Wien wird bei Nacht erst schön (Vienna’s really beautiful by night) Op.216

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 song Wien wird bei Nacht erst schön is a luxuriously harmonised and melodious example of how much the Viennese waltz had slowed down by1915.