Die Fledermaus: Overture

Tunes and Titles

The difference between the Viennese waltz and the polka is that the waltz has the catchy tunes and the polka has the catchy titles. For sheer headline appeal, leaving musical quality aside, even the most famous of Johann Strauss II’s waltzes cannot begin to compare with some of the polkas by his younger brothers, like Josef’s Fireproof, Velocipede or Steeplechase and Eduard’s Far Out, No Holds Barred, No Brakes or Old England for Ever! The polka had to have some kind of novelty effect to compensate for the limitations imposed on the composer’s imagination by their repetitive two-in-a-bar rhythms. Varying its pace made little difference.

The waltz, on the other hand, as Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss I developed it from about 1820 onwards, got so quick that its basic pulse had to be one in a bar - which means that the melodic line, unlike that of the polka, could float above the subsidiary beats in the accompaniment and glide away in long and graceful curves. Bearing in mind that the Viennese waltz is not a one-tune affair but might have as many as five distinct waltz-time sections in succession, each one of them based on two different themes, and that Johann Strauss II wrote well over a hundred of them - not counting the dozens he provided for his many operettas - the Waltz King should also be crowned Emperor of Melody.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Die Fledermaus - Overture

As the most successful of Strauss operettas, and the only one actually set in contemporary Vienna, Die Fledermaus is the best place to start. Not the least entertaining part of it is the Overture which, since it takes no account of the order of events in the plot, 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. From there it cuts back to the bell that strikes six to signal the end of the central ball scene and 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 - Csárdás (“Klänge der Heimat”)

Among the guests at Prince Orlofsky’s ball are Rosalinde and her parlour maid Adele, neither of them invited in her own name and neither aware of the other’s presence. Rosalinde’s disguise as a Hungarian countess is so effective that it deceives even her own husband, Gabriel von Eisenstein, who is also incognito and is posing as a French marquis. It is in order to prove her Hungarian credentials that Rosalinde takes it upon herself to sing the longest and most elaborate aria in the whole score - a csárdás introduced by an authentic-sounding Hungarian gypsy clarinet and consisting of a characteristically nostalgic slow section and a brilliantly fiery ending.

Johann Strauss II

Pizzicato Polka (in collaboration with Josef Strauss)

Champagne Polka, Op.211

Tritsch Tratsch Polka, Op.214

Thunder & Lightning Polka, Op.324

A polka for plucked strings only was a brilliant idea: it would provide a memorably alliterative title and it would be a novel sound. But it was easier said than done, as Josef Strauss found when his elder brother tried to persuade him to write one. 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.

The Champagne Polka was described by its composer as “a musical joke.” Although the punch-line comes in the middle and is repeated several times over, the rhythms fizz and the orchestration bubbles to the very end.

Named after a contemporary Viennese gossip publication, the Tritsch-Tratsch Polka suggests that tittle-tattle gets round the ballroom at tremendous speed and, nonsense though it might be, that it is of no less interest to the Hungarians in the middle than to the Viennese in the outer sections.

If Thunder and Lightning is the most popular of Johann II’s polkas, it could be because it has not only one of the best titles but also some of the best tunes, together with a series of witty observations on the weather - a roll of thunder in the opening bars followed by a flurry of evasive activity, a hectic middle section where the storm rages in lightning cymbal clashes and bass-drum thunder claps, and an ending that betrays not the least sign of any dampening of the irrepressible Viennese genius for having a good time.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

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. If you have ever wanted to know what a Spanish-Moroccan cabaret artist does when attempting to seduce a rich English lord in a North-African dance hall, here is the answer. She sings and dances nothing other than a Viennese waltz: inapropriate though it might seem, it really works.

Johann Strauss II

Emperor Waltz, Op.437

The Emperor Waltz (Kaiser-Walzer in the original) 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 - introduced by horn in unison with violins on the G string - must be the most dignified of its kind. Although none of the following three waltz tunes is quite as stately, the character of the work as a whole derives from the main theme and from a stirring trumpet tune associated with the third waltz. The long coda makes sure of that.

Otto Nicolai (1810-1849)

The Merry Wives of Windsor - Overture

Among the traditional events in the calendar of the Vienna Philharmonic, alongside its famous New Year’s Day celebration, is an annual Nicolai concert, dedicated to the memory of Otto Nicolai who founded the orchestra in 1842. Although he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the Overture to The Merry Wives of Windsor (Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor) in 1847, the opera itself was turned down the by Royal Opera in Vienna and it was only in 1849, after he had returned to Germany as musical director of the Berlin Royal Opera, that he was able to see it performed. Sadly, he died before he was able to witness the immense success his opera was to enjoy - particularly in Vienna, where it retains its place in the repertoire alongside that other masterful version of Shakespeare’s comedy, Verdi’s Falstaff.

The atmospheric material of the slow introduction to the Overture derives from the last scene, set at night by Herne’s Oak in Windsor Forest. As Falstaff’s tormentors enter, disguised as fairies, the tempo accelerates to allegro vivace, its lightly articulated main theme eventually being offset by a lovely lilting melody on violins - a tune which, though it is one of the best in the whole score, never appears in the opera itself.

Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)

Two Slavonic Dances, Op.46

No.1 in C major

No.3 in A flat major

As Rosalinde has already demonstrated in her Csárdás, musical society in Strauss’s Vienna was no stranger to the songs and dances of Hungary. The same applies to the music of Czechoslovakia, another close neighbour that made a significant contribution to the Vienna style, not least by exporting the polka from Bohemia to the Imperial capital round about 1840. So a couple of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances Op.46 (which were written four years after Die Fledermaus in 1878) are by no means out of place here. Although Dvorak wrote his own melodies, all but one of the eight pieces of Op.46 are based on authentic Czech folk models. No.1 in C major derives from the furiant - a vigorous dance characterised, as the name suggests, by the angry conflict of duple rhythms in triple-time metres. The middle section offers a delicate contrast. In much the same way, the syncopated tune on trumpets in the middle of No.3 in A flat major is quite different from both the gentle and the energetic manifestations of the polka on either side of it.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus - The Laughing Song (“Mein Herr Marquis”)

One way out of an embarrassing situation is to laugh it off - just as Adele does in Die Fledermaus. She has taken an evening off her parlour-maid duties in the Eisenstein household ostensibly “to visit a sick aunt” but in reality to attend Prince Orlofsky’s ball as an aspiring actress called Olga. But 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 is no Marquis and shouldn’t be there either.

