Halle Viennese 2010

Mixed Feelings in Vienna

The Viennese public that enjoyed the music of Johann Strauss II, his brothers and his followers seem to have had curiously mixed feelings about the city in which they lived. On the one hand, in their ballroom dances, their waltzes and polkas above all, they liked nothing better than some local association. The iconic status of “The Blue Danube” is a clear demonstration of that, and there are many more waltz-time examples to go with it, “Tales from the Vienna Woods” and “Vienna Blood” being only the two most familiar. As for the polka – which always needed some kind of novelty attraction, if only in the title – the examples are innumerable, including the one dance of its kind in this programme.

In their operettas, on the other hand, the Viennese seem to have looked for an escape from their city. It is true that the most popular Viennese operetta of all, Die Fledermaus, is is set in the Vienna of the day. At the same time, however, it is the ultimate escapist fantasy. The reality is that the central figure, Gabriel von Eisenstein, is just about to go to jail for assault. The fantasy is that he goes instead to a lavish and fairly dissolute ball thrown by the Russian prince Orlofsky. Better still, his wife’s lover – no ordinary Viennese but an Italian opera singer – who had taken advantage of Eisenstein’s absence to call on her, is taken to jail in his place. Flirting outrageously at the ball, Eisenstein is particularly fascinated by a masked Hungarian countess – who, embarrassingly but significantly, turns out to be none other than the wife he thought he had escaped for the evening. The idea that even such an outstanding example of Viennese womanhood is so much more attractive when performing a csárdás is symbolic of a public which tended on the whole to prefer its operettas set in Hungary or at least equipped with a significant proportion of Hungarian-gypsy music to offset the waltzes and polkas. Johann Strauss’s next most popular opera after Die Fledermaus was “The Gypsy Baron” (Der Zigeunerbaron) and among the next most successful Viennese operetta composers after his death were the Hungarians Franz Lehár and Emmerich Kálmán.

Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)

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

The first two items in today’s programme come from opposite ends of    Viennese-operetta history. Franz von Suppé was one of the few Viennese composers before Johann Strauss II with both the initiative and the talent to create pieces just as entertaining as the Offenbach opéras bouffes that, imported in bulk from Paris, threatened to swamp the Viennese theatre in the late 1850s and 1860s. Although it was written in 1844, years before he entered into competition with Offenbach, Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna, a comedy sketch on life in the Austrian capital, must have been an exciting demonstration of his potential – if, that is, the Overture is anything to go by. With its slow introduction, its elegantly lyrical cello solo and its tuneful and increasingly brilliant closing section, it set the standard and in some cases the pattern for those other famous overtures, like Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry, which remain far more familiar than the stage works they were written for.

Franz Lehár (1870–1948)

Giuditta: ‘Meine lippen die kussen so heiss’

Suppé’s Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna was written before the operetta audience’s disillusion with the city set in. Giuditta, which was first performed on no less distinguished a stage than that of the Vienna Staatsoper 90 years later, is one of the most extravagant of    Lehár’s many efforts to provide the exotic setting the public required and yet keep it adequately supplied with waltzes. Its heroine, a dancer of mixed Spanish and Moroccan blood, is married to an elderly Spanish maker of bird cages. Not surprisingly, when invited by a handsome young army captain to accompany him to his garrison town in North Africa, she happily goes along with the idea. In the fourth scene, separated from her lover and unaware that he is in the audience, she is performing in a cabaret at the Alcazar. Only in a score by Lehár could a Spanish-Moroccan cabaret artist set out to seduce a rich English lord at the Alcazar with anything as unmistakably Viennese as “Meine Lippen, die küssen so heiss.” The North African local colour applied to the introduction does not disguise the place and time of origin of the slow waltz at the heart of the song.

Joseph Lanner (1801-1843)

Neujahrs-Galopp (New Year Galop)

The Vienna Philharmonic tradition of presenting New Year’s Day concerts of music by the Strauss family – Johann I, his sons Johann II, Joseph and Eduard – and a select few of their contemporaries, like Joseph Lanner and Carl Michael Ziehrer, goes back only 70 years. But, of course, all those composers and many others would have been called upon to provide music for New Year celebrations in their own day. The New Year Galop by Joseph Lanner, who did much alongside Johann I to establish the authentic Viennese dance idioms, is one such piece. A characteristic example of the breathtaking activity associated with the galop before it was superseded by the quick polka, it has a particularly tuneful and comparatively relaxed middle section.

Johann Strauss II (1825–99)

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

Johann II’s now largely forgotten operetta Das Spitzentuch der Königin (The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief), which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1880, is set in 16th-century Portugal. Even so it includes so many high quality nineteenth-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 Strauss called the new waltz sequence, is unusual in that, although he anticipates its most distinguished melody at the very beginning of the slow introduction, he 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.

