Concerts & Tickets

Programme note

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)
Kaiser-Walzer (Emperor Waltz) Op 437 

The Kaiser-Walzer represents one of the high points in Johann Strauss’s own treatment of the waltz as a concert-hall piece rather than ballroom item. It was written to celebrate the historic state visit made by Kaiser Franz Joseph I of Austria to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany in Berlin in 1889, its grand but neutral title chosen in a diplomatic effort to offend neither emperor and at the same time to flatter them both. Imperial in inspiration, it is also imperial in stature. The introduction takes the form of a delicately scored march, while the first of the waltz tunes – briefly anticipated in march time before its definitive introduction in waltz time on horn and violins – must be the most dignified of its kind. Although none of the following three waltzes is quite as stately, trumpets and trombones certainly make an imposing entry in the last but one of them. Not satisfied with a recapitulation of almost symphonic proportions, recalling the second and third waltzes as well as the main theme itself, Strauss adds an epilogue featuring a thoughtful solo cello and a brilliantly ceremonial ending.

Johann Strauss II
Im Krapfenwald’l polka française Op 336

Exhilarating ballroom exercise though it was, in comparison with the waltz the polka was neither as sexy for the dancer nor as interesting for the composer. Its high-energy requirement meant that it rarely lasted longer than two or three minutes while its high-speed rhythmic activity gave the composer little opportunity to do more than put a cheerful tune and catchy title to it and dress it up in colourful orchestration. The Strauss family did, however, develop a slower version, the so-called polka française, and a fascinating hybrid, the polka-mazurka, which adapted the duple-time polka step to the triple-time mazurka.

Since it is named after Josef Krapf’s well known tavern in the Vienna woods, it would be reasonable to assume that the polka française Im Krapfenwand’l is another tribute to the countryside the Viennese knew best. When it was first performed, however, at the Vauxhall Pavilion in Pavlovsk Park near St Petersburg – where Johann II directed several seasons of summer concerts in the 1850s and 1860s – it was called In the Pavlovsk Woods. Astute businessman though he was, the composer might have been better advised to go for neutrality in this case and give it the 'Cuckoo Polka' title it has since acquired in English-speaking countries. It would at least have acknowledged the vital role played by the virtuoso musician who makes no fewer than eight entries in each of the four main sections and five more in the coda.

Johann Strauss II
Bauern-Polka (Peasant Polka) polka française Op 276

Another polka française, the Bauern-Polka – which takes the dance out of the city and restores it to its countryside origins – was particularly appreciated at Pavlovsk where, according to the composer, the Russian public accompanied every performance by not only beating time with their feet but also (perhaps with some encouragement from the orchestra) humming the tunes.

Johann Strauss II
Rosen aus dem Süden (Roses from the South) Waltz Op 388

All of Johann Strauss’s operettas – only one of which, Die Fledermaus, 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, he 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.

Johann Strauss II
An der schönen blauen Donau (By the Beautiful Blue Danube) Waltz Op 314

The Blue Danube waltz is not only the last word in flattery – the Danube in Vienna is a muddy brown in most lights – but also the ultimate example of the concert waltz. In company with some of the most distinguished examples of its kind, it consists of as many as five distinct waltz-time sections, each one of them based on two different themes. Clearly, as the composer of well over a hundred waltzes (not including those in his operettas), Johann II was a uniquely resourceful melodist. Written for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867, this most familiar of Viennese waltzes was originally scored for chorus and orchestra and in that form it has achieved something like the status of a national anthem. The choral version, however, doesn’t have the splendid coda which in the orchestral version recalls and briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction. It flows just as easily as the Danube itself, and far more colourfully.

Johann Strauss II
Egyptian March

The Egyptian March, written to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, is a wonderfully weird confection, coloured not only by exotic harmonies and percussion sounds but also some curious vocalisation. Whether it was in gratitude for this dubious tribute that Ismail Pasha sent Strauss two giraffes, on the occasion of the composer’s Golden Jubilee in 1890, history does not record.

