Halle Viennese 2006

See me Dance the Polka

The glory of Viennese popular music is, without question, the waltz. Emerging from humble beginnings in the Austrian countryside towards the end of the 18th century, it made its way into the outskirts and then the centre of Vienna and from there conquered the world, both as a dance and a musical form. For most of the 19th century and much of the 20th it was the universal favourite in ballrooms and dance halls from one end of the social scale to the other. It proved to be just as effective in song, at every artistic level from the music hall to the opera house, and - the Strauss family having demonstrated its symphonic potential - it was absorbed at an early stage into just about every kind of music written for the concert hall, the symphony included.

It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate the role of the polka. It was not an Austrian invention - it originated across the border in Bohemia in the 1830s - and it didn’t find its way into the Viennese ballroom until the early 1840s, when it replaced the galop as the must-have item alongside the waltz. Unlike the waltz, which remained a vital source of interest to generations of Viennese and other composers after the end of the Strauss regime, it did not long survive the retirement of Eduard, the youngest of the three brothers, in 1901. Nor, except in the music of Czech composers like Smetana and Janácek, did it penetrate very far into the concert hall or opera house. Even so, the polka was all the rage as it spread through Europe in the 1840s - “Can you dance the Polka? Do you like the Polka? Polka – Polka – Polka – Polka – it is enough to drive me mad,” remarked Punch at the time - and it retained its popularity for decades after that. George Grossmith’s famous music-hall song See me Dance the Polka dates from 1886:

You should see me dance the Polka,

You should see me cover the ground,

You should see my coat-tails flying,

As I jump my partner round;

When the band commences playing,

My feet begin to go,

For a rollicking romping Polka

Is the jolliest fun I know.

Jolly fun it clearly was and, for a while, it was the perfect foil to the seriously sexy waltz. In its basic Viennese form, as the Polka-schnell or quick polka, it was a high-energy dance that could not be sustained for more than a few minutes - which, together with its inflexible duple-time rhythm, meant that it could not be expanded to the symphonic proportions of the waltz as developed by Johann Strauss I and his three sons. They did, however, introduce variants on the polka form - the polka française or slow polka and the polka-mazurka which ingeniously combined the polka step with the triple-time rhythm of the mazurka. They were keen too - perhaps as much to stimulate their own imagination as to retain the interest of the public - to attach a novely element to their polkas. It was sometimes just a title but often actual musical material as well, evoking perhaps a sporting event, a recent invention, some phenomenon of the weather, the thrill of the chase or a train ride, the pop of a champagne cork…

The wit and ingenuity, the rythmic energy and tuneful verve invested in the polka are the qualities that keep it alive as a concert item today. It is such an integral part of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Day tradition that it is regularly represented not only in the programme itself, where it so effectively offsets the waltzes, but also in the strictly controlled series of three encores at the end - which must always end with the Blue Danube Waltz and the Radetzky March and must always begin with a polka.

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

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. 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.

Carl Zeller (1842-1898)

Der Vogelhändler: “Schenkt man sich Rosen in Tirol”

Viennese operetta thrived in its prime - let’s say from the birth of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus in 1874 until the beginning of the First World War - on an insatiable demand for waltz songs set in romantic or erotic situations. Indeed, as Franz Lehár’s long waltz-time career clearly demonstrates, it sustained Viennese musical theatre for decades after that. In the years round the turn of the nineteenth century the popular demand for operetta with good tunes was such that anyone who could write a passable waltz had a chance of acquiring at least a little fame and fortune.

Carl Zeller’s day job was in the higher ranks of the civil service but he also found time to write seven operettas, the two most successful of which were Der Vogelhändler and Der Obersteiger. First performed in Vienna in 1891, Der Vogelhändler (The Bird Seller) is set in the Rhineland and concerns the love affair of Christel, the local postmistress, and Adam, a bird seller from the Tyrol. Adam’s most popular number, a slow waltz song, expresses his wonder at being given a bouquet by a girl he doesn’t know: after all, when you give flowers in the Tyrol you give your heart as well.

Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)

The Tales of Hoffmann: The Ballad of Kleinzach

Offenbach was well known in Vienna, but more for his operettas than for his far more ambitious last stage work, The Tales of Hoffmann, which had only one Viennese performance before the Ringtheater was destroyed by a horrific fire in 1881. It had better luck on its initial run in Paris earlier in the same year, when the Ballad of Kleinzach was greeted as a particularly entertaining episode. With much colourful detail Hoffmann tells a comic story about a dwarf to a group of students in a beer cellar in Nuremberg - much to their amusement in spite of his thoughts drifting off in a romantic direction in the middle.

Carl Millöcker (1842-1899)

Carlotta Waltz

Millöcker was one of the pioneers who - following the initiative taken by Carl von Suppé before Johann Strauss took control of the situation - established a home-grown repertoire of operetta to compete with the Offenbach imports that had threatened to monopolise the Viennese market. His most successful work was Der Bettelstudent (The Beggar Student) but he is remembered too for Gasparone, a story of banditry and high romance set in Sicily and first performed at the centre of Viennese operetta, the Theater an der Wien, in 1884. Named after the heroine of Gasparone, the widowed Carlotta Countess of Santa Croce - who is all the more attractive for the fortune she is about to inherit - the Carlotta Waltz is a medley of the operetta’s best waltz tunes.

Johann II and 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 writing in the pauses which give the conductor an opportunity to tease his instrumentalists while keeping them anxiously waiting for the next beat. It was so effectively done that on its first performance it had to be repeated no fewer than nine times.

Josef Strauss (1827-1870)

Arm in Arm polka-mazurka Op.215

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 his brothers, he might well have turned out the greatest composer of the three. He might even have graduated from the ballroom to a prominent position in the concert hall. Anyway, he was a brilliant exponent of the polka, including the hybrid polka-mazurka, which ingeniously combines the polka step with the triple-time of the mazurka. Arm in Arm, which was first performed in 1867at the Sofiensaal, where Josef shared the conducting duties with his younger brother Eduard, is a fascinating example of its kind. Beginning with brief but robust echo of the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which recurs at regular intervals throughout, it is symmetrically constructed out of four engaging tunes, including one that glides into the middle section almost in the manner of a slow waltz.

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

Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron) Overture

Like many Viennese musicians, Johann Strauss fancied himself as an exponent of the Hungarian idiom - or, to be more precise, the Hungarian-gypsy idiom, which was almost as popular in Vienna as it was in Budapest not so very far down the Danube to the East. The show-stopping status of Rosalinde’s Csárdás in Die Fledermaus is a good indication of the favoured position of that kind of music in Viennese society at the time. Written 11 years after Die Fledermaus in 1885, the next most popular of Strauss’s operettas, Der Zigeunerbaron, is set in Hungary, which gave the composer ample opportunity to indulge his taste for the exotic.

Appropriately enough, the Overture to Der Zigeunerbaron is constructed like a Hungarian rhapsody. It begins with a slow section, anticipating the gruff rhythms associated with the gypsies on their entry in the first act, presenting expressive melodic improvisations on woodwind and dwelling lovingly on a pretty oboe tune that is to be taken up later by the (to all appearances) gypsy heroine Saffi. Although the quick section begins with a polka, most of it is based on Hungarian material. After the necessary waltz-time intervention, based on “So voll Fröhlichkeit” from the second act, Strauss is quick to restore his gypsy disguise, flaunting it most effectively of all in a brilliant coda with characteristically spirited rhythmic syncopations.

Johann Strauss II

Der Zigeunerbaron: “Als flotter Geist und früh verwaist”

On his first entry in Der Zigeunerbaron the gypsy baron of the title is neither gypsy nor, at this stage, a baron. Banished from Hungary during the Turko-Hungarian War, he is taking advantage of an amnesty to return to Temesvar and reclaim the confiscated family estates. As he introduces himself, he gallops through a list of the amazing things he has been doing in the meantime and, in case anyone doesn’t believe him, twice breaks into a reassuringly stylish waltz. The gypsies who have taken over what is left of his castle are so impressed that they make him their “gypsy baron.”

