Tritsch-Tratsch (Chit-Chat): Polka, Op.214 — CBSO Viennese New Year Concerts

The family business

“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. Thanks to the inexhaustible genius of Johann Strauss II the Viennese waltz was to become not just a dance but an industry with a world-wide market for its products. Although Johann Strauss I had played a significant role in creating a demand for the Viennese waltz, and although his sons - not just Johann but Josef and Eduard too - were industrious in sustaining it, when the waltz craze spread abroad it was more than the family business could cope with.

Waltzes and polkas the Strausses could write in their hundreds, and they could do it very brilliantly, but the cult did not stop there. 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 musicians to sustain it. Some of them were no more than competent professionals but, steeped as they were in a style that the world at large found irresistible, they could scarcely go wrong as long as they could come up with a tuneful waltz here and there. The masters of the art were Johann Strauss II, who had little innate sense of theatre but made it his business to develop one, and Franz Lehár, whose Merry Widow ranks just behind Johann II’s Die Fledermaus as one of the two most successful operettas of all time. Josef and Eduard in the meantime had no choice but to go on cultivating the waltz, the polka and the quadrille, which they did with unfailing professionalism and no little genius.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Tritsch-Tratsch (Chit-Chat): Polka, Op.214

Although the polka was almost as popular as the waltz in the 1850s and 60s, it didn’t stay in fashion for anything like as long. It was an exhilarating ballroom exercise but 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 to it and dress it up in colourful orchestration. Tritsch-Tratsch, which was written at the height of the polka craze in 1858, is an outstandingly brilliant example. Named after a Viennese gossip magazine of the time, it demonstrates just how quickly and how irresistibly chit-chat and tittle-tattle can get round a crowded ballroom.

Wiener Blut (Vienna Blood): Waltz, Op.354

The Viennese waltz as the Strauss family 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 they were always ready to accept, however, not least because 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 are 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 debut as director of the Vienna Philharmonic - which no doubt explains the sophisticated string scoring in the introduction.

Rudolf Sieczynski (1879-1952)

Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume (Vienna, my city of dreams), Op.1

By the turn of the nineteenth 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, my city of 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. Its most recent claims to fame include its heroic appearance in the Three Tenors’ concert at Caracalla in Rome in 1990 and its scarcely recognisable presence in a toy-shop scene in Stanley Kubrick’s last film “Eyes Wide Shut.”

Carl Millöcker (1842-1899)

Gasparone:

Dunkelrote Rosen (Dark-red roses)

Carlotta Waltz

When Millöcker’s Gasparone - the eleventh of his eighteen operettas - was first performed in Vienna in 1884 it had no Dunkelrote Rosen. In fact, it acquired the song only in 1933, thirty-four years after the composer’s death, when both the libretto and the score were re-written for a production in Berlin. The song is by Millöcker, however: it was cannibalised from another, by then forgotten operetta of his called Der Vice-Admiral and although it was conceived for a quite different context - with no relevance at all to the original Gasparone story of banditry, smuggling, kidnap and high romance in Sicily in the 1820s - it was an instant hit in its new surroundings. Since then there have been several new versions of Gasparone but few if any of them have failed to include Dunkelrote Rosen, the sentimental melodiousness of which is just too effective to omit.

The Carlotta Waltz is another favourite. Named after the heroine of Gasparone, the widowed Carlotta Countess of Santa Croce - who is all the more attractive for the fortune she is about to acquire - it amounts to a medley of the operetta’s best waltz tunes.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Der Graf von Luxemburg (The Count of Luxembourg):

Duet: Ein Stübchen so klein (A nice little room)

First performed in 1909 at the Theater an der Wien, where The Merry Widow had enjoyed such a great success four years earlier, The Count of Luxembourg was clearly intended to appeal to the same audience - which it did in a big way. It too is set in Paris and features an idle young Count who has the luck, rather than the guile, to end up with the woman he loves. Parallel with the story of Count René and Angèle Didier is that of his friend Armand Brissard, the painter with whom he shares a studio in Montmartre, and Juliette Vermont, who would rather be Armand’s wife than his model. Ein Stübchen so klein is a duet for Armand and Juliette in cheerful anticipation of their domestic bliss.

Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow):

Waltz: Ballsirenen (Sirens of the Ball)

The most famous of all Lehár pieces, next to his Gold and Silver Waltz, is the so-called Merry Widow Waltz - the amorous melody which is so effectively designed to re-ignite the passions of Count Danilo and the “merry widow” Hanna Glawari, who had once been lovers but who have since been separated. An almost equally popular number is Danilo’s carefree and charmingly dissolute Da geh’ ich zu Maxim (I’m off to Chez Maxim). The fact that Danilo’s song is not in waltz time didn’t deter the ingenious arranger from working it into both the introduction and the ending of a waltz sequence, Ballsirenen, which brings together all the best waltz tunes in the operetta - including, in pride of place, the Merry Widow Waltz.

