Halle Viennese 2004

Tunes and Titles

The difference between the Viennese waltz and the Viennese 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 - like On the Beautiful Blue Danube or Wine, Women and Song or Tales from the Vienna Woods - cannot begin to compare with some of his younger brothers’ polkas, such as Josef’s Fireproof, Velocipede, Steeplechase or Eduard’s Far Out, No Holds Barred, No Brakes or Old England for Ever!

But of course, musical quality cannot be left aside. The fact is that, while dozens of Strauss waltzes are as popular today as they ever were, all but a few of the polkas have been forgotten. Polkas had to have some kind of novelty effect - in their title or in their scoring, preferably in both - to compensate for the limitations imposed on the composer’s imagination by their repetitive rhythms: though it remained in vogue for as long as fifty or sixty years after it hopped into Vienna from Bohemia round about 1840, the polka retained its basic four steps to a 2/4 bar and its characteristic jerky movement. Varying its pace - there was a Polka-schnell and a slower polka française as well as a hybrid polka-mazurka in 3/4 time - did little to increase its musical potential.

The waltz has its unmistakable rhythm too and it is derived like that of the polka from peasant sources. But what made the Ländler or the German dance in 3/4 time an exciting prospect for both the dancer and the composer was the way it got quicker and quicker after it entered the ballroom towards the end of the eighteenth century. The Viennese waltz as we know it, and as Joseph Lanner and the elder Johann Strauss developed it from about 1820 onwards, is so quick that its basic pulse has to be one in a bar - which means that the melodic line, unlike that of the polka, can float above the subsidiary beats in the accompaniment and glide away in long and graceful curves.

It was Johann Strauss the younger of course who displayed the greatest melodic creativity in waltz time. But it was a German composer, Carl Maria von Weber, who first demonstrated how a sequence of waltzes could be made into a highly effective concert piece. His concert waltz for piano, Invitation to the Dance - much admired by Berlioz, who made a highly attractive orchestral version of it - links several waltz tunes together and, by framing them between an introduction and a coda, forms a construction as interesting and as coherent as any classical rondo. Perhaps the most sophisticated of Viennese waltz constructions, Johann II’s Tales from the Vienna Woods, was written as long as 50 years after Invitation to the Dance.

Johann II was such an inspired composer, such a competitive professional, and such an eager collector of money that writing dance music, and travelling the world as a celebrity to perform it, was not enough for him. He had ambitions in the theatre too. He had noted the success of Offenbach’s operettas in the Carl Theatre in Vienna, particularly Orpheus in the Underworld, and he was no doubt encouraged by the operetta successes of Viennese composers like Franz von Suppé and Carl Millöcker to devote himself from about 1870 to that kind of entertainment - inserting waltzes and polkas, of course, wherever there was the slightest justification in the flimsy plots supplied by his librettists.

In fact, he had little innate sense of theatre and it took him a few years to create an operetta worthy of his genius, but what he eventually achieved - above all in Die Fledermaus in 1874 and Der Zigeuenerbaron in 1885 - sustained and extended a popular demand that was to last for decades to come. Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow of 1905 and The Count of Luxembourg of 1909 were only the most successful of the hundreds, if not thousands, of operettas produced in Vienna between Johann II’s death and the Second World War.

Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)

Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna: Overture

When Suppé wrote the Overture for Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna - 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 which 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 success of my life” - Bocaccio in 1879. If most of them, like Picque-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 galopp at one point.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Gold and Silver Waltz

Like many of the 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 setting up as a civilian musician 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, 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, which includes an even more sentimental waltz and which was to become the most successful of all Viennese operettas.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

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

Exhilarating ballroom exercise though it was, the polka was neither as sexy as the waltz for the dancer nor as interesting for the composer. Its high-energy requirement meant that it rarely lasted longer than two or three minutes, its high-speed rhythmic activity giving 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, as well as 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.

Robert Stolz (1880-1975)

“Waltzing in the Clouds”

Robert Stolz was the last major survivor from the heyday of Viennese operetta. Although he died less than thirty years ago, and although he was so much of our time as to win two Oscars for his work as a composer in Hollywood, he knew both Brahms and Johann Strauss and had been drafted into the service of operetta before the First World War. And he went on writing for the stage until he was well into his eighties, completing no fewer than sixty-five operettas or musicals as well as hundreds of songs and dozens of film scores.

Rather more sensitive than his colleague Franz Lehár to the political situation in Austria at the beginning of the Second World War, he left Vienna for America in 1940 and stayed there for six years, composing for the film studios and conducting Viennese concerts. One of his earliest Hollywood successes was the music he wrote for Spring Parade.

Set in old Vienna and starring Deanna Durbin and Robert Cummings, the film features a pretty young assistant at a bakery who encourages a handsome and musically gifted army Corporal to write waltzes. The Corporal’s major inspiration is “Waltzing High in the Clouds,” which is sung first by Cummings, taken up by Durbin and danced by the two of them together. Although the song was nominated for an Oscar in 1940, it was beaten into first place by “When you wish upon a star” from Pinocchio. Even so, its widespread and lasting popularity (it was taken up by Nana Mouskouri in the 1980s) is an indication of the undying appeal of the Viennese waltz and the authentic quality of Stolz’s tune.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

The Count of Luxembourg

Franz Lehár’s next popular success after the Gold and Silver Waltz was his operetta The Merry Widow which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1905. 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.