Johann Strauss II

Eine Nacht in Venedig (A Night in Venice): “Sei mir gegrüsst”

When Eine Nacht in Venedig was first performed, in Berlin and Vienna in 1883, “Sei mir gegrüsst” was not part of it. At that time it didn’t even exist. It was actually written four years later, to quiet different words, for another Strauss operetta called Simplicius. It was aborbed into Eine Nacht in Venedig in 1923, long after the composer’s death, as an extra number for Richard Tauber who was to sing the role of the Duke of Urbino in a new production at the Theater and der Wien. Since Simplicius stood no chance of revival and since Eine Nacht in Venedig, an impenetrably complicated story of Venetian intrigue, could benefit from some revision, the new arrangement seemed like a good idea and, in fact, has stood the test of time. Most effectively written for a lyrical tenor voice, “Sei mir gegrüsst” is an ecstatic expression of the Duke’s joy at being back in Venice at Carnival time.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Ave maria (Ellens Gesang III, D839)

arranged for voice and orchestra by

As one of the most beautiful melodies by one of the greatest of all Viennese composers - an early protagonist of the waltz, incidentally - Schubert’s Ave Maria is welcome here even though it has nothing to do with the ballroom or the opera house. It is actually a setting of Ellen’s prayer to the Virgin in Canto III of Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. As Schubert himself remarked soon after he wrote the song in 1825 “it seems to touch all hearts.” It continues to do so in whatever arrangement it is heard.

Josef Strauss

Feuerfest (Fireproof) Polka française, Op.269

Sometimes known in this country as “Anvil Polka” - for reasons which will shortly become obvious - Feuerfest was written for a great Viennese occasion: F.Wertheim & Co. had just completed the manufacture of their 20,000th fireproof safe. Metal strikes metal, sparks fly, and a particularly engaging slow polka rolls down the production line.

Johann Strauss II

Champagner Polka (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.

Hans Christian Lumbye (1810-1874)

Cannon Galop

H.C. Lumbye was Copenhagen’s one-man equivalent of Vienna’s Strauss family. As director of music at the Tivoli Gardens for just under thirty years, he conducted hundreds of “Concerts à la Strauss” and created a vast repertoire of dance music - mainly waltzes, polkas and galops - which, though clearly based on Viennese models, has its own Nordic personality and its own military-bandish sound. The Cannon Galop was written in 1853, after the end of the Danish-German Three-Years War, when cannon fire could once again be a source of as much amusement as the popping corks of the same composer’s even more famous Champagne Galop.

Johann Strauss II

Seid umshlungen, Millionen Waltz, Op.443

Although it takes its title from a line in Schiller’s Ode to Joy, familiar to every musician from the last movement of Beethoven’s “Choral” Symphony, Seid umschlungen, Millionen has little to do with Beethoven. Dedicated to none other than Johannes Brahms, the composer’s great friend and humble admirer, it is perhaps the most classically inclined of all Strauss waltzes - with its serious introduction, its expressive strings anticipating the main theme, the woodwind forest murmurs, the yearning main theme itself, the abundant array of secondary themes, the exhilarating recapitulation and the impressive coda.

Gerald Larner ©2006

NB Box copy

George Grossmith’s “See me dance the Polka” found a 20th-century echo in Edith Sitwell’s poem Polka which begins like this:

‘Tra la la la la la la la

La

La!

See me dance the polka,'

Said Mr. Wagg like a bear,

'With my top hat

And my whiskers that--

(Tra la la la) trap the Fair.

Brilliantly set to music along with other Sitwell poems in William Walton’s Façade, it inspired one of the few modern polkas worthy of comparison with the best of the Strauss examples. Another is Stravinsky’s Circus Polka which was commissioned by the Barnum and Bailey Circus and first performed in Madison Square Garden by “fifty elephans and fifty beautiful girls.” Elephants are said to respond more readily to the waltz than the polka and those involved on this occasions apparently did have a little trouble with George Balanchine’s polka choreography. G.L.