CBSO Viennese 2003 — CBSO Viennese New Year Concerts | The Gerald Larner Programme Note Archive

Dancing on the Danube

Vienna and Budapest have more than the Danube in common. Less than 150 miles apart, the two cities have long been linked in all kinds of ways – politically, commercially, socially, artistically, not least musically. But the river has always been the direct physical connection between them. One of the greatest of all Viennese assets came by way of the Danube when, in about 1750, Johann Michael Strauss travelled up the river from the Hungarian capital to settle in the Austrian capital. His grandson Johann Baptist, who learned to love Viennese dance music in his father’s tavern in the suburb of Leopoldstat, was destined to become the founder of the Strauss musical dynasty – a dynasty comprising four generations of composers, beginning with Johann I himself and including not only his three exceptionally talented sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard but also Eduard’s less talented son Johann III and Johann III’s nephew Eduard II.

While Hungary had little or nothing to do with the early development of either the Viennese waltz or the polka, like most Austrian composers from Haydn onwards, Johann I and his sons were fascinated by Hungarian or, more precisely, Hungarian-gypsy music. Johann I wrote several Hungarian galops and a waltz, Emlék Pestre, dedicated to “the noble Hungarian nation” after a visit to Pest in 1833. As for Johann II, as well as comparatively minor pieces like the Pesther Csárdás and the Éljen a Magyár Polka, he wrote a Hungarian-inspired operetta Der Zigeunerbaron and a comic opera, Ritter Pásmán, which is also set in Hungary.

If Ritter Pásmán was too ambitious a project for a composer of operettas, Der Zigeunerbaron proved to be second in popularity among Johann II’s stage works only to Die Fledermaus – which indicates how much the Viennese public enjoyed the rhythmic zest and the exotic melodies and harmonies of Hungarian-gypsy music. So it is not entirely surprising that the gap in the Viennese operetta market left by the death of Johann II was most successfully filled by two Hungarian composers and long-term Viennese residents – Franz Lehár, who learned to be more Viennese than the Viennese, and Emmerich Kálmán, who combined the waltz with Hungarian-gypsy music in much the same way as Johann II in the trend-setting Ziegeunerbaron. This was not true Hungarian folk music – as Béla Bartók, at one time a fellow student of Kálmán in Budapest, was at pains to demonstrate – but it bothered the Viennese not at all. It had come to the city up the Danube and that was authentic enough for them.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron)

Entrance March

The score of Der Zigeunerbaron - which begins with an overture cleverly designed in the shape of an Austro-Hungarian rhapsody - is an intriguing if sometimes incongruous mix of gypsy music and Viennese polkas and waltzes. The Entrance March in the third act, however, has nothing Hungarian or specifically Viennese in it since it is a brisk military march accompanying the triumphant return of the Imperial troops from a Spanish campaign. According to the composer’s instruction to the management of the Theatre and der Wien, where the operetta was first performed in 1885, “The Entrance March must be imposing. About 80-100 soldiers (on foot, on horse), camp-followers in Hungarian, Viennese (and Spanish) dress, common-folk, children with shrubs and flowers - which latter they strew before the returning soldiers - must appear.” Among the victorious soldiers is our hero, the “gypsy baron,” whose valour in battle entitles him to become a real baron - and to marry his beloved Saffi who is not the gypsy he once thought she was but, it has been revealed, a princess.

Johann Strauss II

Rosen aus dem Süden (Roses from the South) Waltz, Op.388

Although Johann II devoted most of his creative energies in the last thirty years of his life to writing operettas, he did not seriously slow down his production of dances for the ballroom or concert hall. Every Viennese operetta had to be furnished with a generous allocation of songs and other numbers in waltz time and it was a comparatively simple matter to issue these pieces in instrumental arrangements for use outside the theatre. One of the most celebrated of all Strauss waltzes, Rosen aus dem Süden (Roses from the South) is actually a selection of the best waltz tunes from the now largely forgotten operetta, Das Spitzentuch der Königin (The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief), which was successfully first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1880. Unusually for Strauss, although he anticipates it at the very beginning of the slow introduction, he avoids presenting his most distinguished melody as the main theme - it appears on violins and horn with harp accompaniment as the second of the four waltzes - and he doesn’t recall it in the exuberant and otherwise comprehensive coda.

