CBSO viennese 2007

The Dance of the Sexes

Equality between the sexes was not a prominent feature of social life in 19th-century Vienna. While women might not have been represented in the professions, however, and while they did not have the vote, in the ballroom they were in control – not least by way of their carnets de bal. It was in these programme cards or booklets that a man who wanted to be sure of dancing with a particlar partner had to register his name alongside whichever waltz or polka she consented to bestow on him. Often beautifully designed by leading artists of the day – like the Secessionists Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser – they were valued as accessories but no less for what they symbolised.

Actually, emancipation was on its way in everyday life too – women got the vote in Austria before most women in this country – and it was making its presence felt even in the popular music of the time. Alongside the Strauss family polkas reflecting the excitement to be found in boys’ toys like railway trains, fireworks and electromagnets, there are more poetic, even feminine inspirations – many of them by Josef Strauss, including his fascinatingly titled Die Emancipierte (The Emancipated Woman). Included in today’s programme, Johann II’s Lob der Frauen (In Praise of Women) is another if, by present-day standards, somewhat dubious example.

It is significant also that the two most successful Viennese operettas of the period, Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus and Franz Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow), feature resourceful women who outwit men with consummate ease. “How does one deal with women?” asks a group of men in an amusing number in Die lustige Witwe. “Yes,” they conclude, “women are a difficult subject to study!” Their counterparts who asked the same question in the following decades of Viennese operetta, right up to the Second World War, never found the answer.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Die Fledermaus: Overture

The central figure, but by no means the ultimate winner, in Die Fledermaus is Gabriel von Eisenstein. In the first act he is looking forward to a lavish ball to be thrown by the Russian Prince Orlofsky and, in the absence of his wife Rosalinde, hoping to make a conquest or two. What he doesn’t know is that, in the absence of her husband, Rosalinde is about to entertain her lover and singing teacher Alfred. Although her infidelity is discovered in the third and last act, she has a weapon to counter Eisentstein’s indignation. In the second act, set at Orlofsky’s palace, she had turned up at the ball, masked and disguised as a Hungarian countess, and Eisenstein had fallen for her. In his efforts to seduce her he had let her take his watch, which of course she kept as evidence against him.

As the eventful overture suggests, the story is far more complicated than that. It begins with the most dramatic music in the score, which accompanies a final show-down scene in a remarkably comfortable Viennese prison, cuts back to a 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.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus: Csárdás (“Klänge der Heimat”)

One way in which Rosalinde convinces her erring husband that she really is a Hungarian countess is to entertain Orlofsky’s guests with a stylish rendering of a show-stopping csárdás. The longest and most elaborate aria in the whole score – originally conceived as a purely instrumental piece – Rosalinde’s csárdás is introduced by an authentic-sounding Hungarian gypsy clarinet and includes, in the traditional manner, a characteristically nostalgic slow section followed by a brilliantly fiery ending.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Gold and Silver (Gold and Silver): Waltz

Like many of the most popular Viennese composers of his day, Franz Lehár came from a military-musical background. Born in Hungary, he had to spend years as a bandmaster before leaving military service and settling in Vienna in 1902. His timing was perfect. Taste for the characteristically vertiginous one-in-a-bar waltz cultivated by the Strauss family was waning in favour of something more sensuous and more romantic, something that swayed rather than swirled. Although it contains some glitteringly lively episodes too, the gliding melodic style of the Gold und Silber Waltz – written for a ball with a “gold and silver” theme at the Sofiensaal in the 1902 carnival season – was just what was required. It established Lehár’s reputation immediately. Three years later he wrote Die lustige Witwe, which includes an even more sentimental and probably even more popular waltz.

Johann Strauss II

Lob der Frauen (In Praise of Women): Polka-Mazurka, Op.315

Feminism was presumably not so advanced in 1867, when Johann II’s polka Lob der Frauen was first performed at the Vienna Carnival, that there were objections to it on the grounds that a piece written by a man in praise of women was a patronising exercise in male condescension. It was no doubt taken as it was innocently intended. Certainly, as a particularly graceful example of the Polka-Mazurka, a dance that ingeniously combines the duple-time step of the polka with the triple-time metre of the mazurka, it would have been difficult to resist from any point of view. Though slower and less energetic than the average polka, it is only a little longer and is restricted to three sections, the last of which recalls the first.

Franz Lehár

Giuditta : “??” (Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiss)

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? As resourceful as the heroines of generations of Viennese operetta, she sings and dances a seductive waltz. The North African local colour applied to the introduction to the full version of the song does not disguise the Viennese origin of the slow waltz at the heart of it.

Franz Lehár

Die lustige Witwe: The Vilja Song (Es lebt eine Vilja)

The most successful of all Lehár’s operettas – the most successful of all Viennese operettas next to Die Fledermaus – was, and still is, Die lustige Witwe (“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. Lieutenant Danilo’s charmingly dissolute “Da geh’ ich zu Maxim” (I’m off to Chez Maxim) represents the former category. “Es lebt eine Vilja” – introduced by Hanna Glawari, a rich young widow, the loss of whose personal fortune through marriage to a fortune-seeking Frenchman could sink the whole Pontevedran economy – represents the latter category. Usually known as The Vilja Song, it is presented as an exoitcally coloured Pontevedran folk song: Vilja, a beautiful wood nymph, allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . . Hanna herself does not disappear and ends up, having duly outwitted the French, with Danilo, who will no doubt have to stay away from Maxim’s in the future.

Johann Strauss II

Tritsch-Tratsch (Chit-Chat): 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 exhilharating 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. 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 magzeine, it demonstrates just how quickly and how irresistibly chit-chat or tittle-tattle can get round a crowded ballroom. The fact that most of the chattering is done by the higher instruments in the orchestra, with a particularly prominent piccolo, is surely not intended as any kind of gender discrimination?

Johann Strauss II

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 an 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

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, however. 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 contradicts it from time to time. 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 at the end. The seven comparatively modest tunes that are heard in the meantime in this particular piece are chosen for their entertainment value and their potential as contrasting material. Wiener Blut was first performed, incidentally, at an imperial wedding celebration in 1873, when the composer made his debut as director of the Vienna Philharmonic – which no doubt explains the sophisticated string scoring in the introduction.

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, ”the greatest success of my life,” Bocaccio 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 Ein Morgen, Mittag und Abend in Wien (Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna) in 1844. Die leichte Kavallerie (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

Frühlingstimmen (Voices of Sprng): Waltz, Op.410

Originally written as a vocal piece for the coloratura soprano Bianca Bianchi, Frühlingstimmen was dismissed on its first performance in 1883 as “not very melodious” – which would suggest that Mme Bianchi didn’t sing it very well. Certainly, as an orchestral waltz, it is outstanding for the quality of its tunes, not least the sensitively syncopated and delicately scored first theme of the second of its four sections. Although, unlike some others among Johann II’s more ambitious waltzes, Voices of Spring has no introduction, it does have a coda to recall the vigorous opening theme and put a brilliant ending to it.

Oscar Straus (1870-1954)

The Chocolate Soldier (Der tapfere Soldat): “My hero”

Far from being an ‘s’ short of a Strauss, Oscar Straus was a highly accomplished composer of Viennese operettas – dozens of them – in his own rather shorter name. Although his most familiar piece is probably the fairground-waltz theme-tune for the 1950 Max Ophuls film La Ronde, his earliest international success was the operetta Der tapfere Soldat which achieved enormous popularity in this country and the United States as The Chocolate Soldier. Based on Shaw’s play Arms and the Man and set during the Serbo-Bulgarian War in 1885, it is about the inevitably complex love affair between Nadina, daughter of the Colonel of the Bulgarian army, and Lieutenant Bumerli, a Swiss officer attached to the Serbian forces.

Before Nadina meets Bumerli she is engaged to the supposed hero of the Bulgarian army, Major Spiridoff. Fleeing from the Bulgarians and taking refuge, as luck would have it, in Nadina’s bedroom, the very charming Bumerli reveals to her not only his love for chocolate drops but also the decidedly non-heroic status of her fiancé. Her delightfully melodious waltz-song “My hero” is addressed not to Bumerli, however – his bedroom-window entry is still to come – but to her absent and, as far as she knows at this point, heroic fiancé.

Carl Zeller (1842-1898)

Der Obersteiger: “Don’t be cross” (Sei nicht bös)

Though once a member of the Vienna Boys’ Choir and an obviously promising musician in his youth, Carl Zeller decided not to devote his adult life exclusively to music. Even so, as a full-time and high-ranking civil servant, he revived the declining fortune of Viennese operetta in the early 1890s with Der Vogelhändler (The Bird handler) and wrote an equally successful example, Der Obersteiger (The Master Miner) in 1894. The most popular number in the latter work, “Sei nicht bös” (Don’t be cross), is actually a tenor aria – sung in the original by Martin, a foreman miner to his indecisive girlfriend Nelly – but ever since Elisabeth Schumann took a liking to its disarming waltz-time melody, it has become a favourite soprano item. It probably sounds even better that way.

Josef Strauss (1827-1870)

Eingesendet (Letters to the Editor): Quick Polka, Op. 240

As the most sensitive musician among the three Strauss brothers, Josef had a particular genius for the polka française and the polka-mazurka. He could, however, write quick polkas as explosive as any. Named after the heading over the letters-to-the-editor column, Eingesendet (literally “sent in”), this missive from, let’s say, “grumpy of Grinzing” was clearly written in haste and delivered at full speed.

Johann II & Josef Strauss

Pizzicato Polka

A polka for plucked strings only was a brilliant 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 tease his instrumentalists while keeping them anxiously waiting for the next beat.

Johann Strauss II

Eljen a Magyár: 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 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

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

The Blue Danube, as it is usually known in English, is the most famous of all 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 today has a new text which, added in 1890, 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 main sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction. Johann II’s melodic genius was such that even if the river itself were to dry up Vienna and the Danube would still be inseparable.

Gerald Larner ©2007