Franz Lehár

Franz Lehár ( ; ; 30 April 1870 – 24 October 1948) was an Austro-Hungarian composer. He is mainly known for his operettas, of which the most successful and best known is The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe). Life and career Lehár was born in the northern part of Komárom, Kingdom of Hungary (now Komárno, Slovakia), the eldest son of Franz Lehar Sr. (1838–1898), 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. He later put an acute accent above the a of his father’s surname Lehar to indicate the pronunciation of the vowel as , in accordance with Hungarian orthography. While his younger brother Anton entered cadet school in Vienna to become a professional officer, Franz studied violin at the Prague Conservatory, where his violin teacher was Antonín Bennewitz, but was advised by Antonín Dvořák to focus on composition. However, the Conservatory’s rules at that time did not allow students to study both performance and composition, and Bennewitz and Lehár senior exerted pressure on Lehár to take his degree in viol