Liebesfreud

Liebesleid

Tambourin Chinois

Rondino

Praeludium & Allegro

When Kreisler finally confessed that he was the composer of the Pugnani Minuet, the Dittersdorf Scherzo, the Vivaldi Concerto and several other ostensibly baroque and early classical works in his repertoire - after an American critic had found him out - scarcely anyone was seriously shocked by the revelation. The major exception was Ernest Newman, the then oracle of the Sunday Times, who claimed that such “impersonation” was not only unethical but also “within the scope of any ordinarily intelligent musician.” That was a mistake. Kreisler retaliated by suggesting that Newman should try it himself: “If, as an alleged second-grade product of Bach or Handel, your piece succeeds in getting by the caretaker of the Queen’s Hall, I’m prepared to make humble apologies.” Not surprisingly, the challenge was not accepted and no apology had to be made.

Kreisler was such a persuasive violinist and such an accomplished pasticheur that it was difficult for his contemporaries to distinguish between the real thing and the imitation. Most of the music he acknowledged as his own has a strong Viennese flavour, like his elaborate waltz piece Caprice viennois. Two other, shorter works in a similar style, Liebesfreud (“The Joy of Love”) and its counterpart Liebesleid (“The Pain of Love”) he presented not as his own but as “old Viennese dance tunes.” At one recital in Berlin he played the Caprice viennois in the same programme as the “old Viennese dance tunes,” which at that time he attributed to Joseph Lanner. Afterward the critic of the Berliner Tagesblatt reprimanded him for daring to put his own insignificant composition alongside such “Lanner gems” as Liebesfreud and Liebesleid which, he said, “are full of the Schubertian melos.”

Kreisler might even have got away with it if he had presented his Tambourin chinois not as his own Op.3 but as “an old Peking dance tune:” the Berliner Tagesblatt (though surely not the Sunday Times) would have drawn attention to the authentic pentatonic brilliance of the outer sections and a middle section full of voluptuously exotic delights. The Rondino is based on real Beethoven, a charming little Rondo in G for violin and piano written in 1794. The Praeludium and Allegro, though for a long time attributed to Gaetano Pugnani, is nothing but Kreisler.

Rupert Avis©