Sunday Classics: There are good reasons why the great conductors bring their "A" game when they play the music of Johann Strauss II and his family

On Thursday Daniel Barenboim ended his first Vienna New Year's Concert the way it's always ended, with the always-rousing Radetzky March by Papa Johann Strauss I, complete with the traditional audience participation. As I noted yesterday, the maestro added his own touch in his New Year's greeting: "We hope 2009 will be a year of peace in the world, and of human justice in the Middle East."

by Ken

This isn't so much "Change I Can Believe In" as "Change I Don't Get No Stinking Choice About." New Year's Day without Walter Cronkite hosting the Vienna New Year's Concert? For the first time since 1985? I don't think so.

This is no knock on Julie Andrews, the new host of the American telecast. Who could not love Julie Andrews? Still, New Year's Day without Walter? This is "Change That Sucks." (Okay, okay, I realize some kind of announcement was probably made at some point, and if I'd been paying attention, I wouldn't have been taken by surprise. Hey, there's a limit to the number of the world's problems I can worry about at any given moment.)

To be honest, for years now it's popped in my head every year that Walter couldn't go on forever, just like he couldn't go on forever as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News. But have you noticed how crappy the news has gotten since Walter hung up his anchorman's hat? Oh, I don't mean that the news itself has been worse. How much worse could news get than the dreadful tidings Walter reported night after night about Vietnam? But at least when he was behind the desk we had the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that we were getting the news, more or less. It has often been said that when President Johnson lost Walter Cronkite on Vietnam, he lost the country, and I'm inclined to agree.

(This is not meant as a knock on Dan Rather, at least not entirely. I think Dan cared more about the integrity of the news than anyone else who's anchored a network newscast since Walter. But as Walter pointed out in his lovely memoir, A Reporter's Life, his own last CBS anchor contract or two began lifting the job out of the realm of news into that of big business. By Dan's time, with the kind of money the Big Three anchors were being paid, there was no possible question that the broadcasts were, above all, about the bucks.)

The photo above, by the way, is Walter in Vienna on New Year's Day 2005. Having him there each January 1 made for a new year you could believe in. Already I'm dubious about this entire 2009 enterprise.

(I hope at least that Walter remains "with it" enough to have withdrawn by choice from an assignment he's carried out since the Vienna telecasts began in 1985. For the record, he did turn 92 in November. I see that PBS has quoted him thusly: “Though ending this tradition comes with some sadness for me, I am very much looking forward to resuming the long-held custom of spending the holidays with my family and friends. I am also deeply honored that Julie Andrews has been chosen to carry on what has become a holiday high point for millions across America.” Happy holidays, Walter!)

The Andrews "kid" (if I've got the numbers right, she's just shy of 19 years younger than Walter) did fine. The script written for her thoughtfully put to rest my anxiety that I had somehow drifted off like Rip Van Winkle and missed the passing of the New Year's baton, with Julie mentioning that this was her first time on the job and later making gracious reference to Walter's long history at it.

While the writers may have gone a bit overboard establishing the point, Julie has been not only one of the most talented singers of the last half-century, but one of the most compulsively communicative musicians. She nailed down her qualifications for this gig when she recalled singing Johann Strauss's Voices of Spring (at least I think it was Voices of Spring; a bunch of the Strauss waltzes have vocal versions) in her vaudeville days. She would have been a child then, since she was barely past 20 when she electrified the world in My Fair Lady -- that was 1956, in case anyone's counting. I envy the folks in those vaudeville audiences who got an early earful of this amazing talent.

The tradition of the Vienna New Year's Concerts

Now, just to be clear, I'm not a big fan of all the cheesy theatrics and hokey production numbers and dopey dancing stuffed into the New Year's Concert telecast, and the American version seems to be substantially cheesier and hokier than any of the others. I don't wish the Lippizaner Stallions any harm (they're beautiful horses, after all), but really now, what's the point?

I would be happier just to have the concert broadcast straight, with perhaps some informed commentary on the musical selections. If that commentary were not only informed but entertaining, that would be okay too. But I guess it's felt that all the folderol is necessary to build an audience, and I've learned to live with it. Thanks to PBS's longstanding tradition of offering both an afternoon and an evening telecast on New Year's Day, this has come to be a reliably hopeful (and I mean hope you can believe in) way to usher in the new year.

If you're not familiar with the Vienna New Year's Concert tradition, each year the self-governing Vienna Philharmonic invites a conductor to lead a program mixing familiar and not-so-familiar repertory centered around Vienna's legendary Strauss family -- most prominently the Waltz King himself, Johann Strauss II (1825-1899), but often including music by his famous father, Johann I (1804-1849), and his talented brothers Josef (1827-1870) and Eduard (1835-1916), and also drawing from the many Vienna-centric composers who wrote in a similar vein, along with a certain amount of venturing farther afield. This year, for example, Maestro Barenboim honored the 200th anniversary of the death of Haydn by programming the finale of his Farewell Symphony. (We're going to be coming back to Haydn -- in the near future, I hope.)

