Sigmund Romberg

Born in Hungary, Romberg trained as an engineer and joined the Hungarian military. However a career in music was his real ambition, and in 1909 he emigrated to the U.S., on the basis that competition would be less fierce there. From his first American job in a pencil factory, he quickly found work as a café pianist, and subsequently an orchestra conductor. In 1914 he was hired by the Schubert Brothers and within a few years had written hundreds of songs for a score of shows. In the 1920s he had enormous success with a series of operettas, of which the best-known today are The Student Prince, and, with lyrics from Oscar Hammerstein The Desert Song and The New Moon. Romberg wrote for Hollywood in the 1930s, and after a fallow period in the early 1940s returned to Broadway in his first and only collaboration with Dorothy Fields, with whom he had been friends for years. The show was Up in Central Park and it opened in 1945. The show was filmed in 1948 and Fields and Romberg wrote a further song for it. For more information on Sigmund Romberg , visit the Tunesmiths Database : Sigmund Romberg