Word: lehar
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...Lehar's father, a regimental bandmaster in the old imperial Austro-Hungarian Army, wanted him to be a musician, too. So he had worked hard at the Prague Conservatory, studying the violin. When old Johannes Brahms came to Prague, young Franz had fired up his courage, submitted two of his own youthful sonatas to the great composer. After glancing through them, Brahms told him: "Hang your fiddle on the wall and become a composer...
When success first came, Lehar was 35 -broad, bluff and charming. But he had had to fight for his laurels. The first rehearsals of The Merry Widow in Vienna seemed so bad that he had to plead with the director, "Let us at least open." Its Vienna success was instantaneous, and soon Paris, Berlin, London and New York were whistling the famous waltz. But the world never gave Lehar the serious reputation he thought he deserved. He wrote: "Most people are inclined to regard operettas as something inferior-entertaining no doubt, and full of easily remembered tunes-but distinctly lower...
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...