Kaiser-Walzer (Emperor Waltz) Op.437

“Vienna without Strauss is like Austria without the Danube,” wrote Hector Berlioz on the death of Johann Strauss in 1849. But Vienna wasn’t without Strauss: the late Johann’s son of the same name was already engaged on the career that would make him far more famous than his father and probably much richer than any musician living in Austria at the time, Brahms included. The Danube was not only to stay put but also, thanks to Johann II, assume a legendary blue. Through his genius the Viennese waltz became not just a dance but a significant stylistic element in even the most elevated music for the concert hall. Berlioz, it is true, had actually discovered the symphonic potential of the waltz when Johann II was still a small boy. In this respect as in many others, Berlioz was ahead of his time. Within fifty years, however, the Viennese waltz was so thoroughly absorbed into the classical idiom – not only in Austria but in many other countries too, notably Russia by way of the Strauss seasons at Pavlovsk – that it motivated such sublime inspirations as the opening of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and the Valse in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. The waltz continued to be a source of high-minded fascination as well as of popular entertainment for generations to come.   

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Kaiser-Walzer (Emperor Waltz) Op.437

The Kaiser-Walzer represents one of the high points in Johann Strauss’s own treatment of the waltz as a concert-hall piece rather than ballroom item. It was written to celebrate the historic state visit made by Kaiser Franz Joseph I of Austria to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany in Berlin in 1889, its grand but neutral title chosen in a diplomatic effort to offend neither emperor and at the same time to flatter them both. Imperial in inspiration, it is also imperial in stature. The introduction takes the form of a delicately scored march, while the first of the waltz tunes – briefly anticipated in march time before its definitive introduction in waltz time on horn and 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, recalling 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

Im Krapfenwald’l polka française Op.336

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 polka française, and a fascinating hybrid, the polka-mazurka, which adapted the duple-time polka step to the triple-time mazurka.

Since it is named after Josef Krapf’s well known tavern in the Vienna woods, it would be reasonable to assume that the polka française Im Krapfenwand’l is another tribute to the countryside the Viennese knew best. When it was first performed, however, at the Vauxhall Pavilion in Pavlovsk Park near St Petersburg – where Johann II directed several seasons of summer concerts in the 1850s and 1860s – it was called In the Pavlovsk Woods. Astute businessman though he was, the composer might have been better advised to go for neutrality in this case and give it the “Cuckoo Polka” title it has since acquired in English-speaking countries. It would at least have acknowledged the vital role played by the virtuoso musician who makes no fewer than eight entries in each of the four main sections and five more in the coda.

Johann Strauss II

Bauern-Polka (Peasant Polka) polka française Op.276

Another polka française, the Bauern-Polka – which takes the dance out of the city and restores it to its countryside origins – was particularly appreciated at Pavlovsk where, according to the composer, the Russian public accompanied every performance by not only beating time with their feet but also (perhaps with some encouragement from the orchestra) humming the tunes.

Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

Salut d’amour Op.12

Originally scored for violin and piano, Salut d’amour (Love’s Greeting) was written for one of Elgar’s pupils Alice Roberts, whom he was hoping to marry. It was completed in July 1888 and proved to be so effective that they were engaged two months later. It proved to be highly effective too for Elgar’s publisher, who made a small fortune out of it while the composer, who unwisely sold all rights to the score, received no more than a few guineas for it. In Elgar’s own arrangement for small orchestra the amorous melodic line is carried mainly by first violins. After the short middle section a clarinet pleads for the return of the main them and the violins readily agree, to be joined this time by various woodwind who add their voices to the emotional climax of the piece

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

“Glitter and be Gay” from Candide

The original version of Candide – Leonard Bernstein’s fourth music-theatre piece, after On the Town, Trouble in Tahiti and Wonderful Town –    was taken off after only short runs in Boston and New York in 1956. His next musical, West Side Story, achieved no fewer than 734 performance on its initial production on Broadway just a year later. The difference was that, in keeping with the eighteenth-century origins of the libretto, the score of Candide was basically classical, with various applications of local colour, rather than popular American in idiom. A thorough revision, which added three librettists or lyricists to the original tally of five – not including Voltaire, the author of the Candide story on which the whole thing is based – did not much improve matters. Since then, however, it has made its way into the operatic repertoire, not least successfully at Scottish Opera (in an adaptation by John Wells) in 1988.

