RLPO 2002

Tunes and Titles

The difference between the Viennese waltz and the polka is that the waltz has the catchy tunes and the polka has the catchy titles. For sheer headline appeal, leaving musical quality aside, even the most famous of Johann Strauss II’s waltzes - like By the Beautiful Blue Danube or Wine, Women and Song or Tales from the Vienna Woods - cannot begin to compare with some of his younger brothers’ polkas, such as Josef’s Fireproof, Velocipede, Steeplechase or Eduard’s Far Out, No Holds Barred, No Brakes or Old England for Ever!

But of course, musical quality cannot be left aside. The fact is that, while dozens of Strauss waltzes are as popular today as they ever were, all but a few of the polkas have been forgotten. Polkas had to have some kind of novelty effect - in their title or in their scoring, preferably in both - to compensate for the limitations imposed on the composer’s imagination by their repetitive rhythms: though it remained in vogue for as long as fifty or sixty years after it hopped into Vienna from Bohemia round about 1840, the polka retained its basic four steps to a 2/4 bar and its characteristic jerky movement. Varying its pace - there was a slower polka française as well as a hybrid polka-mazurka in 3/4 time - did little to increase its musical potential.

The waltz has its unmistakable rhythm too and it is derived like that of the polka from peasant sources. But what made the Ländler or the German dance in 3/4 time an exciting prospect for both the dancer and the composer was the way it got quicker and quicker after it entered the ballroom towards the end of the eighteenth century. The Viennese waltz as we know it, and as Joseph Lanner and the elder Johann Strauss developed it from about 1820 onwards, is so quick that its basic pulse has to be one in a bar - which means that the melodic line, unlike that of the polka, can float above the subsidiary beats in the accompaniment and glide away in long and graceful curves.

It was Johann Strauss the younger of course who displayed the greatest melodic creativity in waltz time. His ambitions did not stop there, however. Johann II was such a competitive professional and such an eager collector of money that writing dance music, and travelling the world as a celebrity to perform it, was not enough for him. He had a businessman’s eye on the theatre too. He had noted the success of Offenbach’s operettas in the Carl Theatre in Vienna, particularly Orpheus in the Underworld, and he was no doubt challenged by the operetta successes of Viennese composers like Franz von Suppé and Carl Millöcker to devote himself from about 1870 to that kind of entertainment - inserting waltzes and polkas, of course, wherever there was the slightest justification in the flimsy plots supplied by his librettists.

In fact, he had little innate sense of theatre and it took him a few years to create an operetta worthy of his genius, but what he eventually achieved - above all in Die Fledermaus in 1874 and Der Zigeuenerbaron in 1885 - sustained and extended a popular demand that was to last for decades to come. Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow of 1905 was only the most successful of hundreds of Viennese operettas still being produced after Johann II’s death. His Giuditta, written nearly 30 years later, confirmed that nothing from America that had caught on in the meantime - the charleston, the shimmy, the onestep, the foxtrot - could displace the waltz in Viennese affections.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Die Fledermaus - Overture

By far the most successful of Strauss operettas, and the only one actually set in Vienna, Die Fledermaus is the best place to start. Not the least entertaining part of it 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 rather 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 and marking 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.

Johann Strauss II

Eljen a Magyár - quick polka, Op.332

As if there were not enough occasions to celebrate at home in Vienna, the composer members of the Strauss family were skilled in adapting their art to celebrations anywhere else it was required, from Pest to Pavlovsk. Johann and his younger brother Josef made a brief visit to Pest for the Hungarian National Festival in 1869, Josef taking his Andrássy March and Johann his Eljen a Magyár Polka. Dedicated “to the noble Hungarian nation,” Eljen a Magyár (Long live the Magyar) is a delightful combination of everything expected of the quick polka in ballrooms everywhere with zestful Hungarian-gypsy tunefulness and discreetly exotic orchestration.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)

Nehmt meinen Dank (Take my Thanks) K.383

One of Mozart’s favourite singers was the soprano Aloisa Lange. He had actually fallen in love with her when he was staying in Mannheim in 1778 and he went on composing things for her long after she had rejected him - most of them arias designed to show off a voice of an unusually wide range. Nehmt meinen Dank, which was written just a few weeks before he married Aloisa’s sister Constanze, is a more modest kind of piece intended, as the humbly grateful expression of the text seems to confirm, to thank the audience for its generosity at a concert given for Aloisa’s benefit in Vienna in 1782. While there are opportunities for the soloist to insert cadenzas and to add decorations to the vocal line, if the fancy so takes her, it is based on a charmingly unassuming melody accompanied by pizzicato strings and attractively coloured by three woodwind soloists.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus - Csárdás

Among the guests at Prince Orlofsky’s ball are Rosalinde and her parlour maid Adele, neither of them invited in her own name and neither aware of the other’s presence. Rosalinde’s disguise as a Hungarian countess is so effective that it deceives even her own husband, Gabriel von Eisenstein, who is also incognito and is posing as a French marquis. It is in order to prove 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.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

arranged by Pat Ryan

Merry Widow Suite

The most successful of all Lehár’s operettas, the most successful of all Viennese operettas next to Die Fledermaus, was and still is Die lustige Witwe (“The Merry Widow”), which was first performed in Vienna in 1905. Set for the most part in the Paris legation 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.” The stylish and carefree Da geh’ ich zu Maxim (I’m off to Chez Maxim) - sung by Count Danilo Danilowitsch, the charmingly dissolute secretary to the Pontevedran legation - belongs to the former category. The nostalgic Vilja song - introduced by Hanna Glawari, a young and rich and beautiful Pontevedran widow - falls in the latter category.