Johann Strauss II
Annen-Polka (St Anne’s Day Polka) polka française Op 117

One of the most attractive of all French polkas is Johann II’s Annen-Polka, written for the popular Viennese festivities surrounding St Anne’s Day (26th June) and first performed at the 'Wild Man and Parrot' in the Prater in 1852. In comparison with a characteristic example of the quick polka like the breathless and unstoppable Tritsch-Tratsch, it proceeds at a nicely gentle pace and with a charmingly flirtatious step – until, that is, it so firmly puts its foot down at the end.

Ambroise Thomas (1811–96)
'Je suis Titania' from Mignon

Neither a waltz nor a polka Je suis Titania is a polonaise, the prancing rhythms of which are well chosen to reflect the exhilaration experienced by Philine after playing the part of the fairy queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon – an opéra comique based on Goethe’s Wilhulm Meisters Lehrjahre and first performed in Paris in 1866 – Philine is an actress in a travelling theatre group. A shallow character in comparison with the withdrawn and mysterious central figure, Mignon, she more than compensates for that by sheer vivacity. In a brilliantly tuneful aria near the end of the second act she is still Titania, “daughter of the air,” rejoicing in a vocal line “livelier than a bird, quicker than lightning” and in a coloratura that, in the closing cadenza, flies to a hight many sopranos cannot reach.

Johann Strauss II
Perpetuum mobile quick polka Op 257

If any work could be said to sum up the Strauss genius in less time than it takes to cook an egg, it is the non-stop flow of melodic invention, instrumental inspiration, and unpretentious wit of Perpetuum mobile. It was inspired by a press comment on a remarkable evening when the Strauss brothers – Johann II, Josef and Eduard – each conducted one of three balls going on simultaneously in the same hall in Vienna in 1861: “Perpetual motion, or the dance without an end,” one paper called it. That is exactly what Johann Strauss contrived to achieve in a quick polka written for a different ballroom a couple of months later. There being, theoretically, no reason why it should ever stop, it is up to the conductor to choose when to bring perpetual motion to an end.

Johann Strauss II
Unter Donner und Blitz (Thunder and Lightning) quick polka Op 324

An obligatory item, along with The Blue Danube, at the end of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New years concert, Unter Donner und Blitz is possibly the most inspired of all quick polkas. Certainly, it offers a whole series of brilliantly witty observations on the meteorological situation – a roll of thunder in the opening bars followed by a flurry of evasive activity, a hectic middle section where the storm rages in lightning cymbal clashes and bass-drum thunder claps, and a final section which betrays not the least sign of a dampening of the irrepressible Viennese genius for having a good time.

© Gerald Larner

Programme note

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Béatrice et Bénédict Overture (1862)

It might be true that Berlioz’s opera Béatrice et Bénédict, first performed at Baden-Baden in 1862, misses much of the spirit of the Shakespeare comedy on which it is based: “Much Ado about Nothing without the ado” as someone unkindly but succinctly put it. The essence of the comedy, however, is there in the Overture, much of it in the playful introduction, where the silences are as witty as the delightful dialogue between woodwind and strings. After an expressive slower episode - based on Beatrice’s aria 'Il me souvient' in which she realises she is in love with Benedict - that dialogue is converted into the main theme of the following Allegro. Its triplet laughter, taken from the accompaniment to the lovers’ duet in the finale of the opera, bubbles through a brisk march tune and more sentimental material alike and retains its vivacity right through to the highly effective ending.

© Gerald Larner

Programme note

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Jeu de cartes (1936)

First Deal (Première donne): Alla breve – Moderato assai – Tranquillo
Second Deal (Deuxième donne): Alla breve – Marcia – Variazioni 1-5 – Coda – Marcia
Third Deal (Troisième donne): Alla breve – Valse – Presto – Tempo del principio

One of Stravinsky’s earliest so-called ‘neoclassical’ works written in the aftermath of the First World War was the ballet Pulcinella, commissioned by the impresario Sergey Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes, the company that had first brought Stravinsky to international fame with Firebird. Pulcinella was Stravinsky’s discovery of the past, as he later described it, "the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course – the first of many love affairs in that direction – but it was a look in the mirror, too." Despite its dependence on the music of the past, Pulcinella represents an important turning point in Stravinsky’s artistic development. It revealed to him the possibilities of an engagement with all kinds of earlier music in order to renew his own musical language. Crucial, though, for his neoclassical music was not the material he borrowed (which could come from anywhere) but his attitude to it. Everything he touched he made his own.

