Music: 80 Years in Waltz Time

For most people, the mere mention of a Viennese operetta conjures up a waltz of post-Johann Strauss composers—Franz Lehar (The Merry Widow), Oskar Straus (The Chocolate Soldier), Emmerich Kalman (Countess Maritza). But beside their names belongs another: Robert Stolz. In his long career, Stolz has written almost as many operettas as the other three combined. Now 82. Stolz is the grand old man of operetta, the sole survivor of the golden age of popular Viennese music (1910-25). At Austria’s open-air amphitheater on Lake Constance last week, Old Composer Stolz was still at work. Tall and gaunt, he mounted the podium and led the orchestra into a performance of Trauminsel (Isle of Dreams). It was his 43rd full-length operetta, and it was pure Viennese delight.

Heady as Wine. The enormous stage (40,000 sq. yds.) supported such assorted distractions as Aztec temples, adobe huts, palm-tree jungles and a fishing fleet with speckled sails that bobbed in a harbor set at stage left. Dancers and singers, 700 strong, roamed about, some of them equipped with flaring torches. Concealed beneath fishermen’s nets, the 120-man Vienna Symphony whipped out the music everyone had come to hear—a froth of billowy, bubbly Viennese tunes, as light and heady as the Nussberger wine that flowed before the performance. Through it all, the tenor sang of love:

I’ve fallen in love for the thousandth

time

With a girl who is beautiful when she

dances or drinks wine

In the light of the sun or in moon shine,

More beautiful than any other girl who

ever was mine.

After 160 melodious minutes, the old man on the podium turned to acknowledge the gusty applause. The locale of Trauminsel may have been Mexico and the sets Utopian, but no one who had ever heard a Viennese waltz could mistake the theme—a simple case, as Stolz himself put it in the title of his most famous operetta, of Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time.

Fifth & Best. Stolz’s headlong career in three-quarter time has yielded, in addition to his operettas, the music for 99 films, eleven ice shows, and more than 2,000 songs. It all began in Graz, where Stolz picked up the rudiments of conducting at the local conservatory. Appointed assistant conductor of the Stadttheater at Brno when he was 23, he promptly grew a beard to 1) make himself look older, 2) confuse his creditors, and 3) camouflage himself from the first of his five wives—to say nothing of the several other girls he was leaving behind. Stolz was bitten by the composing bug while he was conductor of Vienna’s Theater-an-der-Wien, wrote some of his first real hits while serving as an army clerk in World War I. Among them: Lang, lang ist’s her (700 performances), Madel küss mich (750). Sperrsechserl (a phenomenal 2,600 performances beginning in 1919).

A refugee from Hitler’s Germany, Stolz spent the war years as a composer of screen scores for Hollywood. In 1956 he returned to live in Vienna, where he is honored as the last practitioner of a once popular art. His most ardent fan remains a pretty Viennese to whom he was introduced in Paris during the war as Yvonne (“Einzi”) Ulrich. In Reno, Einzi became his fifth wife. “Like Beethoven’s and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth,” says Stolz with satisfaction, “Einzi is my best.”