Ernesto Lecuona was born in Havana, Cuba, on August 7, 1896. As a boy of eleven he published his first piece of music—an American two step still popular with some Cuban bands. While attending the National Conservatory in Cuba, from which he was graduated in 1911 with a gold medal in piano playing, he earned his living as a pianist in cafés and movie theaters. In 1917 he paid the first of several visits to the United States, at that time making some records and giving a piano recital. He then made concert tours throughout America and Europe playing the piano and conducting semi-classical and popular orchestras. His performances were largely responsible for popularizing in America both the conga and the rumba in the 1920’s. He also made some successful appearances at the Capitol Theater, in New York, where he introduced his own music, including such outstanding successes as Malagueña, Andalucía, and Siboney (the last originally entitled Canto Siboney, which became an American popular-song hit in 1929). These and similar pieces made Lecuona one of the most successful exponents of Latin-American melodies and dance rhythms in the United States. Lecuona has written over five hundred songs, forty operettas, and numerous compositions both for orchestra and for piano solo.
From a piano suite entitled Andalucía come two of Lecuona’s best known instrumental compositions. The first is also called Andalucía, a haunting South American melody set against a compulsive rhythm. It was made into an American popular song in 1955.
Another movement from Andalucía is even more familiar: the Malagueña. Since its publication as a piano solo in 1929, Malagueña has sold annually over a hundred thousand copies of sheet music each year; it has become a favorite of concert pianists; it is also often performed by salon and pop orchestras everywhere in orchestral transcriptions; and it has been adapted into a popular song, “At the Crossroads.” It is in three sections, the first being in the malagueña rhythm dynamically projected in slowing expanding sonorities; a contrast comes in the middle part with a poignant Latin-American melody.
Andalucía, the single movement and not the suite as a whole, has been given a brilliant orchestral dress by Morton Gould who has also orchestrated two outstandingly popular Lecuona songs. One is “La Comparasa,” a picture of a traditional parade during the Carnival season in which Negroes and muleteers play their native instruments and sing their sensual songs. The other is “Gitanerias,” haunting gypsy music.
Franz Lehár
Franz Lehár was born in Komorn, Hungary, on April 30, 1870. His father, a bandmaster, was his first music teacher. When Franz was twelve, he entered the Prague Conservatory where he remained six years specializing in the violin with Bennewitz and theory with Foerster. His studies were completed in 1888, after which he played the violin in the orchestra of the Eberfeld Opera. He subsequently became an assistant bandleader of his father’s ensemble and a director of Austria’s foremost Marine bands. In 1896 he realized his first success as a composer of operettas with Kukuschka, produced in Leipzig. In 1902 he became conductor of the Theater-an-der-Wien, in Vienna, home of operettas. There, in the same year, he had produced Viennese Women (Wiener Frauen). The operetta after that was The Gypsy (Der Rastelbinder), seen in 1902 in one of Vienna’s other theaters. With The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe), seen in 1905, Lehár achieved a triumph of such magnitude that from then on he was one of Austria’s most celebrated operetta composers (and one of the wealthiest) since Johann Strauss II. He wrote about thirty more operettas (three of them in the single year of 1909-1910). The most famous were The Count of Luxembourg (Der Graf von Luxemburg) in 1909; Gypsy Love (Zigeunerliebe) in 1910; Frasquita in 1922; Paganini in 1925; The Tsarevitch (Der Zarewitsch) in 1927; and The Land of Smiles (Das Land des Laechelns) in 1929. During World War II Lehár lived in seclusion at his villa in Bad Ischl, Austria. After the war he became embittered by the widely publicized accusation that he had been pro Nazi, arising no doubt from the well-known fact that The Merry Widow was Hitler’s favorite operetta. What was forgotten in this attack against Lehár was the fact that his wife had been classified by Nazis as non-Aryan and that on one occasion both and he and his wife were subjected by the Gestapo to house arrest. Lehár died in Bad Ischl, Austria, on October 24, 1948. He is one of the few composers to outlive the copyrights of some of his most famous works.
Lehár’s popularity in the early part of this century gave the Viennese operetta a new lease on life at a time when its heyday was believed over. It was through the influence of Lehár’s immense popularity and success that composers like Oscar Straus, Emmerich Kálmán, and Leo Fall began writing their own operettas. Lehár’s best stage works have been described as “dance operettas” because of the emphasis placed on dance music, the waltz specifically. The dance usually becomes the climax, the focal point, of the production. Stan Czech further points out that Lehár’s waltzes are “slower and sweeter than those of Johann Strauss, were definite prototypes of the modern slow waltz, and their Slav atmosphere gave them an exciting and individual character.”
The Count of Luxembourg (Der Graf von Luxemburg)—text by Willner and Robert Bodanzky—was first given in Vienna on November 12, 1909. This operetta opens in an artist’s studio in Paris where René, the impoverished Count of Luxembourg, is offered five hundred thousand francs by Prince Basil if René is willing to marry the singer Angele and let her share his title. The reason for this peculiar arrangement is that the Prince is himself in love with Angele, wants to marry her, but prefers that his wife have a title. After they get married, René and Angele discover they are in love with each other, a fact which eventually the Prince is willing to accept since he is ordered by the Czar to marry a legitimate Countess. As in most Lehár’s operettas, the high musical moment comes with a waltz—the infectious duet of René and Angele, “Bist du’s, lachendes Glueck,” which is also extremely popular in orchestral adaptations. Other appealing numbers are the second act duet, “Lieber Freund, man greift nicht” and the tenor aria, “Maedel klein, Maedel fein.”
Frasquita, produced in Vienna on May 12, 1922, is remembered most often for one of Lehár’s most beautiful vocal numbers, the nostalgic and romantic Frasquita Serenade, “Hab ein blaues Himmelbett.” Fritz Kreisler made a fine transcription for violin and piano, and Sigmund Spaeth provided the melody with American lyrics.
Gypsy Love (Zigeunerliebe), had its world première in Vienna on January 8, 1910. The librettists (Willner and Bodanzky) provided a romantic storybook setting of Rumania, and a romantic central character in the form of the gypsy violinist, Jozsi. Zorika is ineluctably drawn to Jozsi though she is actually betrothed to his half-brother, Jonel. In a dream, she gets a foretaste of what her life would be with one so irresponsible and fickle as a gypsy violinist, with the result that she is more than happy to marry Jonel. The main waltz melody (one of Lehár’s greatest) is “Nur der Liebe macht uns jung” and the most infectious Hungarian tune is Jozsi’s soaring entrance gypsy melody to the accompaniment of his violin, “Ich bin ein Zigeunerkind.”