Pique-Dame - Overture

Vienna’s answer to Offenbach before Johann Strauss assumed the front-line role, Franz von Suppé - or to give him his full name Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo Cavaliere Suppé Demelli - wrote literally dozens of operettas and other popular stage works. If most of them are now forgotten or remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. The overture to Pique-Dame (The Queen of Spades), the operetta which was disappointingly first performed in Vienna in 1862 as Die Kartenschlägerin (The Fortune Teller) and then revised and successfully presented under the new title in Graz in 1864, is a characterically tuneful example. Suppé makes witty use of the stealthy little marching figure at the beginning, overlaying it one point with a lovely melody for clarinet and lower strings and leading it through a variety of adventures before abandoning it in favour of an irresistibly zestful Hungarian dance with side-drum accompaniment. After giving way to a charming episode for two flutes, the Hungarian dance is even more zestful on its return at the end. Brahms was to use the same tune, incidentally, in the last of his Hungarian Dances seventeen years later.

G.L.