George Lessner

George Lessner was born on 15 December 1904 in Budapest (Hungary). He showed musical talent at an early age and reportedly began composing at the age of seven. Some of his early compositions were performed in Budapest and Vienna while he was still a child. Lessner studied at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, where his teachers included Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Ernő Dohnányi and Albert Siklós. In 1921, at the age of sixteen, he composed the opera "The Queen's Maid" with a libretto by Béla Balázs. According to a contemporary biographical account, the opera was also performed in Europe.

In 1926 George Lessner emigrated to the United States, where he continued his career as a composer of classical music and popular songs. In 1935 he moved to Hollywood and began working for the film industry. During the following years he composed music for several motion pictures, including films starring Deanna Durbin, and for animated cartoons produced by Walter Lantz. Among these was the Oswald the Rabbit cartoon "The Dumb Cluck" (1937). Nevertheless, Lessner continued to compose concert music. On 30 December 1939 his orchestral tone poem "Sunrise", written in 1938, was broadcast by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra under Fabien Sevitzky on the CBS radio network.

In 1940 Lessner moved to New York City. Around this time he received a commission from NBC to compose the radio opera "The Nightingale and the Rose", based on a story by Oscar Wilde with a libretto by Nicholas Bela. The one-act opera received its premiere on 25 April 1942 in a nationwide NBC broadcast. Another important performance took place on 10 January 1944, when his orchestral work "A Merry Overture" was performed at Carnegie Hall in New York by the National Orchestral Association under Leon Barzin. Besides his orchestral compositions, Lessner wrote chamber music, songs, piano pieces and stage works. Among his compositions from this period were the ballet-pantomime "Snowflakes" and the Hungarian dance "Paprika", which was published in a version for piano in 1943.

Lessner was also active on Broadway. He provided the orchestrations for two musicals by Robert Stolz, Night of Love (1941) and Mr. Strauss Goes to Boston (1945). In 1948 he composed the music for the Broadway musical "Sleepy Hollow", based on the famous story by Washington Irving. 

During the 1950s George Lessner increasingly worked for television. Among other projects he composed music for The Billy Rose Show and for the children's television series "Bobo the Hobo and His Traveling Troupe". 

George Lessner died on 12 May 1997 in New Rochelle, New York (USA).

In my possession is the autograph manuscript of the Poem for violin and piano by George Lessner. The work was composed in 1943 and my manuscript has an inscription to Margaret Pardee (1920-2016), a violinist and former Juilliard teacher. The dedication was signed on 10 February 1944. George Lessner started also different arrangements of the work for viola and orchestra, for string quartet and also for violin and orchestra. But all these arrangements were not finished and from the version for violin and orchestra only the first 26 bars exist in orchestral score. I am not aware of any performance of the work.

Most of the original manuscripts by George Lessner are archived at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.