|
Lehàr
was born in 1870 in Hungary.
Being born into a musical home (his
father was a military
bandmaster and composer), Franz learned to
play the violin and piano before he could read or write. His
mother
encouraged free improvisation on the piano, and by the
age of eleven, Franz had composed his first
lied. He then
attended the conservatory of Prague for six years.
In 1888, Franz began his military service in the band of the
infantry regiment conducted by his father and in 1899 he was
transferred to Vienna as a bandmaster. In 1902, he
gave up the
military for good and received the position of musical director
at Vienna's Theater an der Wien. There he
met Viktor Leon, a noted librettist and one of the most
important and successful personalities of the Viennese operetta
scene.
Already
a
well-known character around Vienna, Lehàr announced his new
work to be produced for the Theater an der Wien in 1905 as Die
Lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow). The libretto was written by
Viktor Leon and Leo Stein after Henri Meilhac's comedy Der
Gesellschaftsattache. The operetta was an instant success
among the public and continued until 1907, celebrating 400
performances.
After the success of The Merry Widow, Franz
no longer
needed to worry about composing
for a living.
Royalties made him
a rich man and he soon
purchased a summer home in Bad Ischl, the
playground of
the wealthy. And it was in Bad Ischl that Franz
met Sophie Meth, the daughter of a Viennese carpet dealer and
already married. In 1906, they began a love affair that ended
with Sophie's eventual divorce from her husband and subsequent
marriage to Lehàr in 1921.
Lehàr continued to write operettas although none
achieved the
same success as The Merry Widow. In 1921, Lehàr became a
friend of famed tenor Richard Tauber whose interpretation of Lehàr's
work attracted the composer
as well as the public. During the
remainder of the 1920s, Lehàr wrote for Tauber's voice in the
operettas Paganini, Der Zrewitsch (The
Czar) and Das Land des Lachelns (The Land of
Smiles).
In 1933, Lehàr composed Giudetta, a
full fledged comic
opera, which became Lehàr's final work. His wife Sophie died in
1947 and Franz returned to Bad Ischl to give his villa to the
city on the condition that they turn it into a Lehàr museum.
Franz Lehàr died in 1948. A monument dedicated to the composer
was created in Bad Ischl in 1958, and the theater in town
is
named after him.
Where his contemporaries presented
farcical social types, Lehàr
sought greater realism and individualism. "I want to write
music for and around human beings: their hearts and
souls, their
emotions and passions, their
joy and sadness”, he had
expressed.
"The man in the street may love The Merry Widow,"
observed Ernest Newman, "but the musician, in addition to
loving it, admires and wonders at it, so fresh and varied is the
melodic invention in this work, so skillful, for all their
economy, the harmonisation and the
scoring."
Great
tunes were less frequent in later works, and
lightheartedness
was to give way to a more "serious"
tone. But The Merry Widow’s melodic genius is Franz Lehàr's
permanent Romantic
legacy to the musical world. |
