The turning point of the year is the period traditionally devoted to Viennese music. The gratifying rediscovery of the Fahrbach family’s music earlier this year on the CPO label is an opportunity to take a closer look at the genre and some of its forgotten satellites.
1er January at 8 p.m. PBS will rebroadcast Vienna’s famous New Year’s Eve concert. Directed this year by Daniel Barenboïm, it will be presented by Hugh Bonneville, star actor of Downton abbey. This concert has been televised since 1959 and now 90 countries broadcast it. Should Canada be proud to still be among the valiant followers of the three-beat measure?
Initially scheduled for January 3, 2022, at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, in Montreal, the “Hommage à Vienne” program is postponed to 1er January 2023.
To have a little New Year’s concert, everyone can also go back to their nightclub or build up playlists on their on-demand listening platform. As such, why not take a few side roads?
The trees hide the forest
The “king of the waltz” is (1825-1899), the numbering “II” designating the son of Johann Strauss senior (1804-1849). At the root of this dance for orchestra, we find Strauss senior, but also Josef Lanner (1801-1843). The latter was the director of ball music at the imperial court. He composed waltzes, but also gallops and Ländler, to which Strauss father will add polkas and steps, like the Radetzky’s March, composed in 1848. There was a true “Strauss dynasty”, comprising two brothers of Johann II: Josef and Eduard. Josef (1827-1870) is the more prolific and gifted of the two (see his magnificent Die Libelle), but Eduard (1835-1916) provided the New Year’s concert programs with his evocative works in homage to the progress of the time: the train with Bahn frei! ; electricity with polka Elektrisch and even a polka called Telephone.
The best-known Austrian composers on the sidelines of the Strauss are pioneer Lanner and Carl Michael Ziehrer, who will once again have the honor of the Viennese concert this year. Ziehrer (1843-1922) is notably the author of the waltz Hereinspaziert, polka Loslassen and waltzes Wiener Bürger and Weaner Mad’ln. A vast anthology of his works has been dedicated to him by Marco Polo, whose nectar has been collected in a Naxos disc. We will also mention Karl Millöcker and Joseph Hellmesberger (here too the son and father are composers, but it is the son who is known), outstanding figure of the Vienna Philharmonic.
However, Philipp Fahrbach I and II were never scheduled for the New Year’s concert. Of the 14 works recorded by Christian Simonis for CPO, 11 are by Philipp Fahrbach II (1843-1894). We have not yet explored everything, because the Fahrbach dynasty has even more musicians than the Strauss. For musicologist Norbert Rubey, “the Fahrbachs have made an enormous contribution to musical culture and to the development of popular music, not only in the capital region, but also beyond”.
Why such a gulf between the Strauss and the Fahrbach? The musicologist believes above all that the Strauss were much better organized to sell and publicize their creations. If we agree to think like him that “the musical heritage of the Fahrbach dynasty is less studied and documented than that of the Strauss family and yet comparable on the musical level”, the volume published by CPO risks announcing a series , Fahrbach father being at the head of a catalog of 700 scores and his son having composed more than 500. In any case, after having heard 65 minutes of their music, one wonders how they could have been so forgotten.
The French Strauss
What, the Skaters Waltz is from an Alsatian composer? Few people associate a name, Waldteufel, with this famous waltz. Even fewer correlate a face or an origin. Born in Strasbourg in 1837, Charles Émile Lévy Waldteufel is also a “son of”. His father, Lazare Lévy, was a violinist and conductor. The name Waldteufel (devil of the forest) was the pseudonym of his grandfather, Moyse Lévy, a busker in the suburbs of the city.
The Lévy family moved to Paris to provide musical education for their children. Émile, a comrade of Bizet at the Conservatory, quickly became, in the Second Empire, the Parisian equivalent of the Viennese Strauss. The Skaters Waltz is not Waldteufel’s only success. Love and spring is very famous, he composed a waltz on España de Chabrier and our favorite waltz is Studentina.
Two beautiful anthologies dominate the recording market: Willi Boskovsky at EMI and, above all, Theodor Guschlbauer on the defunct label FNAC, today taken over by Erato. As with all the repertoire of the genre, the Marco Polo label has engaged in an exhaustive exploration (11 volumes) of the production of Waldteufel, work whose nectar has been concentrated in a Naxos CD.
Champagne in Copenhagen
There is a “Strauss of the North” and he is not one-armed! If you come across the music of Hans Christian Lumbye (1810-1874), you will wonder how you could have missed it. She is so skillful and well dressed that you will even have the impression that you have finally known her forever. Lumbye, son of a soldier, is a gifted musician, violinist, then trumpeter in a military band from the age of 14. A member of the cavalry in Copenhagen, he earns a supplementary income as an assistant to the city musician (Stadtmusikant), Carl Füssel, and begins to compose dances and marches.
His art was enriched when in 1839 a Viennese orchestra came to play Johann Strauss senior and Lanner in Copenhagen. Lumbye then organized “Strauss Music Concerts”. In 1843, he became in Copenhagen the musician associated with the Tivoli Gardens, newly created on the model of the Viennese Prater. Lumbye has an orchestra of 24 musicians dedicated to entertainment, parties and balls. His emblematic work is the Champagne Gallop. Several beautiful Lumbye anthologies have been recorded and can be found on the platforms (Frandsen – EMI, Rozhdestvensky – Chandos and Peter Guth for Unicorn, taken over by Alto). There too, Marco Polo dug the sheet music catalog, with 11 CDs released, and Naxos, partner company of Marco Polo, published a Best of Lumbye.
And in Berlin?
As often in music, one could have imagined the creation of a strong pole in Berlin as a counterpart to what was happening in Vienna. This is not really the case. There is certainly the breeding ground for a Berlin operetta, taking over from the Viennese operetta, but nothing very striking in the genre of the waltz. That said, a few excellent craftsmen don’t deserve the total oblivion into which they have been plunged. The CD CPO dedicated in 2008 to Benjamin Bilse (1816-1902) proves it. Trained in Vienna, musician in the orchestra of Strauss father in Vienna, Bilse was appointed in 1842 choirmaster of his hometown, Liegnitz in Silesia (today Legnica in Poland), before creating in Berlin, in 1867, the ‘Orchestra Bilse. It is moreover from a split of the Bilse Orchestra in 1882 that the Berlin Philharmonic was born! Christian Simonis’ selection for CPO is impeccable.
Simonis also recorded, in 2010, a beautiful anthology dedicated to Josef Gung’l and his funny Madman Gallop, a Hungarian who made his career in Germany, especially in the spa towns. If you buy CDs, it’s a recommendation like Bilse, just behind Fahrbach. If you are looking for this publication on the platforms, it is an unsolvable puzzle.
Our last spotlight will go to Richard Eilenberg (1848-1927). Like Waldteufel, he is in the eyes of the public the man of a work: The sleigh ride in Saint–Petersburg (Petersburger Schlittenfahrt). Unlike other composers, he was born when Johann Strauss Sr. was already dead. The genre was therefore well established and evolved when Eilenberg specialized in Berlin in the repertoire of marches, dances and salon and entertainment music between the war of 1870 and that of 1914. A superb selection was compiled by Simonis in 2012.
Of all our composers, he is the one who was able to record his works. But after the Great War, the spirit was to heal wounds.