Most prominent among the operatic elements of Candide is “Glitter and be gay” which awards the soprano heroine one of the most brilliant arias of its kind. Introduced by a cor anglais solo, it doesn’t sound very gay at first, as Cunegonde laments in slow waltz time the fallen-woman situation to which events have reduced her. But then, with a change of tempo she finds consolation in it – the champagne, the dresses, the jewellery – and resolves to be bright and cheerful. The slow waltz-time returns but once again she revels in her sapphires, her gold, her diamonds, this time in even more glittering and even more challenging coloratura.

Johann Strauss II

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

All of Johann Strauss’s operettas – only one of which, Die Fledermaus, is set in the Vienna of his day – depended for their success on a generous allocation of songs and other numbers in waltz time, however incongruous they might have been in their context. To take on extreme example, Das Spitzentuch der Königin (The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief) is set in sixteenth-century Portugal and yet 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 he 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 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 briefly 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 II

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.

Johann Strauss II

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

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 gentle pace and with a charmingly flirtatious step – until, that is, it so firmly puts its foot down at the end.

Ambroise Thomas (1811–96)

“Je suis Titania” from Mignon

Neither a waltz nor a polka “Je suis Titania” is a polonaise, the prancing rhythms of which are well chosen to reflect the exhilaration experienced by Philine after playing the part of the fairy queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon – an opéra comique based on Goethe’s Wilhulm Meisters Lehrjahre and first performed in Paris in 1866 – Philine is an actress in a travelling theatre group. A shallow character in comparison with the withdrawn and mysterious central figure, Mignon, she more than compensates for that by sheer vivacity. In a brilliantly tuneful aria near the end of the second act she is still Titania, “daughter of the air,” rejoicing in a vocal line “livelier than a bird, quicker than lightning” and in a coloratura that, in the closing cadenza, flies to a hight many sopranos cannot reach.         

Johann Strauss II

The Laughing Song from Die Fledermaus (“Mein Herr Marquis”)

One way out of an embarrassing situation is to laugh it off – just as Adele does in Die Fledermaus. Adele is a parlour maid who has taken the evening off ostensibly “to visit a sick aunt” but in reality to attend a lavish ball at the villa of Prince Orlofsky, to whom she is introduced as an actress called Olga. As luck would have it, her employer Gabriel von Eisenstein, is at the 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 such a stylishly turned-out young lady 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 well knows that Eisenstein, who has presented himself at the ball as the Marquis de Renard, shouldn’t be there either.   

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Circus Polka for a young elephant

Commissioned to create a ballet for elephants by the Ringling Brothers of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, the choreographer George Balanchine did not hesitate to ask Stravinsky for the music. “What kind of music?” asked the composer. “A polka.” “For whom?” “Elephants.” “How old?” “Young.” “If they are very young, I’ll do it.” And he did, with the result that The Ballet of the Elephants was first performed in Madison Square Garden in the spring of 1942 by “fifty elephants and fifty beautiful girls.” Stravinsky never saw the ballet but he did once meet one of the elephant ballerinas and, he says, “shook her foot.” The elephants, who apparently respond most readily to waltz tunes, are said to have found Stravinsky’s polka rhythms confusing and, according to an expert observer, “it would have taken very little at any time during the many performances to cause a stampede.” In which case the heavy-footed allusions to Schubert’s Marche Militaire near the end would probably have suited them very well.     

Johann Strauss II

Perpetuum mobile quick polka 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 – Johann II, 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,” one paper called it. 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

Unter Donner und Blitz (Thunder and Lightning) quick polka Op.324

An obligatory item, along with The Blue Danube, at the end of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New years concert, Unter Donner und Blitz is possibly the most inspired of all quick polkas. 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.

Gerald Larner © 2011