Lehár

The Merry Widow - 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 (Die lustige Witwe), 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. The Vilja Song - introduced by Hanna Glawari, a young rich and beautiful Pontevedran widow - belongs to 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…

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Two Hungarian Dances

No.1 in G minor

No.6 in D major (arr. Parlow)

The model for Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances was Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, which were completed ten years earlier and also written originally for piano duet. But, whereas Dvorak more or less simultaneously wrote orchestral versions of all his dances, Brahms orchestrated only three of his. So, of the two Hungarian Dances to be heard on this occasion, only No.1 in G minor, with its splendidly sonorous scoring for strings, was orchestrated by Brahms himself. As for No.6 in D major, while several musicians have tested their technique on it, the Parlow version is as good as any in abetting Brahms’s amusing ploy in teasing the ear before each entry of the main theme.

Johann Strauss II

Blue Danube Waltz, Op.314

The Blue Danube (An der schönen blauen Donau) must be the most famous of all Viennese 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 (added in 1890) which 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 sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction. It is no wonder that Johannes Brahms was one of its composer’s most fervent admirers.

Gerald Larner©

The family business

“Vienna without Strauss is like Austria without the Danube,” wrote Hector Berlioz on the death of Johann Strauss in 1849. But Vienna wasn’t without Strauss: the late Johann’s son of the same name was already engaged on the career that would make him far more famous than his father and probably much richer than any musician living in Austria at the time, Brahms included. Thanks to the inexhaustible genius of Johann Strauss II the Viennese waltz was to become not just a dance but an industry with a world-wide market for its products. Although Johann Strauss I had played a significant role in creating a demand for the Viennese waltz, and although his sons - not just Johann but Josef and Eduard too - were industrious in sustaining it, when the waltz craze spread abroad it was more than the family business could cope with.

Waltzes and polkas the Strausses could write in their hundreds, and they could do it very brilliantly, but the cult did not stop there. It expanded out of the ballroom into the musical theatre and, once the taste for Viennese operetta was established, it needed a whole army of musicians to sustain it. Some, like Franz Lehár, became masters of the art. Others were no more than competent professionals but, steeped as they were in a style that the world at large found irresistible, they could scarcely go wrong as long as they could come up with a tuneful waltz here and there. No Viennese operetta, however, not even Lehár’s Merry Widow, has achieved the popularity of Die Fledermaus. Challenged by the success of the Offenbach operettas imported from France, Johann II had made it his business to learn how to do it better and, on his third attempt in 1874, achieved a quality of inspiration that not even he was able to surpass.

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 on an occasion like this there is no better place to start. 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 throw 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 return to where the action is and the earlier tunes are duly recalled in an irresistibly reckless recapitulation.

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 preliminary fanfares, in the eventful introduction to these Tales from the Vienna Woods. And it is from the pastoral background that, after a woodland 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 counter-theme in the accompaniment as well. Although it is not recalled along with the other main themes in the extended coda, 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.

Champagner (Champagne) Polka, Op.211

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 it 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 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. If he could also put a catchy title to it or introduce a special sound effect, so much the better. The Champagne Polka, which was written at the height of the polka craze in 1858, is a characteristic example. Described by the composer 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.

Josef Strauss (1827-1870)

Moulinet (Little Mill): Polka française, 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 was particularly adept in all the polka forms. His Moulinet, 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

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.

Der Zigeuenerbaron (The Gypsy Baron): Entrance March

Although they have no pretensions to musical profundity and are often based on very silly stories - The Gypsy Baron being one of the silliest - Strauss’s operettas were not done on the cheap. Before the first performance of The Gypsy Baron at the Theater an der Wien in 1885 Strauss stipulated that “the Entrance March in the third act 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.”

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 proportions, 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.

Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)

Overture: Die leichte Kavallerie (Light Cavalry)

Vienna’s answer to Offenbach before Johann Strauss assumed the front-line role in operetta, Franz von Suppé - or to give him his full name Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo Cavaliere Suppé Demelli - wrote literally dozens of operettas and other popular stage works. If most of them are now forgotten or remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. The Light Cavalry Overture - written for a two-act comic opera at the Carltheater in 1866 - is one of the most popular of all. 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

Schatz (Sweetheart) Waltz, Op.418

Although Johann II devoted most of his creative energies in the last thirty years of his life to writing operettas, he by no means put a stop to 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 successful of its kind in its day was the Schatz Waltz, which is actually a medley of the best waltz tunes from Der Zigeunerbaron. Furnished with an impressive introduction in Hungarian-Gypsy idiom and four tuneful waltzes - featuring a particularly splendid surge of melody in the second of them - it is clearly due to reclaim its status as a popular favourite.

Perpetuum mobile, Op.257

If any piece could be said to sum up the Strauss genius in less time than it takes to soft-boil an egg, it is this “musical joke” - its non-stop flow of melodic invention, its instrumental inspiration and its unpretentious wit.

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 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 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 (By the Beautiful Blue Danube): Waltz, Op.314

The Blue Danube is the most famous of all waltzes. Written in 1867, it has since 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.

Introduction and programme notes by Gerald Larner ©2002

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Die Fledermaus: Overture

By far the most successful of all Johann Strauss’s operettas, Die Fledermaus is the only one set in the Vienna of his day. So it has a special status in that its waltz and polka numbers numbers are, for once, presented in their true social context. Absurdly unlikely though the events of its tortuous plot undeniably are, it is clear from Die Fledermaus that the dances fashionable in Strauss’s Vienna were products of a flourishing good-time industry catering to the tastes of the upper and professional middle classes. Die Fledermaus is all about having a good time. Other, comparatively minor issues arise – like revenge, marital fidelity, social pretension, crime and punishment – but none of them is treated as seriously as the desirability of indulging oneself, preferably at someone else’s expense.

