Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Eve Concert (ORF, TV Skyline, Vienna Philharmonic, PBS-TV, December 31, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, January 1) my husband Charles and I watched the 90 minutes PBS vouchsafes us of the annual New Year’s concert in Vienna given by the Vienna Philharmonic in the Musikvereinsaal. These concerts started in 1939 when the Vienna Philharmonic’s conductor Clemens Krauss decided the people of Vienna needed a “fun” musical event to make up for the heaviness of the news, particularly the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria by Nazi Germany the year before. So he played a concert of mostly waltzes, polkas and other dance music by the Strauss family: father Johann Strauss, Sr. and his sons Johann, Jr., Josef and Eduard Strauss. The concerts stopped in the later stages of World War II but were revived and have become an annual fixture (and a major cash cow for the Vienna Philharmonic, which every year releases CD’s and DVD’s of the concerts). The American telecasts have been hosted by various celebrities, first Walter Cronkite, then Julie Andrews (whose only connection to Austria is having starred in the film The Sound of Music, which of course was set in Salzburg, not Vienna!) and now British actor and Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville. (Blessedly, he pronounces the “t” in “often.”) The 2022 and 2023 concerts seemed to be in part an attempt to reinvent the Strauss family for the #MeToo era by focusing more on the music of Josef Strauss, a good little husband who didn’t seek out extra-relational activities, rather than his more famous and flamboyant brother Johann Strauss, Jr., who apparently played around a lot. This time, though, the concert swung back the other way; of the 12 pieces performed during the concert (or at least during the portion PBS broadcast, since the Austrian TV network ORF sends out a recording of the complete concert, along with B-roll sequences of various Austrian tourist attractions that can be spliced into it, but the outlets in other countries decide for themselves just what parts of the footage to air) six were by Johann, Jr., two by Josef, one by Eduard and three by non-Strauss composers.

One of these was German composer Carl Michael Ziehrer: the “Vienna Citizens’ Waltz,” which he wrote for a battle of the bands with the Strauss orchestra at a new ballroom just opening in Vienna in the 19th century. Like the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in the 1930’s, this ballroom had two stages so they could have two bands playing alternating sets and the music would never stop. Though Ziehrer’s group was primarily a military band, it won the contest and the “Vienna Citizens’ Waltz” became a city standard. The other two non-Strauss works were “Happy New Year Galop” by Danish composer Hans Christian Lumbye, a contemporary of Johann Strauss, Sr. and often called “the Danish Strauss”; and a “Quadrille” by, of all people, Anton Bruckner. Bruckner’s reputation today stems largely from his symphonies; there are nine “official” ones, of which the last is incomplete because Bruckner didn’t finish its final movement, as well as a symphony Bruckner discovered in his papers and, having already published a Symphony No. 1, when it was prepared for publication Bruckner was asked what it should be called and he said, “Just call it ‘Die Nullte’” – “The Zero”, and an early student symphony which eventually got published as “Study Symphony.” Bruckner’s symphonies are very long, complicated, exist in many versions (thanks to Bruckner’s notorious indecision as to just how they should go) and strike me as way too overextended for their rather meager musical material. So it was a real surprise to see him turn up on the program of a Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, though the “Quadrille” ran true to form in that, even though it was only 12 minutes (still relatively long for a piece of light music), it was starting to overstay its musical welcome towards the end.

Instead of presenting Josef Strauss as the exemplar of marital monogamy and therefore the morally superior one of the Strauss brothers, the 2024 concert focused on Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef, who took the throne in December 1848 as part of a settlement of the various revolutions that year and ruled until his death in 1916, in the middle of World War I (an event Franz Josef’s imperialistic ambitions had done a lot to bring about). Franz Josef married his German cousin Elisabeth Wittelsbach, sister of “Mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria, in 1854, when he was 23 and she was 16. The two had a long and happy relationship (though according to Franz Josef’s Wikipedia page he was a lot more in love with her than she was with him; in her youth she’d been a tomboy and an amateur hunter and she never acclimated to the formal life of the Austro-Hungarian court) until she was assassinated in Italy by an anarchist in 1898. Whatever the ins and outs of their real relationship, this show – especially Bonneville’s commentary – presented it as a love story for the ages, and focused largely on Ischl, the suburb of Vienna where there was a famous bathhouse people used for the supposedly health-restoring powers of the warm salt water. Ischl was also the site of the palace where Franz Josef and Elisabeth spent their happiest times until so many of their children died she started wearing nothing but black and remained in a state of perpetual mourning. The program opened with the overture to Johann Strauss, Jr.’s operetta Waldmeister (“Forest Master”) and then played the “Ischl Waltz” and “Nightingale Polka” (complete with flute sounds meant to emulate the twittering of the titular birds) by Johann, Jr.; the “Mountain Spring Polka” by Eduard (meant to celebrate the building of a new infrastructure project to bring badly needed water to Vienna via one of the mountain springs on the royal properties) and the “New Pizzicato Polka” again by Johann, Jr.

After the Ziehrer, Bruckner and Lumbye pieces (in that order) the Vienna Philharmonic played Josef’s “Deliriums Waltz” (written for a medical convention) and “Jockey Quick Polka” (“jockey” as in horse-racing riders, since Josef was reportedly very fond of the sport) before the inevitable encores: Johann, Jr.’s “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” (with its obligatory halt after the first few bars so the Vienna Philharmonic members can bark out, “Prosit Neujahr!” – “Happy New Year!”) and Johann, Sr.’s “Radetzky March.” This year’s conductor was Christian Thielemann, an old-style German musician with a noticeable lack of a sense of humor, which may have been why some of the pieces tended to drag a bit. One of the traditions is that in the “Radetzky March” the audience is supposed to clap along in unison to the music – one year my husband Charles was so impressed at the audience’s skill he turned to me and joked, “How come in America we got all the white people who can’t clap?” But even more than most conductors who play this concert, Thielemann decided to conduct the audience, gesturing at them when to start clapping and when to stop. It’s a tribute to how well the Vienna Philharmonic members know this music that they stayed together even when Thielemann was facing away from them so he could conduct the audience instead. It was also welcome to see how many women musicians were in the ranks of the Vienna Philharmonic, especially since it was the last major orchestra in Europe to stop discriminating against female musicians.