CBSO viennese 2004

Vienna Whirl

New Year celebrations and the music of Johann Strauss seem to be such natural and inseparable companions that the association must, surely, go back well into the composer’s lifetime. In fact, the tradition didn’t begin until forty years after his death - in a Vienna very different from the city he knew (and very different from the city we know now). Austria having been annexed by Germany 1938, Clemens Krauss and the Vienna Philharmonic chose to give a “Special Concert” of music by the Strauss family on the last day of 1939 as, it is said, a discreet act of Viennese cultural defiance. Ironically, the Nazi authorities liked the idea. In 1941, the event having been switched from New Year’s Eve to the morning of New Year’s Day, German Radio began the annual wartime practice of broadcasting the Vienna Philharmonic’s Strauss concert to the glory of “Greater Germany.”

There was just one problem. According to a record in the register of St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, a Johann Michael Strauss who got married there in 1762 was “a baptised Jew.” What that means is that - by way of Johann Michael’s son Franz Borgias - Johann I, the founder of the Strauss musical dynasty, and his sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard were of (partly) Jewish descent. However, while the Nazi regime believed that banning Mendelssohn and Mahler would do their cause no harm, they felt that they could not afford to lose Johann Strauss. So, to conceal the Jewish origin of his great-grandfather, they falsified the entry in the St Stephen’s register and continued to support the annual broadcast of the New Year’s Day concerts from the Musikverein. The sequence was broken by the proximity of the fighting in 1945 but was taken up again a year later, in very different political circumstances, and has gone on to this day. Since Austrian TV began its live broadcasts of the concerts in 1959 they have become an international institution of ever growing popularity.

So, bearing in mind that Johann II, the greatest of the Strausses, appeared with the Vienna Philharmonic in the Musikverein only once, when he directed the first performance of Wiener Blut in April 1873, the tradition is something of a confection - a “Vienna Whirl,” you might say. But, as long as the ingredients are of good quality and the preparation authentically done, every one likes a confection. That is why, over the last fifty years or so, orchestras all over the world have adopted the practice of giving Viennese concerts in the New Year period. The music is not too serious for a holiday season and yet too good not to have a regular place in the concert hall.

Liberated from the rigid traditions preserved by the Vienna Philharmonic in the Musikverein - where, for example, the New Year concerts must end with three encores: a polka, the Blue Danube Waltz and the Radetzky March - other orchestras in other halls have developed the repertoire in other, interesting directions. In the last five years in the Musikverein only four composers who are not members of the Strauss family have been represented, and only once in each case. Over the same period the CBSO has included music by three times as many non-Strausses - Franz Lehár above all - without diluting the Viennese content or even departing too far from the ballroom and operetta traditions which have Johann II at their centre. Today’s programme, which leaves Vienna only for the very best of historical reasons, is particularly well chosen for both variety and continuity. Give it a whirl!

Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)

Die leichte Kavallerie (Light Cavalry) Overture

When Franz von Suppé started working in the theatre, as an unpaid assistant conductor at the Theater in der Josefstadt in 1840, Viennese operetta as we know it did not exist. It would not exist, in fact, until 1860 when, challenged by the overwhelming popularity of the Offenbach operettas recently imported from Paris, he wrote Das Pensionat, which is certainly not the best known of its kind but was probably the first. He went on to write dozens more, including Die schöne Galathea in 1865, Fatinitza in 1876 and Bocaccio (”the greatest success of my life”) in 1879. If many of them are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are so very inferior as because the overtures are so very good.

Suppé was a master of the overture from an early stage in his career, as he demonstrated in Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna in 1844. The Light Cavalry Overture - written for a two-act comic opera at the Carltheater in 1866 - is one of the most popular of all his compositions. Not surprisingly, it makes a special feature of military material, from the ceremonial fanfares that open and close the piece to the brilliant trumpet gallop associated in the operetta with a cavalry ride across the Hungarian plains. The Hungarian setting also allowed Suppé to indulge a characteristic Viennese taste for Hungarian flavouring, as in the lively dance that opens the main section of the overture and the passionate melody for lower strings introduced by a clarinet cadenza in the middle.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Tritsch-Tratsch Polka, Op.214

Although the polka was almost as popular as the waltz in the 1850s and 60s, 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, like its close relation the galopp, 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. Tritsch-Tratsch, which was written at the height of the polka craze in 1858, is an outstandingly brilliant example. Named after a contemporary Viennese gossip magazine, it demonstrates just how quickly and how irresistibly chit-chat or tittle-tattle can get round a crowded ballroom.

