by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On Monday, January 1 KPBS,
the Public Broadcasting Service’s San Diego outlet, rang in the New Year with a
predictable feature and a decidedly unpredictable one. The unpredictable one — which I’ll be writing about
later because though I was never a fan of its subject, the time (late 1970’s)
and place (San Francisco) where he made his mark is personal to me because I
was living there then and just coming to grips with my sexuality — was a documentary on the Independent
Lens series called The
Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin. The predictable one was the American telecast of the Vienna
Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s concert, which apparently actually starts at midnight so it can take place entirely within
the new year (according to Wikipedia, they actually play the same program three
days in a row — December 30 and 31, and January 1 — but it’s the last of the
three that is internationally televised).
The tradition was started in 1939 by
conductor Clemens Krauss, and it was apparently greenlighted by Baldur von
Schirach, one of the creeps on Adolf Hitler’s staff whom he made Gauleiter (“regional leader”) of Austria after he took it
over in 1938. Like a lot of what
goes on artistically in Vienna, the concert has become quite bound by tradition
— indeed I remember that when PBS first started broadcasting them in the 1980’s
Walter Cronkite was the MC and he kept going on and on and on about “traditional” this and “traditional” that it
seemed to be awfully hidebound for what was supposedly a group of serious
classical musicians letting their hair down and having fun. Of course, the
concert’s greatest tradition is that it primarily features music by the Strauss
family — father Johann Strauss, Sr.; his sons Johann, Jr. (by far the most
famous member and the one we think of when we say “Strauss waltz”), Josef and
Eduard; and his grandson Johann Strauss III, who to confuse the issue was not Johann, Jr.’s son but Eduard’s! I’m not sure
whether we got to see the whole concert — I suspect not — because in previous
years we’ve been able to download the entire concert from private sources,
including extensive silent footage of Viennese landmarks the telecast’s
producers, the Austrian broadcasting company ORTF, shoot so the editors in
various countries can use it as B-roll. Now ORTF, the Vienna Philharmonic and
their record label, Sony Classical, have put the concert on such tight
copyright control — it is a major international cash cow for the orchestra and Sony, after all —
that recordings of it are available for advance-order sale on arkivmusic.com
even before the concert has taken place.
What we got this year was 11 numbers,
nine on the printed program plus the inevitable two encores — the “Blue Danube”
waltz (here accompanied by aerial photographs of the actual Danube River — I
remember being disappointed to read in the 1970’s that the Danube, far from
being beautiful or blue, was then the most polluted river in Europe;
fortunately it’s been cleaned up since then) and Johann Strauss, Sr.’s
“Radetzky March,” to which the audience claps along in strict time and the
conductor sometimes turns away from the orchestra and conducts the audience
instead. (One year Charles turned to me as the audience was clapping in
near-perfect unison and said, “How come we got all the white people who can’t clap?”) The “Blue Danube” is always presented the same way; the
orchestra plays a few bars, the conductor stops them and says, in German, “The
Vienna Philharmonic wants to wish you a … ” — and then the orchestra says, in
unison, “Prosit Neujahr,” which is German for “Happy New Year.” Over the years
the concert programs expanded to include light music by people other than the
Strausses, including last night’s opener, the overture to Franz von Suppé’s
operetta Boccaccio (it’s fun but there are
other Suppé overtures, including Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry, which are better) and the “Stephanie” gavotte by
Alphonse Czibulka (don’t hold me to that spelling). This year’s conductor was
Riccardo Muti, who’s aged a great deal since he established his reputation as a
young firebrand at La Scala in Milan in the 1970’s; he conducted the concert
for the first time in 1993 and did so again in 1997, 2000 and 2004.
