Franz Lehár

In 1947, Lehár conducted the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich in a series of 78-rpm recordings for English Decca (released in the U.S. by London Records) of overtures and waltzes from his operettas. The recordings had remarkable sound for their time because they were made using Decca's Full Frequency Range Recording process, one of the first commercial high fidelity techniques. These recordings were later issued on LP (in 1969 on Decca eclipse ECM 2012 and reprocessed stereo on ECS 2012) and CD. A compilation of his recordings has been released by Naxos Records.

A 1942 Vienna broadcast of his operetta Paganini conducted by the composer has survived, starring soprano, Esther Réthy and tenor, Karl Friedrich (de). A 1942 Berlin radio production of Zigeunerliebe with Herbert Ernst Groh, conducted by Lehár, also survives.

The Nazi regime was aware of the uses of Lehár's music for propaganda purposes: concerts of his music were given in occupied Paris in 1941. Even so, Lehár's influence was limited: it is said that he tried personally to secure Hitler's guarantee of the safety of one of his librettists, Fritz Löhner-Beda, but he was not able to prevent the murder of Beda in Auschwitz-III.

He was elected an honorary citizen of Sopron in 1940.

Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a set of discs recording the 1939 Saarbrucken concert of Lehár's works by German State Transmitter Saarbrucken conducted by Franz Lehár himself was discovered in East German state archives. This was released on CDs by Cpo-Musikproduktion in 2000.

In 1938 Mrs. Lehár was given the status of "Ehrenarierin" (honorary Aryan by marriage). Nonetheless, attempts were made at least once to have her deported.

Between 1925 and 1934 he wrote six operettas specifically for Tauber's voice. By 1935 he decided to form his own publishing house, Glocken-Verlag (Publishing House of the Bells), to maximize his personal control over performance rights to his works.

Lehár was also associated with the operatic tenor Richard Tauber, who sang in many of his operettas, beginning with a revival of his 1910 operetta Zigeunerliebe (de) in 1920 and then Frasquita (de) in 1922, in which Lehár once again found a suitable post-war style. Lehár made a brief appearance in the 1930 film adaptation The Land of Smiles starring Tauber.

After graduation in 1888 he joined his father's band in Vienna, as assistant bandmaster. Two years later he became bandmaster at Losoncz, East Slovakia, making him the youngest bandmaster in the Austro-Hungarian Army at that time, but he left the army and joined the navy. With the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine he was first Kapellmeister at Pola from 1894 to 1896, resigning in the latter year when his first operetta, Kukuschka (later reworked as Tatjana in 1906), premiered at the Wiener Volksoper. It was only a middling success and Lehár eventually rejoined the army, with service in the garrisons at Trieste, Budapest (1898) and finally Vienna from 1899 to 1902. In 1902 he became conductor at the historic Vienna Theater an der Wien, where his operetta Wiener Frauen was performed in November of that year.

Franz Lehár was born on April 30, 1870 in Komárom, Austria-Hungary as Ferencz Lehár. He was married to Sophie Paschkis.

He was the eldest son of Franz Lehár (senior) (1838-1888), an Austrian bandmaster in the Infantry Regiment No. 50 of the Austro-Hungarian Army and Christine Neubrandt (1849-1906), a Hungarian woman from a family of German descent. He grew up speaking only Hungarian until the age of 12. Later he put a diacritic above the "a" of his father's name "Lehar" to indicate the long vowel in Hungarian phonology.