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

A talent for industry

“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. The tradition – exemplified at its best by Johann II’s first great success in the theatre, Die Fledermaus – survived the First World War and and remained a popular institution until well into the 1930s.

Franz von Suppé (1819–1895)

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

When Suppé wrote the Overture for Ein Morgen, Mittag und Abend in Wien – a play with songs first performed in 1844 – Viennese operetta as we know it did not exist. It would not exist, in fact, until 1860 when, challenged by the overwhelming popularity of the Offenbach operettas recently imported from Paris, he wrote Das Pensionat, which is certainly not the best known but was probably the first of its kind. He went on to write dozens more, including Die schöne Galathea in 1865, Fatinitza in 1876 and – ”the greatest succes of my life” – Bocaccio in 1879. If most of them, like Pique–Dame and Light Cavalry, are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are so very inferior as because the overtures are so very good. In fact, Suppé was a master of the overture from an early stage in his career. Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna is a characteristic product, beginning ceremoniously, featuring an extended and highly melodious cello solo, recalling the opening gestures and then racing off in a hurry. Unlike its close relation, the Poet and Peasant Overture, it doesn’t have the time to break into a waltz but it does run into a vigorous ballroom galop at one point.

Johann Strauss II (1825–1899)

Tritsch-Tratsch: Polka schnell, Op.214

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

Johann Strauss II

Rosen aus dem Süden (Roses from the South) Waltz Op.388

While it was a stroke of anachronistic genius on Richard Strauss’s part to make the waltz a prominent feature of an opera set in Vienna in the middle of the eighteenth century, he was by no means the first composer to do such a thing. More than thirty years before Richard Strauss wrote Der Rosenkavalier, Johann Strauss had made a similar feature of the waltz in his operetta Cagliostro in Wien, which is also set in Vienna in the middle of the eighteenth century. There were no complaints about that, of course. There surely would have been, however, if he had left the waltzes out.

In fact, all the Strauss operettas – only one of which is set in the Vienna of his day – depended for their success on a generous allocation of songs and other numbers in waltz time, however incongruous they might have been in their context. To take an extreme example, Das Spitzentuch der Königin (The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief), is set in 16th-century Portugal and yet includes so many high quality 19th-century Viennese waltzes that the composer was able to extract no fewer than four of them and put them together in one of the most successful of his concert pieces. Rosen aus dem Süden, as he called the new waltz sequence, is unusual in that, although he anticipates its most distinguished melody at the very beginning of the slow introduction, Strauss avoids presenting it as the main theme – it appears on violins and horn with harp accompaniment as the second of the four waltzes – and he doesn’t recall it in the otherwise comprehensive, contrapuntally exuberant coda.

Franz Lehár (1870–1948)

“Heut’ noch werd’ich Ehefrau” (Today I’ll be a married woman)

from Der Graf von Luxemburg

Franz Lehár’s most popular success was his operetta Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1905. Der Graf fon Luxemburg (The Count of Luxembourg), written for the same Viennese theatre four years later, was clearly intended to appeal to the same audience – which it did, in a big way. It too is set in Paris and features an idle young Count who has the luck, rather than the guile, to end up with the woman he loves.

Having recklessly spent the family fortune, René Count of Luxembourg is living with a painter friend in Montmartre and is so short of money that when the Russian Prince Basil Basilowitsch offers him 500,000 francs to go through a form of marriage with a singer called Angèle Didier he willingly accepts without even seeing her. Since the whole point is that by marrying him Angèle becomes a Countess and will then, after a quick divorce, be entitled to marry Prince Basil, he can see no harm and only profit in the scheme. What he does not foresee is that, although there is to be a partition between them at the ceremony, as they exchange vows and rings through a gap in the screen, he and Angèle will fall in love with each other. In the end of course, after much unlikely good fortune, Angèle and René become a real married couple and Basil marries a real Countess.

