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

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 by the    Royal Opera in Vienna. Sadly, he died before he was able to witness the immense success it was to enjoy – not least 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, waltz-like melody on violins – a melody which, though it is one of the best in the whole score, never appears in the opera itself.

William Walton (1902-1983)

2 Songs to Poems by Edith Sitwell arranged by Nils-Petter Ankarblom

Through gilded trellises

Old Sir Faulk

The work done by William Walton on Façade when he was barely in his twenties – creating with Edith Sitwell a uniquely inspired “entertainment” for reciter and instrumental ensemble – set him up for life. For more than 50 years he was able to use and re-use its material for orchestral suites, ballets, piano pieces and songs. The idea of re-setting some of the Façade poems as songs rather than as recitations seems to have occurred to the composer in the mid-1920s but it wasn’t several years later that he definitively completed three of them (Daphne, Through gilded trellises and Old Sir Faulk) and published them in a version for voice and piano. The two to be heard on this occasion will be performed in an orchestral arrangement by by Nils-Petter Ankarblom.

The reciter version of Through gilded Trellises was included in Façade not from the very start but was added for the first public performance at the Aeolian Hall in 1923 and has retained its place ever since. Its evocations of musical Andalusia are no less colourful and no less witty in the song version. Old Sir Faulk has been a favourite Façade item since it was first included in the entertainment in 1926, not least because it is such a brilliant and at the same time affectionate parody of the dance-hall music of the day.

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Excerpts from The Nutcracker Op.71 arranged for chamber orchestra by Jonathan McPhee

Miniature Overture

Divertissement

      Spanish Dance

      Arabian Dance

      Chinese Dance

      Russian Dance

      Dance of the Reed Pipes

      Mother Gigogne

Grand Waltz and Finale

The first performances of The Nutcracker, at the Mariinksy Theatre in St Petersburg in December 1892 and January 1893, were well timed. Loosely based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King, it is the essential seasonal entertainment, celebrating both childhood and the magic of Christmas. Whatever the season, however, it would not have achieved its present iconic status without Tchaikovsky’s enchanting, inexhaustibly melodious, often playful and yet never condescending music. While it is best known through the Nutcracker Suite compiled for concert use by the composer himself, the ballet score is constructed in such a way and is so consistently inspired that other selections can be at least as effective.

The Miniature Overture, which also opens Tchaikovsky’s own suite, is both perfectly proportioned for a relatively short ballet and, in the absence of such heavy instruments as cellos and basses, most appropriately coloured for the childish delights of the first scenes.

The Divertissement – much of which is familiar from the suite –is the entertainment presented in the second act of the ballet to the little-girl heroine Clara and the Nutcracker Prince on their state visit to the Kingdom of Sweets. The honoured guests are presented with chocolate in a stylish Spanish Dance beginning on trumpet and coloured inevitably by castanets, with coffee in an Arabian Dance by way of a languorously exotic Georgian lullaby, and with tea in a Chinese Dance grotesquely scored for low-pitched bassoons and high-pitched flutes. After they have been amused by clowns in the Russian Dance, they are offered cakes to go with the coffee and tea: the connection between cakes and the flutes so prominently featured in the Dance of the Reed Pipes (nothing to do with fruit and nuts) is based on the fact that the French word “mirliton” means both a toy wind instrument and a pastry filled with whipped cream. The comedy climax to the celebrations is provided by Mother Gigogne – an allusion to a figure not unlike the old woman who lived in a shoe who is represented here by two Parisian street songs

A great composer of waltzes – who owed something of his mastery of the form to Johann Strauss’s seasons at the Pavlovsk Pavilion near St Petersburg – Tchaikovsky wrote three outstanding examples for The Nutcracker. The last of them comes from near the end of the ballet where it leads, by way of a reference on woodwind to the opening of the second act, into the brief but unmistakable “apotheosis.”       

Luigi Arditi (1822–1903)

Il Bacio (The Kiss)

Luigi Arditi was best known in his lifetime as an opera conductor, not least in London: “He can conduct anything,” Shaw wrote of him, “and come off without defeat.” He was also a considerable composer although he is remembered now not for his several operas but for just a handful of songs. The most familiar of them is Il Bacio which he dedicated to the soprano Marietta Piccolomini – in tribute, it seems from its Traviata waltz-time style, to her status as the most famous Violetta of her day.

Manuel de Falla (1876-1945)

The Three-Cornered Hat: Suite No.1:

Introduction - Afternoon: Allegretto –

Dance of the Miller’s Wife: Allegro ma non troppo -

The Corregidor –    The Miller’s Wife – The Grapes: Vivo

Manuel de Falla – a serious-minded Spaniard who he was not very interested in theatrical glamour – was initially reluctant to work for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. When he finally succumbed to persuasion, however, and made a ballet out of a mime play he had written a couple of years earlier he could scarcely regret his decision. The first performance of “The Three-Cornered Hat” by the Ballets Russes at the Alhambra Theatre in London in July 1919, with authentic flamenco-inspired choreography by Massine and designs by no less an artist than Pablo Picasso, was a resounding success.