Actually, Johann the Father is always represented in the New Year's Concert, because whatever else the particular year's conductor may choose to play, the concert always ends with three encores. The first is of the conductor's choosing, and isn't pre-announced, so there's always an element of surprise. But then, every year, come Johann the Son's best-known waltz, On the Beautiful Blue Danube, and Papa's clap-along Radetzky March.

You can't be serious! (Oh, but I am!)

There is a tendency, especially among those "serious" critics I work so hard to make fun of, to see this repertory, and therefore the New Year's Concert itself, as a musically lightweight, even kitschy affair. There is, for example, a staff critic on a major American newspaper who goes bonkers every time he encounters this music in concert instead of, say, offerings by Elliott Carter or Philip Glass or some no-talent noise-making nonentity, descending into a fit of pompous blithering that suggests one of the Strausses died owing him money. But that's just lazy, inattentive listening. In terms of communicative content, I don't find this music -- in particular that of Johann II -- at all lightweight.

Admittedly, it's not all on the same rarefied level, but you could hardly expect it to be with Johann II's opus numbers running up to 479 -- and that's by no means his total output. (Somebody had to do it, and the Marco Polo label eventually recorded a series covering the whole shebang.) He was most celebrated for his waltzes, and secondarily, as an up-tempo change of pace, his polkas, but there's a generous sprinkling of all sorts of other musical forms. The bulk of this colosssal orchestral output was written for use by his own orchestra, with which he earned enormous celebrity and a lot of money.

Strauss simultaneously had a career as a theater composer, and his greatest operettas, Die Fledermaus ("The Bat") and The Gypsy Baron, not only are enormously successful works in their own right but have overtures that are part of the standard orchestral repertory. Not surprisingly, they turn up frequently in the New Year's Concerts -- Maestro Barenboim launched this year's with the Gypsy Baron Overture, and followed it up with more Gypsy Baron material in the Treasure Waltz.

Fledermaus, as it happens, was one of the seven operas I took on for the Metropolitan Opera Guide to Recorded Opera. As much as I liked the piece going in, I worried that after spending so much time with it, I might never be able to bear another note of it. What happened was the opposite: that I fell much more deeply in love with it. One of these days we'll come back to it. Meanwhile, here's a link to a fine performance of the Overture, which among other things contains one of Strauss's great waltz tunes. (The performance is by the Vienna Philharmonic under Seiji Ozawa, from the 2002 Vienna New Year's Concert.)

A tiny bit of Strauss-waltz "anatomy"

Note that what we call "a Strauss waltz" doesn't consist of just a single catchy waltz tune. Each "waltz" is in effect a suite of waltzes, created for careful contrast as well as dramatic progress. (When the word waltz is included in the title, it's normally in the plural, Walzer, as in the Kaiser-Walzer -- technically the Emperor Waltzes, plural.) Formally speaking, there's always an introduction, drawing the listener in, whetting the musical appetite, building the mood, teasing with hints of the music to come. And the music that comes, the initial waltz into which the introduction leads, is almost always the "big gun," what the composer considered the "killer" among the succession of waltzes to be heard, which he was then free to bring back at will.

No doubt the most arresting opening of a Strauss waltz is the shimmering tremolo in the violins which launches The Blue Danube, and always draws applause when the New Year's Concert audience is "surprised" to hear it in that second-encore position. Over that tremolo, the horns -- first a solo horn, then building to all four -- give us a tease of the "big tune."

Nor is there any doubt, I think, that nobody has ever made more striking, more unexpected, or more effective use of this remarkable introduction, or for that matter of On the Beautiful Blue Danube as a whole, than Stanley Kubrick did in his epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here, alas reduced to "clip" form, is the bone hurled in the air by the ape at the end of the "Dawn of Man" sequence and being transformed into the space ship making its gradual approach to the Space Station:



(The performance is by the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan.)

The "big three" (or four) waltzes -- and a polka

Now, much as I love The Blue Danube, it's really not even my favorite Strauss waltz, which would probably be either the grand and regal Emperor, which begins audaciously in march rhythm (here's a performance by the Vienna Philharmonic under Georges Pretre, from the 2008 Vienna New Year's Concert), or the nostalgically evocative Tales from the Vienna Woods, especially if there's a zither on hand to play the Gypsy-suggestive zither solos. The composer thoughtfully provided an alternative scoring for sadly zitherless orchestras, using a small string ensemble, but there's really no substitute for a zither. (If you know the theme from The Third Man, then you know the zither. Here it is played in 1982 by the man who had played it for the film almost 40 years earlier -- the world's most famous zither player, Anton Karas. Vienna Woods and Third Man theme, that's about the limits of my zither repertory.)

