SCO Viennese 2003

Violin in hand

The pioneers of the Viennese waltz, who worked with small bands in ordinary beer halls and dance halls, were violinists. So were the most sophisticated of their successors, who presided over imperial court balls and other high-society events directing their small orchestras from the violin. The present-day treatment of Viennese dance music as a New Year’s Day television opportunity for the Vienna Philharmonic and a glamorous international conductor, though it has itself become a tradition by now, is not what the Strauss waltzes and polkas were designed for.

The older of the two great pioneers, Joseph Lanner, learned the fundamentals of his art as a violinist in the dance band of Michael Pamer, who was himself a violinist. Johann Strauss I, the first member of his family to adopt music as a profession, might have worked for Pamer too. We know for certain that he joined Lanner’s own recently formed ensemble in 1819 and that he stayed with him until 1825, when he felt it was time to set up as composer and violinist-director in his own right. What eventually gave Strauss the ascendancy in Vienna was not so much his superior creative talent - Lanner was no mean composer - as his head for business, his flair for picking out the next popular dance trend, and his magical musicianship. In Vienna in 1832 Richard Wagner was impressed by the “enthusiasm bordering on frenzy that the strange Viennese displayed for any piece fiddled by Strauss.”

The other advantage Strauss had over Lanner is that, whereas Lanner had only one son, who died young, Strauss had the good fortune to father three sons - Johann II, Josef and Eduard - all of them violinists, all of them more than capable of carrying on where he left off. Under the direction of Johan II, the Strauss orchestra grew in size and reputation, just as the waltzes and polkas themselves developed in sophistication. But the tradition of directing from the violin was maintained. As The Times reported of a concert directed by Johann II in London in 1867, “He conducts the orchestra, like his father, fiddle in hand, and joins in the passages of most importance. This he does with wonderful animation…”

When Johann II put his violin down, it was to conduct the operettas which, Die Fledermaus above all, confirmed both his genius as a composer and his status as one of the greatest and most prolific melodists ever.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Russischer Marsch (Russian March), Op.426

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 publicise 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.

The Russischer Marsch was respectfully dedicated to Tsar Alexander III and first performed under the title Marche des gardes à cheval at a concert in aid of the Red Cross Society in St Petersburg in 1886. Not at all the solemn kind of thing another composer might have written for the occasion, it takes a mischievous delight in the faintly exotic quality of the Russian tune with which it begins and, after the comparatively glamorous ball-room-style middle section, finds even more fun in the opening theme as the horse guards march out of earshot at the end.

Johann Strauss II

Wo die Zitronen blühn (Where the Lemon Trees Bloom) Waltz, Op.364

As its title suggests, Wo die Zitronen blühn - taken from the first line “Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn?”of Goethe’s famous Mignon song - was written for Italy. It was, in fact, first performed (as Bella Italia) under the composer’s direction at the Teatro Regio in Turin in 1875. Introduced by a miniature tone poem evocative of the Italian countryside, it presents three main sections, each with two well contrasted waltz tunes, and recapitulates them in reverse order before briefly returning to the countryside. While it is not the most ambitious of Johann II’s concert waltzes, it is certainly one of the most lyrical.

Johann Strauss II

Durch’s Telephon (By Telephone) Polka, Op.439

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 - in straightforward ternary form - while its high-speed rhythmic activity gave the composer little opportunity to do more than put a cheerful tune to it and dress it up in colourful orchestration. So the easiest way of distinguishing a new polka from hundreds like it was to give it a memorable title - Fireproof, Velocipede, Steeplechase, Far Out, No Holds Barred, No Brakes - anything to catch the eye and stimulate the imagination. Advances in science were a useful source of polka titles - Electric, Electro-Magnetic, Electric Sparks, Electrophor ­- particularly if the new piece was intended for a university ball. Durch’s Telephon (By Telephone) was written, appropriately enough, for a Concordia press ball in 1890, when the telephone was in an early stage of its development but was clearly going to change the journalist’s way of life. For a composer who had already written Taubenpost (Pigeon Post) and Schnellpost (Express Post) polkas Durch’s Telephon was a natural progression. While he obviously did not have the variety of rings available to the owner of the present-day mobile phone, he could call on melodic resources rich enough to supply three good tunes in less than two minutes.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus -

Rosalinde’s Csárdás

Die Fledermaus, the one Strauss operetta set in contemporary Vienna and Johann II’s first major success in the theatre, was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1874. Much of the action takes place at a masked ball thrown by the fabulously rich and morally relaxed Prince Orlofsky. Among the guests 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: posing as a French marquis, he severely embarrasses himself by attempting to seduce the mysterious stranger. It is in order to add verisimilitude to her Hungarian pretensions 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)

Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow)

Hanna’s 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, Die lustige Witwe (“The Merry Widow”), which was first performed at the Theater and der Wien in 1905. Set for the most part in the Paris embassy of an imaginary hard-up 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 tenor lead’s song “Da geh’ ich zu Maxim” (I’m off to chez Maxim) belongs to the former category. The soprano’s Vilja Song - performed 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 a kind of folk song: Vilja, a beautiful wood nymph, allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . .

Franz Lehár

Giuditta -

“Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiss” (On my lips every kiss is like wine)

Giuditta is the opera that crowned Lehár’s long career in the musical theatre. Too serious to be termed an operetta, it was written for no less distinguished a company than the Staatsoper in Vienna, from where its first performance in January 1934 was relayed to 120 radio stations round the world (not least because of the presence of Richard Tauber in the lead tenor role). Its heroine, the beautiful Giuditta, does a great favour to her dull old husband, much dismayed though he is at the time, by going off to North Africa with a handsome young army captain, whom she subsequently destroys. 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 kind of number does a Spanish-Moroccan cabaret artist perform when attempting to seduce a rich English lord in the Alcazar night club? It can only be 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.

