Three Old Viennese Dance Tunes

arranged Swensen

Schön Rosmarin (Fair Rosemary)

Liebesleid (Love’s Pain)

Liebesfreud (Love’s Joy)

A great violinist and a not very serious composer Fritz Kreisler was such a convincing accomplished imitator of musical styles that it was difficult even for scholars (such as they were in his day) 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. These three shorter works in a similar style, Schön Rosmarin, Liebesleid and its counterpart Liebesfreud, he presented not as his own but as “old Viennese dance tunes.”

At a recital in Berlin Kreisler played the Caprice viennois under his own name in the same programme as these “old Viennese dance tunes,” which at that time he attributed to Joseph Lanner (a pioneer of the Viennese waltz along with the father of the Strauss family Johann Strauss I). Afterwards the critic of the Berliner Tagesblatt reprimanded him for daring to put his own insignificant composition, Caprice viennois, alongside such “Lanner gems” which, he said, “are full of the Schubertian melos”. Whatever they have, or might not have, of the “Schubertian melos”, the “old Viennese dance tunes” are most effectively if unsensationally scored for the violin and lack nothing in waltz-time melodic charm.

Originally written for violin and piano, the three Kreisler pieces are played on this occasion in arrangements for violin and orchestra by the soloist Joseph Swensen.