Johann Strauss II

Éljen a Magyár (Long live the Magyar) Quick polka, Op.332

As if there were not enough occasions to celebrate at home in Vienna, the composer members of the Strauss family were skilled in adapting their art to celebrations anywhere it was required, from Pest to Pavlovsk. For the Hungarian National Festival in 1869 Johann and his younger brother Josef made a brief visit to Pest (which was to be united with Buda to form the city of Budapest three years later), 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

Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron) -

“An orphan from my early days” (Als flotter Geist und früh verwaist)

On his first entry in Der Zigeunerbaron the “gypsy baron” of the title is neither gypsy nor, at this stage, a baron. Banished from Hungary during the Turko-Hungarian War, he is taking advantage of an amnesty to return to Temesvar and reclaim the confiscated family estates. As he introduces himself, he gallops through a list of the amazing things he has been doing in the meantime - as a zoo keeper, acrobat, magician, wizard - and, in case anyone doesn’t believe him, he twice breaks into a reassuringly stylish waltz: “Such was life in my youth, ev’ry word is the truth.” The gypsies who have taken over what is left of his castle are so impressed that they make him their “gypsy baron.”

Emmerich Kálmán (1882-1953)

Gräfin Mariza (Countess Mariza) -

“Play Gypsy” (Komm, Zigany)

Kálmán settled in Vienna after the encouraging reception of his first operetta - Tatárjárá in the original Hungarian, Ein Herbstmanöver in the German version - at the Theater an der Wien in 1909. He remained in Vienna until the Anschluss thirty years later, writing a string of operetta successes, including above all Die Csárdásfürstin (The Csárdás Princess or the Gypsy Princess) in 1915 and Gräfin Mariza (Countess Mariza) in 1924. Most of them are set in Hungary, like Gräfin Mariza , or include important Hungarian episodes so that Kálmán could legitimately indulge his love of Hungarian-gypsy music which, following the precedent set by Johann II in Der Zigeunerbaron, he contrived to combine with the required proportion of Viennese waltzes. Even in his last work, Arizona Lady, which is set on a ranch in Arizona, the heroine is Hungarian.

One of the attractions of the Hungarian country house owned by Countess Mariza, where the impoverished Count Tassilo Endrödy-Wittemberg is working incognito as a bailiff, is its gypsy band. It is to the gypsy band, after the Countess has unwittingly offended him, that Tassilo addresses his nostalgic and highly melodious “Play Gypsy,” urging the gypsy band in its own musical idiom to cheer him up. They respond with a lively csárdás, to which he performs an appropriately lively dance - so exciting the admiration of the Countess and initiating the process by which, after many mishaps, they finally get married.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Das Land des Lächelns (Land of Smiles)

“Dein ist mein ganzes Herz” (You are my heart’s delight)

Lehár could turn to the Hungarian musician in him whenever it suited him - as he did in Zigeunerliebe (Gypsy Love) in 1910 and Wo die Lerche singt (Where the Lark sings) in 1918 - but he did not share Kálmán’s long-term obsession with gypsy music. He was happy to set his operettas just about anywhere - most famously of all in the Pontevedran Embassy in Paris in Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) in 1905 but also, to place only a few of them, on a mountain top in the Alps, in Brussels, in Vienna, in Spain, in Italy, in St Petersburg, in Alsace-Lorraine, in Switzerland and, in his last stage work, in North Africa.

As for Das Land des Lächelns, it is set in both China, “the land of smiles,” and Vienna, to which city the heroine Lisa returns after finding life in Peking intolerable in spite of her love for her Chinese husband Prince Souchong. First performed in Berlin in 1929, it owed much of its success, like several other Lehár operettas of the period, to the composer’s partnership with the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber. “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz” (You are my heart’s delight) - in which Souchong protests his exclusive love for Lisa in spite of insisting on fulfilling his duty to take four Chinese wives - was written specially for Tauber and offers perhaps the most famous example of the surging romantic line of the characteristic “Tauber Lied.”

