Composer of the Month
George Hall looks at the life and music of a composer who brought both huge popularity and a new respect to the world of operetta
George Hall on the hugely successful early-20thcentury operetta composer, Franz Lehár
In a document he published under the title Bekenntnis (‘Confession’) in 1947, Franz Lehár asserted the artistic policy that had guided his musical career. Aware that many people regarded operetta not as an artform but simply as entertainment, he ‘formed the resolve to create real people, and to depict them in such colours that they might actually have lived among us. They were to experience love and suffering as we do. Naturally, I had to express this deeper intimacy in the music. I had, without realising it, to employ operatic means whenever the plot demanded it.’ This philosophy is brilliantly put to use in one particular masterpiece of the genre that has ensured Lehár his place in the music history books, but he was no one-trick wonder.
The son of an itinerant military bandmaster in the Austro-hungarian army, Lehár was born in the Hungarian town of Komárom (now in Slovakia) on 30 April 1870. As a child he was a promising violinist, and it was as a student of the instrument that he entered the Prague Conservatoire at the age of 12. Though he never formally studied composition, he seems to have had a few private lessons from Zden k Fibich and his early efforts were encouraged by Dvo ák. But it was as a violinist in a theatre orchestra at Barmenelberfeld that he found his first regular employment in 1888. He was soon called up for military service, though, thereafter spending periods first as a string player and then following in his father’s footsteps as a military bandmaster in various towns in the Austro-hungarian Empire.
Along the way, hoping to establish himself as a composer, he wrote the opera Kuku ka – his third attempt at the genre but the first to reach the stage – whose limited success in Leipzig in
1896 proved insufficient to allow him to put military service behind him. The turning-point came in 1902, when he produced the hugely successful waltz
Gold and Silver for a Viennese society ball and subsequently started work as a conductor at the Theater an der Wien – then famous for its operettas. It was there that his first completed work in the genre
‘I resolved to depict people in such colours that they might actually have lived among us’
was produced in 1902: Der Klavierstimmer (‘The Piano Tuner’) was quickly followed by Der Rastelbinder (‘The Tinker’) at the rival Carltheater. Both won more success than two further operettas in 1904: Der Göttergatte (‘The Divine Husband’) and Die Juxheirat (‘The Mock Marriage’). But it would be with his next work that, at the age of 35, he would hit the operetta jackpot.
The managers of the Theater an der Wien had a libretto on their hands by the team of Victor Léon and Leo Stein, based on an old French boulevard comedy, L’attaché d’ambassade (‘The Embassy Attaché’) by Henri Meilhac.
One of Léon’s previous collaborators, the Austrian composer Richard Heuberger, was initially entrusted with the task of setting it; but after working on several numbers he relinquished the project. It was Emil Steininger, secretary to the