Robert Stolz

Stolz carried Viennese operetta out of the Habsburg twilight and into the age of radio, cinema and the international popular song. The youngest child of a musical family in Graz, he studied at the Vienna Conservatory with Robert Fuchs and later with Humperdinck in Berlin, held conducting posts in Maribor, Salzburg and Brno, and settled at the Theater an der Wien. Operettas, film scores, orchestral pieces and several thousand songs came from his desk, among them Im Prater blüh'n wieder die Bäume and Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time, and he was a distinguished interpreter of Johann Strauss. He emigrated to the United States and returned to Vienna in his later years. He died in 1975. He took over from Artur Bodanzky at the Theater an der Wien in 1907, worked from Berlin after 1925, and in the years before the Anschluss carried Jewish and political refugees across the German-Austrian border in the boot of his car, twenty-one times in all. Interned in Paris as an enemy alien in 1939, he reached New York in 1940, where a Night in Vienna concert at Carnegie Hall led to film commissions and to Academy Award nominations in 1941 and 1945. He was back in Vienna from 1946, wrote nineteen operettas for the Vienna Ice Revue from 1952, and was made an honorary citizen of the city in 1970.