CBSO Viennese 2001

Strauss and Lanner

“Vienna without Strauss is like Austria without the Danube,” wrote Hector Berlioz on the death of Johann Strauss in 1849. But Vienna wasn’t without Strauss: the late Johann’s son of the same name was already engaged on the career that would make him far more famous than his father and probably much richer than any musician, Brahms included, living in Austria at the time. Besides, even if there had been no Strauss at all there would still have been the Viennese waltz, not to mention the polka, the quadrille, the galop and the other favourite ballroom items of the day.

Johannn Strauss I learned his trade in the dance orchestra of Michael Pamer, but so did another young violinist called Joseph Lanner, the two-hundredth anniversary of whose birth will no doubt be celebrated in his native Vienna throughout 2001 - if not perhaps with the extravagance lavished on the centenary of Johann II’s death in 1999. It was alongside Lanner, first in collaboration and then in competition with him, that Johann I so successfully developed the popular Viennese dance forms and the commercial organisation behind them. The reason why the name of Strauss rather than that of Lanner is now overwhelmingly associated with the Viennese waltz is not that Johann I was an overwhelmingly better musician. Johann Strauss had the good fortune to father three sons - Johann II, Josef and Eduard - all of whom were more than capable of carrying on where he left off. Joseph Lanner on the other hand had one son, August, who had both the talent and the inclination to follow him but who, sadly, died at the age of twenty-one.

The decisive factor was that, while Lanner’s daughter Katti was pursuing an illustrious career as a ballet dancer, Johann II was busy diversifying the family business with a series of popular operettas. Johann II’s tireless activity in the musical theatre, together with his unsurpassable and inexhaustible gift for melody, is what finally gave the Strauss family the monopoly in posthumous reputation.

Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)

Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna - Overture

The composer who did most to create Viennese operetta, before Johann Strauss II capitalised on it, was Franz von Suppé. He had not only the initiative but also the talent to create pieces just as entertaining as the Offenbach opéras bouffes that threatened to swamp the Viennese theatre in the late 1850s and 1860s. If most of the dozens of operettas he composed for the Theater an der Wien and the Carltheater are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. Though written in 1844, years before he entered into competition with Offenbach, the overture to a comedy sketch on life in Vienna called Ein Morgen, ein Mittag und ein Abend in Wien - with its slow introduction, its elegantly lyrical cello solo, and its tuneful and increasingly brilliant closing section - is a thoroughly characteristic example.

Johann Strauss I (1804-1849)

Homage to Queen Victoria of England - Waltz, Op.103

Another reason why the Strausses prevailed over their rivals is that they were always prepared to travel whereas the Lanners were not. Johann I, for example, made the first of his two visits to this country in 1838, when the many celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Coronation sustained a demand for his musical services through a tour lasting as long as six months or more. The most significant composition of that period was a waltz written in homage to the new Queen for her first State Ball at Buckingham Palace. The relevance of its semi-ceremonial introduction and, in spite of a little unavoidable rhythmic distortion, the identity of the last of its generous medley of waltz tunes will be as clear to today’s audience as they were to the loyal subjects of Queen Victoria.

Josef Strauss (1827-1870)

Blabbermouth! (A Musical Joke) - Polka, Op.245

We can safely assume that the Plappermäulchen Polka - the title of which translates literally as “Blabbermouth” and which is not to be confused with another polka by Josef Strauss called Die Schwätzerin or “Chatterbox” - was not intended as a homage to Queen Victoria or, indeed, anyone of dignified status. It is actually a “musical joke” written for the Viennese Carnival season of 1868 and, with its amusing instrumental repartee and its percussion rattling on, is a characteristically ingenious example of the novelty polka. Instead of the abrupt ending adopted in most performances, incidentally, the version to be heard today restores the original coda.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Die Fledermaus - “Spiel’ ich die Unschuld vom Lande”

The most successful of Johann II’s operettas, and the only one set in contemporary Vienna, was and still is Die Fledermaus, which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1874. One of its principal characters is Adele, a parlour maid who has serruptitiously taken the evening off to attend a lavish ball thrown by the Russian Prince Orlovsky and at the same time to further her ambitions as an actress. How she comes to be showing off her acting abilities in a prison in the early hours of the morning would take too long to explain but, clearly, as she goes through the repertoire of parts she can play, she is not in the least put off by the incongruous circumstances.

Johann Strauss II

Die Tänzerin Fanny Elssler - “Draussen in Sievering”

(arr Oskar Stalla and Bernard Grün)

Such was the demand for Strauss operettas that other composers continued to manufacture them out of Johann II’s dance music for literally decades after his death. The score of Die Tänzerin Fanny Elssler, compiled round a libretto by Hans Adler on the scandalous life of a celebrated Viennese dancer, is the second-hand creation of Oskar Stalla and his colleague Bernard Grün. First performed in the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1934, it scored a particular success with “Draussen in Sievering” (Yonder in Sievering), a number which, having appropriated one of Johann II’s most seductive waltz melodies and one of his most attractive polka tunes to make its romantic tribute to Vienna, could scarcely have failed.

Johann Strauss II

“Wienerwald Lerchen” (arr Max Schönherr)

Professor Dr Max Schönherr, a scholar and conductor who specialised in the music of the Strauss family, put his expertise in the idiom to effective use when he converted one of Johann II’s polkas ('s gibt nur a Kaiserstadt, 's gibt nur a Wien, Op. 291) into a coloratura vocal piece to fanciful words by Hans Werner, “Wienerwald Lerchen” (Larks of the Vienna Woods). The birdsong imitations in the virtuoso vocal part and in the scoring for woodwind are brilliantly done.

