Vienna Nights 6
Franz Lehár 1870-1948
Franz Lehár
1870-1948
Franz Lehár
Concert Overture for The Merry Widow

Hungarian composer Franz Lehár is remembered today for his operettas, which were all the rage at the beginning of the twentieth century. The best known of these is Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) premiered in Vienna in 1905.

The story revolves around, Hanna, a rich widow in a small, impoverished Grand Duchy, and the efforts of the Royal Court to keep her money at home by marrying her off to a local aristocrat. The designated groom, the dashing Count Danilo, plays hard to get, but in the end the match is struck.

As for most of Lehár’s operettas, The Merry Widow had no overture. In 1940, however, in honor of his seventieth birthday, Lehár was invited to the Salzburg Festival and also to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic. For the occasion he composed a medley of the most popular melodies from the operetta. It was never meant as an overture for stage production.

Lehar’s approach has a somewhat Hollywood sound to it, perhaps influenced by the flood of musicals produced during the thirties. He creates transitions using musical allusions, as here with the so-called “Merry Widow Waltz” Example 1 and direct quoting as in Hanna’s aria, “Delia.” Example 2
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756-1791
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1756-1791
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467

Mozart composed a total of 28 solo keyboard concertos, most of them for his own use in subscription concerts in Vienna. Consequently, the timing of their composition was influenced by the artistic climate and the economic wellbeing of the city. In the short period between 1782 and 1786, a booming economy created a heyday for musical life in Vienna. Aristocratic families vied with one another to underwrite and sponsor concerts of the latest in musical fashion. During those flush years, Mozart was in great demand both as a composer and a performer on the keyboard, composing 17 concertos, including this one in C major.

In the late 1780s Austria experienced a severe economic slump, the result of rebellions and the war with Turkey, which menaced the Eastern frontier of the Empire. To make matters worse, the revolutionary events in France terrified the Austrian Emperor, who rescinded his earlier liberal reforms and reintroduced various repressive measures. The resultant atmosphere led to a stifling of cultural life and a decline in patronage and public concerts. Consequently, Mozart composed only two piano concertos in the last five years of his life.

The Concerto in C major was composed in early 1785, finished – in true Mozartean procrastination – on March 9, and premiered on March 10 in a subscription concert. The concert, as well as the Concerto, was an artistic and financial success; according to Mozart's father Leopold, the composer took in 559 Gulden – about $2000 in today's money. The Concerto's cheerful and outgoing character is in stark contrast to its predecessor, the Concerto No. 20 in D minor, composed only three weeks earlier. No. 21 utilizes the full classical orchestra of strings with divided violas, a flute and two each oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets and kettledrums. No cadenza by Mozart has survived.

The first movement is by far the longest, presenting a common opening theme for orchestra and piano, the two parts of which are also used as refrains. Example 1 Piano and orchestra, however, have a series of different secondary themes, Example 2 & Example 3 the piano arriving at the dominant G major via an unusual minor route. Example 4 & Example 5 During the development section, the piano adds yet another theme to the pot. Example 6

After Ingmar Bergman’s 1967 film Elvira Madigan, which used the second movement of this Concerto as the principal soundtrack, it consistently ranks among classical music’s greatest hits. The beauty of this theme resides in the manner in which Mozart spins it out to great length with poignant internal cadences. Example 7

Some listeners find the transition to the final movement like being awakened from a dream. The mood and harmonic language of the Concerto change abruptly into a generally celebratory atmosphere. Example 8 The movement is not the customary rondo, but rather a sonata form. As a parallel to the first movement, Mozart uses the piano to supply a darker coloring as it moves into the secondary theme in the dominant, as well as within the development section. Example 9 & Example 10
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840-1893
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1840-1893
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
The Sleeping Beauty Suite, Op. 66a

Tchaikovsky’s first ballet, Swan Lake (1877) was a revolutionary work. Its intensely dramatic score was so demanding for choreographer, dancers and orchestra that from its premiere, music from other composers was increasingly substituted for Tchaikovsky’s original score. The ballet itself was dropped from the repertoire after 1883 and was only revived in 1895, two years after the composer’s death, and even then in modified form.

By 1888, with his reputation firmly established, such shabby treatment would have been unthinkable. The Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg commissioned The Sleeping Beauty, promising the composer a lavish staging paid for through the personal patronage of Tsar Alexander III.

The story, based on a French seventeenth century tale, was the work of the director of the Imperial Theaters. The details of the individual numbers were precisely specified as to tempo, meter and length by the famous choreographer and ballet master Marius Petipa.

Through Tchaikovsky’s imaginative orchestration and Petipa’s spectacular staging and choreography The Sleeping Beauty became the model for the display of the Russian imperial style. The story became secondary or, as Tchaikovsky commented: “Going to the Ballet for the plot is like going to the opera for the recitatives.” It was premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in January, 1890. The Tsar, who was at the premiere, was less than enthusiastic: “Very nice” was his tepid comment. The rest of the audience – and the rest of the world – thought otherwise.

