A HIGHLIGHT on the musical calendar in Europe for many each year is the New Year’s Concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, enjoyed not only by those fortunate to have booked their ticket on the second day of the previous year, but by thousands if not millions of TV viewers around the world.
Vienna has long been a centre of musical innovation, and began its rise as a cultural centre in the early 1500s. It was the ruling dynasty of the Hapsburgs during the 18th and 19th century who made Vienna the European classical music capital with great composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Johann Strauss associated with the city.
Waltzes are still an important part of day to day living in Vienna and another is operetta. (It is the diminutive of opera and is a light opera with spoken dialogue, songs and dances.) Viennese operetta can be divided into two periods – the ‘Classical’, which includes composers like Johann Strauss and Franz von Suppe, and the ‘Modern’ which includes Franz Lehar, Oscar Strauss and Emmerich Kalman.
But Viennese operetta began as a direct result of Offenbach’s international popularity, with his Parisian operettas having a tremendous vogue in Vienna during the 1860s. It was the subjects which made Offenbach more and more popular – he satirised composers like Wagner and Meyerbeer, the army, the government and even Greek mythology. Wagner, however, wrote that Offenbach’s music was “a dung heap on which all the swine of Europe wallowed”. However, with each success, Offenbach demanded higher and higher fees until Viennese theatre managers groaned under his totalitarian rule. For over twenty years, he reigned as the master of his particular art, but when in the mid 1870s the public began to tire of him and he became bankrupt after a series of spectacular productions failed, he went to America where he was offered $1,000 a night for a minimum of 30 performances.
Franz von Suppe was a purveyor of light music to the gentry par excellence and the Viennese lapped it up, and still do. There is almost no military band in the world that doesn’t include the Light Cavalry or Poet and Peasant overtures in its programmes. He was nicknamed The German Offenbach and produced a vast amount of music – 30 comic operas and 180 stage pieces which came to rival the work of Strauss in popularity. Despite the operettas not having survived the repertoire, the tuneful overtures still retain their appeal.
One of the last of the great Viennese operetta composers was Franz Lehar, who at the age of 35 was a dollar millionaire. He was the musical heir to Johann Strauss II, and brought a blend of nostalgia and sophisticated humour to the frivolous operetta which perfectly suited the spirit of privileged gaiety in Vienna at the turn of the century.
A military posting to Vienna unlocked doors for Lehar when he wrote the ‘Name waltz’ for Princess Metternich’s Gold and Silver ball in January 1902. He was overwhelmed with requests for it from all over the world and left the military service to take the post of Kapellmeister at the Theater an der Wien. When he simultaneously wrote another operetta for a rival theatre, he was discovered and forced to resign. It was three years later on December 30, 1905 that his Merry Widow premiered at the Theater an der Wien and went on to become a hit. In the first year after the premiere, it was performed more than 5,000 times in the United States with five productions playing simultaneously in five different languages in Buenos Aires. For 103 years now, it has broken box office records and delighted audiences with countless recordings, films and television shows made.
Lehar was now very rich and successful and by his later admission “I stumbled blindly into writing operetta, without any idea of what I was doing, but this helped me to find my own style.”
Although with the death of Emperor Franz Josef and the outbreak of the First World War, Lehar’s success subsided, it was revitalised when he met the renowned opera and Lieder singer Richard Tauber. He wrote a succession of operettas suited to Tauber’s rather magnetic personality and had a string of triumphs. When war again broke out, Lehar retired to his villa at Bad Ischl and became a favourite composer of Hitler, even rewriting the overture to The Merry Widow and dedicating it to the Fuhrer.
Lehar founded his own publishing house in 1935 in order to maintain control over the performance and availability of his works and re-acquired most of his work from other publishers to whom he had previously sold various rights. He died in Bad Ischl on October 24, 1948. For many decades now, the administration of this repertoire has been entrusted to the Glocken Verlag Companies in Vienna, London and Frankfurt/Main.
Back to Vienna and the traditional New Year’s Concert with the Vienna Philharmonic – this year, the French conductor Georges Pretre, will be on the podium with a mixture of Johann Strauss, Jr., Johann Strauss Sen., Joseph Strauss, Joseph Hellmesberger Jr. and Joseph Lanner. The concert will again be broadcast by the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation on Channel 1.
If you want to be part of the concert next year, registrations for the tickets will take place online between January 2 and 23 with the draw taking place from the submitted applications in March 2008. Tickets range from a mere €25 to €850 for the New Year’s Concert.
JOKE
You’re driving down the street – there’s an accordion on one side and a banjo on the other… which do you go for first? The accordion, because it’ s business before pleasure.
FAMOUS QUOTES
“Now I have finished with all earthly business and high time too. Yes, yes, my dear child, now comes death.”
Franz Lehar
MUSICAL TERM
Fugue: A composition written for three to six voices. Beginning with the exposition, each voice enters at different times, creating counterpoint with one another
THIS DAY IN HISTORY
* Birthday of Reinhold Gliere 1874
* Death of James Brown 2004
* Premiere of Khachaturian’s Symphony No 2 in a minor in USA 1942
* Premiere of Brahms’ Symphony No 2 in D major Vienna 1877
* Premiere of Bruckner’s Symphony No 7 in E major Germany 1884
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