Franz Lehár

Waltz from Suite de danse

When Lehár wrote his Suite de danse he was not far short of twice the age he was when he wrote Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow), the Viennese operetta that made his fame and fortune. But, while there are differences in style, he is recognisably the same composer. He still has the genius for waltz tunes that endeared him to the public at the beginning of his career in Vienna thirty-five years earlier. To begin with, in the rhapsodic introduction, Suite de danse sounds like the work of a composer stimulated by the energy of the Broadway musical and infected by a taste for the colours of the Hollywood film score. At an early stage after the opening fanfare, however, there is a glimpse of an old-fashioned waltz tune which, on its definitive presentation in the central section of the piece, clearly demonstrates its descent from Gold and Silver or the Merry Widow Waltz. Although Lehár offers other waltz ideas here, including one that inspires a sentimental violin solo, that first tune is clearly his favourite, not least perhaps because it proves robust enough to take the Broadway treatment too. At the end of the work, in a bizarre development not included in today’s performance, the waltz tune is transformed into a march.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Contredanses, WoO14

There were balls in Vienna even before the Strauss family settled there and composers as distinguished as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven wrote dances for them. No one knows the occasion for which Beethoven supplied these little Contredanses but it was probably for an event in the winter season of 1802 - and a grand event too since they are scored for orchestra (although they were also published in more cheaply accessible alternative versions for piano and for two violins and bass). Unlike the same composer’s German Dances and Ländler written for similar occasions, the Contredanses are in duple rather than triple time and have nothing to do with the history of the waltz. They do, on the other hand, have something to do with the history of the symphony since one of them is based on a tune Beethoven had just used in his Prometheus ballet and was to use again not only in his piano Variations in E flat but also in the last movement of his “Eroica” Symphony in the same key.

EITHER

Johann Strauss I (1804-1849)

Piefke und Pufke polka française Op.235

Whatever you make of the title - the meaning of “Piefke und Pufke” is lost somewhere in the history of Viennese dialect - it is an unusually tuneful polka. It offers three good tunes in less than two minutes: the very busy one which animates the first section (and briefly reappears at the end) and a rather more graceful one together with a faintly exotic one, both of them resourcefully scored, in the middle section.

Johann Strauss II

Annen-Polka (St Anne’s Day Polka), Op.117

Exhilarating ballroom exercise though it was, in comparisonn with the watlz the polka was 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 - in straightforward ternary form - while its high-speed rhythmic activity gave the composer little opportunity to do more than put a cheerful tune and catchy title to it and dress it up in colourful orchestration. The Strauss family did, however, develop a slower version, the so-called French polka, and a fascinating hybrid, the polka-mazurka, which adapted the duple-time polka step to the triple-time mazurka. One of the most attractive of all French polkas is Johann II’s Annen-Polka, written for the popular Viennese festivities surrounding St Anne’s Day (26th June) and first performed at the “Wild Man and Parrot” in the Prater in 1852. In comparison with a characteristic example of the quick polka like the breathless and unstoppable Tritsch-Tratsch, it proceeds at a nicely gently pace and with a charmingly flirtatious step - until, that is, it so firmly puts its foot down at the end.

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

Un bal (A Ball) from Symphonie fantastique, Op.14

“Vienna without Strauss is like Austria without the Danube,” wrote Hector Berlioz on the death of Johann I in 1849. Clearly, Strauss had his fans in France too. It is unlikely, however, that he had any influence on the waltz movement, Un bal, in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Johann I did not take his orchestra out of Austria until 1833, when they travelled down the Danube to Pest, and they first appeared in Paris only in 1837 - seven years after the Symphonie fantastique was first performed at the Conservatoire.