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Der Rosenkavalier - First Sequence of Waltzes

Although he was born and trained as a musician in Munich and was in no way related to the Strauss family in Vienna, Richard Strauss was an enthusiastic and highly expert composer of waltzes - if not for their own sake then at least as episodes in longer works. Ironically, however, in the Strauss opera where the waltz is most prominently featured it is historically out of place. It is true that Der Rosenkavalier is set in Vienna but it is the Vienna of Maria Theresa in the mid-18th century, when the Viennese waltz as we know it simply didn’t exist, even though its Ländler and Deutsche forbears certainly did. In the kind of society inhabited by the principal characters of Der Rosenkavalier - the young Count Octavian, the Marschallin (or Field Marshall’s wife) whom he thinks he loves, and Sophie van Faninal whom he finally marries - the minuet would have been all the rage.

Even so, the opportunity was too good to miss and, anachronistic and even satirically intended though they might be, the waltzes became the most popular aspect of Der Rosenkavalier from the day of its first performance in Dresden in 1911. Thirty-three years later, partly to make money and partly to displace other musicians’ piratical arrangements of his work, Strauss compiled a suite of waltzes from the first two acts of Der Rosenkavalier, calling it the First Sequence to distinguish it from an already existing suite of waltzes from the third act.

The First Sequence begins with a substantial extract from the introduction to the opera, featuring Octavian’s virile horn call and the more yielding Marschallin theme linked in what one might call a close embrace. The first of the waltzes, which accompanies their breakfast, is scored with almost eighteenth-century decorum for clarinets and bassoon. The waltz version of Octavian’s theme on solo violin is very respectable too, as is the elegant little dance that follows it. When Baron Ochs, Octavian’s boorish and absurdly optimistic rival for Sophie, appears on the scene the atmosphere changes - not immediately, since his favourite waltz tune is very quietly and very gently introduced by the strings, but in due course as it develops in both vitality and vulgarity, with pounding basses and scorching brass counterpoints, in a long-sustained approach to its climax

Joseph Lanner (1801-1843)

Hungarian Galop, Op.97 (arr John Bradbury)

The Schönbrunn Waltz, Op.200

Like many Viennese composers of the time, Joseph Lanner fancied himself in the Hungarian idiom which, thanks to the proximity of Budapest and the presence of a large Hungarian population in the Imperial capital, was an integral part of the Viennese musical identity. He was also a specialist in the galop, the vigorous forerunner of the Parisian cancan, which achieved the height of its popularity in Viennese ballrooms in the 1830s. Lanner’s Hungarian Galops - which are part of a whole series of Italian, Spanish and English Galops - are unmistakable in their national origin, particularly this one where Lanner celebrated the Rakoczi March ten years before Berlioz in his now very much more familar Marche hongroise.

Lanner’s most famous waltz also has a relationship with a later work in that its main theme, with its delicate little grace notes and repeated notes, is ingeniously (though not quite literally) echoed in a waltz episode featuring the Ballerina in Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka. In its original setting it is just one of several themes arranged, as was the Viennese custom by now, in a sequence of waltz tunes that are briefly developed and recapitulated in a quasi-symphonic construction. Written in 1842 and named after the royal palace to the south-west of the city, The Schönbrunn Waltz is a convincing demonstration that, while Lanner might not have been capable of writing a Blue Danube, the Viennese waltz would still have become an internationally popular dance form even if the Strauss family had never existed.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Circus Polka for a Young Elephant

Stravinsky turned to the Viennese tradition again when, by way of the choreographer George Balanchine, he was commissioned to provide the music for a ballet of elephants in the Barnum and Bailey Circus. In spite of the difficulty the pachyderm dancers apparently had with the polka rhythms, not least where they get mixed up with Schubert’s Marche militaire, this ballet for Modoc and a corps de ballet of 49 other elephants was performed no fewer than 425 times in Madison Square Gardens, New York City, in 1942.

Rudolf Sieczynski (1877-1952)

“Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume,” Op.1

By the turn of the century the Viennese waltz idiom was so firmly established, the tricks of the trade so familiar, that apparently any competent musician could produce a decent example. Rudolf Sieczynski, a writer and a comparatively humble composer whose music scarcely penetrated to the high-society ballrooms of his day, is known in the concert hall only for his Op.1. “Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume” (Vienna, city of my dreams), for which he wrote both the words and the music, is a waltz song of such tender charm that no one with a taste for the popular Viennese repertoire can resist it.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus - Adele’s Laughing Song (“Mein Herr Marquis”)

One way out of an embarrassing situation is to laugh it off - just as Adele does in Die Fledermaus. Having taken the evening off her parlour-maid duties in the Eisenstien household, ostensibly “to visit a sick aunt,” she is at Prince Orlofsky’s ball disguised as an actress called Olga. But Gabriel von Eisenstein is at the ball too, pretending to be a French Marquis, and recognises her in one of his wife’s best dresses. Adele’s response is to treat the situation as a huge joke - how amusing that a stylishly turned-out young lady such as she should be mistaken for a parlour maid! - and sings an elegant little number that regularly breaks out in brilliant peals of laughter. She can well afford to laugh because she knows that Eisenstein is no Marquis and that he shouldn’t be there either.

Johann Strauss II

An der schönen blauen Donau - Waltz, Op.314

An der schönen blauen Donau - better known in this country as The Blue Danube - must be the most famous of all Viennese waltzes. Written in 1867, it has achieved the status of a Viennese folk song, or anthem even. Although the original version, written for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association, has fairly frivolous words attached to it, the choral version usually performed nowadays has a new text which confirms the depth of the local sentiment inspired by the waltz in the meantime. But that doesn’t have the splendid coda which in the orchestral version recapitulates and develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction. It is no wonder that Johannes Brahms was one of its composer’s most fervent admirers.

Gerald Larner©