Johann II & 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.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus: Rosalinde’s Csárdás

Eisenstein’s wife Rosalinde has been introduced to the Orlofsky ball as a Hungarian countess and is so convincing in her mask and her national costume, that even he is both deceived and bewitched by her exotic appearance. It is in order to demonstrate her Hungarian credentials 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.   

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus: Overture

Not the least entertaining part of Die Fledermaus 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 Prince Orlofsky’s extravagantly furnished ball. 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 polka-style effort to get back to where the action is and the earlier tunes are duly recalled in an irresistibly reckless recapitulation.

Johann Strauss II

Tritsch-Tratsch (“Chit-Chat”) 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.

Franz Lehár

Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow): Viljalied (Vilja Song)

The most successful of all Lehár’s operettas – the most successful of all Viennese operettas next to Die Fledermaus – was, and still is, “The Merry Widow,“ which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1905. Set for the most part in the Paris embassy of an imaginary Balkan state, it skilfully exploits both the sophisticated amusements of the great city and the sentiment associated with the backward way of life in Pontevedro. “I’m off to chez Maxim” belongs to the former category. The Vilja Song – introduced by Hanna Glawari, a young and rich and beautiful widow, the loss of whose personal fortune through marriage to a fortune-seeking Frenchman could sink the whole Pontevedran economy – falls in the latter category. It’s an ingenious simulation of the exotic kind of folk song Lehár knew the Viennese audience would like: Vilja, a beautiful wood nymph, allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . .

Franz Lehár

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. Although it contains some glitteringly lively episodes too, the gliding melodic style of the Gold und Silber 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. The “Merry Widow” waltz he wrote for his operetta three years later is even more sentimental and scarcely less popular.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron): Entrance March

The score of Der Zigeunerbaron    – which begins with an overture cleverly designed in the shape of an Austro-Hungarian rhapsody – is an intriguing mix of gypsy music and polkas and waltzes ingeniously tailored to suit the Viennese taste of the day. The Entrance March in the third act, however, has nothing Hungarian or specifically Viennese in it since it is a brisk military march accompanying the triumphant return of the Imperial troops from a Spanish campaign. According to the composer’s instruction to the management of the Theatre an der Wien, where the operetta was first performed in 1885, “The Entrance March must be imposing. About 80–100 soldiers (on foot, on horse), camp-followers in Hungarian, Viennese (and Spanish) dress, common-folk, children with shrubs and flowers – which latter they strew before the returning soldiers – must appear.” Among the victorious soldiers is our hero, the “gypsy baron,” whose valour in battle entitles him to become a real baron – and to marry his beloved Saffi who is not the gypsy he once thought she was but, it turns out, a princess. He should have known.

Franz Lehár

Zigeunerliebe (Gypsy Love): Song and Csárdás

Lehár’s equivalent of Strauss’s Gypsy Baron, an operetta set in Hungary and yet with Viennese waltzes regularly present to offset the gypsy music, was Gypsy Love, which was first performed at the Carltheater in Vienna in 1910. Strangely enough, hugely successful though it was in that form, the item now most famously associated with it, Ilona’s Song and Csárdás in the last act, was not at that time part of the score. It was a separate piece which, though written in 1908, was incorporated in the opera only in 1938, presumably to add still more local colour and to provide a showpiece for the less favoured of the two sopranos who occupy prominent roles in the work. It certainly succeeds in both those respects, first as a melodious expression of nostalgia awaked by the sound of a gypsy violin and than as a vigorous dance which is so idiomatic and so brilliant as to challenge even Rosalinde’s    Csárdás in Die Fledermaus.     

Johann Strauss II

Pesther Csárdás Op.23

The one purely orchestral example of the Hungarian csárdás in the Strauss catalogue dates from a comparatively early stage in Johann II’s career, before the twin cities on opposite sides of the Danube, Buda and Pest, were united as Budapest. Written in 1846 for a tour of Hungary, it complies with what was then thought to be the authentic csárdás form of a slow section followed by a quick one. Any feeling of disappointment that, after the heavy rhythmic accents of the first part, the polka-like beginning of the second is too tamely Viennese is quickly dispelled by the increasingly fiery rhythms and energetic dance steps which follow.

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, my city of dreams”), for which he wrote the words and the music in 1913, is a waltz song of such tender charm that no singer interested in the popular Viennese repertoire can resist it. For the public of the day, by now recovered from their disillusion and cherishing a nostalgia for the rapidly disappearing old Vienna, it was just right.

Johann Strauss II

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

This most famous of all Viennese waltzes – written originally in a rather different form for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867 – consists of many as five distinct waltz-time sections in succession, each one of them based on two different themes and none of them recalled before the sequence is complete. What gives it its symphonic stature is the slow introduction with its seductive anticipations of the main theme and, following the fifth waltz, the splendid coda which recalls and briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction.

Gerald Larner © 2010