Austrian concert programme — Reznicek, Lehár, II & others — Concert Programmes

Emil von Reznicek (1860-1945)

Donna Diana Overture

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Gold und Silber Waltz

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Tritsch-Tratsch Polka, Op.214

Franz Lehár

Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiss (from Giuditta)

Robert Stolz (1880-1975)

Spiel’ auf deiner Geige (from Venus in Seide)

Rudolf Sieczynski (1877-1952)

Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume Song, Op.1

Josef Strauss (1827-1870) and Johann Strauss II

Pizzicato Polka

Johann Straus II

Kaiser Waltz, Op.437

Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)

Dichter und Bauer Overture

Johann Strauss II

Rosen aus dem Süden Waltz, Op.388

Auf der Jagd Polka-schnell, Op.373

Wo uns’re Fahne weht! March, Op.473

Nico Dostal (1895-1981)

Spiel mir das Lied (from Die ungarische Hochzeit)

Josef Strauss

Die Schwätzerin Polka-Mazurka, Op.144

Johann Strauss II

An der schönen blauen Donau Waltz, Op.314

The Viennese waltz wasn’t just a dance, and it wasn’t just Viennese either. At the height of its popularity, and for some time after that, it was an industry with a world-wide market for its products. Although Johann Strauss I had played a significant role in creating the popular taste for it, and although his sons were industrious in sustaining it, when the waltz craze spread abroad it was more than the family business could cope with. For all their genius and all their travelling, Johann Strauss II and his younger brothers Josef and Eduard could fulfil no more than a fraction of the international demand.

Waltzes and polkas they could write in their hundreds, and they could do it very brilliantly, but the cult did not stop there. Not least because of the efforts of the Strauss family itself, it expanded out of the ballroom into the musical theatre and, once the taste for Viennese operetta was established, it needed a whole army of Austrian musicians to sustain it. Some, like Franz Lehár, became masters of the art. Others were no more than competent professionals but, steeped as they were in a style which the world at large found irresistible, they too enjoyed their successes.

Emil von Reznicek was one of several Austrian composers drafted into the service of operetta from a military-musical background. In fact, it was while working as a military band master in Prague that he wrote his comic opera Donna Diana, which was first performed in that city in December 1894. Although he was to write as many as fifteen other stage works, and although he was to achieve some distinction as a composer and teacher in Berlin between the two World Wars, Donna Diana is the one piece by which he is now remembered and its overture the one score of his which is still regularly performed. The special quality of the Donna Diana Overture is that it is exactly the right length for its material, which is to say that it is very short. Its energy is generated by the busy little main theme which grows out of the introductory flourishes and which remains indefatigably active throughout - even on those timely occasions when the broader second theme enters to occupy the foreground for a while.

Franz Lehár, composer of the most successful of all Viennese operettas, also 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. The Gold und Silber (“Gold and Silver”) waltz he wrote on his arrival in Vienna, though it contains some lively episodes too, was just what was required. It established his reputation immediately. Three years later his operetta Die lustige Witwe (“The Merry Widow”) - which includes an even more romantic waltz - made his fortune.

The Tritsch-Tratsch Polka, on the other hand, was written in what has come to be known as the “golden age” of Viennese popular music, when Johann Strauss II was in his prime and Josef and Eduard were working diligently alongside him. Although it was first performed at one of the Strauss family’s regular summer seasons at the Vauxhall Pavilion in Pavlovsk near St Petersburg in 1858, it takes its title from a Viennese satirical paper and is thoroughly Viennese in spirit. “Tittle-Tattle” clearly gets round the ballroom as quickly as gossip gets round society and, nonsense though it might be, the Hungarian news in the middle is no less interesting than the Viennese scandal in the outer sections.

Lehár’s long life in the musical theatre was crowned by his opera Giuditta. Too serious to be termed an operetta and first performed on no less distinguished a stage than that of the Staatsoper in Vienna in 1934, Giuditta is Austria’s equivalent to Carmen . In the fourth scene of the opera, separated from her lover and unaware that he is in the audience, Giuditta is performing in a cabaret at the Alcazar. And what does a Spanish-Moroccan cabaret artist do when attempting to attract the attention of a rich English lord in a North-African dance hall? Well, what else could she do but dance and sing a Viennese waltz? After a suitably exotic introduction, a waltz section as seductive as the words of its first line Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiss (“My lips give such hot kisses”), has the desired effect.

