CBSO Viennese 2002

A not so happy family

“The public attends a Strauss concert expecting to be put into a happy mood,” declared Johann Strauss to his brother Eduard. As if Eduard didn’t know! Every single dance or operetta the Strauss family had written - beginning with Johann I in the 1830s and continuing with his three sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard in the second half of the century - was intended at the very least to entertain and, with luck, to delight or even thrill its audience. It had no ambition to make people think, still less to depress them. And yet this was not a happy family.

The Strausses who wrote those hundreds of exhilarating waltzes and cheerful polkas - to name only the two most popular dances of their day - were split by rivalries, money arguments and disputes over the distribution of an increasingly heavy work-load. When Eduard, the last surviving of the three brothers, retired in 1901 and finally disbanded the Strauss Orchestra he wrote of his joy at having got to the end of “thirty years’ work with all its unpleasantness, rancour, troubles, sorrows, deprivations and exertions.” Six years later he was still so disturbed by it all that he systematically destroyed the whole archive of the Strauss Orchestra, three cartloads of it including manuscripts and unpublished works.

At least Eduard had a long life - he died at the age of 81 in Vienna in 1916 - and he made a small fortune, though nothing like as much as Johann II, who was not only the outstanding musical genius but also the most ambitious and most successful businessman among them. The middle brother Josef, on the other hand, died comparatively young and comparatively poor. As a promising architect and engineer, he had definitely not wanted to go into the musical business. But an emergency, a nervous breakdown suffered by his elder brother Johann in 1853, forced him into it. He found himself not only directing the Strauss Orchestra but also taking up composition - most reluctantly, as the title of his first waltz, Die ersten und die Letzten (The First and the Last) clearly indicates. A year later, however, he was hooked and was to go on to write more than three hundred dance pieces. A sad and sensitive man plagued by ill health, he died in his 43rd year after collapsing on the rostrum at a concert in Warsaw.

Johann II said of Josef, “He is the more gifted of us two; I am merely the more popular.” In a concert with a Josef Strauss item at the beginning, in the middle and at the end we have the opportunity to test the truth of that surprisingly generous statement.

Josef Strauss (1827-1870)

Sphärenklänge (Music of the Spheres): Waltz, Op.235

The Viennese waltz as the Strauss family developed it - with its four or five main sections offering two tunes each - was a formidable challenge to a composer’s melodic invention. It was a challenge they were always ready to accept, however, not least because they had perfected the musically rewarding art of setting a waltz melody free from its triple-time accompaniment. The inspired main theme of Sphärenklänge, the one that glides in on violins and woodwind once the waltz tempo is established, floats with heavenly serenity above the gently articulated but persistent rhythm of even crotchets below it. Melodies of this distinction - there are rarely more than one in each waltz - are usually anticipated in a slow introduction, as this one so appealingly is in an episode as atmospheric as any scena in a ballet. Like its counterparts in most other Viennese waltzes, it is then presented in its definitive form as the first main theme and is finally recalled in glory at the end. The nine comparatively modest tunes that are heard in the meantime in this piece, which was written for the Medical Association Ball in 1868, are chosen not so much for their spherical or medical relevance as for their entertainment value and their potential as contrasting material.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Egyptian March, Op.335

The Egyptian March, written to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, is a wonderfully weird confection, coloured not only by exotic harmonies and percussion sounds but also some outlandish vocalisation. Whether it was in gratitude for this dubious tribute that Ismail Pasha sent Strauss two giraffes, on the occasion of the composer’s Golden Jubilee in 1890, history does not record.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow): “Viljalied” (Vilja Song)

The most successful of all Lehár’s operettas - the most successful of all Viennese operettas next to Die Fledermaus - was, and still is The Merry Widow, which was first performed in Vienna in 1905. Set for the most part in the Paris embassy of an imaginary Balkan state, it skilfully exploits both the sophisticated amusements of the great city and the sentiment associated with the backward way of life in Pontevedro. “I’m off to Chez Maxim” belongs to the former category. The “Vilja Song” - introduced by Hanna Glawari, a young and rich and beautiful widow, the loss of whose personal fortune through marriage to a fortune-seeking Frenchman could sink the whole Pontevedran economy - falls in the latter category. It’s a kind of folk song: Vilja, a beautiful wood nymph, allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . .

Giuditta: “Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiss” (My lips give such hot kisses)

Giuditta is the opera that crowned Lehár’s long life in the musical theatre. Too serious to be termed an operetta and first performed on no less distinguished a stage than that of the Staatsoper in Vienna in 1934, it is Austria’s equivalent to Carmen. Its heroine, a dancer of mixed Spanish and Moroccan blood, is married to an elderly Spanish maker of bird cages. Not surprisingly, when invited by a handsome young army captain to accompany him to his garrison town in North Africa, she goes with him. In the fourth scene, separated from her lover and unaware that he is in the audience, she is performing in a cabaret at the Alcazar. And what does a Spanish-Moroccan cabaret artist do when attempting to seduce a rich English lord in the Alcazar night club? Well, what else could she do but dance and sing a Viennese waltz? The North African local colour applied to the introduction to the full version of the song does not disguise the place and time of origin of the slow waltz at the heart of it.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Vergnügungszug (Excursion Train): Polka, Op.281

Although the polka was almost as popular as the waltz in the 1850s and 1860s, it didn’t stay in fashion for anything like as long. It was an exhilarating ballroom exercise but neither as sexy for the dancer nor as interesting for the composer. Its high-energy requirement meant that it rarely lasted longer than two or three minutes while its high-speed rhythmic activity gave the composer little opportunity to do more than put a cheerful tune to it and dress it up in colourful orchestration. Written at the height of the polka craze in 1864, Vergnügungszug - featuring a train that seems to be equipped with a klaxon rather than a steam whistle - is one of Johann II’s most extended examples. Even so, it’s amazing how quickly time passes when you are enjoying yourself.

Josef Strauss

Delirien (Delirium): Waltz, Op.212

Josef’s Delirien Waltz is constructed in much the same way as his Sphärenklänge. The introduction, however, is quite different: this one is a tiny tone poem depicting the nightmare vision of delirious sleep. If the main theme, which is anticipated by a solo flute shortly before its definitive entry on violins, is less poetic than that of Sphärenklänge its melodic line is no less sensitively drawn - a distinctive feature of the best of Josef’s waltz tunes - and its return at the end is no less worth looking forward to.

Johann Strauss II

Eljen a Magyár (Long Live the Magyar): Polka, Op.332

As if there were not enough occasions to celebrate at home in imperial Vienna, the composer members of the Strauss family were skilled in adapting their art to celebrations anywhere else it was required, from Pest to Pavlovsk. Johann and Josef made a brief visit to Pest for the Hungarian National Festival in 1869, Josef taking his Andrássy March and Johann his Eljen a Magyár Polka. Dedicated “to the noble Hungarian nation,” Eljen a Magyár (Long live the Magyar) is a delightful combination of everything expected of the quick polka in ballrooms everywhere with zestful Hungarian-gypsy tunefulness and discreetly exotic orchestration.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Die Fledermaus: Overture

Die Fledermaus is not only the most successful of Strauss operettas but is also the only one actually set in the high-society Vienna of his day - for the most part at a midnight ball. So there is no operetta more appropriate to an occasion like this. Not the least entertaining part of the work is the Overture which, since it takes no account of the order of events in the story, requires no previous knowledge of how one of its principal characters acquired the embarrassing nickname of “Die Fledermaus” (The Bat) and how he gets his own back at a lavish and rather dissolute party thrown by the Russian Prince Orlofsky.

It begins with the most dramatic music in the score, which accompanies a show-down scene in a remarkably comfortable Viennese prison in the last of the three acts, cuts back to the bell striking six and marking the end of the central ball scene, and cuts back again to the vigorous waltz which represents the climax of the Orlofsky festivities. A sentimental episode from the first act is followed by an increasingly impatient effort to get back to where the action is and the earlier tunes are duly recalled in an irresistibly reckless recapitulation.

Die Fledermaus: “Mein Herr Marquis” (Laughing Song)

One way out of an embarrassing situation is to laugh it off - just as Adele does in Die Fledermaus. Adele is a parlour maid who has taken the evening off ostensibly “to visit a sick aunt” but in reality to attend the ball at the villa of Prince Orlofsky, to whom she is introduced as Olga, an actress. As luck would have it, her employer Gabriel von Eisenstein is at the ball too and recognises her in one of his wife’s best dresses. Her 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, who for reasons of his own is passing himself off as the Marquis de Renard, shouldn’t be at Orlofsky’s ball either.

Banditen-Galopp (Bandits’ Gallop): Polka, Op.378

Those of a nervous disposition are warned that near the beginning, about half-way through and near the end of Johann II’s otherwise good-natured Banditen-Galopp they might just be frightened out of their skin.

Kaiser (Emperor) Waltz, Op.437

The Emperor Waltz is a great example of Johann II’s good taste in providing exactly what was required by a particular occasion. It was written in 1888 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the accession of the Emperor Franz Joseph. So the introduction takes the form of a delicately scored march and the first of the waltz tunes - briefly anticipated in march time before its definitive introduction on horn and the G-string of the violins - must be the most dignified of its kind. Although none of the following three waltzes is quite as stately, trumpets and trombones certainly make an imposing entry in the last but one of them. Not satisfied with a recapitulation of almost symphonic proportons, which recalls the second and third waltzes as well as the main theme itself, Strauss adds an epilogue featuring a thoughtful solo cello and a brilliantly ceremonial ending.

Josef Strauss

Ohne Sorgen! (Without a care in the world!): Polka, Op.271

Josef Strauss might have been in ill health, unhappy in his work and over-sensitive to the point of melancholy but, clearly, he could still have a good laugh.

Gerald Larner ©2002