Farewell, Yvonne Kálmán (1937-2025)

Yvonne Kálmán, youngest daughter of the celebrated Austro-Hungarian composer Emmerich Kálmán, passed away peacefully on Friday, 7 November 2025, at 6:17 p.m. Pacific Standard Time in Los Angeles, surrounded by friends in a hospital in Santa Monica. She was 88 years old.

Born in Vienna into a life of splendor and privilege, as the youngest of Kálmán’s three children, Yvonne had to flee with her family when the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938 because both her parents were Jewish. After Paris and Hollywood, she spent her early years in New York, where her father worked with people such as Lorenz Hart on new projects like Miss Underground, a musical comedy about the Resistance in France.

After the war, she returned with her parents – who had divorced and re-married while in the United States – to Europe, where she witnessed first-hand how her father struggled to restart his career. She attended many opening nights, including that of his last posthumous operetta, Arizona Lady, a cowboy piece in the then-novel style of Oklahoma about a Hungarian immigrant in America who runs a farm and won’t let the locals tell her how to lead her life. It’s a depiction of an immigrant experience with a happy end.

Yvonne fell in love with the tenor buffo in the Bern production of Arizona Lady, and briefly married him – which brought her into even closer contact with the operetta world.

For many decades she stood in the shadow of her glamorous mother, Vera Kálmán, who promoted the works of her husband after he died in late 1953. Nonetheless, Yvonne helped get productions underway as she lived in places such as Sydney or Los Angeles, where stagings of Csárdásfürstin or Gräfin Mariza were put on thanks to her efforts.

After her mother passed away in 1999, Yvonne and her brother Charles were the sole representatives of the family, sister Elisabeth having been tragically killed in Paris.

While Charles occasionally gave interviews in his Munich penthouse to share his immense musical knowledge about his father – with whom he had collaborated numerous times as a young man, especially in the USA and shortly afterwards in Germany and France – Yvonne was a world traveler and continued her mother’s jet-set lifestyle, combining it with countless encounters with theater people she dined and wined in a truly remarkable way. She always advocated for her father’s works and tried to get less well-known titles performed.

One place where nearly all Kálmán operettas have been staged over the years is the Ohio Light Opera Festival in Wooster, where Yvonne was a regular guest. One of the festival’s most important sponsors was Yvonne’s close friend Michael Miller of the Operetta Archives in Los Angeles.

That archive also preserved various handwritten Kálmán scores that had come to the United States in the 1940s with the family in exile. In addition, Michael Miller and the Operetta Archives have released many of the Ohio performances on DVD, as well as various important historic recordings on CD, helping to make Kálmán’s music widely accessible to new generations. It was only recently that Yvonne and the children of the late Charles Kálmán sold these scores plus various other personal items to the Budapest Operetta Theater, because the Hungarian State sees Kálmán’s oeuvre as an important part of the national heritage.

One of the people who negotiated the sale of these items told ORCA, that they were collected from three locations by experts from the National Theater Institute and Museum. The Vienna Theater Museum also handed over the items it had in its possession, primarily furnitures. Charles Kálmán’s son Robert handed over all of his father’s personal photos, posters, etc. The most valuable items, are the manuscripts, obviously. Today, there is a small exhibition of these objects at the Budapest Operetta Theater, and before that, there was one at the theater in Kaposvár when Csardasfürstin was performed there. Yvonne visited both exhibitions herself, the one in Budapest this summer, when she went to see the new Circus Princess production.

She spent the last decades of her life in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she ran a lavish hotel which she built with her late husband Helmuth Klumpp, who had been an executive director at Lufthansa.

Beyond the world of operetta, Yvonne Kálmán was deeply committed to animal welfare. In Puerto Vallarta, she founded the Yvonneka Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to rescuing and caring for abandoned dogs, providing medical treatment, shelter, and adoption opportunities. Under her guidance, the foundation became one of the region’s leading voices for compassion and humane treatment of animals — a cause as close to her heart as music itself. She decided to leave her wealth to that Foundation.

She travelled extensively till the very end, attended many opening nights of Kálmán shows, even after the copyright ran out in 2024. She hosted lavish birthday parties in Budapest, together with the afore mentioned Budapest Operetta Theater, and invited friends from all over the world to attend multiple-day celebrations; I had the great privilege to attend various such festivities.

For her cultural achievements, she was awarded the Pro Cultura Hungarica medal by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture in 2017, on her 80th birthday.

Many of her extensive group of queer friends criticized her for being close with the Orbán family, when she described the wife of the Prime Minister in social media posts as “my new very best friend” because she helped promote her father’s works and brought Victor Orbán along to operetta events. I recall standing right next to him myself at a reception after a Kálmán gala at the Budapest Operetta Theater, which was a chilling experience if you see Orbán’s politics critically, not just his anti-LGBT legislations. The Orbán government was instrumental in getting the above described Kálmán items to Budapest. And the same right-wing government stimulates various international tours to bring Hungarian operetta music, Kálmán in particular, to all corners of the world. Which can be seen as problematic considering the ideological message inherent and the particular “nationalistic” way Kálmán’s music is presented in this context. (Read more about this here.)

According to sources, Yvonne was trying to get a Kálmán Museum established in Budapest, and she worked towards this goal until her death. It remains to be seen what will happen with this idea in the future.

Yvonne Kálmán’s life was a bridge — between past and present, between nations and generations, between art and compassion. Through her advocacy, her organizational work, and her humanitarian spirit, she ensured that both Emmerich Kálmán’s melodies and her own legacy of kindness will continue to resonate across the world.

She always encouraged young singers, stage directors and researchers to examine the life of her father, and she never stopped anyone when they decided to address topics that she herself felt uncomfortable with. I speak from experience, because I wrote my PhD on Kálmán, based mostly on facts Charles Kálmán shared and which Yvonne did not want to share. But she never let that get in the way of our friendship and was happy that new aspects of her father’s (and mother’s) life were brought to light.

Till the very end she was in discussions with film producers about a possible TV series on Kálmán’s life, even if she could never quite decide which aspect of his life and career should be the focus: his years of success in Budapest and Vienna from 1909 until the early Thirties, his turbulent marriage with Vera in 1929 and the years in exile (which were artistically mostly unsuccessful but very melodramatic), or something else entirely. She dreamed that Netflix would turn the story – whichever aspect they chose – into a biopic, and she always hoped Anna Netrebko would play the diva. Netrebko did sing the Csárdásfürstin music at various galas and at a New Year’s concert in Dresden, conducted by Christian Thielemann. Juan Diego Flórez was her tenor partner.

With Yvonne Kálmán, the last of the high-profile widows and children of famous operetta composers dies. She gave all who knew her a glimpse of that forgotten world – and sometimes shared truly remarkable details during dinner. Details that show a very different life lived behind the glamour façade.

She will be greatly missed, not just by me. I always enjoyed receiving messages out of the blue, no matter where I might be in the world, asking if I’m free for drinks. And we met up all over the place, from Santa Fe to LA to Budapest, London and Vienna, St. Gallen, Amsterdam, Munich and Berlin. These are evenings I’ll treasure forever.

So all I can say now is: thank you for everything, Yvonne. You enriched my life in so many ways, and you always welcomed my various partners into your circle as we went along, even acting as a matchmaker here and there, which still brings a smile to my face when I think about it.

R.I.P.

* This is a revised version of the original article, with corrections regarding the payout sum for the Kálmán items bought by the Budapest Operetta Theater and about their current whereabouts.