Robert Stolz was the last major survivor from the heyday of Viennese operetta. Although he died little more than twenty 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 too 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. The most popular number in his operetta Venus in Seide, which was first performed in Zurich in 1932, is Spiel auf deiner Geige das Lied von Leid und Lust (“Play on your violin the song of pain and joy”), a song inspired in the heroine of the piece, a Polish-Hungarian Princess, by the sound of a gypsy violin.

By the turn of the 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, city of my dreams”), for which he wrote both the words and the music, is a waltz song of such tender charm that no singer interested in the popular Viennese repertoire can resist it.

The polka, being less flexible in its strict duple time and less likely than the waltz to inspire a great melody, usually needed something to distinguish it from all the others of its kind, even if it was nothing more than a clever title. So a polka for plucked strings only was a great idea. 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 at Pavlovsk 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 down beat.

The Kaiser (“Emperor”) Waltz is a great example of Strauss’s good taste in providing exactly what was required by a particular occasion. It was written in 1888 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the accession of the Emperor Franz Joseph. So the introduction takes the form of a delicately scored march, and the first of the waltz tunes - introduced by horn in unison with violins on the G string - must be the most dignified of its kind. Although none of the following three waltz tunes is quite as stately, the work as a whole takes its tone from the main theme and from a stirring trumpet tune associated with the third waltz. The long coda makes sure of that.

The composer who did most to create Viennese operetta was not one of the Strausses - though Johann II certainly capitalised on it - but Franz von Suppé, who had the talent and the initiative to write pieces just as entertaining as the Offenbach opéras bouffes which threatened to monopolise the Viennese audience in the late 1850s. If most of the dozens of operettas he wrote for the Theater an der Wien and the Carltheater are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. Though written in 1846, years before he entered into competition with Offenbach, and though intended not for one of his operettas but for a play by Carl Elmer, the Dichter und Bauer (“Poet and Peasant”) Overture - with its slow introduction, its lyrical cello solo, its rousing main theme and, of course, its elegant Viennese waltz tune - is a thoroughly characteristic example.

Just as the ballroom supplied operetta with some of its most successful numbers, usually in the form of waltzes or polkas, so operetta replenished the ballroom repertoire with selections of its most successful numbers, usually in the form of waltzes or polkas. Rosen aus dem Süden (“Roses from the South”), one of the most sophisticated of all Viennese medley waltzes, is made up of five tunes from the seventh of Johann II’s operettas, Das Spitzentuch der Königin (“The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief”), which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1880. Its main theme is from the hit song of the show, Wo die wilde Rose erblüht (“Where the wild rose blooms”). The quick polka Auf der Jagd (“At the Hunt”) - a title which invites a particularly colourful use of horns and trumpets - comes from a Strauss operetta much admired by Brahms, Cagliostro in Wien (“Cagliostro in Vienna”) ands Wo unsere Fahne weht (“Wherever our flag flies”) is a stirring march from the last of Johann II’s sixteen operettas, Die Göttin der Vernunft (“The Goddess of Reason”).

Nico Dostal was yet another Austrian musician from a military-musical background - both his uncle and his grandfather were noted military-band composers - who was recruited to the service of operetta abroad. Working mainly in Germany, he was a thorough professional who wrote several authentic examples of operetta as it developed in the period between the two World Wars. His Die ungarische Hochzeit (“The Hungarian Wedding”), first performed in Stuttgart in 1939, was revived at the Vienna Volksoper as recently as 1981, when the deceived bride’s lament, Spiel mir das Lied von Glück und Treu (“Play me the song of joy and truth”), proved to be as touching as ever.

If Johann Strauss II was the “waltz king” of Vienna, his brother Joseph was the polka prince, as adept at devising clever titles as he was at inventing catchy tunes. He was also an expert in the art of combining the duple-time polka with the triple-time mazurka - which was tricky but, since it is characteristic of the mazurka that its rhythms quite often fit into duple time, not quite as difficult as it seems. His Schwätzerin (“Chatterbox”) polka-mazurka is a particularly delightfuland ingenious example of its kind.

As well as being the earliest waltz in the programme, An der schönen blauen Donau (known in English simply as “The Blue Danube”) is also the most famous. Written in 1867, it has achieved the status of a Viennese folksong. Indeed, in the original version, written for the Vienna Mens’ Choral Association, it boasts strong local sentiment in a text supplied by the Association’s poet Josef Seyl. But the choral version doesn’t have the splendid coda which, in the orchestral version, recapitulates and develops four of the five great waltz tunes, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction.