Biography
Oscar Straus (also credited as Oscar Strauss or Oskar Strauss) was an Austrian composer of operettas, film scores and songs. Born in Vienna, he studied music in Berlin under Max Bruch and worked as a theatre conductor and cabaret composer before returning to Vienna to write operettas.
His best-known operettas include Ein Walzertraum (1907) and Der tapfere Soldat (1908; known in English as The Chocolate Soldier). He composed film scores for Ernst Lubitsch's The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) and One Hour with You (1932), as well as La Ronde (1950). Following the Nazi Anschluss he fled to Paris, where he became a French citizen, and later to Hollywood; after the Second World War he returned to Europe and settled in Bad Ischl, where he died in 1954.