Not the least entertaining part of the operetta is the Overture which, since it takes no account of the order of events in the plot, 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 frankly dissolute party thrown by the Russian Prince Orlofsky. It begins with the most dramatic music in the score, which accompanies a confrontation scene in a remarkably comfortable Viennese prison in the last act, cuts back to the bell striking six to mark 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

Auf der Jagd (At the Hunt) Op.373: Quick polka

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 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. Auf der Jagd (At the Hunt) – a title that invites the brilliant sound of horns and trumpets – comes from    Cagliostro in Wien (Cagliostro in Vienna),    a Strauss operetta now little known but much admired by Brahms in its day. The horses carrying the huntsmen, incidentally, are only the first of several equine representatives featured in this concert.

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

William Tell: Overture

The overture to Rossini’s last opera William Tell, which was first performed in Paris in 1829, is like no other work of its kind. Far from following the familiar pattern observed by most of Rossini’s other overtures, it amounts to nothing less than a small-scale tone poem. While it clearly reflects something of the Alpine scenery in which the opera is set, and while it vividly anticipates the eventual victory of William Tell and his Swiss-patriot companions over Austrian oppression, it has its own unique construction and, for the most part, its own material.

Perhaps the most inspired aspect of the work is the slow introduction for an ensemble of five solo cellos united in an eloquent evocation of peace in nature – or, as Berlioz more poetically described it, “the calm of profound solitude, that solemn silence of nature when the elements and human passions are at rest.” Nature does not long remain long at rest, however. Foreshadowed by drum rolls while the cellos are still luxuriating in their profound solitude, a storm develops: breezes swirl on violins and rain drops fall in the woodwind as the pressure rises towards a climax of raging winds on trombones, flashes of lightning on piccolo and peals of thunder on timpani. The storm dies away and peace is restored in a pastoral episode featuring a traditional Alpine herdsman’s melody, a ranz des vaches, piped on cor anglais and answered by an exuberantly virtuoso flute. Peace is again interrupted, this time by a fanfare announcing the entry of a troop of Swiss cavalry (more horses) in an unstoppable gallop to ultimate victory.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Hungarian Dance No.5 in G minor (arr.Parlow)

Hungarian gypsy music was as liberating an influence on some nineteenth-century composers as jazz on some twentieth-century composers. Brahms succumbed to it, its distinctive rhythms and exotic harmonies, when he met Eduard Reményi, a slightly disreputable but persuasive Hungarian violinist who gave several concerts with the young composer in the early 1850s. When Brahms started writing his own Hungarian Dances for piano duet in 1858, while there were other sources he could have drawn on, he no doubt remembered the Hungarian pieces that had made such an impression on him when he heard Reményi play them. Certainly, when the first two sets Hungarian Dances were published in 1869 Reményi accused Brahms of stealing the tunes from him.

The Hungarian Dance No.5 in G minor – unfortunately not one of the three that the composer orchestrated himself – is a particularly brilliant example of what Brahms and his contemporaries found so attractive in the Hungarian gypsy idiom: the fervent melodies, the vigorous rhythms and the syncopations, hesitations and delays that so effectively offset them.

Antonin Dvorák (1841-1904)

Prague Waltz

Like Brahms, his friend and champion in Vienna, Dvorák was an admirer of Johann Strauss. Or so it seems from his Prague Waltz which resembles Strauss’s concert waltzes not only in the triple-time rhythms essential to all pieces of its kind but also in its construction – in this case an unbroken sequence of five dances, each consisting of two tunes, framed by a short introduction and coda. Even so, with a harmonic and melodic style so clearly related to that of Dvorák’s recently completed first set of Slavonic Dances, there is no chance of his Prague Waltz being mistaken for a Viennese waltz.

Josef Strauss (1827-70)

Sport: QuickPolka Op.170

The composer of Sport was no sportsman himself. Josef, one of Johan II’s two younger brothers, was more interested in things of the mind. He was a successful architect, engineer and inventor, as well as being an aspiring artist and poet. He joined the family business of writing and performing dance music only reluctantly and, as events proved, he didn’t have the constitution for it: he died at the age of 42 after collapsing at the podium.

Had Joseph lived as long as either of his brothers he might have turned out to be the best composer of the three. He was already recognised as the most sensitive with his own somewhat melancholy melodic charm. Even so, he could write cheerful quick polkas when necessary, as he did in Sport. The illustrated cover of the sheet music suggests that he was interested in horse-racing and the polka certainly passes by at high speed, compressing four tunes (two of them in a middle section) into little over two minutes.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Five Liebeslieder (Love-Song) Waltzes Op.52

16 Animato

18 Animato
13 Im Ländler Tempo

06 Grazioso

11 Piú animato

arranged for string orchestra by Friedrich Hermann

Brahms was one of Johann II’s greatest admirers: “Unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms,” he wrote under a quotation from “The Blue Danube” he had entered in the autograph book of a member of the Strauss family. The influence of the waltz can be traced even in music as serious as his symphonies and at the same time he was not above putting together collections of popular-style waltzes, as in the 16 Waltzer Op.39 for piano duet published in 1865. The Liebeslieder Waltzes Op.52 for (ad-lib) vocal quartet and piano duet which followed in 1869 and the Neue Liebeslieder Waltzes Op.65 of 1874 were a direct result of the success the piano Waltzer and were a huge success.

Since Brahms did not insist on including the voices in performances of the Liebeslieder Waltzes it is doing no disservice to him to present them purely as instrumental music. As for the arrangement for string orchestra – written in 1889 by Friedrich Hermann (1876-1924), a prolific composer and arranger – Brahms would presumably have objected if he didn’t approve of it.

All five of today’s selection from the Hermann arrangements are obviously in triple time. They are not all obviously Viennese waltzes, however. Johann II wrote nothing like the first of them, No.16, the outer sections of which regularly divide the ensemble into two halves (in the original as in the arrangement) so as to effect contrapuntal exchanges between them. No.18, the last piece in Op.52, makes frequent key changes to end in the relative major. No.13 is nearer the Strauss model and much of the graceful No.6, which extends to an expressive slower middle section, was surely intended as a tribute the much admired master of the ballroom waltz. The last of them, on the other hand, No.11 in C minor, has echoes of Brahms in the Hungarian idiom, which makes it an appropriately lively ending.

Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962)

Three Old Viennese Dance Tunes

arranged by Joseph Swensen

Schön Rosmarin (Fair Rosemary)

Liebesleid (Love’s Pain)

Liebesfreud (Love’s Joy)

A great violinist and a not very serious composer, Fritz Kreisler was such a convincing accomplished imitator of musical styles that it was difficult even for scholars (such as they were in his day) to distinguish between the real thing and the imitation. Most of the music he acknowledged as his own has a strong Viennese flavour, like his elaborate waltz piece Caprice viennois. These three shorter works in a similar style, Schön Rosmarin, Liebesleid and its counterpart Liebesfreud, he presented not as his own but as “old Viennese dance tunes.”

At a recital in Berlin Kreisler played the Caprice viennois under his own name in the same programme as these so-called “old Viennese dance tunes,” which at that time he attributed to Joseph Lanner (a pioneer of the Viennese waltz along with the father of the Strauss family Johann Strauss I). Afterwards the critic of the Berliner Tagesblatt reprimanded him for daring to put his own insignificant composition, Caprice viennois, alongside such “Lanner gems” which, he said, “are full of the Schubertian melos”. Whatever they have, or might not have, of the “Schubertian melos”, the “old Viennese dance tunes” are most effectively if unsensationally scored for the violin and lack nothing in waltz-time melodic charm.

Originally written for violin and piano, the three Kreisler pieces are played on this occasion in arrangements for violin and orchestra by the soloist Joseph Swensen.

Johann Strauss II

Kaiser-Walzer (Emperor Waltz) Op.437

The Emperor Waltz 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.

Joseph Strauss

Jokey (Jockey): Quick Polka Op.278

Josef’s interest in horse racing is confirmed by his “Jockey” Polka which – with just one tune in the middle section and whipped along as it is by some encouraging percussion – gallops to the finishing post in even less time than the “Sport” Polka.   

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

Traditionally the last item in a New Year concert    – although it might be followed by an encore, often a quick polka – “The Blue Danube” is the most famous and melodically most inspired 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 the choral version does not 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 genius was such that even if the river itself were to dry up Vienna and the Danube would be inseparable.

Gerald Larner © 2018

A Family Business

“Vienna without Strauss is like Austria without the Danube,” wrote Hector Berlioz on the death of Johann Strauss in 1849. But Vienna wasn’t without Strauss: the late Johann’s son of the same name was already engaged on the career that would make him far more famous than his father and probably much richer than any musician living in Austria at the time, Brahms included. Thanks to the inexhaustible genius of Johann Strauss II the Viennese waltz was to become not just a dance but an industry with a world-wide market for its products. Although Johann Strauss I had played a significant role in creating a demand for the Viennese waltz, and although his sons – not just Johann but Josef and Eduard too – were industrious in sustaining it, when the waltz craze spread abroad it was more than the family business could cope with.

Waltzes and polkas the Strausses could write in their hundreds, and they could do it very brilliantly, but the cult did not stop there. It expanded out of the ballroom into the musical theatre and, once the taste for Viennese    operetta was established, it needed a whole army of musicians to sustain it. Some, like Franz Lehár, became masters of the art. Others were no more than competent professionals but, steeped as they were in a style which the world at large found irresistible, they could scarcely go wrong as long as they could come up with a tuneful waltz here and there. No Viennese operetta, however, not even Lehár’s Merry Widow, has achieved the popularity of Die Fledermaus. Challenged by the success of the Offenbach operettas imported from France, Johann II had made it his business to learn how to do it better and, on his third attempt in 1874, achieved a quality of inspiration that not even he was able to surpass.

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 on an occasion like this there is no better place to start. 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.

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 return to where the action is and the earlier tunes are duly recalled in an irresistibly reckless recapitulation.

Johann Strauss II

Leichtes Blut (Light of Heart): Quick Polka Op.319

Johann II’s Leichtes Blut polka was written in 1867 in the same fruitful season as the Blue Danube waltz. If it is not as familiar an example of its kind as its waltz-time companion, Leichtes Blut is certainly one of the best of all polkas. In fact, it is a perfect little inspiration, irresistibly propelled through the outer sections by a spring-heeled skipping rhythm, lifted by an exuberant new melody in the middle, and finished off by an ingenious little coda.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

The Merry Widow: “Vilja”

Paganini: ”Liebe du Himmel auf Erden” (Love, Heaven on Earth)

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” (Die lustige    Witwe), which was first performed in Vienna in 1905. Set partly in the Paris embassy of an imaginary, impoverished 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 most treasured Pontevedran asset is the merry widow herself, Hanna Glawari, who is not only beautiful but also so rich that the loss of her personal fortune through marriage to any but another Pontevedran would sink the the country’s whole economy. Her most popular number, which she sings at a glamorous party in her Parisian residence, is Lehár’s clever and highly attractive idea of what a Pontevedran folk song would sound like: it tells the story of    Vilja, an irresistible wood nymph who allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . . Hanna proves to be similarly irresistible – to the one Pontevedran she fancies – and finally, unlike Vilja, commits herself to him.

Over the course of a long career Lehár scored many other hits, not least with Paganini in 1925. Based on an entirely imaginary episode in the life of the legendary violinist, it was the first of several Lehár operettas written with Richard Tauber in mind as the leading tenor. One of its most celebrated numbers, however, is for a soprano, the Princess who falls in love with Paganini and who, as she makes quite clear in ”Liebe du Himmel auf Erden”, is most reluctant to lose him. Although the operetta is set in Lucca in the early nineteenth century, no one in Vienna in the early twentieth would have been surprised to hear Princess Anna Elisa pouring her hear out in a Viennese waltz song.

Franz Lehár

Gold and Silver: Waltz

Like many of the most popular Viennese composers of his day, 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, however. 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 and Silver 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 The Merry Widow.

Johann Strauss II

Champagne Polka Op.211

Described by its composer 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.

Eduard Strauss (1835-1916)

Mit Extrapost (Express Delivery): Galopp Op.259

While it isn’t 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 speedier the better – which made him a natural exponent of the quick polka 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

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 his younger brother 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)

Künstlerleben (An Artist’s Life): Waltz Op.316

The Viennese waltz, as Johann Strauss developed it and his even more successful son Johann Strauss II perfected it, is not just a one-tune affair. It might consist of many as four or five distinct waltz-time sections in succession, 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. The main theme of An Artist’s Life is anticipated in the slow introduction, first on oboe and then on horn and solo cello, but it is only one of ten tunes allocated into five sections of two each. Most of them are recalled in a coda developed to symphonic proportions and ending with a climax based on the theme so poetically anticipated in the introduction.