The most famous item of all, the so-called “Merry Widow Waltz,” belongs neither to Paris nor to Pontevedro: it is an essentially Viennese inspiration and could have been written nowhere else. Its effect, however, is momentous, since it reunites former lovers Danilo and Hanna and so ensures that, far from falling into the hands of a fortune-seeking Frenchman and so sinking the whole Pontevedran economy, the Glawari riches stay in the country.

These three numbers are all included, along with several other poular favourites, in the Merry Widow Suite arranged for Sir John Barbirolli by Pat Ryan, who at one time doubled as clarinettist and librarian to the Halle Orchestra in Manchester.

Eduard Strauss (1835-1916)

Bahn frei! (Clear the Track!) - quick polka, Op.45

Among the many pieces of music inspired by the railway - Honegger’s Pacific 231 being the most impressive of all - there are a number of attractive polkas by Eduard Strauss. Indeed, Johann’s youngest brother seems to have been obsessed by travel: Bahn frei! (Clear the Track!), Mit Dampf (Steam up), Auf and davon (Up and Away) Ohne Bremse (No Brakes) are only a few of his tributes to locomotion. A master of the quick polka, Eduard wrote Bahn frei! for a railway officials’ ball in 1869 - offering the dancers a bumpy ride beginning with the screech of a steam whistle and proceeding at full speed to a short halt and another blast of the whistle.

Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)

Dichter und Bauer (Poet and Peasant) - Overture

The composer who did most to create Viennese operetta was not one of the Strausses - though Johann II certainly capitalised on it in a big way - 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 Poet and Peasant Overture is a thoroughly characteristic example: a slow introduction, a lyrical cello solo, a rousing main theme and, of course, an elegant Viennese waltz tune.

Johann Strauss II

Egyptian March, Op.335

The Egyptian March, written to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, is a wonderfully weird confection, tinged not only by exotic harmonies and percussion sounds but also some local-colour 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.

Josef Strauss (1827-1870)

Die Libelle (The Dragonfly) - polka-mazurka, Op.204

Johann II said of his brother Josef, “He is the more gifted of us two; I am merely the more popular.” If he 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, Josef might well have turned out the greatest composer of the three - not necessarily of dances but of more ambitious forms of music. Even so, he was a brilliant exponent of the polka, including the hybrid polka-mazurka, which ingeniously combines the polka step with the uneven triple-time of the mazurka. The Dragonfly, with its prettily scored main theme, is one of the most attractive of its kind.

Richard Heuberger (1850-1914)

Der Opernball (The Opera Ball) - “Im chambre séparée” (In our private room)

There was such a demand for operetta in Vienna round the turn of the nineteenth century that even music critics tried their hand at it. Richard Heuberger, who succeeded the formidable Hans Hanslick on the Neue freie Presse, actually proved to be quiet successful in this line even if little of what he wrote is still heard today. The Opera Ball, which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1898, survives mainly on the undying appeal of its best waltz number, “Im chambre séparée.” Although the operetta is clearly an attempt to emulate Die Fledermaus - it is set at a midnight ball in the Paris Opera House - “Im chambre séparée” is quite different from the standard Strauss waltz. Appropriately for a French maidservant in disguise inviting the object of her amorous intentions to drink champagne with her in one of the opera house’s private rooms, it is a seductive slow waltz very much in the Parisian manner.

Franz Lehár

Giuditta: “Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiss” (My lips give such hot kisses)

Giuditta is the opera that crowned Lehár’s long life in the musical theatre. 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, it is Austria’s equivalent to Carmen. 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 goes with him. 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. And what does a Spanish-Moroccan cabaret artist do when attempting to seduce a rich English lord in the Alcazar night club? Well, what else could she do but dance and sing a Viennese waltz? The North African local colour applied to the introduction to the full version of the song does not disguise the place and time of origin of the slow waltz at the heart of it.

Josef Strauss

Auf Ferienreisen (Off on Holiday) - quick polka, Op.133

Sensitive composer though he was, Josef could be as boisterous as his brothers when the occasion required it - as his Steeple-chase, Pêle-mêle, Sport and Jokey polkas confirm. In the Off on Holiday Polka he also seems to share something of Eduard’s enthusiasm for travel although, to judge by the post-horn fanfares, he prefers the coach to the train, particularly if his fellow-travellers are in as a good mood as they are here.

Johann Strauss II

An der schönen blauen Donau (By the Beautiful Blue Danube) - waltz, Op.314

The Viennese waltz - as Johann Strauss developed it and his more famous son of the same name perfected it - is not just a one-tune affair. Like By the Beautiful Blue Danube, it might consist of many as five distinct waltz-time sections in succession, 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 effortless completing a perfectly integrated construction.