CBSO Viennese 2008

A Regiment of Composers

Military discipline might seem an unlikely way of acquiring the seductive rhythmic techniques essential to the waltz or the tuneful charm required by operetta. Even so, the two main bastions of popular musical culture in 19th century Vienna, the ballroom and the operetta theatre, both needed their military men – and not just to occupy the boxes of the Theater an der Wien or to cut elegantly uniformed figures on the dance floor of the Sofiensaal. They also played a significant part in meeting the apparently insatiable public demand for the kind of music performed in those places. So, alongside the civilian composers and performers working in Vienna at the time, like the Strauss brothers themselves, there was this strategic reserve of musicians who, through choice or necessity, had learned their trade by working in a regimental band. Indeed, one of them, Philipp Fahrbach, had collaborated closely with Johann I – founder of the Strauss dynasty and father of Johann II, Joseph and Eduard – and had even had a hand in the composition of one of the most famous of all Strauss works, the Radetzky March.

All three of the non-Strauss composers represented in this programme had bandmaster experience of one kind or another. Coming from a long line of military musicians, Emil von Reznicek was actually conservatoire-trained but then, after working in Graz Opera and other theatres for a few years, reverted to family type and became director of music with the 88th Infantry Regiment in Prague, where he stayed for as long as seven years before returning to civilian life. It was during that time that he wrote the one work by which he is still remembered. His comic opera Donna Diana was first performed in Prague in 1894 and achieved the height of its fame when it was conducted by Gustav Mahler himself at the Vienna Opera in 1904.

Franz Lehár’s father served for nearly 40 years as a military bandmaster and, in spite of conservatoire training as a violnist in Prague, his son might well have spent the larger part of his life in the same way. In fact, he played in or directed military bands for 14 years before he was posted with his regiment to Vienna and realised what opportunities there were for accomplished musicians in that city. Johann II had just died and, although Eduard Strauss was still industriously active, Vienna needed not ony a new operetta composer but also a new ballroom style. With perfect timing Lehár’s Gold und Silber, written for the 1902 carnival season, proved to be just the kind of waltz the public now wanted. He promptly left military service, turned his attention to the theatre and in 1905 wrote Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow), which was to be one of the most successful works in operetta history, and went on writing for the stage for more than 20 years.

Playing the violin next to Lehár in the 50th Austrian infantry regiment in the late 1880s was another son of a military bandmaster, Leo Fall. Although he was quicker than Lehár to extricate himself from military life, Fall took very much longer to establish himself as a composer. It wasn’t until he left Berlin, where he had gone to work with his father, and settled in Vienna that, between 1907 and 1908, he wrote his first successful operettas (Der fidele Bauer, Die Dollarprinzessin and Die geschiedene Frau), which immediately promoted him to the status of one of the leading composers of his kind, alongside Lehár, Oscar Straus and Emmerich Kálmán.

While it is true, incidentally, that neither Straus (no relation to the Strauss family) nor Kálmán had anything to do with the military, if we take into account the vast contribution of bandmaster Carl Michael Ziehrer – who was a serious rival to Johann II at one time and who went on writing operettas until the beginning of the First World War – Vienna’s regiment of military composers could claim to have acquitted itself with full musical honours.

Emil von Reznicek (1860–1945)

Donna Diana Overture

When Donna Diana was performed at the Vienna Opera under the direction of Gustav Mahler it met with mixed reviews. There was general agreement, however, that while he was not a great opera composer Reznicek was “an outstanding virtuoso of the orchestra.” That could be why it is only the overture that survives in the repertoire today. Its special quality is that it is exactly the right length for its material, which is to say that it is very short. Its energy is generated by the busy little main theme which grows out of the introductory flourishes and which remains indefatigably active throughout – even on those timely occasions when the broader second theme enters to occupy the foreground for a while.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Wein, Weib und Gesang (Wine, Women and Song) Waltz, Op.333

Like the Blue Danube Waltz a couple of year before it, Wine, Women and Song was written for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association, for whom Johann II was to provide no fewer than nine choral compositions in all – six waltzes, two polkas and a march. As with the Blue Danube, however, he scored it in such a way that it could be performed as an orchestral piece, without the choral parts, and it is in this form that it has achieved its universal popularity. While there is no need to refer to the text supplied by the Association’s official poet Josef Seyl for the choral version, it might be as well to remember the old Viennese rhyme

Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang

Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang.

which roughly translates as

He who doesn’t like wine, women and song

Will remain a fool his whole life long.

