Lehar Liberated

The little old man in a pink Tyrolean shirt played the piano with trembling hands. When the two Allied war correspondents swayed to his lilting Merry Widow Waltz, tears came to the old man's eyes. "Then the world has not forgotten me," he said.

The pianist was 75-year-old Franz Lehar, the world's greatest living composer of operetta music. His first brush with the Nazis came when he refused to leave his "non-Aryan" wife. After a second arrest, he moved to the Austrian town of Bad Ischl. Army G.I.s found him there last week. The portly oldster spoke of the future: "Music will come again . . . I shall write . . . about the struggle of peoples for freedom. There are many things in my head and tomorrow I start to work."

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