Ábrahám, Pál (EN)

Ábrahám Pál, Paul, *2 November 1892 Apatin (then Hungary, now Serbia), †6 May 1960 Hamburg, Hungarian operetta composer. In 1910–16, he studied at the Academy of Music in Budapest, where later he was a professor of theory and history of music. In 1920, his Cello Concerto and Orchestral Serenade were performed in Budapest, and in 1922, his String Quartet was performed during the Salzburg Festival. From 1927 he was a conductor at the operetta theatre in Budapest; at this time he began to write his first operettas. On 21 February 1930 in Budapest (23 December 1930 Vienna) the premiere of Ábrahám’s most popular operetta took place, Victoria and Her Hussar. Among Ábrahám’s subsequent operettas, The Flower of Hawaii and Ball at the Savoy, which had their world premieres in Germany, were particularly popular. In 1933 Ábrahám left Germany; he stayed in Vienna until 1938, and then returned to Budapest for a short time. In 1939, the composer moved to Paris. The money he received for filming The Flower of Hawaii enabled him to travel to Cuba and then to New York, where Ball at the Savoy was performed on Broadway. Ábrahám’s compositional output includes several operettas. In 1945 he became mentally ill. In 1956 he returned to Europe. He died in a hospital for the mentally ill in Hamburg.

In 1952/53, the GDR film studio reissued the film version of The Flower of Hawaii, and the P. Ábraham Society was founded in Hamburg. Ábrahám was one of the main representatives of operetta in the 1930s and 1940s. In his work, he continued the traditions of the Hungarian operetta by I. Kálmán; combined features of Hungarian folk music with fashionable dance rhythms (Boston, foxtrot) and elements of jazz music.

Literature: O. Schneidereit Operettenbuch, Berlin 1964; B. Grun Kulturgeschichte der Operette, Berlin 1967, Polish edition Dzieje operetki, translated by A. Kurecka, Krakow 1974.