Oscar Straus (1870-1954)

The Chocolate Soldier

“My hero”

Far from being an ‘s’ short of a Strauss, Oscar Straus was a highly accomplished composer of Viennese operettas - dozens of them - in his own rather shorter name. Although his most familiar piece is probably the fairground-waltz theme tune for the 1950 Max Ophuls film La Ronde, his earliest international success was the operetta Der tapfere Soldat which achieved enormous popularity in the United States as The Chocolate Soldier. Based on Shaw’s play Arms and the Man and set during the Serbo-Bulgarian War in 1885, it is about the inevitably complex love affair between Nadina, daughter of the Colonel of the Bulgarian army, and Lieutenant Bumerli, a Swiss officer attached to the Serbian forces.

Before Nadina meets Bumerli she is engaged to the supposed hero of the Bulgarian army, Major Spiridoff. Fleeing from the Bulgarians and taking refuge, as luck would have it, in Nadina’s bedroom, the very charming Bumerli reveals to her not only his love for chocolate drops but also the decidedly non-heroic status of her fiancé. Her delightfully melodious waltz-song “My hero” is addressed not to Bumerli, however - he has not yet climbed through her bedroom window - but to her absent and, as far as she knows at this point, heroic fiancé.

Johann Strauss II

Wiener Blut (Vienna Blood) Waltz, Op.354

The Viennese waltz as Johann II and his brothers developed it - with its four or five main sections offering two tunes each - was a formidable challenge to a composer’s melodic invention. It was a challenge the Strausses were always ready to accept, however. The dance was their way of life and, what is more, they had perfected the musically rewarding art of setting a waltz melody free from its triple-time accompaniment. The inspired main theme of Wiener Blut, the one that glides in on violins and woodwind once the waltz tempo is established, floats serenely above the persistent pizzicato rhythm in the bass and even contradicts it from time to time. Melodies of this distinction - there is rarely more than one in each waltz - are usually anticipated in the introduction, as this one is in an episode featuring an unusually expressive string ensemble. Like its counterparts in most other Viennese waltzes, it is then presented in its definitive form as the first main theme and is finally recalled in glory at the end. The seven comparatively modest tunes that are heard in the meantime in this particular piece are chosen for their entertainment value and their potential as contrasting material.

Wiener Blut was first performed, incidentally, at an imperial wedding celebration in 1873, when the composer made his first and only appearance with the Vienna Philharmonic in the Musikverein - which no doubt explains the sophisticated string scoring in the introduction.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Divertimento in D major, K.136

Allegro

Andante

Presto

The Divertimento in D major is one of a set of three written in Salzburg in 1772 when the composer was no more than sixteen. That is all we know about them. It is not certain for example whether they were intended to be played by a solo string quartet, as most present day scholars believe, or string orchestra. It certainly looks from the manuscript as though Mozart had solo strings in mind. On the other hand, they are not scored like string quartets and they have always proved most effective when played by a small string orchestra.

The first movement of the Divertimento in D is particularly brilliant - for the first and second violins, that is, if not for the other instruments - its carefree extroversion cleverly offset by mysterious little passages in the minor just before the recapitulation. There is a similar contrast between the somewhat formal aspect of the opening of the Andante in G major and more personal expression of the second theme. The energetic little Presto contains in its middle section the one contrapuntal passage in the whole work, giving the lower strings more than a menial responsibility at last.

Joseph Lanner (1801-1843)

Sehnsuchts-Mazur (Yearning Mazurka) Op.89

By far the most fashionable dances during the period when the ballrooms of Vienna were ruled by the second generation of the Strauss dynasty - Johann II and his brothers Josef and Eduard - were the waltz and the polka. The latter, which had hopped over the border from Czechoslovakia in 2/4 time, was a comparatively recent craze but was so popular that it displaced everything else but the waltz. The two most prominent dance composers of the earlier generation, Johann Strauss I and his slightly older colleague Joseph Lanner, both wrote dozens of waltzes and many gallops but few polkas. Lanner apparently preferred the Polish mazurka to the Bohemian polka. Certainly, he wrote eight examples of the mazurka - including Der Uhlane in 1833 and the Sehnsuchts-Mazur a year later, both of them with solo violin parts - and only three polkas. He failed, however, to make it stick. Even though the displaced rhythmic accents of the mazurka make it quite different from the waltz, there was room in Vienna, it seems, for only one dance in triple time.

Joseph Strauss (1827-1870)

Die Emancipirte (The Emancipated Lady) Polka-Mazurka, Op.282

The mazurka did, on the other hand, survive as an element in the curious hybrid developed (after a Parisian model) by the second generation of Strausses, the polka-mazurka, which combines the steps of the duple-time polka with the triple-time metre of the mazurka. Slower than the waltz, it is also less ambitious in construction and is designed, like the ordinary polka, with matching outer sections and a contrasting middle section. The expert in this particular field was Josef Strauss, who wrote several charming, rhythmically and harmonically sensitive examples, often finding his inspiration in nature, as in Die Lachtaube (The Ringdove) or Die Libelle (The Dragonfly). Die Emancipirte, the last polka-mazurka he completed before his early death, is rather different from the others in that it seems to have some satirical intent. Whatever the meaning of the title - its precise significance is lost somewhere in Viennese social history - it presents a melodically emancipated middle section between teasingly tuneful outer sections.

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 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 many as five distinct waltz-time sections, each one of them based on two different themes. 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 effortless completing a perfectly integrated construction. It flows just as easily as the Danube itself, and is far more colourful.

Introduction and programme notes Gerald Larner©2003