Wiener Blut (Vienna Blood): Waltz Op.354

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

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 Johann and his brothers, Joseph and Eduard, 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 such inspired tune 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.

Eduard Strauss (1835-1916)
Bahn Frei (Track clear): Quick Polka Op.45

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.

Eduard Strauss, though neither as brilliant as his brother Johann nor as sensitive as his other brother Joseph, was a particularly effective composer of polkas on locomotive themes. In this case the track is clear for the express kind of transport he found so exciting. So, after a short warm-up and a blast of the whistle, off the train goes with just one stop to an evidently popular excursion destination.

Robert Stolz (1880-1975)

Gruss aus Wien (Greeting from Vienna) Op.898

Robert Stolz was the last major survivor from the heyday of Viennese operetta. Although he died little more than forty 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 called to the service of operetta before the First World War. He had met Johann II shortly before the latter’s death in 1899, which made him think about writing in a similar popular idiom. He completed his first operetta in 1901 and six years later became conductor at the Theater an der Wien, still the Viennese centre for works of that kind. 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. His cheerful march Gruss aus wien, with an only slightly more serious middle section, could scarcely be a more cordial greeting. The Op. No.898 gives some idea of how prolific he was during a long composing career.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus: Adele’s Laughing Song

One way out of an embarrassing situation is to laugh it off – just as Adele does in the most successful of Johann Strauss’s operettas Die Fledermaus. Adele is a parlour maid who has taken the evening off ostensibly “to visit a sick aunt” but in reality to attend a lavish 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 a stylishly turned-out young lady such as 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.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow): Viljalied (Vilja Song)

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 partly in the Paris embassy of an imaginary, impoverished 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 most treasured Pontevedran asset is the merry widow herself, Hanna Glawari, who is not only beautiful but also so rich that the loss of her personal fortune through marriage to any but another Pontevedran would sink the the country’s whole economy. Her most popular number, which she sings at a glamorous party in her Parisian residence, is Lehár’s clever and highly attractive idea of what a Pontevedran folk song would sound like. It tells the story of    Vilja, an irresistible wood nymph who allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . . Hanna proves to be similarly irresistible – to the one Pontevedran she fancies – and finally, unlike Vilja, commits herself to him.

Franz Lehár

Gold und Silber (Gold and Silver) Waltz

Like many of the most popular Viennese composers of his day, 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. Although it contains some glitteringly lively episodes too, the gliding melodic style of the Gold und Silber Waltz – written for a ball with a “gold and silver” theme at the Sofiensaal in the 1902 carnival season – was just what was required. It established Lehár’s reputation immediately. Three years later he wrote The Merry Widow, which includes an even more sentimental waltz.

Emil Waldteufel (1837-1915)

Prestissimo: Galop Op.152

Waldteufel, the Parisian equivalent of Johann Strauss in Vienna, was celebrated as a ballroom conductor in France before he made much of an impact as a composer. The breakthrough came when he was introduced to the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII). Royal interest in his music made it fashionable in London where he secured an important publishing contract, which brought him much success in Paris too. In contrast to the elegance of his best known work, the waltz Les Patineurs, the Prestissimo-Galop (the galop was an even more energetic dance than the polka) is a brilliant example of reckless high-speed stamina.   

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 did not seriously slow down his production of dances for the ballroom or concert hall. Every Viennese operetta had to be furnished with a generous allocation of songs and other 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, Rosen aus dem Süden, 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.

Paul Lincke (1866-1946)

Berliner Luft (Berlin Air): Overture

Not the most sophisticated of German composers, Paul Lincke lacked nothing in popularity. The Overture to his 1904 operetta Berliner Luft is a characteristically boisterous example. (There is a YouTube video of a 2005 outdoor performance by the Berlin Philharmonic with Sir Simon Rattle – not conducting but playing the bass drum and adding to the delight of the crowded audience at the Berlin Walbühne).

