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 | The Genius of Franz Lehár Posted by Rodney Rawlings on 2/14, 7:42am | |
| This item (click on the title above), now on an archived page of the defunct Daily Objectivist site, contains a bit of material that also appears in my SoloHQ article “Evaluating Music--and Franz Lehár.” But there is enough different to justify my posting it here. Franz Lehár is my favorite composer--and may have been Ayn Rand’s favorite operetta composer. Objectivist author Matthew Johnson, in The Intellectual Activist (February 2003), contends that Rand’s favorite in that genre was Emmerich Kálmán. This may be true, but the evidence equally points to Lehár. Perhaps she liked them both the same. I too love Kálmán, but to me Lehár’s best melodies and orchestration seem just a bit more expert and sophisticated than his. Here is an opinion I encountered just yesterday from Ayn Rand’s favorite composer of all, as quoted in Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (Bertensson and Leyda, 1956, p. 137): [Rachmaninoff writes in a 1907 letter:] To tell the truth: they write well nowadays, but they wrote even better in the past. I also saw an operetta, [Lehár’s] Die lustige Witwe. Though written now, it too is a work of genius. I laughed like a fool. Absolutely wonderful. … Such is my spiritual food. | ||
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