Certainly, that hedonistic sentiment is accurately reflected in the four cheerful waltzes that make up the main part of the piece. The introduction, on the other hand, one of the longest and most developed of its kind, begins in a thoughtful frame of mind with an Andante quasi religioso which is not only sensitively scored but also discreetly contrapuntal in texture. It shouldn’t be taken too seriously, however, since the composer himself has no qualms about transforming his “religious” melody into the second of the waltzes. The length of the introduction – which also includes a march and the obligatory fanfare as well as an anticipation of the fourth waltz – is compensated for by a very short coda.

Johann Strauss II

Tritsch-Tratsch Polka schnell Op.214

Tritsch-Tratsch has always been one of the most popular of Viennese polkas. After its first performance in 1858 there was such a demand for it that the sheet music was sold out within a few days of its publication and was hastily reprinted – to the delight no doubt of the owners of the recently issued Tritsch-Tratsch magazine from which it takes its name. A brilliant example of the Polka schnell (or quick polka), it demonstrates just how swiftly and how irresistibly chit-chat or tittle-tattle can get round a crowded ballroom.

Im Krapfenwald’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 the Polka française (or slow polka) Im Krapfenwand’l is a 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.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

The Merry Widow: “I’m off to chez Maxim”

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 (as Die lustige Witwe) in Vienna in 1905. Set for the most part in the Paris legation 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.” The stylish and carefree “I’m off to Chez Maxim” (Da geh’ ich zu Maxim) – sung by Count Danilo Danilowitsch, the charmingly dissolute secretary to the Pontevedran legation – belongs to the former category.

Paganini: ”Girls were meant to love and kiss”

Highly successful though he was up to the beginnng of the First World War – with operettas like Der Graf von Luxemburg (The Count of Luxembourg) and Zigeunerliebe (Gypsy Love) – Lehár’s career faltered at that point. It was revived in a big way by his association with the phenomenally popular tenor Richard Tauber, whose lyrical vocal qualities he was able to exploit with unfailing effect. Paganini, based on an entirely imaginary episode in the life of the legendary violinist and first performed in Vienna in 1925, includes a characteristic Tauber song known in English as “Girls were meant to love and kiss.” Rather less cloyingly titled in the original German, “Gern hab’ich die Frauen geküsst” is Paganini’s revelation of the secret of his brilliant technique – as a lover, that is, not a viiolinist.

Gold and Silver Waltz

After the death of Johann II, taste for the characteristically vertiginous one-in-a-bar waltz cultivated by the Strauss family, was on the decline. The dancing public was beginning to favour something more sensuous and more romantic, something that swayed rather than swirled. Lehár’s Gold und Silber waltz, written for a ball with a “gold and silver” theme in the Sofiensaal in 1902, made his reputation overnight. While it contains some glitteringly lively episodes too, its gliding melodic style was just what was required. Three years later an even more sentimental and even more seductive waltz was to become a popular highlight of The Merry Widow.

Johann Strauss II

Egyptian March

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 intriguing 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.

Emperor Waltz, Op.437

The Emperor Waltz (Kaiser-Walzer) is not only a great piece of music but also a great piece of diplomacy. It was written to celebrate the historic state visit made by Kaiser Franz Joseph I of Austria to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany in Berlin in 1889 and was given its grand but neutral title so as to offend neither emperor and to flatter them both. Imperial in inspiration, it is also imperial in stature. The introduction takes the form of a delicately scored march, while the first of the waltz tunes – briefly anticipated in march time before its definitive introduction in waltz time on horn and 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 proportions, recalling 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.

Franz Lehár

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 annexed by 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. That 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 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 wants. 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)

Mit Extrapost Galopp, Op.259

While it is not always easy to tell the difference between the music of the three Strauss brothers, each one had his speciality. Eduard, the youngest of them, was particularly inspired by trains and carriages, and the quicker the better – which made him a natural exponent of the Polka schnell or its near relative the Galopp. Mit Extrapost is an exhilarating account of a ride in the quickest means of public transport in the days of horse-drawn travel, the special post, which, at a special price, was available on demand at any time of night or day.