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 helped to revive the declining fortunes 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.

Johann Strauss II

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

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 a lavish ball at the villa of Prince Orlofsky, to whom she is introduced as an actress called Olga. 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 such 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 has presented himself at the ball as the Marquis de Renard, shouldn’t be there either.   

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 prescribing the pauses which give the conductor an opportunity to tease his instrumentalists while keeping them anxiously waiting for the next beat.

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 in Vienna is a muddy brown in most lights – but also the ultimate example of the concert waltz. In company with some of the most distinguished examples of its kind, it consists of as many as five distinct waltz-time sections, each one of them based on two different themes. 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 briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction. It flows just as easily as the Danube itself, and far more colourfully.     

Eduard Strauss

Bahn frei (Track Free): Quick polka

The programme ends with Eduard and one of his boys’ toys, in this case a railway with a track free for the express kind of transport which he finds so exciting. So, after a short warm-up and a blast of the whistle, off it goes with just one stop to an evidently popular excursion destination.

Gerald Larner © 2012

The family business

“Vienna without Strauss is like Austria without the Danube,” wrote Hector Berlioz on the death of Johann Strauss in 1849. But Vienna wasn’t without Strauss: the late Johann’s son of the same name was already engaged on the career that would make him far more famous than his father and probably much richer than any musician living in Austria at the time, Brahms included. Thanks to the inexhaustible genius of Johann Strauss II the Viennese waltz was to become not just a dance but an industry with a world-wide market for its products. Although Johann Strauss I had played a significant role in creating a demand for the Viennese waltz, and although his sons - not just Johann but Josef and Eduard too - were industrious in sustaining it, when the waltz craze spread abroad it was more than the family business could cope with.

Waltzes and polkas the Strausses could write in their hundreds, and they could do it very brilliantly, but the cult did not stop there. It expanded out of the ballroom into the musical theatre and, once the taste for Viennese operetta was established, it needed a whole army of musicians to sustain it. Some, like Franz Lehár, became masters of the art. Others were no more than competent professionals but, steeped as they were in a style which the world at large found irresistible, they could scarcely go wrong as long as they could come up with a tuneful waltz here and there. No Viennese operetta, however, not even Lehár’s Merry Widow, has achieved the popularity of Die Fledermaus. Challenged by the success of the Offenbach operettas imported from France, Johann II had made it his business to learn how to do it better and, on his third attempt in 1874, achieved a quality of inspiration that not even he was able to surpass.

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 on an occasion like this there is no better place to start. 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.

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 return to where the action is and the earlier tunes are duly recalled in an irresistibly reckless recapitulation.

Champagne Polka, Op.211

Pizzicato Polka (in collaboration with Josef Strauss)

One of the least likely of Johann II’s many enterprises was the seasons of summer concerts - ten of them between 1856 and 1865, two more in 1869 and 1886 - which he and his brother Josef conducted in the Vauxhall Pavilion in Pavlovsk Park near St Petersburg. After the conclusion of a favourable deal with the Tsarskoye-Selo Railway Company, which wanted to publicize its line between St Petersburg and Pavlovsk, Johann made a small fortune while the Russian audience had the privilege of being the first to hear such favourite pieces as the Tritsch-Tratsch, Champagne and Pizzicato Polkas and music by an unknown composer called Tchaikovsky was performed for the first time in public.

Although the polka remained in vogue for as long as fifty or sixty years after it hopped into Vienna from Bohemia round about 1840, it did not have the musical potential of the waltz. To compensate for its repetitive two-in-the bar rhythm, it had to have some kind of novelty effect - preferably in the scoring but, failing that, in a witty title at least. The Champagne Polka was described by its composer as “a musical joke.” The punch-line, which no one is likely to miss, comes in the middle and is repeated several times over, while the rhythms go on fizzing and the orchestration goes on bubbling to the end of the bottle.

A polka for plucked strings only was a brilliant idea. But, as Josef Strauss found when his elder brother tried to persuade him to write a Pizzicato Polka for their season at Pavlosk in 1869, it was easier said than done. In the end they collaborated on it - amusing themselves 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 downbeat.

Richard Heuberger (1850-1914)

Der Opernball: “Im chambre séparée” (In our private room)

There was such a demand for operetta in Vienna round the turn of the nineteenth century that even music critics tried their hand at it. Richard Heuberger, who succeeded the formidable Hans Hanslick on the Neue freie Presse, actually proved to be quiet successful in this line even if little of what he wrote is still heard today. Der Opernball (The Opera Ball), which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1898, survives mainly on the undying appeal of its best waltz number, “Im chambre séparée.” Although Der Opernball is clearly an attempt to emulate Die Fledermaus - it is set at a midnight ball in the Paris Opera House - “Im chambre séparée” is quite different from the standard Strauss waltz. Appropriately for a French maidservant in disguise inviting the object of her amorous intentions to drink champagne with her in one of the opera house’s private rooms, it is a seductive slow waltz very much in the Parisian manner.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

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

Giuditta is the opera which 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 a North-African dance hall? Well, what else could she do but dance and sing a waltz in the late Viennese manner? . . . . It works too!

Johann Strauss II

Tritsch-Tratsch (Chit-Chat) Polka, Op.214

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

Named after a contemporary Viennese gossip publication, the Tritsch-Tratsch Polka suggests that chit-chat or tittle-tattle gets round the ballroom at tremendous speed. Nonsense though it might be, it is clearly of no less interest in the Hungarian idiom in the middle than in the Viennese accents of the outer sections.

If Thunder and Lightning is the most popular of Johann II’s polkas, it is not only because it has one of the best titles but also because it has some of the best tunes, together with a series of witty observations on the weather - a roll of thunder in the opening bars followed by a flurry of evasive activity, a hectic middle section where the storm rages in lightning cymbal clashes and bass-drum thunder claps, and an ending that betrays not the least sign of any dampening of the irrepressible Viennese genius for having a good time.

Kaiser (Emperor) Waltzer, 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 - introduced by horn in unison with violins on the G-string - must be the most dignified of its kind. Although none of the following three waltz tunes is quite as stately, the character of the work as a whole derives from the main theme and from a stirring trumpet tune associated with the third waltz. The long coda makes sure of that.