In the first of two concert suites later compiled by the composer the opening fanfare of the ballet, written to give the audience chance to admire Picasso’s bull-ring curtain design, serves as a short Introduction. It is followed without a break by music from the first scene, Afternoon, which introduces the Miller with a broodingly sombre murciana low on clarinet and cor anglais and the Miller’s Wife with the beginning of a contrastingly bright jota high on first violins. The Corregidor, the pompous old magistrate with the three-cornered hat and lustful designs on the Miller’s Wife, also makes his first entry here in a briefly comic bassoon solo.

The Dance of the Miller’s Wife, an exuberantly orchestrated fandango combining high energy with sensual grace, is not calculated to dampen the magistrate’s ardour. He registers his reaction in another comic little bassoon solo and the Miller’s Wife gently mocks him with an old-style minuet. In the next scene, The Grapes, which also follows without a break, she teases him with the fruit she is picking from the vine outside the mill and leads him a dance in which, inevitably, he trips and falls to the ground. He leaves, much discomfited, and the Miller joins his Wife in a reprise of the fandango from the previous movement.

Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)

Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann): “Les oiseaux dans la charmille” (The Birds in the Bower)

The Hoffmann of The Tales of Hoffmann is none other than the E.T.A. Hoffmann whose The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King indirectly inspired Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. Offenbach’s last, serious rather than comic, opera is based on a play which presents Hoffmann as a participant in three of his own stories. In the first of them he falls in love with a remarkably life-like automated doll, Olympia, who has been programmed by her inventor to perform a coloratura aria “Les oiseaux dans la Charmille.” If Hoffmann had had his wits about him he would have realised – from the ingeniously mechnical nature of the music or at least from the tendency of the clockwork to run down – that Olympia was a brilliant fake.

Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)

Banditenstreiche (Bandit Pranks): Overture

Although Johann Strauss is the hero of Viennese operetta – and in his lifetime he had no serious rival – its father figure was Franz von Suppé. It was Suppé who had the talent and the initiative to write pieces just as entertaining as the Offenbach opéras bouffes which threatened to monopolise the Viennese audience in the late 1850s, before Strauss came on the scene. If most of the dozens of operettas he wrote 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. The overture to Banditenstreiche, for example, is irresistible, from its opening fanfares to the following march and, above all, the charming clarinet melody that twice stops the show – the second time just before a coda which demonstrates that if Suppé couldn’t beat Offenbach he could certainly join him.

Josef Strauss (1827–70)

Eislauf (Ice-Skating) Polka schnell Op.261

If Josef Strauss had not been plagued by illness, which resulted in his death at the age of forty-three, and if he had been as ambitious as Johann and Eduard, he might well have turned out the greatest composer of the three. Certainly, if Johann was the waltz king of Vienna, Josef was the polka prince. While he excelled in the Polka française (or slow polka) and the hybrid Polka-mazur (or polka-mzurka) he could produce as boisterous a Polka schnell (or quick polka) as either of his brothers when the occasion required. If his exhilarating Eislauf polka is based on personal experience he must have been a positive danger on the ice-rink.

Josef Strauss

Stiefmütterchen (Pansies) Polka mazur Op.183

Josef’s speciality was the Polka-mazur (or polka-mazurka), which so ingeniously and so gracefully combines the polka step with the uneven triple-time of the mazurka. Inspired like many of his dances by a natural object, Stiefmütterchen is a characteristically attractive example, above all in its melodious anticipation of the Parisian valse lente and not least in its lingering, pastoral ending.

Johann Strauss I (1804–49)

Indianer-Galopp (Indian Galop)

A forerunner and close relation of both the Viennese polka and the French can-can, the galop was perhaps the most energetic of all ballroom dances in the first half of the nineteenth century. Before the polka overtook it in popularity the elder Johann Strauss wrote dozens of galops, many including some novelty element such as the exotic sounds and harmonies in the outer sections of the Indian Galop.

Johann Strauss II (1825-99)

Zigeneurin-Quadrille (The Bohemian Girl Quadrille) Op.24

Most of Johann II’s quadrilles were written in the early stages in his career – when it was still fashionable to take tunes from popular scores by other composers and present them as a sequence of polka-like ballrom dances. The Zigeunerin-Quadrille was written in 1846 as a tribute to Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl which opened in a Viennese production (as Die Zigeunerin) at the Theater and der Wien in July of that year and and ran through 31 performances into March 1848.     

Johann Strauss II

Satanella-Polka Op.124

Another imported theatrical sensation was the ballet Satanella which was first seen in Vienna at the Kärntnor-Theater in 1853 with the she-devil title role taken by Marie Taglioni. Johann II was not slow to capitalise on its success, presenting a “Satanella Ball” in the Sofiensaal and making use of Pugni and Hertel’s melodic material in both a polka and a quadrille

Johann Strauss II

Frühlingsstimmen (Voices of Sring) 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, 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.

Victor Herbert (1859–1924)

The Enchantress: “I want to be a prima donna”

The paradox of the song “I want to be a prima donna” – from Victor Herbert’s musical The Enchantress, which opened on Broadway in 1911 – is that you can’t sing it unless you are already a prima donna.

Johann Strauss II

An der schönen blauen Donau (The Blue Danube) 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