This week’s theme is…Shining Silver! Silver gleams and glistens. It’s gold’s sleek, slick, and stylish cousin. Where gold holds court, silver courts. Silver has driven the history of the world just like gold, and appears in music in many different ways. This week, we look music on which silver has left its dapper lustrous.
Shining Silver, Day 5 – Gold and Silver Waltz by Franz Lehar
Three major currents flowed through the German and Austrian orchestral music of the late nineteenth century. While they sometimes mixed together (that is how currents work after all), they remained independent enough to identify discreetly as they informed the works of different musicians over that period.
The first current was the symphony after Beethoven, which can be seen to culminate in the four symphonies of Johannes Brahms (and Mahler after him). Brahms was absolutely meticulous in generating the notes of four undisputed masterpieces which worthily continue Beethoven’s legacy, which is one of the reasons that there are so few of them. Brahms’ output was also significantly colored by the lyrical German songs of Franz Schubert, which you can read more about in this post, but the primary focus of his orchestral music was to make new and meaningfully immortal statements in Beethoven’s symphonic vein.
Another, simultaneous, stream was the symphonic nature of Richard Wagner’s titanic music dramas. You can read a more detailed discussion of Wagner’s art in this post, but in short (although they are anything but short!) his great operas are animated and deepened as much by their symphonic character as the singing. Orchestral musicians value Wagner as much as singers, if not more, and the impressive orchestral overtures and symphonic poems found throughout his operas have become some of the best-loved symphonic music in Western history, often performed without singing on the programs of symphony orchestras throughout the classical music-loving world.
And then there is the whimsical, but deceptively rigorous, third current, the glittering dance music of Viennese aristocracy as exemplified by the works of Johann Strauss Jr. The story of this music is more fascinating than I had realized, and filled with considerably more human drama than the benign elegance of the famous Waltzes and Polkas would suggest. Johann Strauss Jr. assumed his status of Vienna’s Waltz Emperor at the end of a sordid drama of ambition, betrayal, overshadowed genius, adultery, and almost devious dynastic succession.
To make a long story short, the elder Johann Strauss made a fortune prior to his death in 1850 serving up waltz after waltz with his incredibly precise orchestra to the hungry Viennese public. He and his partner, fellow composer Joseph Lanner, had almost single-handedly raised the new craze for light dance music to an art, a science, and a crackling business. But eventually the two parted ways, variously amicably depending on the account, and both worked with their own orchestras for awhile, with Strauss eventually winning in popularity. Strauss ran his orchestra with a domineering strictness that was a new development in the history of conducting, using his violin bow as a baton, a practice which has not gone away. Recognize this cat?
Strauss’ conducting was critical to exhibiting the incredible clarity of orchestration and rhythmic vitality of the Viennese Waltzes, important features of the craft which were praised by serious composers, and the overall effect was intoxicating to all who heard them, layman and connoisseur.
The elder Strauss pressured his children to stay away from professional music, but his influence was diminished when he started a new household across town with his mistress and sired four children there. His son, Johann Jr., of his rightful family, was able to pursue his musical ambitions after this and eventually took over his father’s orchestra. In response to his debut, conducting the orchestra at a fashionable Viennese restaurant and biergarten in 1844, a newspaper review raved “Good night Lanner, good evening Strauss Sr., good morning Strauss Jr.!”. And the rest is history.
Best known are Strauss Jr.’s incredible waltzes of the 1860s, replete with all the famous titles you would certainly recognize (Blue Danube, Tales of the Vienna Woods, etc.) Johann Strauss created light music, but it is inspired and exquisitely-crafted light music, qualities acknowledged by composers more heavily influenced by the other Germanic streams, including both Brahms and Richard Strauss. Brahms praised the orchestration of Strauss’ waltzes, noting that none of them contained a single wasted note or stroke of orchestration. The Wagnerian Richard Strauss (for more on him, see this post) was once treated by the conductor and pianist Hans von Bulow to an entire evening of Strauss waltzes (on the piano I suspect) of which he subsequently spoke with reverence and great nostalgia. Richard Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier represents a rare and most effective melding of the Wagnerian and Viennese light music streams.
While Richard Strauss saw fit to meld two of the Germanic streams in his opera, more often composers chose one stream in which to work, even if they admired the others. Brahms, for example, an ardent admirer of Johann Strauss’ art (he once remarked that he had not composed the Blue Danube, regrettably), stayed squarely in the symphonic stream of Beethoven, as already mentioned. A notable Austro-Hungarian composer named Franz Lehar, committed to working within the light music stream, as exemplified by Strauss.
Lehar is best known for his work in another genre that also saw some success from Johann Strauss Jr., and also some notable composers elsewhere on the continent, operetta. Opera’s much lighter and more digestible cousin, operettas tend to have entertaining, comic, and sometimes satirical plots, much more tuneful and transparent music, and less existential drama than their heavier operatic counterparts. While Johann Strauss Jr. did have some notable successes, his output of operetta is uneven, owing largely to the corresponding quality of the libretti that he chose. But Lehar’s operettas are more consistent, and he has joined the ranks of Offenbach and Arthur Sullivan is one of the best composers of operettas. An American composer who wrote some operettas was John Philip Sousa (read more about him in this post). In a very real sense he can be seen as an American analogue to Johann Strauss Jr. Just replace Viennese balls with American parades and they are quite comparable in many other ways!
Before he found success with operetta, Lehar composed other light music, including marches and waltzes, in the vein of Strauss. (He even played violin, the instrument of the Viennese waltz master!) His most famous waltz is the Gold and Silver, a tuneful and elegant number composed for the Gold and Silver Ball hosted by Princess Pauline von Metternich in 1902. With this event Lehar became another in a series of composers whom the Princess championed and supported, including Bedrich Smetana, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner. Here is Lehar’s lyrical waltz which set the tone for Metternich’s grand affair at the turn of the twentieth century:
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