Josef Strauss (1827-1870)

Moulinet Polka, Op.57

Other ways of getting round the limitations of the polka included slowing it down and calling it a “polka française” and, more ingeniously, combining it with the triple-time rhythm of the mazurka and calling it a “polka-mazurka.” Josef Strauss, the older of Johann II’s two brothers, was particularly adept in all the polka forms. His Moulinet (Little Mill), its two beats in the bar clicking with mechanical precision in the percussion, is a particularly attractive example of both the gently paced polka française and the distinctive melodic charm of its underrated composer.

Johann Strauss II

Accelerationen (Accelerations) Waltz, Op.234

Tempo changes are not, by necessity, a prominent feature of the Viennese waltz. It is no doubt for that very reason, and certainly to amuse the engineering students of Vienna University at their St Valentine’s Day Ball in 1860, that Johann II defied the first law of ballroom choreography in his Accelerations Waltz. Following an introduction that is in itself a tease, the first waltz begins slowly and reaches its true tempo only gradually, as if wound up by a well-oiled rotary handle. A neat piece of engineering, it can be admired four times in all, twice near the beginning and, after an abundantly varied sequence of other waltz tunes, twice near the end.

Josef Strauss

Die Libelle (Dragonfly) Polka-mazurka, Op.204

If Josef Strauss had not been plagued by illness, which resulted in his death at the age of 43, 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. “He is the more gifted of us two,” said Johann II, “I am merely the more popular.” His mastery of the polka is nowhere more evident than in his examples of the hybrid polka-mazurka, which ingeniously combines the polka step with the uneven triple-time of the mazurka. The Dragonfly, with its prettily scored main theme, is one of the most attractive of its kind.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus - Csárdás

Hungary had little or nothing to do with the early development of either the Viennese waltz or the polka, but Hungarian-gypsy music - which had ready access to the Austro-Hungarian capital by way of the Danube - was a source of fascination and inspiration for Austrian composers from Haydn onwards. If gypsy bands were not as common in Strauss’s Vienna as they were less than 150 miles away in Budapest, their music was certainly part of Viennese popular culture - hence the immense success of Johann II’s operetta Der Zigeunerbaron (Gypsy Baron) at the Theater an der Wien in 1885

Eleven years earlier Johann II had included a colourful Hungarian episode in Die Fledermaus, which was a significant factor in making that work his first major success at the Theater an der Wien. The composer’s original intention was to introduce a gypsy band into the masked ball where most of the intrigue, much of it based on false identities, takes place. Later, having written a piece specially for the band, he changed his mind about a purely instrumental number and converted it into a showstopper for the leading soprano role, Rosalinde, who has turned up at the ball disguised as a Hungarian countess. Rediscovered in 1962 and published a few years later, the original instrumental piece - a csárdás introduced by an authentic-sounding clarinet and consisting of a characteristically nostalgic slow section and an authentically fiery ending - is no less a showstopper than its vocal version.

Johann Strauss II

Champagner (Champagne) Polka, Op.211

The Champagne Polka, which was written at the same time as Tritsch-Tratsch at the height of the polka craze in 1858, is a characteristic example of what Johann II could do with a witty idea and a sound to match. Described by the composer himself as “a musical joke,” it pops it punch line in the middle and, while the rhythms fizz and the orchestration bubbles, repeats it several times over.

Johann Strauss II

Wiener Blut (Vienna Blood) Waltz, Op.354

The Viennese waltz as Johann II and his brothers 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 the Strausses were always ready to accept. The dance was their way of life and, what is more, they had perfected the musically rewarding art of setting a waltz melody free from its triple-time accompaniment. The inspired main theme of Wiener Blut, the one that glides in on violins and woodwind once the waltz tempo is established, floats serenely above the persistent pizzicato rhythm in the bass and even makes a point of contradicting it. Melodies of this distinction - there is rarely more than one in each waltz - are usually anticipated in the introduction, as this one is in an episode featuring an unusually expressive string ensemble. 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, after three other waltz episodes, at the end.