Otto Nicolai (1810-1849)

Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor): Overture

Among the traditional events in the calendar of the Vienna Philharmonic, alongside its famous New Year’s Day celebration, is an annual Nicolai concert, dedicated to the memory of Otto Nicolai who founded the orchestra in 1842. Although he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the Overture to The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1847, the opera itself was turned down the by Royal Opera in Vienna and it was only in 1849, after he had returned to Germany as musical director of the Berlin Royal Opera, that he was able to see it performed. Sadly, he died before he was able to witness the immense success his opera was to enjoy - particularly in Vienna, where it retains its place in the repertoire alongside that other masterful version of Shakespeare’s comedy, Verdi’s Falstaff.

The atmospheric material of the slow introduction to the Overture derives from the last scene, set at night by Herne’s Oak in Windsor Forest. As Falstaff’s tormentors enter, disguised as fairies, the tempo accelerates to allegro vivace, its elfin main theme eventually being offset by a lovely lilting melody on violins - a melody which, though it is one of the best in the whole score, never appears in the opera itself.

Antonin Dvorák (1841-1904)

2 Slavonic Dances, Op.46

No.1 in C major: Presto

No.3 in A flat major: Poco allegro

Vienna is so close to both Hungary and Czechoslovakia that the music of those countries - which supplied a small army of composers to satisfy the demand for operetta in the boom years round the turn of the nineteenth century - has become part of the Viennese tradition. So a couple of Dvorák’s Slavonic Dances are by no means out of place in a Viennese programme. In fact it was partly because of the encouragement of Johannes Brahms, one of Vienna’s most famous residents, that Dvorák came to write these dances, eight of them in his Op.46 in 1878 and another set of eight in Op.72 eight years later. Although they were to some extent modelled on Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, they differ from them in one important respect: whereas Brahms used real Hungarian gypsy tunes, Dvorák wrote his own melodies in the authentic Slavonic style and rhythms.

The first of Dvorák’s Slavonic Dances derives from one of his favourite Czech folk dances, the furiant. Like its companion, it is has a contrastingly melodious middle section, this one showing scarcely a trace of the angry rhythmic contradictions that are so effective in invigorating the outer sections. In the middle section of No.3 in A flat two trumpet in thirds introduce a syncopated melody quite different from both the gentle and the energetic manifestations of the Bohemian polka on either side of it.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Paganini: ”Liebe du Himmel auf Erden” (Love, Heaven on Earth)

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, Die lustige Witwe (“The Merry Widow”), which was first performed in Vienna in 1905. He scored many other hits, however, not least with Paganini in 1925. Based on an entirely imaginary episode in the life of the legendary violinist, it was the first of several Lehár operettas written with Richard Tauber in mind as the leading tenor. One of its most celebrated numbers, however, is for a soprano, the Princess who falls in love with Paganini and who, as she makes quite clear in ”Liebe du Himmel auf Erden”, is most reluctant to lose him. Although the operetta is set in Lucca in the early nineteenth century, no one in Vienna in the early twentieth would have been surprised to hear Princess Anna Elisa pouring her hear out in a Viennese waltz song.

Set for the most part in the Paris embassy of an imaginary Balkan state, The Merry Widow 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 . . . .

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

2 Hungarian Dances

No.1 in G minor: Allegro molto

No.6 in D major: Vivace

When Brahms started writing his Hungarian Dances in 1858 there were several sources he could turn to for authentic Hungarian Gypsy material. It must have been difficult for him, however, to avoid drawing on his memory of the Hungarian pieces that had made such an impression on him when he played them with a persuasive Hungarian violinist called Eduard Reméni a few years earlier. Certainly, when the first two sets of Hungarian Dances were published in 1869 Reményi accused Brahms of stealing the tunes from him.

As it happens, neither of the two Hungarian Dances in this programme derives from Reményi. 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. The Hungarian Dance No.6 in D major is based on The Dance of the Rose Bush attributed to a composer called Nittinger. The teasingly slow opening followed by a sudden explosion of energy is only one of the many tempo changes in a dance remarkable for its exuberant harmonies, its reckless rhythms and, with at least five distinct tunes presented in quick succession, its melodic abundance.

Johann Strauss II

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

The Blue Danube 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 be inseparable.

Mixed Feelings in Vienna

The Viennese public that enjoyed the music of Johann Strauss II, his brothers and his followers seem to have had curiously mixed feelings about the city in which they lived. On the one hand, in their ballroom dances, their waltzes and polkas above all, they liked nothing better than some local association. The iconic status of “The Blue Danube” is a clear demonstration of that, and there are many more waltz-time examples to go with it, “Tales from the Vienna Woods” and “Vienna Blood” being only the two most familiar. As for the polka – which always needed some kind of novelty attraction, if only in the title – the examples are innumerable, including two examples in this programme.

In their operettas, on the other hand, the Viennese seem to have looked for an escape from their city. It is true that the most popular Viennese operetta of all, Die Fledermaus, is is set in the Vienna of the day. At the same time, however, it is the ultimate escapist fantasy. The reality is that the central figure, Gabriel von Eisenstein, is just about to go to jail for assault. The fantasy is that he goes instead to a lavish and fairly dissolute ball thrown by the Russian prince Orlofsky. Better still, his wife’s lover – no ordinary Viennese but an Italian opera singer – who had taken advantage of Eisenstein’s absence to call on her, is taken to jail in his place. Flirting outrageously at the ball, Eisenstein is particularly fascinated by a masked Hungarian countess – who, embarrassingly for him but significantly from our point of view, turns out to be none other than the wife he thought he had escaped for the evening. The idea that even such an outstanding example of Viennese womanhood is so much more attractive when performing a csárdás is symbolic of a public which tended on the whole to prefer its operettas set in Hungary or at least equipped with a significant proportion of Hungarian-gypsy music to offset the waltzes and polkas. Johann Strauss’s next most popular opera after Die Fledermaus was “The Gypsy Baron” (Der Zigeunerbaron) and among the next most successful Viennese operetta composers after his death were the Hungarians Franz Lehár and Emmerich Kálmán.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Die Fledermaus: Overture

Not the least entertaining part of Die Fledermaus is the Overture which, since it takes no account of the order of events in the plot, 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 Prince Orlofsky’s extravagantly furnished ball. 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 to mark 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 polka-style effort to get back to where the action is and the earlier tunes are duly recalled in an irresistibly reckless recapitulation.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Gold und Silber (“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, however. 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 and Silver” 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    “The Merry Widow” (Die lustige Witwe), which includes an even more sentimental waltz and which was to become one of the two most successful of all Viennese operettas.

