Franz Lehár’s father was a bandmaster in the Austrian army, and served in many different garrisons in the Austro-Hungarian empire, with his family accompanying him. Franz learnt to play the violin and piano before he could read or write and his mother encouraged him to improvise freely on the piano. By the age of eleven, he had composed his first song and was a member of his uncle’s summer spa orchestra in Bad Ullersdorf in Moravia. When he was twelve years old he entered the Prague Conservatory where he studied violin and theory, and took private lessons in composition from Fibich. He also came into contact with Dvořák, who is reputed to have advised him, ‘Hang up your fiddle, my boy, and write music!’
Called up for military service Lehár played in his father’s military band, sharing a desk with another future composer of operetta, Leo Fall. He was made a bandmaster in 1890, serving first in Losoncz before moving to the naval base of Pola on the Adriatic, where, with an orchestra of over one hundred players at his disposal, he was able to perfect his orchestration technique. Together with his first theatre librettist, the naval officer Felix Falzari, he composed the operetta Kukuška, which was performed with little acclaim in Budapest and Leipzig in 1896. Having resigned from the army in the hope of success Lehár was now obliged to re-enlist, being assigned as bandmaster in Trieste. When his father retired he took over his position in Budapest, before being appointed in 1899 to another regiment based in Vienna. Already active as a composer of marches and dances, he achieved international recognition with the composition of the ‘name waltz’ for Princess Metternich’s ‘Gold and Silver Ball’ in January 1902.
As a result of this success Lehár left the army for a second time, conducting firstly in the Prater in Vienna and then at the Theater an der Wien; but when two of his operettas, Wiener Frauen and Der Rastelbinder, were performed simultaneously at the Theater an der Wien and its rival the Carltheater he was obliged to resign from his conducting post at the former, and decided to pursue a career solely as a composer. After two further operettas failed during 1904, Lehár struck gold with his setting of a libretto originally intended for Heuberger, Die lustige Witwe. First performed at the end of 1905 at the Theater an der Wien this quickly became a huge international success, with numerous productions throughout Europe and North America, and was followed during 1909 and 1910 by the composition of Das Fürstenkind, Der Graf von Luxemburg and Zigeunerliebe, which also achieved international success. As Lehár commented later, ‘I stumbled blindly into writing operetta, without any idea of what I was doing, but this helped me to find my own style,’ and he brought to the world of operetta in these and other works an intensity of feeling and depth of characterisation that it had not previously known.
During World War I Lehár was active as a conductor, but the subsequent dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian empire destroyed the world with which he was familiar. However, his disorientation was relatively short: in 1921 he came into contact with the tenor Richard Tauber, whose voice and consummate stage technique had an immediately positive effect upon him. Between 1925 and 1934 he wrote six operettas, each created especially for Tauber and containing a constant stream of memorable songs, duets and ensembles: Paganini (1925), Der Zarewitsch (1926), Frederica (1928), Das Land des Lächelns (1929), Schön ist die Welt (1931) and Giuditta (1934). The last-named was first performed at the Vienna State Opera (the first operetta to be so honoured) with Tauber and Jarmila Novotná in the leading roles, and the première was relayed by one hundred and twenty radio stations. Giuditta was to be Lehár’s last major work. He had founded his own publishing company in 1935, Glocken Verlag, taking over and managing the publication and performance rights of many of his compositions, and during World War II he remained in Austria; the fact that Die lustige Witwe was a favourite work of Hitler protected him and his wife, who was Jewish, although several of his collaborators, also Jewish, died in concentration camps.
Following the death of his wife in Zürich in 1947, Lehár returned to the summer house in Bad Ischl which he had purchased long ago with the aid of royalties from Die lustige Witwe, and died there in 1948, leaving it to the town of Bad Ischl as a Lehár museum. Lehár made some commercial recordings in Vienna during the late 1930s and early 1940s, conducted radio concerts of his music as well as complete performances of several of his operettas and recorded for Decca after World War II. These recordings provide a first-hand insight into the style of performance which he envisaged for his music, and also demonstrate that he was a more than competent conductor. They well illustrate Lehár’s comment about his intentions as a composer: ‘I want to write music for and around human beings: their hearts and souls, their emotions and passions, their joy and sadness.’
