Chansonette quadrille op259

Chansonette Quadrille, Op.259

All the Strausses, including Johann I, wrote quadrilles. They had to: like the polka, the quadrille was a popular dance form in Vienna in from the 1840s onwards. Although its popularity waned in the ballroom, it retained a certain novelty value in that composers would frequently draw on themes from current successes in the musical theatre and attempt to fit them into the six sections, always in eight-bar phrases and mostly in duple time, of the conventional Viennese qudrille – often with hilarious results. Johann II wrote as many as sixty quadrilles, some of them for his concert seasons at Pavlovsk near St Petersburg. The Chansonette Quadrille was first performed at Pavlovsk in 1861 under the title Rigolboche Quadrille, ‘Rigolboche’ being the stage name of the leader of a French girls’ song and dance troupe enjoying huge success in St Petersburg at the time. Given the style of the Rigolboche tunes presented here – they clearly come straight out of the Parisian music hall, with the two most cheerfully vulgar respectively first and last in the sequence – one can understand why the girls were so popular. Presumably because Rigolboche had no profile in Vienna, Strauss’s Austrian publisher preferred the more demure but not inappropriate title Chansonette.