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Pleasure by the Coffee Cup

In imperial Vienna enjoyment was a fine art. The journalist Friedrich Torberg described how one waiter at the Café Herrenhof carried not a coffee menu, but a colour chart with 20 different shades. Regulars would order their coffee by colour: ‘A 14 with cream, please!’ It was a philosophy that the historian Hilde Spiel summed up as ‘the world in a dewdrop’. Everyday pleasures deserved infinite care.

And, if that was the case for coffee, how much more so for music? In the hands of Johann Strauss (1804–49) and his son Johann II (1825–99) the waltz escaped from the wine-gardens of suburban Vienna to become a global craze. Add the Bohemian polka and the Hungarian csárdás, French galops and Italian song, and Vienna’s ballrooms and cafés never lacked for musical spice. Diversity was the lifeblood of Viennese style: Vienna’s empire stretched from the Alps to Ukraine, and from the shores of the Adriatic to southern Poland. If Viennese music means anything, it’s a seductive fusion of musical cultures, blended as subtly – or as punchily – as the mélange at the Herrenhof. It was a mouth-watering recipe, and from the 1840s to the Anschluss, Vienna produced a stream of world-conquering popular hits.

The most triumphant of them all was Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow, which premiered in December 1905 before snowballing into an unprecedented global smash. By the end of 1907, there had been productions around the world, and audiences could buy ‘Merry Widow’ biscuits, hats, shoes and cigars. No-one was more astonished than Lehár – a former army bandmaster who had been the theatre’s second choice of composer (securing the job by playing a sample melody down the telephone to the manager), and hadn’t even bothered writing an overture. He eventually composed one for his own 70th-birthday gala in 1940: a sumptuous rhapsody on the show’s best-loved melodies from a composer looking back – not without nostalgia – at the moment that changed his life.

Chocolate and Paprika

From 1906 onwards, every Viennese operetta composer dreamt of becoming the next Lehár. Oscar Straus (1870–1954) – no relation to Johann – acquired the rights to George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man (Shaw authorised it on the condition that the posters described it as ‘unauthorised’). The Chocolate Soldier (1908) became an unexpected smash in London and New York. In the duet we hear tonight, our heroine Nadina discovers that Lieutenant Bumerli, the enemy soldier who’s just come in through her window, is armed with nothing more deadly than a packet of pralines.

But snobbery is another Viennese speciality, and only at the end of Lehár’s career was he offered the chance to write for the Vienna State Opera. Giuditta premiered in 1934, the story of a flame-haired free spirit who leads her lovers to ruin across Italy and North Africa. In ‘Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiss’, Giuditta unleashes a blaze of Latin passion – though it’s not long before she’s gliding into one of the last of the great Viennese waltzes.

By then, Lehár had only one really major rival: his friend, the Hungarian Emmerich Kálmán (1882–1953). Being an empire of two halves, Austria-Hungary offered Viennese composers the chance to double their money in Budapest, and vice versa – so it paid to sprinkle a dash of paprika into your score. Kálmán’s Countess Maritza (1924) is set in eastern Hungary, where the handsome Béla Török is really an Austrian nobleman, fallen on hard times. Kálmán knew that, by giving him a passionate song of longing for distant Vienna (in waltz–time, naturally), he’d be giving the home crowd exactly what they demanded.

Champagne for Two

By contrast, from the first notes of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus (1874), the party is in full swing. Three chords pop like champagne corks: what follows is sparkling, sophisticated … and liable to go straight to the head. Lehár’s Paganini (1925), meanwhile, is a historical weepie: the story of a doomed romance between the fabled 19th-century violinist and an Italian princess. Lehár tailored the title-role to the voice of a rising star, the matinée-idol tenor Richard Tauber. But obviously, since that role was Paganini, the violin was the star too – as this opening sequence demonstrates.

Writing an operetta hit wasn’t as easy as it looked. The leading Viennese choral conductor and influential music critic Richard Heuberger had been the first choice of composer for The Merry Widow. It proved beyond him; still, he’d struck gold in 1898 with The Opera Ball, and one song in particular. A ‘chambre séparée’ was a private room in an upmarket restaurant where a couple might retreat for privacy – no questions asked. In this number – surely the only operatic excerpt to have been recorded by both Anna Netrebko and Harry Secombe – the chambermaid Hortense has caught the eye of her employers’ handsome young nephew Henri. The music hints at what happens next …

Sachertorte and Lemon Zest

Heuberger first encountered Lehár in 1901, when he’d auditioned him for a conducting job. ‘Lehár possesses a good knowledge of classical music, but fails when faced with the modern waltz,’ he concluded. Princess Pauline von Metternich disagreed, and in January 1902, for her Gold and Silver Ball, she invited Lehár – then still serving with the 26th Infantry Regiment – to ‘write a waltz that will make you famous overnight’. The ballroom was decorated with gilded palm trees; the ceiling glittered with golden stars. Lehár’s harp and glockenspiel make his Gold and Silver Waltz sound like it’s dripping with jewels.

It seems that most of the guests simply talked over it, but careful listeners will have detected a hint of lemon zest in this musical Sachertorte, just as Hanna’s Vilja Song in The Merry Widow is simultaneously a haunting mock folk song and a veiled confession of heartbreak.

Lehár was never a one-note genius, and after the fall of Austria–Hungary in 1918 he adapted, telling stories of longing, displacement and loss for an audience whose certainties had vanished overnight. And, with Tauber as his star, bitterness never sounded so sweet. ‘My dear Richard! Here you have your Tauber-lied!!’ he scribbled on the score of ‘You are my heart’s delight’ – the big number from The Land of Smiles (1929). The Chinese prince Sou-Chong is about to have his heart torn in two by his Austrian wife Lisa; you can tell that Lehár and Puccini were close friends.

It’s a long way from here to the carefree wit of the Pizzicato Polka. Johann Strauss II and his brother Josef (1827–70) had quarrelled prior to their tour to St Petersburg in the summer of 1869. But the show had to go on – and, according to legend, after Johann wrote the first few bars, Josef was so amused that he took up the challenge and wrote the next section.

Time was running out for Vienna’s tolerant, multicultural musical tradition, but the watch that chimes through this duet from Act 2 of Johann II’s Die Fledermaus accompanies a more cheerful tale. Gabriel von Eisenstein isn’t supposed to be at Prince Orlofsky’s masked ball; but neither, as far as he knows, is his wife Rosalinde. As he uses his watch to time the heartbeat of a mysterious beauty (naturally, she’s pretending to be Hungarian), Strauss’s music can hardly contain its laughter: a husband flirting with his own wife, while the plot accelerates towards a very Viennese kind of chaos in which the situation might be hopeless, but is never serious – and where, once the party’s over, it can all be blamed on champagne.

^{Programme notes © Richard Bratby
Richard Bratby writes on music and culture for ‘The Spectator’, ‘Gramophone’, 'The Arts Desk’ and the ‘Birmingham Post’ and is a passionate operetta enthusiast. His book ‘Forward: 100 Years of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’ was published last year.}