PAUL LINCKE  

Paul Lincke (1866–1946) worked as a theatre conductor and music publisher in Berlin around the turn of the century. He spent two years in Paris as musical director of the famous Folies-Bergère, but then returned to Berlin, where he conducted at the Apollo Theatre. A versatile musician, he started with the violin, changed to the bassoon and then finally to the piano. He was the foremost champion of a sort of mixture of pop tune and operetta that became very popular in Germany and elsewhere. It is from such a project that Lincke’s most popular piece is derived: Glühwürmchen-Idyll from Lysistrata (1902), and the march Berliner Luft from the musical Frau Luna (1899). The piece immediately became very popular and Lincke used it again in 1906 in a musical that was itself named Berliner Luft, to exploit the work’s fame. Lincke apparently composed more that 500 works, some of them under the pseudonym of Ted Huggens.