Halle Viennese 2003

Dancing on the Danube

Vienna and Budapest have more than the Danube in common. Less than 150 miles apart, the two cities have long been linked in all kinds of ways - politically, commercially, socially, artistically, not least musically. But the river has always been the direct physical connection between them. One of the greatest of all Viennese assets came by way of the Danube when, in about 1750, Johann Michael Strauss travelled up the river from the Hungarian capital to settle in the Austrian capital. His grandson Johann Baptist, who learned to love Viennese dance music in his father’s tavern in the suburb of Leopoldstat, was destined to become the founder of the Strauss musical dynasty - no fewer than four generations of composers, beginning with Johann I himself and including not only his three exceptionally talented sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard but also Eduard’s less talented son, Johann III, and Johann III’s nephew, Eduard II.

While Hungary had little or nothing to do with the early development of either the Viennese waltz or the polka, like most Austrian composers from Haydn onwards, Johann I and his sons were fascinated by Hungarian or, more precisely, Hungarian-gypsy music. Johann I wrote several Hungarian gallops and a waltz, Emlék Pestre, dedicated to “the noble Hungarian nation” after a visit to Pest in 1833. As for Johann II, as well as comparatively minor pieces like the Pesther Csárdás and the Éljen a Magyár Polka, he wrote a Hungarian-inspired operetta Der Zigeunerbaron and a comic opera, Ritter Pásmán, which is also set in Hungary.

If Ritter Pásmán was too ambitious a project for a composer of operettas, Der Zigeunerbaron proved to be second in popularity among Johann II’s many stage works only to Die Fledermaus - which indicates how much the Viennese public enjoyed the rhythmic zest and the exotic melodies and harmonies of Hungarian-gypsy music. So it is not entirely surprising that the gap in the Viennese operetta market left by the death of Johann II was most successfully filled by two Hungarian composers and long-term Viennese residents - Franz Lehár, who learned to be more Viennese than the Viennese, and Emmerich Kálmán, who combined the waltz with Hungarian-gypsy music in much the same way as Johann II in the trend-setting Ziegeunerbaron. This was not true Hungarian folk music - as Béla Bartók, once a fellow student with Kálmán in Budapest, was at pains to demonstrate - but the Viennese didn’t worry about that. It had come to the city up the Danube and that was authentic enough for them.

Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)

Die leichte Kavallerie (Light Cavalry) Overture

Vienna’s answer to the Offenbach invasion, before Johann Strauss assumed the front-line role in operetta, Franz von Suppé wrote literally dozens of 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 the 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 (1825-1899)

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.

Johann Strauss II

Éljen a Magyár (Long live the Magyar) 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 it was required, from Pest to Pavlovsk. For the Hungarian National Festival in 1869 Johann and his younger brother Josef made a brief visit to Pest (which was to be united with Buda to form the city of Budapest three years later), 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.

Emmerich Kálmán (1882-1953)

Die Csárdásfürstin (The Gypsy Princess) -

“Heia, heija in the lonely mountains” (Heia, heia in den Bergen)

Kálmán’s most successful operetta Die Csárdásfürstin was first performed at the Johann-Strauss Theatre in Vienna in 1915 - thirty years after Johann II’s trend-setting Der Zigeunerbaron. The difference in period is immediately obvious in the more lavish orchestration and the difference in style in the more authentic Hungarian-gypsy idiom. The first vocal number is sung by the “csárdás princess” herself, the Budapest cabaret singer Sylvia Varescu, as a farewell to her public before leaving on a tour of America. A true example of the csárdás, it begins slowly and in nostalgic mood with evocative wind solos - “In the lonely mountains is my home, there in childhood days I loved to roam” - and then races off in a quick dance tempo stimulating a high-energy performance from both voice and orchestra.

Johann Strauss II

Wienerwald Lerchen (Larks of the Vienna Woods) (arr Max Schönherr)

Professor Dr Max Schönherr, a scholar and conductor who specialised in the music of the Strauss family, put his expertise in the idiom to effective use when he converted one of Johann II’s polkas ('s gibt nur a Kaiserstadt, 's gibt nur a Wien, Op. 291) into a coloratura vocal piece to fanciful words by Hans Werner, “Wienerwald Lerchen” (Larks of the Vienna Woods). The birdsong imitations in the virtuoso vocal part and in the scoring for woodwind are brilliantly done.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus -

Adele’s Audition Song

The most successful of Johann II’s operettas - the only one set in contemporary Vienna, incidentally - was and still is Die Fledermaus, which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1874. One of its principal characters is Adele, a parlour maid who has taken the evening off ostensibly to “visit a sick aunt” but in reality to attend a lavish ball thrown by the Russian Prince Orlofsky where she hopes to further her ambitions as an actress. How she comes to be showing off her acting abilities in a prison in the early hours of the morning would take too long to explain but, clearly, as she goes through the repertoire of parts she can play, she is not in the least put off by the incongruous circumstances.

