Gold and Silver Waltz

Franz Lehár, (1870 – 1948), born in Komárom, Hungary, was the leading composer of operetta in the twentieth century, and responsible for giving the genre renewed vitality. He wrote some 30 operettas, the most famous and enduring of which is The Merry Widow, which has achieved worldwide popularity.

Lehár’s greatest musical gift was that of being able to fashion memorable melodies. Yet he was also extremely technically accomplished in harmony and orchestration, which only served to enhance his melodic gifts. He often used the waltz as the centerpiece of an operetta.

Despite his extremely accessible and popular musical idiom, he was well-versed in the music of his contemporaries, notably Puccini, Richard Strauss and Debussy.
Lehár came from a Central European musical family: his father was for 40 years a military bandmaster and composer of dances and marches, while his uncle was music director in Sternberg, where the young Lehár was sent to play violin in the town orchestra under his uncle’s baton.

He studied at the Prague Conservatory and was encouraged by Czech composer Antonín Dvorák to follow a musical career. Lehár began as a theatre violinist in the region of the Rhineland, before being called up for military service where he played under his father. In the 1890s he held musical appointments in the military before eventually moving to Vienna in 1902.

Once in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire and musical capital of Europe, Lehár’s career as an outstanding composer of Austro-German operetta flourished.
Lehár’s success continued in the 1920s with a valuable association with the tenor Richard Tauber, starting in Salzburg in 1921. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Lehár began to be involved with film versions of several of his operettas.

Franz Lehár: Gold and Silver Waltz, Op.79
Wiener Philharmoniker Orchestra
John Eliot Gardiner, Conductor

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