Halle Viennese 2009

The Relief of Vienna

In the middle of the nineteenth century Vienna was the undisputed capital of the waltz. No other city could even begin to threaten its supremacy. As Johann I, the founder of the Strauss dynasty, had developed it and as his eldest son Johann II had by about 1860 perfected it, the Viennese waltz had its own sophisticated form and a distinctive style which, far from taxing a composer’s melodic resources, seemed both to multiply and refine them. Certainly, Johann II and his younger brother Joseph rarely failed to come up with at least one captivating tune for each of their hundreds of waltzes. Given a similarly inexhaustible supply of good ideas for the polka – which is where the youngest Strauss brother, Eduard, was particularly imaginative –- the Austrian capital was unrivalled in the production of high-quality ballroom-dance music.

Outside the ballroom, however, in the musical theatre, Vienna was under threat. From the mid-1850s Offenbach operettas had been imported from Paris, often in pirated versions, and had become so popular that within a few years Offenbach himself was presenting his latest works in Vienna as soon as they had been seen in Paris. His success, like his income, was enormous. In 1865, for example, La belle Hélène was given no fewer than 65 performances at the Theater an der Wien - an iconic centre of Austrian culture where Beethoven’s Fidelio had first seen the light of day. “Here the war cry is Offenbach for ever!” the composer reported from Vienna. And it wasn’t only Offenbach: composers like Adam, Boieldieu and Lecocq were cashing in too.

It was a situation which no self-respecting Viennese composer with a living to make could tolerate but, in spite of the often inspired efforts of Franz von Suppé at the Carltheater and the Theater an der Wien, none of them could turn back the tide from Paris. It wasn’t until Johann Strauss II resigned his post as Director of Music to the Imperial Court Balls to devote himself to the musical theatre that Vienna had a hope of repelling the French invasion. It took several years to do it but, once Strauss had demonstrated the superiority of his art with his third operetta, Die Fledermaus, at the Theater an der Wien in 1874, Viennese music was on the way to winning the same kind of supremacy in the theatre as it had long enjoyed in the ballroom.

Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)

Die leichte Kavallerie (Light Cavalry): Overture

Franz von Suppé was a master of the overture from an early stage in his career, as he demonstrated in Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna in 1844. The Light Cavalry Overture – written for a two-act comic opera at the Carltheater, Vienna, in 1866 – is one of the most popular of all his compositions. 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 a characteristic 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)

Perpetuum mobile: Quick Polka Op.257

If any one work could be said to sum up the Strauss genius in less time than it takes to boil an egg, it is the non-stop flow of melodic invention, instrumental inspiration, and unpretentious wit of Perpetuum mobile. This “musical joke,” as the composer called it, was inspired by a press notice for a remarkable evening when Johann and his two brothers, Josef and Eduard, 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,” the newspaper called it, and that is exactly what Johann contrived to achieve in a quick polka written for a different ballroom a couple of months later. There being, in theory, no reason why it should ever stop, it is up to the conductor to choose how to bring perpetual motion to an end.

Johann Strauss II

Tausend und eine Nacht (A Thousand and one Nights): Waltz Op.346

More than 100 of Johann II’s dances – mainly polkas but waltzes too – were written originally for operettas like Die Fledermaus, A Night in Venice and The Gypsy Baron and proved so popular in that context that they were then adapted for the ballroom. His first operetta Indigo und die vierzig Räuber (Indigo and the Forty Thieves) was not an overwhelming success when he conducted it at the Theater an der Wien in 1871 but it included as many as nine numbers he was able to extract from it and use as separate items. Prominent among them is the waltz he called Tausend und eine Nacht (A Thousand and one Nights) in homage to the literary source of his libretto. He did not go so far, however, as to introduce anything exotic into the actual music, either in the trumpet solo at the beginning or in the delightfully idiomatic Viennese waltzes that follow.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)

“Voi che sapete” from Le Nozze di Figaro

Based on a revolutionary play by Beaumarchais, in which the servants outwit and humiliate their noble master, Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) was first performed, against all the political odds, in Vienna in 1786. The action takes place in Count Almaviva’s castle near Seville, where Figaro works as his valet and Susanna as the Countess’s maid. Cherubino is employed in the same castle as a page – a boy young enough for the part to be awarded by Mozart to a mezzo-soprano and yet old enough to fall for every woman he sees. His passionate and not entirely innocent little aria “Voi che sapete” is addressed to the Countess, with whom he believes himself in love, and accompanied on the guitar by Susanna, whom he quite fancies too.

Carl Zeller (1842-1898)

Der Vogelhändler: “Schenkt man sich Rosen in Tirol”

By the turn of the nineteenth century the Viennese popular demand for operetta 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.

Johann Strauss II

Banditen-Galopp (Bandits’ Gallop): Quick Polka Op.378

The Banditen-Galopp (Bandits’ Gallop) is another refugee from an operetta that was less than a complete success on the stage, in this case Prinz Methusalem (Prince Methuselah) which was first performed at the Carl-Theater in 1877. Those of a nervous disposition are warned that near the beginning, about half-way through and near the end of Johann II’s otherwise good-natured bit of banditry they might just be frightened out of their skin.