Johann Strauss II

Tritsch-Tratsch (“Chit-Chat”) 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.

Franz Lehár

Giuditta: ‘Meine lippen sie kussen so heiss’

Giuditta is the opera that crowned Lehár’s long career 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 happily goes along with the idea. 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. Only in a score by Lehár could a Spanish-Moroccan cabaret artist set out to seduce a rich English lord at the Alcazar with anything as unmistakably Viennese as “Meine Lippen, die küssen so heiss.” The North African local colour applied to the introduction does not disguise the place and time of origin of the slow waltz at the heart of the song.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus: Rosalinde’s Csárdás

Posing under an assumed identity as a Hungarian countess, Eisenstein’s wife Rosalinde    is so convincingly disguised in her mask and her national costume, that even her husband is both deceived and bewitched by her exotic appearance. It is in order to demonstrate her Hungarian credentials that Rosalinde takes it upon herself to sing the longest and most elaborate aria in the whole score – a csárdás introduced by an authentic-sounding Hungarian gypsy clarinet and consisting of a characteristically nostalgic slow section and a brilliantly fiery ending.           

Johann Strauss II                    

Perpetuum mobile: Polka schnell 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 Johann Strauss and his two 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.

Johann Strauss II

Champagner Polka (“Champagne”) Polka schnell Op.211

Described by its composer 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 Viennese 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.

Johann Strauss II

Kaiser-Walzer (“Emperor”) Waltz,    Op.437

The “Emperor” Waltz 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 von Suppé (1819-1895)

Ein Morgen, ein Mittag und ein Abend in Wien (“Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna”): Overture

Franz von Suppé was one of the few Viennese composers before Johann Strauss II with both the initiative and the talent to create pieces just as entertaining as the Offenbach opéras bouffes that, imported in bulk from Paris, threatened to swamp the Viennese theatre in the late 1850s and 1860s. Although it was written in 1844, years before he entered into competition with Offenbach, “Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna,” a comedy sketch on life in the Austrian capital, must have been an exciting demonstration of his potential – if, that is, the Overture is anything to go by. With its slow introduction, its elegantly lyrical cello solo and its tuneful and increasingly brilliant closing section, it set the standard and in some cases the pattern for those other famous overtures, like “Poet and Peasant” and “Light Cavalry,” which remain far more familiar than the stage works they were written for.

Johann Strauss II

Egyptischer Marsch (“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 curious 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.

Johann Strauss II

Frühlingsstimmen (“Voices of Spring”) Waltz Op.410

The Viennese waltz, as Johann Strauss I developed it and his even more talented son Johann Strauss II perfected it, is not just a one-tune affair. Like “Voices of Spring,” it might consist of many as four distinct waltz-time sections in succession, 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 originally as a vocal piece for the coloratura soprano Bianca Bianchi, “Voices of Spring” 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 section. 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 the piece.

Johann Strauss II

Im Krapfenwald’l (“The 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 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.

Emile Waldteufel (1837-1915)

Les Patineurs (Skaters Waltz) Op.183

Emile Waldteufel, who worked mainly in Paris, is with Lehár one of the two most popular waltz composers after Johann Strauss II. In the most famous of all his compositions, the “Skaters’ Waltz,” written at the height of his powers in 1882, he reveals not only a considerable gift for melody but also, in spite of an obvious debt to his Viennese contemporaries, an early inclination towards the French tendency to adopt a more relaxed attitude to the form, reducing the number of waltzes in the sequence and occasionally – as in the main theme of the “Skaters’ Waltz” – sliding rather than skipping into the triple-time rhythms.

Franz Lehár

Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Wido): 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 an ingenious simulation of the exotic kind of folk song Lehár knew the Viennese audienc would like: Vilja, a beautiful wood nymph, allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . .

George Gershwin (1898-1937)

By Strauss

Written towards the end of George and Ira Gershwin’s joint career – for    Freedman and Hart’s revue “The show is on” at the Winter Garden Theatre, New York, in 1936 – By Strauss is one of their most sophisticated collaborations. After an introductory (and probably unconscious) allusion to the Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, it takes flight in a waltz tune with authentically Viennese rhythmic verve and melodic appeal. Though not immediately successful, it owes much of its later popularity to its performance by Gene Kelly and Oscar Levant in the 1951 film “An American in Paris.”

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 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

Unter Donner und Blitz (“Thunder and Lightning”) Polka-schnell, Op.324

Written ten years after Tritsch-Tratsch, “Thunder and Lightning” is possibly an even more inspired quick polka than the earlier work.    Certainly, it offers a whole series of brilliantly witty observations on the meteorological situation – a roll of thunder in the opening bars followed by a flurry of evasive activity, a hectic middle section where the storm rages in lightning cymbal clashes and bass-drum thunder claps,    and a final section which betrays not the least sign of a dampening of the irrepressible Viennese genius for having a good time.

Johann Strauss II

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

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 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.

Gerald Larner © 2010

Mixed Feelings in Vienna

The Viennese public that enjoyed the music of Johann Strauss II, his brothers and his followers seem to have had curiously mixed feelings about the city in which they lived. On the one hand, in their ballroom dances, their waltzes and polkas above all, they liked nothing better than some local association. The iconic status of “The Blue Danube” is a clear demonstration of that, and there are many more waltz-time examples to go with it, “Tales from the Vienna Woods” and “Vienna Blood” being only the two most familiar. As for the polka – which needed some kind of novelty attraction, if only in the title – the examples are innumerable: there are two, Tritsch-Tratsch and and the so-called “Cuckoo” Polka (Im Krapfenwandl), in this programme alone.