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. The Gold und Silber Waltz he wrote on his arrival in Vienna, though it contains some lively episodes too, was just what was required. It established his reputation immediately. Three years later he wrote Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) which includes an even more romantic waltz and which was to become the most successful of all Viennese operettas.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Contredanses, WoO14

There were balls in Vienna even before the Strauss family settled there and composers as distinguished as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven wrote dances for them. No one knows the occasion for which Beethoven supplied these little Contredanses but it was probably for an event in the winter season of 1802 - and a grand event too since they are scored for orchestra (although they were also published in more cheaply accessible alternative versions for piano and for two violins and bass). Unlike the same composer’s German Dances and Ländler written for similar occasions, the Contredanses are in duple rather than triple time and have nothing to do with the history of the waltz. They do, on the other hand, have something to do with the history of the symphony since one of them is based on a tune Beethoven had just used in his Prometheus ballet and was to use again not only in his piano Variations in E flat but also in the last movement of his “Eroica” Symphony in the same key.

Johann Strauss II

Annen-Polka (St Anne’s Day Polka), Op.117

Exhilarating ballroom exercise though it was, in comparison with the waltz the polka 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 and catchy title to it and dress it up in colourful orchestration. The Strauss family did, however, develop a slower version, the so-called French polka, and a fascinating hybrid, the polka-mazurka, which adapted the duple-time polka step to the triple-time mazurka. One of the most attractive of all French polkas is Johann II’s Annen-Polka, written for the popular Viennese festivities surrounding St Anne’s Day (26th June) and first performed at the “Wild Man and Parrot” in the Prater in 1852. In comparison with a characteristic example of the quick polka like the breathless and unstoppable Tritsch-Tratsch, it proceeds at a nicely gently pace and with a charmingly flirtatious step - until, that is, it so firmly puts its foot down at the end.

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

Un bal (A Ball) from Symphonie fantastique, Op.14

“Vienna without Strauss is like Austria without the Danube,” wrote Hector Berlioz on the death of Johann I in 1849. Clearly, Strauss had his fans in France too. It is unlikely, however, that he had any influence on the waltz movement, Un bal, in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Johann I did not take his orchestra out of Austria until 1833, when they travelled down the Danube to Pest, and they first appeared in Paris only in 1837 - seven years after the Symphonie fantastique was first performed at the Conservatoire.

The more likely influence on Un bal was Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, which was written in 1819 and was one of the first examples of the concert waltz, a coherent sequence of waltz tunes, of the kind later developed by the Strauss family. It is true that Berlioz did not make his famous orchestral arrangement of Invitation to the Dance until 1841 but he would have known Weber’s piano original long before that. Anyway, the second movement of the Symphonie fantastique, the equivalent of the scherzo in a classical symphony, is a brilliant waltz most imaginatively scored, particularly for the two harps. The abrupt change of mood and the entry of a new melody on flute and oboe represents the moment where the hero of the story behind the work catches sight of his beloved among the dancers. She is briefly glimpsed again, in more reflective mood on clarinet, just before the acceleration at the end.

Hector Berlioz

Zaïde

An innovator in so many ways, Berlioz was one of the first French composers to indulge himself in the Spanish musical idiom. In his orchestral song Zaïde - which was written for a concert in Vienna in 1845 - he was inspired by Roger de Beauvoir’s evocation of Granada to adopt the rhythms of the bolero and the clicking of castanets, neither of which was a familiar sound on the banks of the Danube. The same composer’s Hungarian March from the Damnation of Faust would have been a different matter.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus -

Adele’s Laughing Song

One way out of an embarrassing situation is to laugh it off - just as Adele does in Die Fledermaus. As luck would have it, her employer Gabriel von Eisenstein, is at the Orlofsky 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, who has presented himself at the ball as the Marquis de Renard, shouldn’t be there either.

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 is a muddy brown in most lights in both Vienna and Budapest - but also the ultimate example of the concert waltz. In company with some of the most distinguished examples of its kind, it consists of many as five distinct waltz-time sections, 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 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 brieflly 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.

Johann Strauss I (1804-1849)

Radetzky March, Op.228

Johann I’s Radetzky March is as an even more potent national emblem than his son’s Blue Danube waltz. It was written to celebrate the decisive victory of the Austrian Army led by the Hungarian 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 but at the same time one of the most effective of all piece of its kind.

introduction and programme notes by Gerald Larner©2003