Franz Lehár
‘I resolved to depict people in such colours that they might actually have lived among us’
In a document he published under the title Bekenntnis (‘Confession’) in 1947, Franz Lehár asserted the artistic policy that had guided his musical career. Aware that many people regarded operetta not as an artform but simply as entertainment, he ‘formed the resolve to create real people, and to depict them in such colours that they might actually have lived among us. They were to experience love and suffering as we do. Naturally, I had to express this deeper intimacy in the music. I had, without realising it, to employ operatic means whenever the plot demanded it.’ This philosophy is brilliantly put to use in one particular masterpiece of the genre that has ensured Lehár his place in the music history books, but he was no one-trick wonder.
The son of an itinerant military bandmaster in the Austro-Hungarian army, Lehár