PBS’s
choice for an on-screen host was rather dubious; in years past it was Walter
Cronkite and then Julie Andrews (whose most famous film, The Sound of Music, took place in Austria — but in Salzburg, not
Vienna!), but this year it was the offensively booming Hugh Bonneville, an
actor who joked about how the magnificent palace settings might make you think
you were watching a PBS pledge-break marathon of Downton Abbey, a popular British series that is probably
Bonneville’s best-known vehicle (though if you look him up on imdb.com the
first credit that comes up is for another show, Notting Hill). I’ve never watched Downton Abbey — I have about zero interest in shows glorifying
the British aristocracy and either patronizing or ignoring the British 99
percenters who keep them in business — and if Hugh Bonneville’s announcements
on the New Year’s concert are any indication, I haven’t missed much. He reminds
me of the stories I’ve heard about how in the early days of sound filmmaking
actors who had been trained on the stage boomed out their lines at fortissimo volume, as if they were still straining to make
sure they were heard in the back rows, and they had to learn that acting before
a camera and a microphone demanded a different, more naturalistic style of line
delivery than acting before a live audience, especially a large one.
Bonneville’s booming style made this show considerably less fun than it could
have been, but the music was still excellent, and if the show seemed all too
lovingly to use all that B-roll of the preposterously decorated palaces in
which the Austro-Hungarian monarchs lived before the Great War (as World War I
was called before there was a World War II) ended the empire and dispersed the
royal family.
At least the musical selections involved some of the lesser-known
works of the “Waltz King” as well as such standards like “Tales from the Vienna
Woods” (containing the beautiful solos for zither that are usually omitted in
modern arrangements — and I had always thought the zither was strictly a
plucked instrument but this show got its cameras close enough that you could
tell it has a miniature keyboard as well), “Roses from the South” and the
inevitable “Blue Danube,” including the “Myrtle Blossoms” waltz, the “Magic
Bullets” quick polka (composed by Johann Strauss Söhn to commemorate one of the Austro-Hungarian ruling
family’s many hunting trips — one family member kept a meticulous record of
just how many animals he killed and one of those palaces has a solid wall of
trophy heads), a “Festive March” that was simply attributed to “Johann Strauss”
but which I suspect might be the work of the father rather than the son, and
what was probably the most interesting piece on the program, a quadrille based
on themes from Verdi’s opera Un Ballo in Maschera (which Muti recorded as a complete opera in London
in 1975 with Plácido Domingo and Martina Arroyo — there are also live versions
from 1972 and 1974 in Florence and 2001 at La Scala in Milan). There was also a
charming piece by Josef Strauss (a composer a lot of critics think was more
innovative and advanced than his far more famous brother), a polka called
“Letters to the Editor” that was written in honor of Crown Prince Rudolf, the
heir of the long-time Emperor Franz Josef, who was a reformer who would
frequently write letters to the editors of Austrian papers urging that the
empire lighten up and change to a style of government more suited to the 20th
century.
The Strauss oeuvre can be conducted as great music (especially in the records by Leopold
Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy and Herbert von Karajan — Karajan led the New Year’s
concert just once, in 1987, but he recorded what’s probably the most famous
version of anything by
Johann Strauss, Jr., the concert version of the “Blue Danube” heard in the film
2001: A Space Odyssey); in
Muti’s hands it wasn’t as grand or sweeping as it can be but it was great fun, with Muti’s quick, snappy, Toscaninian
approach suiting the music well enough even if it got the Vienna Philharmonic
just a bit out of its comfort zone (which is probably why Muti wasn’t invited
to conduct this concert until he’d already been a star for over 20 years!).
Incidentally the listing for the advance-order CD on arkivmusic.com offers six
pieces that were played before what we got to hear on the telecast — “Einzugsmarsch” and “Brautschau”
from Johann Strauss, Jr.’s operetta The Gypsy Baron, “Wiener Fresken” by Josef Strauss, “Leichtes
Blut” and “Marien-Walzer” by Johann Strauss, Jr. and a gallop by Johann, Jr.
based on themes from Rossini’s William Tell — which ought to be interesting listening! (The CD
does not include the final “Blue
Danube” and “Radetzky March” traditional encores.)
