Albert Szirmai

Albert Szirmai (also Albert Sirmay) (2 July 1880 –15 January 1967) was a Hungarian operetta composer. A graduate of the Budapest Academy of Music, studying piano and composition (with Hans Koessler), Szirmai was devoted to creating works for the stage. He wrote music for 12 one-act plays and over 300 songs for the Budapest theater Népszínház-Vígopera, at which he was musical director. When his first operetta, The Yellow Domino, met with success, he decided to continue in the genre; it is due to the works of Szirmai, Emmerich Kálmán, and Victor Jacobi, among others, that the Hungarian operetta gained recognition internationally at the beginning of the 20th century.

Szirmai was born in Budapest. In 1926, he moved to New York and took a post as music director for Chappell Music (a publishing house now owned by Warner Music Group), and was music editor for such Broadway luminaries as Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin. Szirmai made headlines in 1965, when he discovered 100 unpublished songs Porter had written, 1924-1955, in Porter's nine room apartment in the Waldorf Towers shortly after Porter's death. "I would call the material a rich musical heritage," Sirmay told the New York Times. "There is enough material for one or two Broadway musical scores. There are dozens of excellent songs." Though he lived in America for most of his later years and was a good friend of Gershwin, Szirmai eschewed the jazz styles popular at the time; in addition to the folk music of his native Hungary, his music shows the influence of German Romanticism, particularly Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, whom he most admired. He died in New York.