As in many suites derived from ballets, the sequence of scenes used in this suite does not follow the sequence in the ballet. It emanates, rather, from the musical sensibility and taste of the compiler of the suite. The Suite, Op. 66a opens with the Introduction, but it ends with the celebrated “Sleeping Beauty Waltz” from the middle of Act I, as courtiers celebrate Princess Aurora’s sixteenth birthday. Nevertheless, this Suite picks up signature moments from the Ballet, despite the rearrangement of the dances.

The Introduction foreshadows the curse of the evil fairy Carabosse, Example 1 immediately followed by the mitigating blessing of the “Lilac Fairy music”. Example 2 The “Rose” Adagio is one of the most famous moments in the Ballet during which the Princess Aurora is courted by four suitors, each bearing a rose; she remains on pointe as she is slowly handed off from one to the other.Example 3 “Le chat botte et la chatte blanche” (Puss in Boots and the White Cat) appear on stage scrapping, among the fairytale characters invited to Aurora’s wedding in Act 3. Example 4 The “Panorama” is the opening number to Act 2, showing the forest around Aurora’s castle where everyone has been asleep for a hundred years. Example 5 And finally comes the so-called “Sleeping Beauty Waltz” from Act 1. Example 6
Maurice Ravel 1875-1937
Maurice Ravel
1875-1937
Maurice Ravel
La valse

At the outbreak of World War I, Ravel attempted to join the military for what was presumably going to be a short war. Although he made several attempts to enlist in the air force as a pilot, he was rejected on health grounds. Finally, in March 1916, he became an ambulance driver, naming his vehicle Adélaïde after the ballet made from his suite Ma mere l’oye (Mother Goose). Before the outbreak of the war, he had begun work on a symphonic poem that he tentatively called Vienna, but in light of the spreading hostilities he refrained from working on the project and did not return to it until 1919 at the urging of Sergey Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets russes, giving it the title La valse.

Ravel is said to have appraised La valse as “a fantastic and fatefully inescapable whirlpool.” On the score he added the stage direction “An Imperial Court, about 1855.” This was a period when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in decline, withstanding nationalist movements in Germany, Hungary and the Balkans, while trying to hold its own against the continual threat of the Ottoman Empire on its eastern frontier and losing to France in the west. At the time Ravel took up his pen to complete his work, the Empire had just suffered its final defeat in 1918.

In the Vienna of 1855, the Hapsburg court maintained a show of glittering joie de vivre. The city, dancing on a volcano, swayed to the waltzes and operettas of the Strauss family. Economically, this was the most brilliant and prosperous period of the monarchy. With the hindsight of 1919, however, Ravel had a clear picture of the Empire’s decadence.

La valse was premiered as an orchestral work in 1920 to great success. But Diaghilev was unhappy with it and never staged it. It was finally staged in Paris in 1928 in the style of an elegant festive ball in the Paris of the Second Empire in the 1860s. Finally, in 1951, George Balanchine gave it the choreographic interpretation that expressed Ravel’s original intention of the “inescapable whirlpool.”

The atmosphere of the music is thoroughly Viennese, although Ravel composed it before he ever visited the city. It opens with a pulsating heartbeat deep in the basses, contrabassoon and timpani, faintly delineating the waltz meter, closely following the scenic directive Ravel added to the score: “Clouds whirl about. Occasionally they part to allow a glimpse of waltzing couples. Example 1 As the clouds lift, one can see a gigantic hall, filled by a crowd of moving dancers. Example 2 The stage gradually brightens and the glow of the chandeliers breaks out fortissimo.” Example 3 Like a proper Viennese waltz, the score progresses through a variety of themes, Example 4 but as the dance becomes wilder and wilder, a rhythmic and dynamic tour de force. The melodies become engulfed in an increasingly dissonant whirlwind, and the dancers lose control. Example 5 It is a frightening, deathly riot, cut off at the end as if by a bolt of lightning. Example 6

Like all his orchestral works, with the possible exception of Bolero, Ravel composed La valse at the piano and only then orchestrated the piano score. At the same time he also prepared a two-piano version. But the solo piano version usually performed today is by Lucien Garban (1877 - 1959), a lifelong friend of Ravel, who worked for the music publisher Durand and made transcriptions of works by Debussy and Ravel.

Juventino Rosas 1868-1894
Juventino Rosas
1868-1894
Juventino Rosas
Sobre las olas (Over the Waves)

Known as Mexico’s “waltz king,” Juventino Rosas was a musician by instinct. He started making music for a living at age seven, starting to play violin in a large dance band in Mexico City when he was twelve. Mostly self-taught, he could toss off waltzes and other European dances as needed, on one occasion trading one for a pair of shoes.

Sobre las olas was published in 1884 in New Orleans while Rosas and his band played at the World Cotton Centennial World Fair. The music is so European in character that the waltz has occasionally been attributed to Johann Strauss II. Example 1 It has been a favorite of trapeze artists, because it was one of the tunes on Wurlitzer’s fairground organs.

Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2011