Die leichte Kavallerie (Light Cavalry) Overture

When Franz von Suppé started working in the theatre, as an unpaid assistant conductor at the Theater in der Josefstadt in 1840, Viennese operetta as we know it did not exist. It would not exist, in fact, until 1860 when, challenged by the overwhelming popularity of the Offenbach operettas recently imported from Paris, he wrote Das Pensionat, which is certainly not the best known of its kind but was probably the first. He went on to write dozens more, including Die schöne Galathea in 1865, Fatinitza in 1876 and Bocaccio (”the greatest success of my life”) in 1879. If many of them are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are so very inferior as because the overtures are so very good.

Suppé was a master of the overture from an early stage in his career, as he demonstrated in Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna in 1844. The Light Cavalry Overture - written for a two-act comic opera at the Carltheater in 1866 - is one of the most popular of all his compositions. Not surprisingly, it makes a special feature of military material, from the ceremonial fanfares that open and close the piece to the brilliant trumpet gallop associated in the operetta with a cavalry ride across the Hungarian plains. The Hungarian setting also allowed Suppé to indulge a characteristic Viennese taste for Hungarian flavouring, as in the lively dance that opens the main section of the overture and the passionate melody for lower strings introduced by a clarinet cadenza in the middle.