Tausend

Johann Strauss II

Tausend und eine Nacht (A Thousand and one Nights): Waltz Op.346

More than 100 of Johann II’s dances – mainly polkas but waltzes too – were written originally for operettas like Die Fledermaus, A Night in Venice and The Gypsy Baron and proved so popular in that context that they were then adapted for the ballroom. His first operetta Indigo und die vierzig Räuber (Indigo and the Forty Thieves) was not an overwhelming success when he conducted it at the Theater an der Wien in 1871 but it included as many as nine numbers he was able to extract from it and use as separate items. Prominent among them is the waltz he called Tausend und eine Nacht (A Thousand and one Nights) in homage to the literary source of his libretto. He did not go so far, however, as to introduce anything exotic into the actual music, either in the trumpet solo at the beginning or in the delightfully idiomatic Viennese waltzes that follow.