The daughter of an operetta legend visited Slovakia! This is how Yvonne Kálmán (85) celebrated her jubilee in Košice
The daughter of an operetta legend visited Košice. Yvonne Kálmán (85), the last living descendant of the world-famous music composer Emmerich Kálmán, celebrated her 85th birthday in the metropolis of the East.
At the respectable jubilee, she remembered the painful journey from Europe to America, when they had to, as a Jewish family, at the beginning of the 2nd St. war escape from the Nazis, while her father was personally offered Adolf Hitler himself. The patroness and ambassador of the legendary composer’s music received as a gift a performance of her father’s opera at the State Theater in Košice. She compared it to an American Broadway performance.
Despite your respectable age, you still travel the world. Yvonne Kálmán (85) came from the USA to Košice to open the new theater season of the Košice State Theater opera in mid-September. The first performance was dedicated to Ms. Yvonne, and as a gift she received a live performance of the operetta The Duchess of Chicago, written by her father. “It was a fantastic adaptation, enjoyed by young and old alike. My father composed what people wanted to hear. This is also the reason why we still like his works to this day. I am very proud of this production and I would like it to travel all over Europe, it was as if they were playing on Broadway,” Mrs. Yvonne praised the Košice theater actors.
The lover of operettas and theater was supposed to come to Slovakia in May this year to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the National Theater in Košice. However, her journey was interrupted by the war that broke out just beyond the Slovak border in Ukraine. As she mentioned, her family had to flee from the horrors of war once, she did not want to experience it a second time. Her father, Emmerich Kálmán, came from a Jewish family. According to Yvonne, her father had a very good intuition that saved his family more than once. When the war was approaching, the Kálmán family left their residence in Austria for Switzerland.