Johann Strauss II

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

Although Johann II devoted most of his creative energies in the last thirty years of his life to writing operettas, this by no means halted his production of dances for the ballroom or concert hall. Every Viennese operetta had to be furnished with a generous allocation of numbers in waltz time and it was a comparatively simple matter to issue these pieces in instrumental arrangements for use outside the theatre. One of the most celebrated of all Strauss waltzes, Roses from the South, is actually a selection of the best waltz tunes from the now largely forgotten operetta, Das Spitzentuch der Königin (The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief), which was successfully first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1880. Unusually for Strauss, although he anticipates it at the very beginning of the slow introduction, he avoids presenting his most distinguished melody 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 exuberant and otherwise comprehensive coda.

Carl Michael Ziehrer (1843 - 1922)

Der Fremdenführer (The Tourist Guide):

Ja, beim Militär (Yes, a soldier’s life)

Carl Michael Ziehrer was the nearest rival to the Strauss family in the ballroom, the concert hall and the musical theatre - though not a very serious rival, obviously, since his music did not have the quality to survive in anything like such quantity or for anything like as long as that of the Strausses. He is remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for two of his twenty or so operettas, Der Landstreicher and Der Fremdenführer. One of the most attractive numbers in the latter work, which was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1902, is Ja, beim Militär which is sung by a minor character, an Austrian military bandsman called Ratz, at an early stage in the first act. As Ziehrer was himself a military bandsman at one time, he might have agreed that the hard life of a soldier is made tolerable only by love affairs - not just one but many of them, at all times of the day.

Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)

La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein (The Grand Duchess of Gérolstein)

Ah, que j’aime les militaires (Oh, how I love soldiers)

La vie parisienne (Parisian Life)

Duet: L’amour, c’est une échelle immense (Love is an immense ladder)

One reason why Johann II turned to operetta in his late forties - apart from the fact that the theatre was where the big money was to be made - was the challenge to Viennese pride and commerce represented by the popular success of Offenbach opéras-bouffes imported from Paris. La vie parisienne reached Vienna in January 1867, a few months after it was first seen in the French capital, and its immediate successor La Grande Duchesse followed hard on its heels in May of the same year. There were Viennese composers of operetta around at the time, like Suppé and Millöcker, but none of them could compete in sheer verve and wit with such numbers as Ah, que j’aime les militaires - a brilliant rondeau in which the Grand Duchess indicates her liking for brave and smartly turned-out soldiery with surprising, indeed shameless enthusiasm. And what about the seductive mischief of the “Cloud Duet” from La vie parisienne where a Parisian chambermaid, under instructions to distract the attention of a visiting Swedish Baron, applies her charm with such evident success? Viennese composers at the time could do nothing like it.

Eduard Strauss (1835-1916)

Carmen Quadrille, Op.134

All the Strausses, including Johann I, wrote quadrilles. They had no choice since from the 1840s onwards the quadrille, like the polka, was one of Vienna’s top-favourite dance forms. Although its popularity waned in the ballroom, it long retained a certain novelty value: composers frequently drew on themes from current successes in the musical theatre and attempted to fit them into the six sections, always in eight-bar phrases and mostly in duple time, of the conventional Viennese quadrille - often with amusingly incongruous results. Johann II wrote as many as sixty quadrilles, the later ones based on music from his own operettas, while Josef and Eduard wrote about thirty each - Josef’s including one on Lehár’s Graf von Luxemburg and Eduard’s one on Offenbach’s La vie parisienne and another on Millöcker’s Gasparone.

One of the most entertaining to our ears, since Bizet’s last opera is so much more familiar to us than most of the scores the Strausses plundered, is Eduard’s Carmen Quadrille. It refers to at least twelve themes, some of them just in passing and some - like Carmen’s Là-bas dans la montagne, which occupies the whole of the third section - at comparative length. Other prominent tunes include the opening of the Prelude, Don José’s Halte là! Qui va là ?and the children’s march in the first section, Carmen’s Habanera and the beginning of the Toreador’s song in the second section, Carmen’s dance with castanets, Remendado and Dancairo’s La chose, certes, nous étonne and the male chorus La cloche a sonné in the fifth section, the Card Trio and the Toreador’s march in the finale.

Josef Strauss (1827-1870)

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

If Josef Strauss had not been plagued by illness, which resulted in his death at the age of 43, and if he had been as ambitious as his brothers, he 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 form the 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.

Johann Strauss II

Perpetuum mobile, Op.257

If any piece could be said to sum up the Strauss genius in less time than it takes to cook an egg, it is this “musical joke” - its non-stop flow of melodic invention, its instrumental inspiration and its unpretentious wit.

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

The Blue Danube is the most famous of all waltzes. Written in 1867, it has achieved the status of a Viennese folk song, or anthem even. Although the original version, written for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association, has fairly frivolous words attached to it, the choral version usually performed today has a new text which, added in 1890, confirms the depth of the local sentiment inspired by the waltz in the meantime. But that doesn’t have the splendid coda which in the orchestral version recapitulates and develops the main themes of four of the five main sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction. Johann II’s melodic genius was such that even if the river itself were to dry up Vienna and the Danube would still be inseparable.