Wiener Blut was first performed at an imperial wedding celebration in 1873, the occasion when the composer made his one and only appearance as director of the Vienna Philharmonic in the Musikverein - which no doubt explains the sophisticated string scoring in the introduction. Another work performed on the same concert, though under a different musical director, was Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, which is to be heard later in this programme.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Die lustige Witwe (Merry Widow): Overture

On its first performance in 1905 The Merry Widow had no overture and it survived happily without one for thirty-five years. The overture Lehár finally got round to writing in 1940 could almost be by a different composer. Certainly, with Austria at war and now incorporated into Germany, the times were very different indeed. If Lehár regretted the passing of Vienna under alien control he could at least console himself with the thought that he was one of Hitler’s favourite composers and that The Merry Widow was one of his favourite works - which is probably why he dedicated the newly written Overture to the Führer. It was a tribute which later - as he began to realise the full horror of Nazi politics and as he and his Jewish wife had to leave Austria to find refuge in Switzerland - he had ample cause to regret.

Music had changed too during those thirty-five years and, although Lehár was by no means a progressive composer, the harmonic and orchestral treatment he applies to the old Merry Widow material in the new overture he would never even have contemplated in 1905. It is a strange work, a contrapuntal rhapsody on familiar themes from the opera and at the same time a cleverly sustained tease which withholds from the public what it most wanted. The universal favourite, the so-called “Merry Widow Waltz” which finally unites Hanna and Danilo in the last act of the operetta, is there much of the time but in more or less hidden allusions, as on its first appearance on lower strings under a violin solo in the introduction. It never rises to the surface for the full-scale romantic treatment. The composer seems to prefer an earlier, livelier and less sentimental waltz danced and sung by Hanna and Danilo at the end of the first act. Other tunes which emerge more or less intact are Hanna’s “Vilja” ballad, a vigorous discussion of women by the men in the cast and, after an unexpected orchestral crisis, Danilo’s famously charming song in praise of Maxim’s and the congenial feminine company he finds there.

Eduard Strauss (1835-1916)

Bahn frei Polka-Galopp, Op45

Among the many pieces of music inspired by the railway - Honegger’s Pacific 231 being the most impressive of all - there are a number of attractive polkas by Eduard Strauss. Indeed, Johann’s youngest brother seems to have been obsessed by travel: Bahn frei (Clear the Track), Mit Dampf (Steam up), Auf and davon (Up and Away) Ohne Bremse (No Brakes) are only a few of his tributes to locomotion. A master of the quick polka, Eduard wrote Bahn frei for a railway officials’ ball in 1869 - offering the dancers a bumpy ride, beginning with the screech of a steam whistle and proceeding at full speed to a short halt and another blast of the whistle.

Johann & Josef Strauss

Pizzicato Polka

A polka for plucked strings only was a great idea: it would provide a memorably alliterative title, it would be a novel sound and, since the polka doesn’t require sustained melodic lines, it wouldn’t seem unnatural to deny the string players the use of their bows. But it was easier said than done, as Josef Strauss found when his elder brother tried to persuade him to write a Pizzicato Polka for their season in the Vauxhall Pavilion at Pavlosk near St.Petersburg in 1869. In the end they collaborated on it - amusing themselves, no doubt, not only by scoring the sudden shifts in dynamics, from fortissimo to pianissimo and back again, but also by writing in the pauses which give the conductor an opportunity to torment his instrumentalists while keeping them anxiously waiting for the next beat.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

2 Hungarian Dances

No.1 in G minor

No.5 in G minor (orch.Parlow)

Brahms, who was to become one of Johann II’s greatest admirers, was an enthusiast for Hungarian-gypsy music even before he settled in Vienna. Having partnered a Hungarian violinist called Eduard Reményi on concert tours in his early twenties, he was intimately familiar with the idiom and retained his affection for it to the end of his life. His Hungarian Dances for piano duet, drawing on his memories of the music he had played with Reményi but on other sources too, were written between 1858 and 1880, the later ones in Vienna.