The more likely influence on Un bal was Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, which was written in 1819 and was one of the first examples of the concert waltz, a coherent sequence of waltz tunes, of the kind later developed by the Strauss family. It is true that Berlioz did not make his famous orchestral arrangement of Invitation to the Dance until 1841 but he would have known Weber’s piano original long before that. Anyway, the second movement of the Symphonie fantastique, the equivalent of the scherzo in a classical symphony, is a brilliant waltz most imaginatively scored, particularly for the two harps. The abrupt change of mood and the entry of a new melody on flute and oboe represents the moment where the hero of the story behind the work catches sight of his beloved among the dancers. She is briefly glimpsed again, in more reflective mood on clarinet, just before the acceleration at the end.

Josef Strauss

Die tanzende Muse (The Dancing Muse) Polka-mazurka Op.266

If Josef Strauss had not been plagued by illness, which resulted in his death at the age of forty-three, and if he had been as ambitious as his brothers, he might well have turned out the greatest composer of the three - not necessarily of dances but of more ambitious forms of music. Even so, he was a brilliant exponent of the polka, including the hybrid form the polka-mazurka, which ingeniously combines the polka step with the uneven triple-time of the mazurka. Die tanzende Muse - in which the faintly lugubrious outer sections so effectively offset Josef’s lyrical inspiration as the muse smiles on him in the middle section - is one of the most interesting examples of the form.

Emmerich Kálmán

Das Veilchen von Montmartre (The Violet of Montmartre or Paris in Spring)

“Heut’ nacht hab’ich getraümt von dir” (Last Night I dreamed of you)

Unlike Lehár, Kálmán was not averse to adopting modern dance forms as popular music developed, largely under American influence, during the course of his career. The jazz-flavoured score of Die Herzogin von Chicago (The Duchess of Chicago) that Kálmán wrote for Vienna in1928 was something Lehár couldn’t for a moment have contemplated. Not that his progressive attitude always guaranteed him success, as he saw two years later when his next operetta, Das Veilchen von Montmartre (known in English-speaking productions as “Paris in Spring”), failed to achieve the same kind of popularity as his earlier, Austro-Hungarian confections. The real problem seems to have been the libretto, which is said to be an inferior version of La Bohème, rather than the score. On the other hand, if every number had been as sensational as this slow-tango showpiece for the leading tenor, it would have had to be a very bad libretto indeed to get in its way.

Franz Lehár

Giuditta

“Freunde, das Leben ist lebenswert” (Friends, life is worth living)

Giuditta is the opera that crowned Lehár’s long career in the musical theatre. Too serious to be termed an operetta, it was written for no less distinguished an opera house than the Staatsoper in Vienna where its first performance in January 1934 was relayed to 120 radio stations round the world - not least because of international interest in Richard Tauber, who was singing the male lead role of the army captain Octavio. His “Freunde, das Leben ist lebenswert” (Friends, life is worth living) comes from the first scene, just before the love of his life, Giuditta, is moved to leave her dull old husband to follow him to North Africa. If he had been aware at this stage what heartbreak the beautiful Giuditta was to cause him - she is Lehár’s Spanish-Moroccan equivalent of Carmen - he would not have been quite as positive about life as he is in this characteristically ecstatic and lavishly orchestrated “Tauber Lied” in waltz time.

Johann Strauss II

An der schönen blauen Donau (By the Beautiful Blue Danube) Waltz, Op.314

The Blue Danube waltz is not only the last word in flattery - the Danube is a muddy brown in most lights in both Vienna and Budapest - but also the ultimate example of the concert waltz. In company with some of the most distinguished examples of its kind, it consists of many as five distinct waltz-time sections, each one of them based on two different themes. Clearly, as the composer of well over a hundred waltzes (not including those in his operettas), Johann II was a uniquely resourceful melodist. Written for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867, this most familiar of Viennese waltzes was originally scored for chorus and orchestra and in that form it has achieved something like the status of a national anthem. The choral version, however, doesn’t have the splendid coda which in the orchestral version recalls and brieflly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortless completing a perfectly integrated construction. It flows just as easily as the Danube itself, and far more colourfully.