Waltzes in Manhattan

Franz Lehar, composer of Adolf Hitler's favorite operetta, The Merry Widow, still lives in Vienna. His friends say he cannot get out. He has paid out millions of marks to safeguard his wife, a "non-Aryan." But most of the other men who wrote Vienna's waltzes in better days are now in the U.S. and last week in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall a concert of Viennese music, from Mozart to Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time, testified to their presence.

The concert was a benefit for an organization called Artists in Need, Inc., which helps poor Austrian exiles. Among the conductors who put 65 New York Philharmonikers through a waltzy whirl were Ralph Benatzky (White Horse Inn), Robert Stolz (Two Hearts, Spring Parade in the movies) and a courtesy-Viennese, Jaromir Weinberger, famed Czech polka-&-fugue man (Schwanda der Dudelsackpfeifer, Variations and Fugue on Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree).

For all their soft talk, hand-kissing and coffee-drinking, the "Viennese Masters" (as the concert program called them) work hard. Composer Benatzky, author of 5,000 songs and 88 theater pieces, has an operetta, The Belle of Venice, about ready for production. Composer Weinberger is working on a new opera, Composer Emmerich Kalman has been doing movie music. Composer Stolz has written an operetta with some lyrics, he says, by "Chimmy" Walker. A voluntary "Aryan" exile, he has also done a piece which he is saving for the appropriate occasion: Hitler's funeral march.

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