The Marriage of Figaro: Overture — CBSO Viennese New Year Concerts

The Vienna Sound

If Vienna had produced nothing more than the waltzes, polkas and operettas inseparably associated with it at this time of the year, it would still qualify as one of the great musical cities. But, in actual fact, it couldn’t have. Not even two generations of composers as prodigious as those of the Strauss family - Johann I and his sons Johann II, Joseph and Eduard - could have created such a vast and distinctively stylish repertoire out of nothing. Those irresistibly melodious waltzes and tuneful polkas are the highly sophisticated product of a long tradition in which classical music co-existed, intermingled and interbred with the popular music of the city and the countryside around it. The Vienna ballroom sound was there before the Strauss era: it still survives in the dances of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. And the interbreeding continued during and after the Strauss era in all kinds of works by Brahms, who was a great fan of Strauss waltzes, and in the symphonies of Mahler, who retained a lifelong love of the rustic relations of the ballroom favourites.

Paradoxically, having grown in one place out of mainly local material, the waltz and the polka proved to be readily adaptable to conditions elsewhere, in other capital cities and other cultures. True, the polka boom, based as it was on a dance of limited rhythmic and structural interest, lasted little longer than the Strauss brothers had the energy to promote it. But the waltz as they had developed and perfected it - melodic lines soaring over the bar lines, rhythms teasing the beat in displaced accents and syncopations, structures accumulating not far short of symphonic proportions - proved to be an extraordinarily fruitful and long-lasting source of inspiration to composers everywhere. Vienna has its waltzes but, to mention only the other cities represented in this programme, so do Paris and St Petersburg.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)

The Marriage of Figaro: Overture

The direct link in the chain between Mozart and Viennese operetta is The Magic Flute which was first performed in 1791 at the same popular theatre, the Theater an der Wien, where composers like Franz von Suppé, Johann Strauss and Franz Lehár were to enjoy some of their most spectacular successes. The Marriage of Figaro was first performed five years before The Magic Flute at the Burgtheater, which was a much classier establishment. Even so, since it is unsurpassed even now in creating a scarcely contained sense of anticipation, the Marriage of Figaro Overture is as good a place to start as anywhere. Mozart’s inspiration here seems to have been the alternative title of the Beaumarchais play on which the opera is based - The Mad Day. Certainly, there is no time for a conventional sonata-form construction. With bustling strings and bassoons making the pace, the hectic rate of activity is only twice reduced, and even then only slightly and only briefly, to offset the general impatience to get on with it.

The Marriage of Figaro: Aria - “Deh vieni non tardar”

Bearing in mind that the Burgtheater was in effect the court theatre and that the Beaumarchais play had recently been banned in Vienna as politically subversive, it is surprising that the opera could have been performed there when it was. Indeed, there was much opposition to it, even though Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte had toned down its revolutionary ardour. It was only because Da Ponte was a master of intrigue as well as theatre that it escaped falling victim to censorship. Susanna’s fourth-act aria “Deh, vieni, non tardar” is a vital item in a servant’s strategy to entrap and embarrass a noble but morally reprehensible master. Expressively introduced by woodwind, it is so seductive in fact that the unfortunate Figaro, her servant fiancé hidden nearby, is convinced that she really cannot wait for her assignation with the rapacious Count Almaviva.

Concert aria: “No, no, che non sei capace,” K.419

One of several arias written by Mozart for favourite singers, “No, no, che non sei capace” is very different from Susanna’s little serenade in The Marriage of Figaro. The soprano he had mind was Aloysa Lange, who occupied a special place in the composer’s affections not only because she was his wife’s sister but also because he had been in love with Aloysa before he had married Constanze. She must have been an uncommonly accomplished singer too. “No, no, che non sei capace” - one of three arias Mozart supplied to supplement a production of Anfossi’s Il curioso indiscreto at the Burgtheater in 1783 - makes extraordinary demands on the soprano voice, requiring it to rise to the E above top C not just once but several times and, what is more, to bounce around the leger lines with instrumental agility. The nearest thing to it is the Queen of the Night’s aria “Der Hölle Rache” in The Magic Flute where similarly brilliant coloratura is used to express anger: in the case of “No, no, che non sei capace” it is anger at being falsely accused of infidelity.

Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)

Pique-Dame: Overture

Although Johann Strauss is the hero of Viennese operetta - and in his lifetime he had no serious rival - its father figure was Franz von Suppé (or, to give him his full name and title, Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo Cavaliere Suppé Demelli). It was 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, before Strauss came on the scene. If most of the dozens of operettas Suppé 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.