Johann Strauss II

Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald (Tales from the Vienna Woods): Waltz, Op.325

The best thing that ever came out of the Vienna woods, the composer seems to be telling us, is the Viennese waltz. Certainly, the Ländler, the peasant ancestor of the most sophisticated of 19th-century dance forms, originated in the countryside round Vienna – the rustic charms of which are poetically evoked, alongside the usual waltz-time fanfares, in the extended introduction to these Tales from the Vienna Woods. And it is from this pastoral background that, after a picturesque flute cadenza, one of the main themes first emerges, not as a waltz at this stage but as a simple Ländler played on a zither (or, failing that, on muted strings). It is introduced in its waltz form – on string and woodwind this time – in the second of the four central sections of the work, each one of which has its own main and subsidiary themes and sometimes a countertheme in the accompaniment as well. Although it is not recalled along with the other main themes in a coda long enough to match the scale of the introduction, it is heard for the last time, as a Ländler again on zither (or violins), in a brief but show-stopping episode of nostalgia just before the end.

Champagne Polka, Op.211

Described by Johann II as “a musical joke,“ the Champagne Polka –which was written at the height of the polka craze in 1858 – pops its punch line at an early stage and, as the rhythms fizz and the orchestration bubbles, repeats it several times over. While it is a celebration of the high life in one sense, it is also a tribute to the low-life tavern song "Mir is's alles an's, ob i a Geld hab oder kan's !" (Nothing matters to me as long as I have money) which provided the melodic material of the piece.

Chansonette Quadrille, Op.259

All the Strausses, including Johann I, wrote quadrilles. They had to: like the polka, the quadrille was a popular dance form in Vienna in from the 1840s onwards. Although its popularity waned in the ballroom, it retained a certain novelty value in that composers would frequently draw on themes from current successes in the musical theatre and attempt to fit them into the six sections, always in eight-bar phrases and mostly in duple time, of the conventional Viennese qudrille – often with hilarious results. Johann II wrote as many as sixty quadrilles, some of them for his concert seasons at Pavlovsk near St Petersburg. The Chansonette Quadrille was first performed at Pavlovsk in 1861 under the title Rigolboche Quadrille, ‘Rigolboche’ being the stage name of the leader of a French girls’ song and dance troupe enjoying huge success in St Petersburg at the time. Given the style of the Rigolboche tunes presented here – they clearly come straight out of the Parisian music hall, with the two most cheerfully vulgar respectively first and last in the sequence – one can understand why the girls were so popular. Presumably because Rigolboche had no profile in Vienna, Strauss’s Austrian publisher preferred the more demure but not inappropriate title Chansonette.

Leo Fall (1873–1925)

Die Rose von Stambul (The Rose of Istanbul): “Ihr stillen süssen Frau’n”

While Lehár seemed to have lost his popular touch during the First World War, his ex-military-bandsman colleague Leo Fall recovered his – not least in Die Rose von Stambul, which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1916. Based on a story with interestingly modern reverberations, Die Rose von Stambul is about the clash of traditional and West-European cultures in what was then the capital of Turkey. Kondja Gül, the Pasha’s daughter known as “the rose of Stamboul,” is thoroughly westernised. She is fond of music by Wagner, Strauss and Lehár and is also a passionate admirer of a poet she has never met called André Lery. The problem is that her father has promised her to Achmed Bey, the son of his Prime Minister, when she realy fancies André Lery. Three acts later she is delighted to find out that, unlikely though it might seem, Achmed Bey and André Lery are one and the same person.

Tonight’s excerpt comes from much earlier in the story when Achmed meets the ladies-in-waiting of his promised bride and, suggesting he should see their faces, asks them to remove their veils. His debonair and appropriately, if minimally, exotic “Ihr stillen süssen Frau’n” (You sweet, silent ladies) registers his delight when they comply.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Das Land des Lächelns (The Land of Smiles): “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz”

Lehár was happy to set his operettas just about anywhere – most famously of all in the ‘Pontevedran’ Embassy in Paris 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 both in China, “the land of smiles,” and in 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 that was his special quality.

Johann & 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 by keeping them anxiously waiting for the next beat.

Unter Donner und Blitz (Thunder and Lightening) Polka, Op.324

The theory that the most famous of all Strauss polkas was first performed under the title Sternschnuppe (Shooting Star) is difficult to accept. The music – with its drumrolls, its rumbling basses, its brilliant flashes of cymbal and piccolo sound, its general impression of the heavens let loose – is so appropriate to its present Thunder and Lightning title that is scarcely credible that it could have been conceived with any other scenario in mind.

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

The Blue Danube, as we know it, is the most famous of all waltzes. Written in 1867, under the title An der schönen blauen Donau 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 be inseparable.

Introduction and programme notes by Gerald Larner © 2008