Anton Karas

By some reckoning, Anton Karas was the quintessential one-hit wonder, a man associated the world over with one song, and one song only, "The Third Man Theme" (also known as "The Harry Lime Theme.") Few musicians, however, ever did more to insinuate the sound of a single, relatively obscure musical instrument on the consciousness of the world -- Karas and the "Third Man Theme" did for the zither what George Harrison and a handful of Beatles tunes did for the sitar, only in a much bigger way, selling many millions of copies. That piece of music turned Karas into a wealthy man after 28 years of toiling in obscurity in relative poverty in Vienna. Karas was born in Vienna in 1906, the son of an automobile worker. He began playing the zither -- a stringed instrument vaguely similar to an autoharp -- at age 12. By 1921, at age 15, he was earning a living of sorts entertaining patrons for tips in Vienna's taverns. Karas remained in the city throughout the tumultuous years of the rise of Nazi sympathies and the German takeover, the war, and the Allied occupation that followed. He supported a wife and three children on as little as $15 a week in those days, and then, in September of 1948 (some sources say the spring of 1949), fate took a hand. British director Carol Reed was in Vienna shooting a thriller called The Third Man, based on a story by Graham Greene. Most of the details of the final film had been worked out, but not the music -- Reed had decided that there would not be any Johann Strauss waltzes, but not what would be used for the score. One night, he was passing by a Heuriger, a wine tavern where growers offer their own wines for sale directly, and heard Karas' playing in the background. Reed had never heard a zither before and found the sound to be attractive. He...