Word: lehar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. Herbert Stothart, 64, top-ranking composer of M-G-M cinemusical scores (Rose Marie, May time); of a heart ailment; in Los Angeles. A onetime collaborator with Franz Lehar, Rudolph Friml and George Gershwin, Stothart won the 1939 Academy Award for his sprightly, hard-to-forget score for The Wizard...
Died. Donald Brian, 73, onetime Broadway musicomedy star (the original Prince Danilo in the 1907 Broadway production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow); in Great Neck...
Adolf Hitler had proposed some tinkering with The Merry Widow too. He used to see it as often as three times in a month, but he wanted Lehar to "modernize" it. Hitler's admiration cooled, and later Lehar was put under house arrest in Vienna because he had refused to abandon his wife, a "non-Aryan." At war's end, the composer fared hardly better with the Russians. When his wife Sophie told Red army soldiers that her husband's papers and manuscripts were priceless, they snorted "Capitalist!" and destroyed...
Last year, in the luxurious hotel in Zurich where they had gone to live, Sophie Lehar died. At first the broken and ailing Franz spent his days and nights sitting motionless in a chair in his room. Last month, when he was given a blood transfusion at his Bad Ischl home near Salzburg, word spread that he had died. Said Franz: "Hardly ever before was there a man whom the press was so eager to eliminate." But his strength was indeed ebbing and, one day this week, at 78, he followed Sophie...
Died. Franz Lehar, 78, operetta composer; of cancer and complications; in Bad Ischl, Austria (see Music...