Rosen aus dem Süden

Johann Strauss II

Rosen aus dem Süden (Roses from the South) Waltz, Op.388

Although Johann II devoted most of his creative energies in the last thirty years of his life to writing operettas, he did not seriously slow down his production of dances for the ballroom or concert hall. Every Viennese operetta had to be furnished with a generous allocation of songs and other numbers in waltz time and it was a comparatively simple matter to issue these pieces in instrumental arrangements for use outside the theatre. One of the most celebrated of all Strauss waltzes, Rosen aus dem Süden, is actually a selection of the best waltz tunes from the now largely forgotten operetta, Das Spitzentuch der Königin (The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief), which was successfully first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1880. Unusually for Strauss, although he anticipates it at the very beginning of the slow introduction, he avoids presenting his most distinguished melody as the main theme – it appears on violins and horn with harp accompaniment as the second of the four waltzes – and he doesn’t recall it in the exuberant and otherwise comprehensive coda.     

Johann Strauss II

Rosen aus dem Süden (Roses from the South) Waltz, Op.388

While it was a stroke of anachronistic genius on Richard Strauss’s part to make the waltz a prominent feature of an opera set in Vienna in the middle of the eighteenth century, he was by no means the first composer to do such a thing. More than thirty years before Richard Strauss wrote Der Rosenkavalier, Johann Strauss had made a similar feature of the waltz in his operetta Cagliostro in Wien, which is also set in Vienna in the middle of the eighteenth century. There were no complaints about that, of course. There surely would have been, however, if he had left the waltzes out.

In fact, all the Strauss operettas - only one of which is set in the Vienna of his day - depended for their success on a generous allocation of songs and other numbers in waltz time, however incongruous they might have been in their context. To take on extreme example, Das Spitzentuch der Königin (The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief) is set in sixteenth-century Portugal and yet includes so many high quality nineteenth-century Viennese waltzes that the composer was able to extract no fewer than four of them and put them together in one of the most successful of his concert pieces. Rosen aus dem Süden, as he called the new waltz sequence, is unusual in that, although he anticipates its most distinguished melody at the very beginning of the slow introduction, Strauss avoids presenting it as the main theme - it appears on violins and horn with harp accompaniment as the second of the four waltzes - and he doesn’t recall it in the otherwise comprehensive, contrapuntally exuberant coda.