The playful score for Jeu de cartes is relatively unusual in Stravinsky’s output in that it not only alludes to a variety of earlier music, but also quotes directly from it. The most obvious reference occurs towards the end, when a (barely) altered theme from the overture to Rossini’s The Barber of Seville is to be heard. Elsewhere in the score allusions are made to the music of Beethoven, Johann Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, and even to other works by Stravinsky himself. The composer is playing games with his listeners, as befits the ballet’s subject-matter. The scenario was chiefly of Stravinsky’s making, based on his own enjoyment of playing cards. It is a relatively trivial plot in which the dancers represent the principal cards in a game of poker. There are three ‘deals’, marked by the recurrence of readily recognisable music, and each play is disrupted by the mischievous and unpredictable Joker. The music is exuberant, full of rhythmic energy and complexity, as one idea cuts across another, simple material is transformed by syncopations, and the metre refuses to settle in one place for long. Occasionally a darker shadow is cast over the music, such as in the closing moments of the score, where the ‘deal’ music takes on a more sinister character, leaving a strange taste in the mouth. Play, for Stravinsky, was a serious business.

The work was premiered by the American Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1937, and was Stravinsky’s first collaboration with George Balanchine since their time together with the Ballets Russes. It was to prove an enduring partnership: in all but one of Stravinsky’s future ballets Balanchine was to play a major creative role. Only for Balanchine would Stravinsky make changes to his scores, such was his admiration for the dances he choreographed. Their work was to culminate in Agon, first staged by the New York City Ballet in 1957, which has an abstract subject entirely without plot. ‘Agon’ is Greek for ‘contest’, and it is not hard to see its origins in the dramatized game-playing of Jeu de cartes.

© Jonathan Cross

Programme note

Fredrick Delius (1862-1934)
The Walk to the Paradise Garden

A Village Romeo and Juliet was Delius’s 4th opera; it seems to have occupied him for almost a decade since early sketches date from 1898 and he was still tinkering with it in 1907 just before its German premiere in Berlin. Delius drafted his own libretto from one of the best-known stories by Gottfried Keller (1819-1890), a Swiss writer who enjoyed quite a vogue among musicians in the late 19th century. His work inspired music by composers as disparate as Schoenberg, Wolf and Sinding, and he is generally described as Poetic Realist – belonging to that branch of Romanticism that celebrated universal and eternal themes (love, immortality, life of the spirit) through earthy subjects. His tale is set among peasant farmers, vagabonds and mysterious elemental spirits. His Romeo and Juliet are called Vrenchen and Sali, and their families are in dispute over a strip of land that actually belongs not to either of them but to a shady figure called The Dark Fiddler. In the course of the drama, Sali and Vrenchen are caught kissing by Vrenchen’s father; he, in his anger, he abuses Vrenchen and Sali kills him. After this, the impossibility of their love grows ever more evident; everywhere they go they feel outcast. They originally plan to go to the Paradise Garden (a dilapidated but lovely riverside inn) to forget their woes and dance all night. But when they get there, they realise that it is truly a garden of paradise: they accept that they will never fit in anywhere now, and when finally they chose death it is as an ecstatic embrace with eternity and oblivion.

This miniature is in fact an arrangement (by Sir Thomas Beecham) of the entracte that describes Sali and Vrenchen walking to the inn. Its rhapsodic, idyllic tone has often been commented upon as odd, given that the young lovers are going to their deaths. But remembering that Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was just over 30 years old when Delius started work on this piece explains a lot. Wagner’s drama with its passionate love-death-wish inspired countless imitators in all the arts and both Keller and Delius were touched by it. The music would have been played with the curtain down, and Delius gives no scenic directions in the libretto, but surely the riverside setting of the inn is the key to this music? It flows languorously along – and it is the river that will ultimately take the lover’s lives.

© Svend Brown