Note that the Big Three are literally bigger than the usual run of Strauss waltzes, often pushing beyond the 10-minute mark, all the way up to, and in some performances even over, 11 minutes. I would also add that in my personal Strauss waltz pantheon, Artist's Life comes ever so close to the Big Three. Thinking back to my shocked discovery, back in my active score-buying days, that you couldn't buy collections of 10 or 25 or 50 Strauss waltzes, but instead had to buy miniature scores individually, I found myself wondering what I had wound up buying, and went to the appropriate shelf to check. What did I find? The Emperor, Vienna Woods, Blue Danube, and Artist's Life -- my Big Four! (Actually, Dover did eventually publish a volume of eight of the waltzes in full score. One of these days I suppose I really should get hold of that.)

I'm afraid I've given short shrift to Johann II's non-waltz output. Probably the best-known of his zippy polkas is the whirlwind Unter Donner und Blitz ("Amid Thunder and Lightning" -- in German, of course, especially at the holidays, it has a distinctly reindeerish echo). Here's a performance by the Vienna Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan, from the 1987 Vienna New Year's Concert.

But is it great music? (Of course it is!)

Now there's no way I can "prove" that this is great music, worthy to stand alongside the finest output of more "serious" composers, although I do indeed believe it. I might point out that the "other" Strauss, the great Richard, not only was unembarrassed by the legacy of the (unrelated) Viennese Strausses, but paid homage to it in the glorious waltzes with which he festooned Der Rosenkavalier -- as if he wanted to prove that he did have some of that Strauss blood running in his veins!

Or I could point out that almost every conductor has felt the need to test himself in this repertory, and that most of the great conductors cherished it. In it they often voiced the deepest and most generous aspects of their artistic personalities -- even artists whose personalities didn't have especially generous aspects.

The rich humanity of conductors like Bruno Walter (who unfortunately never got around to doing a stereo Strauss LP), John Barbirolli, Josef Krips, and Rudolf Kempe shines forth in this music. And orchestral wizards like Herbert von Karajan and Eugene Ormandy achieved some of their most persuasive orchestral wizardry. (Karajan recorded so much of this material, for EMI, Decca, and DG, that I can't begin to keep track of what's available, but there's a midprice DG single-CD selection. Sony BMG has a budget Ormandy CD.)

The material showcased the mastery of specialists like Arthur Fiedler and his Boston Pops (first for RCA, then for DG; there doesn't seem to be much of either in print, but it's worth watching for out-of-print CD issues) and longtime Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster Willi Boskovsky (first for Decca, then for EMI -- the Decca performances, with his old orchestra, are better played and recorded; there are modestly priced six-CD compilations of both the Decca and EMI material, and an inexpensive Decca CD of waltzes and an even less expensive EMI twofer of 19 waltzes -- but again, just waltzes).

The mixture of earthy weight and sparkle which Fritz Reiner achieved in his collaboration with the Chicago Symphony holds up remarkably well on the well-filled Vienna CD of Strauss family and related waltz material, including a short Reiner-arranged suite of Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier waltzes in the RCA Living Stereo series (there's also a hybrid SACD edition). I've got an enjoyable CD of highly individual yet persuasively idiomatic performances by Robert Stolz, who came to this material as perhaps the last link in the line of Viennese operetta composers descended from Strauss, but RCA once had a big box -- five LPs, was it? -- of Stolz conducting music by the school of Viennese operetta composers. I wonder what's become of all that. I've also gotten a lot of mileage out of a three-LP Vox Box, which I've never seen on CD, of Music of the Strauss Family played by "Eduard Strauss and his Orchestra," the conductor turning out to be a great-nephew of the Waltz King (the grandson of his brother Eduard). While the performances have a scrappy quality, they also have plenty of spunk. The set was labeled "Volume 1," but I never heard tell of a Volume 2.

All of that said, nobody produced more sheer radiance in this repertory than, perhaps surprisingly, Karl Boehm -- in a relatively late DG LP with the Vienna Philharmonic. At under 47 minutes it wasn't terribly generous even for an LP, and that made for an even chintzier CD. Still, if you see it, I suggest pouncing on it.

In my book, Barenboim has proved himself in important chunks of repertory (e.g., Mozart piano concertos and operas, Bruckner symphonies, Wagner's Ring cycle and other operas) the most imaginative and probing conductor of recent times, and his first Vienna New Year's Concert struck me on casual first hearing as a major cut above the norm in interpretive reach. Even in the wonderfully dopey Radetzky March he doesn't push as hard for cheap effect as most conductors, and the music actually opens up a little.

As for brothers Josef and Eduard --

For a taste of Johann II's brother Josef, in this year's New Year's Concert Maestro Barenboim conducted a gorgeous performance of his Sounds of the Spheres waltz, illustrated with some gorgeously appropriate Alpine vistas. As for baby brother Eduard, he's probably best known now, for better or worse, for his Bahn frei ("Clear Track," as in railroad track) polka. This is one of those pieces, like Leonard Bernstein's Candide Overture (see the link below), I can listen to over and over and over. It obviously also made a lasting impression on Keith Olbermann, a fellow lover of the great Jean Shepherd's old shaggy-dog radio show. Jean used it as his signoff theme, and Keith uses it now for the "Oddball" segment of Countdown.

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