Johann Strauss II

Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald (Tales from the Vienna Woods): Waltz Op.325

One of the finest of Johann II’s extended waltz constructions, Tales from the Vienna Woods is a tribute to the kind of countryside where, as the German dance or the Ländler, Vienna’s favourite dance form originated. Indeed, the impressionistic pastoral introduction culminates in a Ländler played in authentic style on a zither (or, failing that, on muted strings). In the main section of the piece there are no fewer than five effortlessly imaginative and artfully varied ballroom waltzes, the second of them an up-to-date, up-tempo version of the Ländler from the introduction. Just before the end, after the other tunes have been recalled in the coda, the Ländler makes one last, nostalgic appearance on the zither (or muted strings) in its original form.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus: Overture

Die Fledermaus is by far the most successful of all Johann Strauss’s operettas. The only one set in the Vienna of his day, it has a very special status in that its waltz and polka numbers are, for once, presented in their true social context. Absurdly unlikely though the events of its tortuous plot undeniably are, it is clear from Die Fledermaus that the dances fashionable in Strauss’s Vienna were products of a flourishing good-time industry catering to the tastes of the upper and professional middle classes. Die Fledermaus (first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1874) is all about having a good time. Other issues arise - like revenge, marital fidelity, social pretension, crime and punishment - but none of them is treated as seriously as the desirability of indulging oneself, preferably at someone else’s expense.

Not the least entertaining part of the operetta is the Overture which, since it takes no account of the order of events in the plot, requires no previous knowledge of how one of its principal characters acquired the embarrassing nickname of “Die Fledermaus” (The Bat) and how he gets his own back at a lavish and frankly dissolute party thrown by the Russian Prince Orlofsky. It begins with the most dramatic music in the score, which accompanies a show-down scene in a remarkably comfortable Viennese prison in the last of the three acts, cuts back to the bell striking six to mark the end of the central ball scene, and cuts back again to the vigorous waltz which represents the climax of the Orlofsky festivities. A sentimental episode from the first act is followed by an increasingly impatient effort to get back to where the action is and the earlier tunes are duly recalled in an irresistibly reckless recapitulation.

Egyptian March

The Egyptian March, written to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, is a wonderfully weird confection, coloured not only by exotic harmonies and percussion sounds but also some curious vocalisation. Whether it was in gratitude for this dubious tribute that Ismail Pasha sent Strauss two giraffes, on the occasion of the composer’s Golden Jubilee in 1890, history does not record.

Emile Waldteufel (1837-1915)

Les Patineurs (Skaters’ Waltz) Op.183

Emile Waldteufel, who was born in Strasbourg but 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.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“Un moto di gioia” K579

Like “Voi che sapete,” the other Mozart aria in this programme, “Un moto di gioia” (A thrill of joy) was written for Le Nozze di Figaro but, unlike “Voi che sapete,” it did not feature in the first performance in 1876. It was composed specially for Adriana Gabrieli who took over the part of Susanna in a revival of the opera in Vienna three years later. Rather shorter than Venite inginocchiatevi, the aria it replaced, it is scarcely less successful in reflecting the charm and vivacity of the character who sings it.

Johann Strauss II

Der Zigeunerbaron: “So elend und so treu… O habet Acht”

The next most successful of Johann II’s operettas after Die Fledermaus is Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron), which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1885. It owes its popularity to its waltz numbers, of course, but also to the composer’s delight in the Hungarian gypsy idiom and the Viennese taste for anything flavoured with paprika. The aria “So elend und so treu… O habet Acht,” a Hungarian rhapsody in miniature, is a particularly good example, even though Saffi, who sings it towards the end of Act I, is not really a gypsy. Having been brought up as a gypsy, however, she proudly believes she is one. Certainly her expression of gypsy defiance is so authentic in its csárdás style that the Gypsy Baron of the title, who is neither a gypsy nor a baron, falls in love with her. In the end she turns out to be the daughter of the last Pasha of Hungary and he, having distinguished himself as a war hero in the meantime, becomes a real baron. They live happily ever after.

Johann Strauss II

Furioso: Quick Polka Op.260

One of the least likely of Johann II’s many enterprises was the seasons of summer concerts – ten of them between 1856 and 1865, two more in 1869 and 1886 – which he directed in the Vauxhall Pavilion in Pavlovsk Park near St Petersburg. As the result of a deal with the Tsarskoye-Selo Railway Company, which was eager to publicize its line between St Petersburg and Pavlovsk, the Russian audience had the privilege of being the first to hear such favourite pieces as the Tritsch-Tratsch and Pizzicato Polkas, an unknown composer called Tchaikovsky had his first opportunity to hear his music performed in public, and Johann Strauss made a small fortune in roubles. Written for the Pavlovsk season of 1861, the Furioso Polka has an appropriately Russian-dance flavour to its bustling opening theme. Not that, in the increasingly frenetic galop that follows, any dancer would have the time to notice such stylistic niceties.

Johann Strauss II

An der schönen blauen Donau (By the Beautiful Blue Danube): Waltz Op.314

The Blue Danube 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.