Sigmund Romberg was born in 1887 and died in 1951. Tonight we have songs from The Student Prince, the story of an ill fated love between a prince and a barmaid. We’ll begin with Romberg conducting from a recording he made in 1951, on to Dorothy Kirsten, Gordon Macrae, and Mario Lanza, some of them more than once, but all of the versions are fresh. And for an encore, Dorothy Kirsten and Gordon Macrae will each sing a selection from New Moon.
Romberg himself rated his music as below that of his composer friends Jerome Kern George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers. He felt he was middlebrow, but did defend his music from the critics with the comment no one liked it except the public. But if he was middlebrow, his music finds a permanent place in the hearts of anyone who has ever heard it, and is some of the most enduring anyone wrote in the 20th c.