Angèle’s aria “Heut’ noch werd’ich Ehefrau” comes from the point in the first act where she is just about to go through with her mock marriage to René. Quite happy to become a Countess now and a Princess only three months later, she has no objection at all to the arrangement. If she seems a little uncertain in the introduction, as she begins her pretty little waltz tune (with discreetly frivolous colouring from the glockenspiel) she betrays no such apprehension. Before the end of the song she is thoroughly warmed to the idea.

Richard Heuberger (1850–1914)

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

Such was the 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.

Johann Strauss II

Auf der Jagd (At the Hunt): Polka-schnell, Op.373

Just as the ballroom supplied operetta with some of its most successful numbers, usually in the form of waltzes or polkas, so operetta replenished the ballroom repertoire with selections of its most successful numbers, usually in the form of waltzes or polkas. Rosen aus dem Süden is, as we have heard, a particularly sophisticated example of a waltz born of operetta. The quick polka Auf der Jagd (“At the Hunt”) – a title which invites a particularly colourful use of horns and trumpets – comes from a Strauss operetta much admired by Brahms, Cagliostro in Wien (“Cagliostro in Vienna”).

Johann Strauss II

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

Like An der schönen blauen Donau (The Blue Danube) waltz a couple of year before it, Wein, Weib und Gesang 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 An der schönen blauen Donau, however, he scored it in such a way that it could be performed as an orchestral piece, without the choral parts, and it is in this form that it has achieved its universal popularity. While there is no need to refer to the text supplied by the Association’s official poet Josef Seyl for the choral version, it might be as well to remember the old Viennese rhyme

Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang

Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang.

which roughly translates as

He who doesn’t like wine, women and song

Will remain a fool his whole life long.

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

Johann Strauss I (1804–1849)

Radetzky March, Op.228

Although Johann II more or less eclipsed his father as a composer of ballroom dances, none of his fifty or so marches can compete in popularity with Johann I’s Radetzky March, which means as much to Vienna as any of the Strauss waltzes, even An der schönen blauen Donau. It was written to celebrate the decisive victory of the Austrian Army led by the 82–year–old Field-Marshal Johann Josef Wenzel, Count Radetzky von Radetz, over the Italian forces at Custozza in 1848. Reputedly completed in no more than two hours and incorporating two Viennese folk songs, it is one of the least solemn and one of the most effective pieces of its kind. For the Viennese at least, “It fires the blood like paprika.”

Johann Strauss II

Wiener Blut (Vienna Blood): Waltz, Op.354

The Viennese waltz as Johann II and his brothers developed it – with its four or five main sections offering two tunes each – was a formidable challenge to a composer’s melodic invention. It was a challenge the Strausses were always ready to accept, however. The dance was their way of life and, what is more, they had perfected the musically rewarding art of setting a waltz melody free from its triple-time accompaniment. The inspired main theme of Wiener Blut, the one that glides in on violins and woodwind once the waltz tempo is established, floats serenely above the persistent pizzicato rhythm in the bass and even contradicts it from time to time. Melodies of this distinction – there is rarely more than one in each waltz – are usually anticipated in the introduction, as this one is in an episode featuring an unusually expressive string ensemble. Like its counterparts in most other Viennese waltzes, it is then presented in its definitive form as the first main theme and is finally recalled in glory at the end. The seven comparatively modest tunes that are heard in the meantime in this particular piece are chosen for their entertainment value and their potential as contrasting material. Wiener Blut was first performed, incidentally, at an imperial wedding celebration in 1873, when the composer made his debut as director of the Vienna Philharmonic – which no doubt explains the sophisticated string scoring in the introduction.

Franz Lehár

Die lustige Witwe (Merry Widow): Overture

On its first performance in 1905 Die lustige Witwe had no overture and it survived happily without one for 35 years. The overture Lehár finally got round to writing in 1940 could almost be by a different composer. Certainly, with Austria at war and now incorporated into Germany, the times were very different indeed. If Lehár regretted the passing of Vienna under alien control he could at least console himself with the thought that he was one of Hitler’s favourite composers and that Die lustige Witwe was one of his favourite works – which is probably why he dedicated the newly written Overture to the Führer. It was a tribute which later – as he began to realise the full horror of Nazi politics and as he and his Jewish wife had to leave Austria to find refuge in Switzerland – he had ample cause to regret.

Music had changed too during those 35 years and, although Lehár was by no means a progressive composer, the harmonic and orchestral treatment he applies to the old material in the new overture he wouldn’t have even contemplated in 1905. It is a strange work, a contrapuntal rhapsody on familiar themes from the opera and at the same time a cleverly sustained tease which withholds from the public what it most wanted. The universal favourite, the so–called “Merry Widow Waltz” which finally unites Hanna and Danilo in the last act of the operetta, is there much of the time but in more or less hidden allusions, as on its first appearance on lower strings under a violin solo in the introduction. It never rises to the surface for the full–scale romantic treatment. The composer seems to prefer an earlier, livelier and less sentimental waltz danced and sung by Hanna and Danilo at the end of the first act. Other tunes which emerge more or less intact are Hanna’s “Vilja” ballad, a vigorous discussion of women by the men in the cast and, after an unexpected orchestral crisis, Danilo’s famously charming song in praise of Maxim’s and the congenial feminine company he finds there.

Franz Lehár

“Einer wird kommen” (One will come) from Der Zarewitsch

Der Zarewitsch dates from the period when, though clearly old-fashioned in comparison with the jazz-influenced songs and dances imported from America, Lehár’s operettas were sustained in their popularity by the regular participation of Richard Tauber in the leading roles: “Du bist mein ganzes Herz” (You are my heart’s delight) from Das Land des Lächelns (The land of smiles) was his greatest success of all. The first performance of Der Zarewitsch in Vienna in 1927, with Tauber as the Tsarevich and Jarmila Novotna as Sonja, was broadcast by no fewer than 120 radio companies. Set in St Petersburg at the end of the 19th century, it is a peculiar story about a Russian prince who, though he dislikes women, is going to have to marry for political reasons. In order to break him in gently the Grand Duke secretly arranges matters so that the Tsarevich gets to know a slim young dancer disguised – so that he won’t immediately reject her – as a Circassian officer. “Einer wird kommen” is what Sonja sings to herself as she wonders what the prince will be like and whether her rather dangerous mission will be successfully accomplished. In the end it is and it isn’t.

Rudolf Sieczynski (1879–1952)

“Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume” (Vienna, city of my dreams)

By the turn of the nineteenth century the Viennese waltz idiom was so firmly established, the tricks of the trade so familiar, that apparently any competent musician could produce a decent example. Rudolf Sieczynski, a writer and a comparatively humble composer whose music scarcely penetrated to the high–society ballrooms of his day, is known in the concert hall only for his Op.1. “Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume” (Vienna, city of my dreams), for which he wrote both the words and the music, is a waltz song of such tender charm that no singer interested in the popular Viennese repertoire can resist it. Its most recent claims to fame include its disproportionately heroic role in the Three Tenors’ concert at Caracalla in Rome in 1990 and its scarcely recognisable walk–on part in a toyshop scene in Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut.

Johann Strauss II

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

The theory that the most famous of all Strauss polkas was first performed under the title Sternschnuppe (Shooting Star) is difficult to accept. Given what seems to be a whole series of brilliantly witty observations on a severe 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 – it is scarcely credible that Unter Donner und Blitz could have been written with any other scenario in mind. Certainly, the final section 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 (By the Beautiful Blue Danube): Waltz, Op.314

The Blue Danube, as it is known in English, is the most famous of all waltzes. Written in 1867, it has achieved the status of a Viennese folk song, or anthem even. Although the original version, written for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association, has fairly frivolous words attached to it, the choral version usually performed today has a new text which, added in 1890, confirms the depth of the local sentiment inspired by the waltz in the meantime. But that doesn’t have the splendid coda which in the orchestral version recapitulates and develops the main themes of four of the five main sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction. Johann II’s melodic genius was such that even if the river itself were to dry up Vienna and the Danube would be inseparable.

Gerald Larner ©2007