In their operettas, on the other hand, the Viennese seem to have looked for an escape from their city. It is true that the most popular Viennese operetta of all, Die Fledermaus, is is set in the Vienna of the day. At the same time, however, it is the ultimate escapist fantasy. The reality is that the central figure, Gabriel von Eisenstein, is just about to go to jail for assault. The fantasy is that he goes instead to a lavish and fairly dissolute ball thrown by a Russian prince. Better still, his wife’s lover who had taken advantage of Eisenstein’s absence to call on her, goes to jail in his place. Flirting outrageously at the ball, Eisenstein is particularly fascinated by a masked Hungarian countess – who, embarrassingly but significantly, turns out to be none other than the wife he thought he had escaped for the evening. The idea that standard Viennese womanhood is so much more attractive when performing a csárdás is symbolic of a society which tended on the whole to prefer its operettas set in Hungary or at least equipped with a significant proportion of Hungarian-gypsy music to offset the waltzes and polkas. Johann Strauss’s next most popular opera after Die Fledermaus was “The Gypsy Baron” (Der Zigeunerbaron) and among the next most successful Viennese operetta composers after his death were the Hungarians Franz Lehár and Emmerich Kálmán.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Die Fledermaus: Overture

Not the least entertaining part of Die Fledermaus is the Overture which, since it takes no account of the order of events in the plot, 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 Prince Orlofsky’s extravagantly furnished ball. 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 to mark 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 polka-style effort to get back to where the action is and the earlier tunes are duly recalled in an irresistibly reckless recapitulation.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Gold und Silber (“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, however. 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    “The Merry Widow” (Die lustige Witwe), which includes an even more sentimental waltz and which was to become one of the two most successful of all Viennese operettas.

Johann Strauss II

Tritsch-Tratsch (“Chit-Chat”) 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.

Johann Strauss II

2 arias from Die Fledermaus

Adele’s Laughing Song

Rosalinde’s Csárdás

One way out of an embarrassing situation is to laugh it off – just as Adele does in Die Fledermaus. Adele, a parlour maid in the Eisenstein household, has taken the evening off ostensibly “to visit a sick aunt” but in reality to attend the Orlofsky ball.    But of course 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 such 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 has presented himself at the ball as the Marquis de Renard, shouldn’t be there either.

Also posing under an assumed identity is Eisenstein’s wife Rosalinde who has been introduced as a Hungarian countess and who, in her mask and her national costume, is so convincing that even Eisenstein is both deceived and bewitched by her exotic appearance. It is in order to demonstrate her Hungarian credentials that Rosalinde takes it upon herself to sing the longest and most elaborate aria in the whole score – a csárdás introduced by an authentic-sounding Hungarian gypsy clarinet and consisting of a characteristically nostalgic slow section and a brilliantly fiery ending.           

Johann Strauss II                     

Perpetuum mobile Polka schnell 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 Johann Strauss and his two 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.

Johann Strauss II

Champagner Polka (Champagne) Polka schnell Op.211

Described by its composer 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 Viennese 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.

Johann Strauss II

Kaiser-Walzer (Emperor) Waltz,    Op.437

The “Emperor” Waltz 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 von Suppé (1819-1895)

Ein Morgen, ein Mittag und ein Abend in Wien (Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna) Overture

The composer who did most to prepare the way for authentic Viennese operetta, before Johann Strauss II so firmly established it, was Franz von Suppé. He had not only the initiative but also the talent to create pieces just as entertaining as the Offenbach opéras bouffes that threatened to swamp the Viennese theatre in the late 1850s and 1860s. If most of the dozens of operettas he composed for the Theater an der Wien and the Carltheater are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. Though written in 1844, years before he entered into competition with Offenbach, the overture to a comedy sketch on life in Vienna called Ein Morgen, ein Mittag und ein Abend in Wien – with its slow introduction, its elegantly lyrical cello solo, and its tuneful and increasingly brilliant closing section – is a thoroughly characteristic example.

Johann Strauss II

Egyptischer Marsch (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 curious 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.

Johann Strauss II

Frühlingsstimmen (Voices of Spring) Waltz Op.410

The Viennese waltz, as Johann Strauss I developed it and his even more talented son Johann Strauss II perfected it, is not just a one-tune affair. Like “Voices of Spring,” it might consist of many as four distinct waltz-time sections in succession, 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 originally as a vocal piece for the coloratura soprano Bianca Bianchi, “Voices of Spring” 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 section. 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 the piece.

Johann Strauss II

Im Krapfenwald’l (The 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 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.

Emmerich Kálmán (1882-1953)

Gräfin Mariza (Countess Mariza): Komm, Zigany

Kálmán settled in Vienna after the encouraging reception of his first operetta 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 “The Gypsy Princess” (Die Csárdásfürstin) in 1915 and “Countess Mariza” (Gräfin Mariza ) in 1924. Most of them are set in Hungary, like “Countess 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 “The Gypsy Baron,” he contrived to combine with the required proportion of Viennese waltzes.

One of the attractions of the Hungarian country house owned by Countess Mariza, where Count Tassilo Endrödy-Wittemberg is working incognito as a bailiff, is its gypsy band. It is to the gypsy band, after the Countess has offended him, that Tassilo addresses his nostalgic and highly melodious “Komm’ Zigány,” urging the gypsies in their own 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

Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Wido): 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” (Die lustige    Witwe), 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 an ingenious simulation of the exotic kind of folk song Lehár knew the Viennese audienc would like: Vilja, a beautiful wood nymph, allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . .

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 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.       

Franz Lehár

Giuditta: ‘Meine lippen sie kussen so heiss’

Giuditta is the opera that crowned Lehár’s long career 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 happily goes along with the idea. 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. Only in a score by Lehár could a Spanish-Moroccan cabaret artist set out to seduce a rich English lord at the Alcazar with anything as unmistakably Viennese as “Meine Lippen, die küssen so heiss.” The North African local colour applied to the introduction does not disguise the place and time of origin of the slow waltz at the heart of the song.

Johann Strauss II

Unter Donner und Blitz (Thunder and Lightning) Polka-schnell, Op.324

Written ten years after Tritsch-Tratsch, Unter Donner und Blitz is possibly an even more inspired quick polka than the earlier work.    Certainly, it offers a whole series of brilliantly witty observations on the meteorological situation – a roll of thunder in the opening bars followed by a flurry of evasive activity, a hectic middle section where the storm rages in lightning cymbal clashes and bass-drum thunder claps,    and a final section which betrays not the least sign of a dampening of the irrepressible Viennese genius for having a good time.

Johann Strauss II

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

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 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.

Gerald Larner © 2010