Franz von Suppé

Biography

Franz von Suppé or Francesco Suppé Demelli (April 18, 1819 – May 21, 1895) was an Austrian composer of light operas who was born in what is now Croatia during the time his father was working in this outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A composer and conductor of the Romantic period, he is notable for his four dozen operettas. Two of Suppé's comic operas – Boccaccio and Donna Juanita – have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but failed to become repertoire works. He compos...

Franz von Suppé or Francesco Suppé Demelli (April 18, 1819 – May 21, 1895) was an Austrian composer of light operas who was born in what is now Croatia during the time his father was working in this outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A composer and conductor of the Romantic period, he is notable for his four dozen operettas.

Two of Suppé's comic operas – Boccaccio and Donna Juanita – have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but failed to become repertoire works. He composed about 30 operettas and 180 farces, ballets, and other stage works. Although the bulk of Suppé's operas have sunk into relative obscurity, the overtures – particularly Dichter und Bauer (Poet and Peasant, 1846) and Leichte Kavallerie (Light Cavalry, 1866) – have survived and some of them have been used in all sorts of soundtracks for movies, cartoons, advertisements, and so on, in addition to being frequently played at symphonic "pops" concerts. Some of Suppé's operas are still regularly performed in Europe; Peter Branscombe, writing in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, characterizes Suppé's song Das ist mein Österreich as "Austria's second national song". Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.