Emmerich Kálmán (1882-1953)
Emmerich Kálmán was born on 24 October 1882 in Siófok,
on the southern shore of Lake
Balaton, Hungary, the son of a businessman. At the age of ten young Emmerich was sent to
the Gymnasium in Budapest, and it was while he was still a student there that he commenced
lessons in composition at the renowned Budapest Academy of Music, where his contemporaries
included Bartók and Kodaly.
Kálmán had initially set his sights on becoming a concert pianist, but over-assiduous
practice led to the onset of arthritis, and he instead turned his attention to
composition. Among Kálmán's earliest works were a Scherzando for Strings (1903)
and a symphonic poem, Saturnalia (1904), but despite gaining a prize for
composition at the Academy in 1906 he was unsuccessful in attracting the interest of a
publisher. Kálmán is alleged to have confided to colleagues: "If it goes on like
this, I shall write an operetta!"
Kálmán made his début as an operetta composer with Ein Herbstmanöver (An
Autumn Manoeuvre), which Budapest's Lustspieltheater mounted on 22 February 1908. News of
the operetta's success soon reached the management of the Theater an der Wien in Vienna,
and a production was staged there the following year. A string of successes followed,
among them Der Zigeunerprimas (1912), Die Csárdásfürstin (1915), Gräfin
Mariza (1924) and Die Zirkusprinzessin (1926).
Together with his fellow-Hungarian, Franz Lehár, Kálmán was
one of the leading architects of what has come to be termed the 'Silver Age' of Viennese
operetta during the first quarter of the present century. Kálmán's principal
contribution to the genre was the apparent facility with which he fused Viennese
sentimentality with the colourful rhythms and energy of his native Hungary.
Towards the end of the 1930s the composer sought refuge from Hitler's Nazis in the
United States of America, where he remained until after the end of the war. Returning to
Europe he settled with his family in Paris where he died, shortly after his seventy-first
birthday, on 30 October 1953.
