Franz Lehar, Richard Strauss and Adolf Hitler

I listened to the broadcast of the new Metropolitan Opera production of Lehar's Merry Widow. Lehar's Merry Widow was Hitler's favourite opera. Nebich, such luck. By the time Hitler came to power Lehar was 63 years old, and his operetta, The Merry Widow had its first performance 28 years before, in 1905. It is a charming, gemütlich, work, full of melodies that are easy to sing and whistle. It reflects the happy, prosperous, era of the last years of the reign of Emperor Franz Josef, a golden creative bourgeois dominated age. But the age had a dark underside of poverty, resentment, exclusion, and anger. Hitler was the product of that underside. Lehar and Hitler would not have run into each other, certainly would not have had anything in common, had Hitler not become the most powerful politician of Europe. Lehar basked in the honour and adulation that the German Reich showered on him. He was a man in his twilight years, of course he liked being appreciated. He was a band master before he became a spectacularly successful composer. Band masters are not called upon to be courageous. Lehar did not have the courage to speak up for his persecuted Jewish friends, librettists, singers. He survived Hitler and the Third Reich, died shortly after. Was he full of remorse and regret? Who knows. He was an old man, a relic of a bygone era, a misfit in the post-war Europe. Richard Strauss, another of Hitler's favourites, though possibly as a conductor rather than a composer of operas on decadent subjects by Jewish librettists. He was six years older than Lehar, a much more serious composer. He was also blamed for collaborating with the Nazis and not standing up for his principles. But you can hear his regrets, his remorse in his last works that he wrote in his late seventies and eighties. Some of these reflect a profound sense of sadness and disillusionment. He had contempt for the Nazis but worked with them because, as he said, he hoped to do some good and prevent worse misfortunes.