by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I
watched our “feature” for the evening: the PBS telecast of the Vienna
Philharmonic’s fabled New Year’s Eve concert, devoted to the music of the
Strauss waltz family in general and the most famous of them, Johann Strauss,
Jr., in particular. The Strauss line began with the father, whose most famous
composition, the “Radetzky March,” is always presented as the so-called
“encore” at the end — with the audience invited to clap along (and one year
they clapped in such impressive unison Charles joked, “How come America got all
the white people who can’t clap?”), who had three sons, Johann, Jr., Josef and Eduard, all of whom became composers as well — and if that
isn’t confusing enough, there was a Johann Strauss III, but he wasn’t Johann, Jr.’s
son, he was Eduard’s! (There was also Richard Strauss, who wasn’t Austrian but
German and wasn’t related to any of those other Strausses, but he wrote some
killer waltzes of his own, notably for his opera Der Rosenkavalier.) The Vienna Philharmonic has been doing these New
Year’s Eve concerts since Clemens Krauss conducted the first one in 1938, and
when I first started watching them on PBS Walter Cronkite was the host and he
would go on and on and on about how totally the programming of these concerts was determined by
“tradition” — just about every other word out of his mouth was “traditional”
this and “traditional” that. Later he was displaced as the host by Julie
Andrews, whose big connection to Austria was having played Maria von Trapp in
the film version of The Sound of Music — and even that was set in Salzburg, not Vienna. Today the host is
British actor Hugh Bonneville, whose main qualification for the gig was that he
achieved at least semi-stardom in the TV show Downton Abbey, which is set in an old, lavishly appointed
Victorian-era mansion like many of the Austrian locales in this show.
In
previous years Charles and I were able to obtain grey-list downloads of the
entire concert as the Austrian state-owned TV network ORF (their equivalent of the
BBC) made it available to TV stations around the world, including not only the
actual musical performances in the Vienna State Opera House but also the ballet
sequences (which are pretty obviously pre-recorded and pre-filmed — in one
ballet scene this year the dancers started on the balconies of the Opera House outdoors in daylight, and traversed the building until they
ended up on stage — but neither the stage nor the seats for an audience were
occupied) and the immense amount of B-roll they supply of various Austrian
tourist attractions which networks licensing the telecast in other countries
can use as they see fit, often (as PBS did) patching in their chosen host to
gabble on and on and on about
what we’re seeing. (I’ve complained about how too many live performances of
classical music these days feature way too much of the musicians talking to the audience — I think they figure
people raised on pop concerts expect this — and it’s even worse in a telecast than it is “live.”) One good thing Hugh Bonneville did was explain the
structure of the Vienna Philharmonic and how it differs from the Vienna State
Opera Orchestra. The two comprise exactly the same people, but the Vienna
Philharmonic is self-governing while the Vienna State Opera Orchestra is employed
by, you guessed it, the Vienna State Opera. You win a place in the orchestra by
auditioning for the people who run the Vienna State Opera, and once you’re
approved you get to become a voting member of the Vienna Philharmonic, and the
orchestra collectively decides on who its conductors will be and what music it
will perform. It was also nice to see quite a few women in the ranks of the
Vienna Philharmonic — for years it held out as the last bastion of all-maleness
in the ranks of European symphony orchestras; it allowed a few women, usually
harpists (a woman harpist was prominently featured in this concert), to perform
as guest artists but it wasn’t until the 1990’s that the orchestra finally
admitted its first fully equal female member. The New Year’s concerts can be
pretty schmaltzy affairs — all that “tradition,” you know — but this one
actually had a spine to it, mainly courtesy of the conductor, Christian
Thielemann. Hugh Bonneville’s narration mentioned that he’s the regular
conductor of the Dresden orchestra and also artistic director of the summer
Salzburg Festival; it did not mention that he’s also the principal conductor and artistic director of
the Bayreuth Festival.