The Hungarian Dance No.1 in G minor is based on the Isteni Csárdás by Ferenc Sárközi and, above all in its passionate opening theme on the strings, is a highly attractive example of what Brahms and his contemporaries found so attractive in the Hungarian-gypsy idiom. It is one of the three (the others being No.3 in F and No.10 in E) orchestrated by Brahms himself. The version we are about to hear of No.5 in G minor is by bandmaster Parlow who, having Brahms’s treatment of No.1 in the same key as a model, could scarcely go wrong. Based on Béla Kéler’s Souvenir de Bártfai, it is another display of rhythmic vigour with a particularly stylish episode of syncopations following the explosively energetic first entry of the main theme.

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)

Invitation to the Dance (orch. Berlioz)

The relevance of a piano rondo written by a German composer in Dresden in 1819, when Johann Strauss I was still in his mid-teens, might not be immediately obvious. Weber’s Invitation to the Dance was, however, one of the first examples of the structured waltz, the ordered and integrated sequence of waltz tunes later adopted and so successfully developed by the Strauss family. The joy of domestic pianists all over Europe, it was certainly known in Vienna long before Hector Berlioz - another Strauss admirer, incidentally - multiplied its popularity by making an orchestral version of it in 1841.

Having made his arrangement, for a ballet in a production of Weber’s Der Freischütz at the Paris Opéra, Berlioz took pride in the fact that “not a note has been changed” - although, to make it easier for the orchestra, he did transpose it from D flat to D major. He might also have claimed that the gentleman’s invitation to the lady in the introduction is more eloquent on solo cello than on piano and that her woodwind replies, turning him down at first and then accepting him, are more charmingly modest. As for the waltzes themselves, Berlioz applied a remarkably variety of colour, but never for its own sake. Where Weber makes a literal repetition, as of the recurrent first theme in D major, Berlioz does the same. When the second waltz wanders into the wrong harmonies, Berlioz heightens the effect with the utmost discretion. The return to D major at the brilliant end to the dance is not quite the end of the piece: the cello gentleman thanks the woodwind lady with a nice appreciation of musical as well as social form.

Johann Strauss II

Perpetuum mobile, Op.257

If any work could be said to sum up the Strauss genius in less time than it takes to boil an egg, it is the non-stop flow of melodic invention, instrumental inspiration, and unpretentious wit of Perpetuum mobile. It was inspired by a press comment on a remarkable evening when the Strauss brothers each conducted one of three balls going on simultaneously in the same hall in Vienna in 1861: “Perpetual motion, or the dance without an end,” one paper called it, and that is exactly what Johann Strauss contrived to achieve in a quick polka written for a different ballroom a couple of months later. There being, theoretically, no reason why it should ever stop, it is up to the conductor to choose when to bring perpetual motion to an end.

Im Krapfenwand’l (Cuckoo): Polka française, Op.336

Since it is named after Josef Krapf’s well known tavern in the Vienna

Woods, it would be reasonable to assume that Im Krapfenwand’l is another tribute to the countryside the Viennese knew best. When it was first performed, however, at the Vauxhall Pavilion in Pavlovsk Park near St. Petersburg - where Johann II directed several seasons of summer concerts in the 1850s and 1860s - it was called In the Pavlovsk Woods. Astute businessman though he was, the composer might have been better advised to go for neutrality in this case and give it the “Cuckoo” title it has since acquired in English-speaking countries. It would at least have acknowledged the vital role played by the virtuoso musician who makes no fewer than eight entries in each of the four main sections and five more in the coda.

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

Although the Strauss family tended to avoid the rondo form adopted by Weber in the Invitation to the Dance, his idea of linking several waltz tunes together became one of their guiding principles. This most famous of all Viennese waltzes - written originally in a rather different form for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867 - consists of as many as five distinct waltz-time sections in succession, each one of them based on two different themes and none of them recalled before the sequence is complete. What gives it its symphonic stature is the slow introduction with its seductive anticipations of the main theme and, following the fifth waltz, the splendid coda which recalls and briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction.

introduction and programme notes by Gerald Larner © 2004