Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron) - Overture

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron) - Overture

Like many Viennese musicians, Johann Strauss fancied himself as an exponent of the Hungarian idiom - or, to be more precise, the Hungarian-gypsy idiom, which was almost as popular in Vienna as it was in Budapest not so very many miles down the Danube to the East. The show-stopping status of Rosalinde’s Csárdás in Die Fledermaus is a good indication of the favoured position of that kind of music in Viennese society at the time. As it happens, although Johann II didn’t have much time to devote himself to the Hungarian idiom - waltzes and polkas were what the public wanted from him - the most ambitious of his stage works, Ritter Pásmán, and one of the most successful, The Gypsy Baron, are both settings of Hungarian subjects.

The Overture to The Gypsy Baron offers a delightful sample of what the score as a whole - hung on the flimsiest of flimsy operetta plots - has to offer. Hungarian-gypsy melodic inflections, immediately evident in the aggressive beginning of the slow introduction, are put to most expressive use in the elegantly sustained line which eventually emerges on solo oboe over a quiet pizzicato accompaniment. Although the waltz which is the main interest of the second part of the overture is of the conventional Viennese kind, there is a wide variety of material here and much of it is of Hungarian inspiration, not least the syncopations so zestfully incorporated in the coda.