an uneasy one. He had always used Jewish librettists for his operas. The Nazi regime was aware of the uses of Lehár's music for propaganda purposes.

Connections

Father:

Franz Lehár (senior) (1838–1898)

Mother:

Christine Neubrandt (1849–1906)

Spouse:

Sophie (née Paschkis)

younger brother:

Anton

teacher:

Antonin Bennewitz