I’ve criticized him before for his stiff-upper-lip
approach to the music of Wagner, the composer to whom the Bayreuth Festival is
devoted almost exclusively (the only non-Wagner piece ever performed there is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a
piece Wagner regarded as key to his own artistic aims because in the last
movement of his last and greatest symphony, at least according to Wagner’s
analysis, Beethoven had run against the limits of what instrumental music on
its own could express and he was compelled to add poetry, and solo singers and
a chorus to sing the words), but the stiff-upper-lipness I’ve complained about
in Thielemann’s Wagner performances served him surprisingly well in a concert
devoted mostly to the music of Johann Strauss, Jr. Of the 13 pieces on the PBS
telecast (though I suspect more selections were performed at the actual
concert), nine were written by Johann, Jr., one by Johann, Sr. (the obligatory
“encore” of the “Radetzky March” at the very end), two by Josef, and only one
by a non-Strauss: Jules Hellemsberger, Jr.’s “Entr’acte Waltz.” (Hellemsberger
was a late 19th century Austrian composer whose two symphonies were
recently rediscovered and recorded, and the Fanfare critic who reviewed the records noted how similar
they sounded to Brahms and basically said, “Disappointed that Brahms only wrote
four symphonies? Here’s two more that sound just like him!”) One thing
Thielemann did that I liked was program quite a few pieces from Johann, Jr.’s
stage works; he opened his concert with the overture from A Night in Venice and later played the “Bayadere (Quick Polka)” from
an Arabian Nights pastiche called Indigo and the Forty Thieves Strauss, Jr. composed at the height of the craze
for all things Middle Eastern sparked by the successful completion and opening
of the Suez Canal. (One of the bits of tourist footage in this concert showed
the entire room in the Austro-Hungarian imperial palace Crown Prince Rudolf
decorated in antiquities looted from Egypt, though some of the wall paintings
were reconstructions. As Boris Karloff’s character says in John L. Balderston’s
script for the 1932 horror classic The Mummy, “We Egyptians are not permitted to dig up our
ancient dead. That privilege is reserved for foreign museums.”)
Thielemann also
programmed two works from what he introduced as Johann Strauss, Jr.’s only
full-fledged opera (as opposed to operetta), The Night Passman — a work I must confess I’ve never heard of
before: the one Strauss, Jr. work that has at least a toehold in the standard
operatic repertory is Die Fledermaus (literally “the flying mouse,” actually usually rendered in English as The
Bat), an operetta which has
the advantage of taking place on New Year’s Eve and therefore being a natural
“fit” for the end of the year. The best thing about Thielemann’s performance at
the Vienna New Year’s concert is he cut the sentimentality down to a minimum
and took a tough, no-nonsense approach to these pieces. Earlier in the day we’d
been to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, where civic organist
emeritus Jared Jacobsen had performed his own arrangement of Fritz Kreisler’s
violin encore “Caprice Viennois” and boasted that he would play it mit
Schlag — it literally means “with
whipped cream” and refers to the Viennese habit of putting whipped cream on
their pastries, but it’s come to mean an overwrought, overdone approach to
Viennese light music by the Strausses and others. Thielemann seemed to be going
out of his way to play the Strauss oeuvre as much ohne Schlag as possible, much the way
my two all-time favorite recordings of the “Blue Danube” waltz (its official
name is “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” — “An der Schönen Blauen Donau” — and in
the 1970’s there were a lot of articles noting the irony that at the time the
Danube was the most heavily polluted river in Europe, though the river seems
from the footage of it shown last night to have regained at least some of its Schönen and Blauen) — Leopold Stokowski’s with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the 78 rpm
era and Herbert von Karajan’s 1959 version with the Berlin Philharmonic (the
latter being the one used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey) — drain it of all the accumulated sentiment and Schlag and as a result make it sound more beautiful, more
noble and more fun.
I also give
Thielemann credit for programming some of the less obvious Strauss works — the
only ones of Johann, Jr.’s chestnuts heard here were “Artist’s Life” (the
chyron misplaced the apostrophe as “Artists’ Life” — more than one artist —
though the German title, Kunstlerleben, literally means “Artist Life,” no possessive at all) and the
obligatory next-to-last piece, the Blue Danube — during which the conductor is supposed to stop
the orchestra after the first few bars (Thielemann did it after just one
chord!) and proclaim, “The Vienna Philharmonic wants to wish all of you … ,”
after which the orchestra is supposed to chant in unison, “Prosit Neujahr!” (In
case you couldn’t guess, that’s “Happy New Year” in German.) I loved the two
Josef Strauss pieces, “The Dancer (French Polka)” and what’s his best-known (or
at least the least not well
known) piece, “The Music of the Spheres.” Thlelemann also programmed Johann,
Jr.’s own “Egyptian March,” a “polka-mazurka” called “In Praise of Women,” and
a quick polka called “On the Double” that was Thielemann’s choice for the first
of the three “encores” and the only one that’s the conductor’s choice and not
dictated by tradition. Thielemann did not, as previous New Year’s conductors have, reach past Austria and Germany
for material — one year one of the conductors played the opening to Offenbach’s
operetta Rheinnixen, a sort
of parody of Das Rheingold Offenbach, a German immigrant to France, did for his operetta audience
in Paris — but his tough-minded approach added heft and sinew to music that can
all too often be used as an excuse to grab the heart-strings and drown them in
sugar.
