Emmerich Imre Kalman

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Emmerich Kalman Life

He showed musical talent at an early age and began training as a pianist, but he had to abandon these studies on account of chronic neuritis.

In 1900 he joined Koessler's composition class at the Budapest Academy of Music, where for a time he was a fellow student of Bartok and Kodaly.

He also pursued law studies, but not to completion.

From 1904 to 1908 he served as music critic for the daily Pesti naplo, also presenting himself as a composer of "serious" music.

In 1907 he received the Franz Josef Prize of Budapest for his works, and this enabled him to visit Bayreuth.

However, the extraordinary popularity of his humorous cabaret songs in the same year pushed him in the direction of light music and prompted his first operetta, Tatarjaras (The gay hussars, 1908).

This met with enormous success throughout Europe and the USA before World War I; in particular, it was very well received in Vienna, the capital of operetta, and this led him to settle there.

Kalman's years in Vienna were his most productive ones, and he lived there until the Nazi takever of Austria (1938) and subsequent banning of his operettas.

His Viennese operettas are of a high musical quality; moreover, their librettos were carefully chosen, sometimes after years of searching by the composer, to appeal to contemporary taste (as a result the texts normally have to be extensively modified for revival).

The unusually high standard of the music can be attributed to Kalman's having undergone athorough training under Koessler.

Kalman's music happily combines the best features of the Viennese operetta style with Hungarian elements - not those that Bartok and Kodaly drew from indigenous folk music, but those of the post-Lisztian "Hungarian style".

He chose his librettos to have a Hungarian subject, or else a sub-plot with opportunities for music in this manner.

In Die Herzogin von Chicago (1928) he experimented with jazz, but his greatest works are those permeated by the flavors of Hungary and the Viennese waltz.

He was an excellent orchestrator, taking Tchaikovsky as his model.

His main contribution to operetta as a form was to prune away the irrelevancies of "dance operetta" and give a more important place to the chorus instead.

In their construction and craftsmanship the thoroughly rounded finales of some of his works stand comparison with those of certain operas.

Kalman moved to Paris in 1939 and then, on the German occupation ofthe city, to the USA.

He retained his Hungarian nationality until 1942, becoming an American citizen only when the Hungarian government aligneditself definitively with Hitler.

Kalman later returned to Paris where he died on October 30, 1953.

His posthumous operetta Arizona Lady wasgiven its final form by his son Charles Emmerich Kalman (b. Vienna, 17 Nov. 1929), himself the composer of several finely written and enjoyable lightpieces and musicals.