Johann Strauss II

Tritsch-Tratsch: Quick Polka Op.214

Tritsch-Tratsch has always been one of the most popular of Viennese polkas. After its first performance in 1858 there was such a demand for it that the sheet music was sold out within a few days of its publication and was hastily reprinted – to the delight no doubt of the owners of the recently issued Tritsch-Tratsch magazine from which it takes its name. A scintillating example of the quick polka, it demonstrates just how swiftly and how irresistibly chit-chat or tittle-tattle can get round a crowded ballroom.

Ivor Novello (1893-1951)

The Dancing Years: Waltz of my Heart

It’s a rare event when a British composer turns up in a New Year concert. But Ivor Novello, the most successful composer of British musicals before Andrew Lloyd Webber, was no stranger to Viennese music. The fact that he saw The Merry Widow no fewer than 27 times is an indication of how deeply he immersed himself in Viennese operetta, just as his The Dancing Years – which was first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1939 – shows how effectively he adapted its idiom to his own melodic style. As librettist, composer and principal singer, he wrote for himself the leading role of Rudi Kleiber, an at first penniless but ultimately prosperous Viennese composer of operetta. His big number in Act 1, “Waltz of my Heart”, marks the beginning of Rudi’s tortuous love affair with an operetta star, Maria Ziegler.

Johann Strauss II

Annen-Polka (St Anne’s Day Polka): Polka française Op.117

In efforts to increase the musical interest if the polka, theStrauss family developed a slower version, the so-called French polka, and a fascinating hybrid, the polka-mazurka, which adapted the duple-time polka step to the triple-time mazurka. One of the most attractive of all French polkas is Johann II’s Annen-Polka, written for the popular Viennese festivities surrounding St Anne’s Day (26th June) and first performed at in the Prater fairground in 1852. In comparison with a characteristic example of the quick polka like the breathless and unstoppable Tritsch-Tratsch, it proceeds at a nicely gently pace and with a charmingly flirtatious step – until, that is, it so firmly puts its foot down at the end.

Johann Strauss II

Banditen-Galopp (Bandits’ Gallop): Quick Polka Op.378

The Banditen-Galopp (Bandits’ Gallop) is another refugee from an operetta that was less than a complete success on the stage, in this case Prinz Methusalem (Prince Methusalah) which was first performed at the Carl-Theater in 1877. Those of a nervous disposition are warned that near the beginning, about half-way through and near the end of Johann II’s otherwise good-natured bit of banditry they might experience a noisy surprise.

Franz Lehár (1870-1948)

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.

Johann Strauss II

Die Fledermaus: Rosalinde’s Csárdás

Returning to Die Fledermaus, we find that Eisenstein’s wife Rosalinde is also at Orlofsky’s ball. Posing under an assumed identity as a Hungarian countess, she is so convincingly disguised in her mask and her national costume, that even her husband is both deceived and bewitched by her exotic appearance. It is in order to demonstrate 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.   

Josef Strauss (1827-1870)

Feuerfest (Fireproof): Polka Française Op.269

Sometimes known in this country as “Anvil Polka” – for reasons that will shortly become obvious – Feuerfest was written for a great Viennese occasion:    F.Wertheim & Co. had just completed the manufacture of their 20,000th fireproof safe. Metal strikes metal, sparks fly, and a particularly engaging slow polka rolls down the production line.

Johann Strauss II

Unter Donner und Blitz (Thunder and Lightning) Quick Polka, Op.324

Written ten years after Tritsch-Tratsch, Unter Donner und Blitz is possibly an even more inspired quick polka than the earlier work. Certainly, it offers a whole series of brilliantly witty observations on the meteorological situation – a roll of thunder in the opening bars followed by a flurry of evasive activity, a hectic middle section where the storm rages in lightning cymbal clashes and    thunder claps on bass-drum, and a final section which betrays not the least sign of a dampening of the irrepressible Viennese genius for having a good time.

Johann Strauss II

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

This most famous of all Viennese waltzes – written originally in a rather different form for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867 – consists of many as five distinct waltz-time sections in succession, each one of them based on two different themes and none of them recalled before the sequence is complete. What gives it its symphonic stature is the slow introduction with its seductive anticipations of the main theme and, following the fifth waltz, the splendid coda which recalls and briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction.

Gerald Larner © 2017/18