The overture to Pique-Dame (The Queen of Spades) - the operetta which was disappointingly first performed in Vienna in 1862 as Die Kartenschlägerin (The Fortune Teller) and then revised and successfully presented under the new title in Graz in 1864 - is a characteristically tuneful example. Suppé makes witty use of the stealthy little marching figure at the beginning, overlaying it at one point with a lovely melody for clarinet and lower strings and leading it through a variety of adventures before abandoning it in favour of an irresistibly zestful Hungarian dance with side-drum accompaniment. After giving way to a charming episode for two flutes, the Hungarian dance is even more zestful on its return at the end. Brahms was to use the same tune, incidentally, in the last of his Hungarian Dances seventeen years later.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Emperor Waltz (Kaiser-Walzer), Op.437

The Emperor Waltz is not only a great piece of music but also a great piece of PR. 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 and was given its grand but neutral title so as to offend neither emperor but 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.

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

As the Emperor Waltz so impressively demonstrates, the fully developed Strauss waltz is not just a one-tune affair. Like By the Beautiful Blue Danube (to give it its full title) 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 briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortless completing a perfectly integrated construction.

Die Fledermaus: Overture

Die Fledermaus, is not only the most popular of all Strauss operettas but also the only one actually set in Vienna. The audience at the first night at the Theater an der Wien in 1874 must have sensed from the beginning that something special was about to happen. They might not have known anything of the plot - 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 - but the Overture makes entertaining musical sense in itself. 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.

Die Fledermaus: The Laughing Song

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 the 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 she 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 knows that Eisenstein, who has presented himself at the ball as the Marquis de Renard, shouldn’t be there either.

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 supplying the pauses which give the conductor an opportunity to tease his instrumentalists while keeping them anxiously waiting for the next beat.

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Eugene Onegin: Waltz

The summer seasons he conducted in the Vauxhall Pavilion in Pavlovsk Park - ten of them between 1856 and 1865, two more in 1869 and 1886 - were among the least likely of Johann II’s many commercial enterprises.

However, 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 composer made a small fortune in roubles, the Russian audience had the privilege of being the first to hear such favourite pieces as the Tritsch-Tratsch and Pizzicato polkas, and an unknown composer called Tchaikovsky had his first opportunity to hear his music performed in public.

It was partly through his contact with Johann Strauss and the experience of hearing him conduct his own music that the waltz became one of Tchaikovsky’s favourite dance forms. There are big waltz episodes in each of his three ballets, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, and all kinds of waltz-time passages in his instrumental and orchestral music. If the waltz in the second act of his opera Eugene Onegin is rather less resplendent than the polonaise in the third act, it is because the latter is featured in a ball in a palace in St. Petersburg whereas the former is performed at a rather more modest party in a country house. Another reason is that, while he treats the polonaise as an orchestral show piece and preserves its formality, Tchaikovsky makes dramatic use of the waltz and its reputation as a sexy number. Onegin dances first with Tatyana and then with Olga, the fiancée of his best friend Lensky - the sight of which, as Onegin mischievously intended, sends Lensky into a fit of jealousy, with ultimately tragic results.

Charles Gounod (1818-1893)

Faust: Jewel Song

The earliest waltz by a French composer of any reputation is the second movement, Un Bal, of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique - which was completed as early as 1830, seven years before Johann I took his orchestra to Paris. So it is very likely that the inspiration came not directly from Vienna but by way of Dresden where Carl Maria von Weber wrote his Invitation to the Dance - a brilliant and very remarkable anticipation of the concert waltz as developed, perhaps under Weber’s influence, by the Strauss family. Anyway, by 1859, when Gounod came to write his Faust opera the waltz was firmly established in the affections of the Parisian public, as the composer duly acknowledged by including a large-scale waltz finale to the second act and a waltz-time aria for his heroine in the third act. Marguerite has just discovered a case of jewels left for her by Faust, as an item in his seduction strategy, and is excited by what she finds there. Bearing in mind the association of the waltz with social glitter, frivolity and easy virtue, it is not surprising that she should be tempted to celebrate her acquisition in a waltz song of exceptional vocal brilliance and rhythmic vivacity.

Emile Waldteufel (1837-1915)

Skaters’ Waltz (Les Patineurs), Op.183

Emile Waldteufel, who worked mainly in Paris, is with Franz Lehár one of the two most popular waltz composers after Johann Strauss II. In the most famous of all his compositions, the Skaters’ Waltz, written at the height of his powers in 1882, he reveals not only a considerable gift for melody but also, in spite of an obvious debt to his Viennese contemporaries, an early inclination towards the French tendency to adopt a more relaxed attitude to the form, reducing the number of waltzes in the sequence and occasionally - as in the main theme of the Skaters’ Waltz - sliding rather than skipping into the triple-time rhythms.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Gold and Silver Waltz (Gold und Silber)

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. The gliding melodic style of the Gold und Silber Waltz - written for a gold-and-silver-themed evening at the Sofiensaal in the 1902 carnival season - though it contains some glitteringly lively episodes too, was just what was required. It established his reputation immediately. Three years later he wrote The Merry Widow, which includes an even more sentimental waltz and which was to become the most successful of all Viennese operettas.