“Fancy Free”

Angèle’s aria “Fancy Free” 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, still less as she goes on to take the opportunity to demonstrate the quality of her voice.

Luxembourg Waltzes

One of the most attractive of all numbers in The Count of Luxembourg is a slow waltz song “Tell me, can this be love?” sung by René and Angèle as they begin to realise, though they still haven’t seen each other, what is happening to them on their respective sides of the screen. It is featured in the Overture and it is also the main theme of the Luxembourg Waltzes, a medley of the best waltz tunes put together by Lehár himself to capitalise on the Viennese public’s unfailing demand for its favourite dance form. Introduced by a brisk little march, “Tell me, can this be love” is not only the first waltz to be heard but is also the one which, after the intervention of three other waltz tunes, reappears to be worked to a climax just before the end.

Johann Strauss II

Roses from the South Waltz, Op.388

Although Johann II devoted most of his creative energies in the last thirty years of his life to writing operettas, he did not seriously slow down 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 celebrated of all Strauss waltzes, Roses from the South, is actually a selection of the best waltz tunes from the now largely forgotten operetta, Das Spitzentuch der Königin (The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief), which was successfully first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1880. Unusually for Strauss, although he anticipates it at the very beginning of the slow introduction, he avoids presenting his most distinguished melody 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 exuberant and otherwise comprehensive coda.

Franz Lehár

Merry Widow: Overture

On its first performance in 1905 The Merry Widow had no overture and it survived happily without one for thirty-five years. The overture Lehár finally got round to writing in 1940 could almost be by a different composer. Certainly, with Austria at war and now incorporated into Germany, the times were very different indeed. If Lehár regretted the passing of the passing of Vienna under alien control he could at least console himself with the thought that he was one of Hitler’s favourite composers and that The Merry Widow was one of his favourite works - 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, he had ample cause to regret.

Music had changed too during those thirty-five years and, although Lehár was by no means a progressive composer, the harmonic and orchestral treatment he applies to the old Merry Widow material in the new overture he would never even have contemplated in 1905. It is a very strange work, a kind of rhapsody and at the same time a cleverly sustained tease which withholds from the public what the composer knew 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 (to be heard later in this concert), a vigorous discussion of women by the men in the cast and, after an unexpected orchestral crisis, Danilo’s famous song in praise of Maxim’s and the congenial feminine company he finds there.

Johann Strauss II

Perpetuum mobile, Op.257

If any work could be said to sum up the Strauss genius in less time than it takes to cook 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 the Strauss 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

Die Fledermaus - Rosalinde’s Csárdás

Die Fledermaus, the one Strauss operetta set in contemporary Vienna and Johann II’s first major success in the theatre, was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1874. Much of the action takes place at a masked ball thrown by the fabulously rich and morally relaxed Prince Orlofsky. Among the guests 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: posing as a French marquis, he severely embarrasses himself by attempting to seduce the mysterious stranger. It is in order to add verisimilitude to her Hungarian pretensions 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.

Franz Lehár

The Merry Widow - Hanna’s “Vilja” Song

Hanna’s “Vilja” Song is Lehár’s answer to Rosalinde’s Csárdás in Die Fledermaus. Opening in the Paris legation of an imaginary hard-up 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. The tenor lead’s song “Da geh’ ich zu Maxim” (I’m off to chez Maxim) belongs to the former category. The soprano’s “Vilja” Song - performed by Hanna Glawari, a young and very rich and beautiful widow, the loss of whose personal fortune through marriage to a fortune-seeking Frenchman could sink the whole Pontevedrin economy - falls in the latter category. It’s a kind of folk song: Vilja, a wood nymph, allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . . After that expression of national sentiment - although we are held in suspense until she and Danilo, the pleasure-loving secretary to the legation, settle their differences in the “Merry Widow” Waltz - there is little doubt that Hanna could ever marry anyone but a Pontevedrin.

Emile Waldteufel (1837-1915)

Skaters’ Waltz (Les Patineurs), Op.183

Emile Waldteufel, who worked mainly in Paris, is with Franz 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.

Johann Strauss II

Thunder and Lightning Polka, Op.324

Is Thunder and Lightning the most popular of Johann II’s polkas because it has the best tunes or because it has the best title? The answer must be that it has both, together with a series of brilliantly 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 a final section which betrays not the least sign of a dampening of the irrepressible Viennese genius for having a good time.

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

As Roses from the South has already so attractively demonstrated, the fully developed Strauss waltz is not just a one-tune affair. Like By the Beautiful Blue Danube (to give it its full title) it might consist of many as 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. 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, does not 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 effortless completing a perfectly integrated construction.

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 The Blue Danube. 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.”

introduction and programme notes by Gerald Larner ©2004