For more than a half-century, Franz Lehár enchanted Viennese audiences with some 30 operettas. Born in Komárno, Kingdom of Hungary (now Slovakia), in 1870, Lehár was the son of an Austro-Hungarian Army bandmaster. After getting his degree in violin performance at the Prague Conservatory (where Dvořák encouraged him to compose), Lehár joined his father’s band in Vienna as assistant bandmaster. His debut opera, Kukuška, premiered in Leipzig in 1896, yet he didn’t embrace the genre as his true calling until 1902’s Wiener Frauen. Following Johann Strauss II and other Viennese-style operetta composers, Lehár emphasized waltzes in his work, alongside innovative additions such as traditional Eastern European folk music and Parisian cancan. His most famous waltz appears in his best-known work, The Merry Widow (1905). Other Lehár standards include “Vilja” from The Merry Widow and “You Are My Heart’s Delight” from The Land of Smiles (1929). He capped his career with the ambitious operatic musical comedy Giuditta in 1934, his last new work prior to his death in 1948.