Overture: Poet and Peasant

Although Johann Strauss is the hero of Viennese operetta - and in his lifetime he had no serious rival - its father figure was Franz von Suppé (or, to give him his full name and title, Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo Cavaliere Suppé Demelli). It was Suppé who had the talent and the initiative to write pieces just as entertaining as the Offenbach opéras bouffes which threatened to monopolise the Viennese audience in the late 1850s, before Strauss came on the scene. If most of the dozens of operettas he wrote for the Theater an der Wien and the Carltheater are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. Though written in 1846, years before he entered into competition with Offenbach, and though intended not for one of his operettas but for a play by Carl Elmer, the Poet and Peasant Overture - with its slow introduction, its lyrical cello solo, its rousing main theme and, of course, its elegant Viennese waltz tune - is a thoroughly characteristic example.