Download Program Note

Program Note
n the early 19th century, the waltz was all the rage in Vienna, its intimate
embrace between partners and whirling energy matching the boom and
bustle of the Habsburg Empire’s cosmopolitan, pleasure-seeking capital city.
Having evolved from various folk dances—including the Ländler, immortalized
through its incorporation into works by Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Berg,
and especially Mahler—the waltz was so popular throughout Central Europe by
the late 18th century that a March 1792 Journal des Luxus und der Moden article
reported that in Berlin “waltzes and nothing but waltzes are now so much in
fashion that at dances nothing else is looked at; one need only be able to waltz,
and all is well.” In Vienna’s gilded ballrooms, the obsession with the dance only
grew from there, and starting some 30 years later, the music of the Strauss family
raised Vienna’s waltz-mania to such a fever pitch that is has never subsided.
Though Johann Strauss II—composer of Die Fledermaus—is now
remembered as the “Waltz King,” it was his father who began the Strauss
dynasty and whose music first dominated Vienna’s extravagant, wine-soaked
nightlong parties. Johann Strauss I, also known as Johann Strauss the elder, was
one of music history’s most successful entrepreneurs, forming his own orchestra
at age 21 and ceaselessly composing dance music for anyone who could pay. He
had a gift for melody and orchestration, and his empire grew quickly as he won
more and more acclaim for the quality of both his music and his orchestra, an
ensemble of crack musicians expertly drilled by the demanding and somewhat
despotic Strauss that set a new standard for orchestral virtuosity and precision.
Eventually the elder Strauss’s organization employed more than 200 people and
his orchestras were in demand all over Europe, traveling widely and making an
especially strong impression in the British Isles.
Though Johann Strauss I strenuously opposed any of his three sons pursuing
music as a career, he lost his influence over them after his constant absence and
persistent affair with another woman led to the end of his marriage. The boys’
mother Anna encouraged their musical pursuits, and eventually all three Strauss
sons—Johann II, Josef, and Eduard—became professional musicians and
composers. Initially, Johann II, the oldest and most prodigiously talented of the
three, found it impossible to escape the shadow of his father, with whom he had
developed an unfriendly rivalry and who actively hindered his progress in any
way possible. In 1845, at age 19, he formed his own orchestra to compete with
his father, and though his performances and compositions were well received,
he had more success in surrounding regions than in his home city of Vienna,
where Johann I still dominated musical proceedings. Johann II ran further afoul
of his father and the establishment when he openly supported the revolutionary
elements of the short-lived Vienna Uprising of October 1848. Father and son
finally came to an uneasy reconciliation in 1849—just in time, in turned out,
as Johann the elder died of scarlet fever later that year. Following his father’s
death, Johann II consolidated his and Johann I’s enterprises, brought his two
brothers into the business, and instantly became the new monarch of Viennese
dance music. By 1852, the journal Allgemeine Wiener Theaterzeitung recorded
I
34
that “It now turns out for certain that Strauss Father has been fully replaced by
Strauss Son.” Johann II soon progressed from replacing his father to completely
overshadowing him, eventually writing more than 400 pieces of dance music
and rightfully earning his remembrance as the “Waltz King.”
By the 1860s, a new genre had set fire to the theaters of Europe as quickly
as the waltz had overtaken its ballrooms 70 years earlier: operetta. Emerging
in Paris in the 1850s and fueled by the smash hits of Jacques Offenbach, the
operetta frenzy spread quickly, charming audiences with its combination
of lighthearted scenarios, catchy melody, comedy, and irreverence. Usually
incorporating spoken dialogue, dance sequences, and characters with whom
bourgeois theatergoers could identify, operetta was fun, eminently accessible,
and the perfect foil to the heavy subject matter and lavish productions that were
the norm in 19th-century opera houses.
In Vienna, operetta—especially the works of Offenbach—was as popular
as everywhere else. But Austria had been to war with the French four times in
recent memory, and the Viennese, culturally nationalistic at the best of times,
were keen for homegrown music for the theater to challenge the primacy of the
French imports. Native son Johann Strauss II—a master of melody and dance
who by this time had enjoyed more than 30 years at the pinnacle of Viennese
popular music—was the natural choice to write it. In response to entreaties from
the impresarios and encouragement from his first wife, theater-savvy mezzosoprano Henriette Treffz, the composer began trying his hand at operetta, the
first of which premiered in 1871. Eventually, he took the drastic step of entrusting
the Strauss family orchestra to his brother Eduard and devoted himself to
theater music full-time, completing 15 operettas and one opera over the final
three decades of his life.
Die Fledermaus, Strauss’s greatest and most enduring work for the theater,
was his third operetta, premiering at the Theater an der Wien in 1874. Ironically,
the libretto was adapted from a French vaudeville by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic
Halévy—who had provided libretti for many of Offenbach’s most popular
works—called La Réveillon. But that work was itself an adaptation of the obscure
German stage comedy Das Gefängnis by Roderich Benedix, and presumably
this Germanic origin was enough to wash away any Gallic taint. The setting of the
French work did present a problem, however, as the réveillon—an extravagant
feast followed by an all-night party, traditionally held on Christmas or New
Year’s Eve—was both unmistakably French and would not sit well with Austria’s
conservative Catholic authorities. Luckily, the solution was simple and perfectly
natural: Christmas Eve became an indeterminate day elsewhere on the calendar
and the réveillon became an equally raucous Viennese ball, allowing Strauss to
bring his decades of experience writing music for such events to the theater.
The composer also had no shortage of models on which to base Prince
Orlofsky’s wild party at the heart of Die Fledermaus. Though the layers of
mistaken identity that provide much of this operetta’s comedy require some
suspension of disbelief, the Champagne-drenched revelry that provides the
Visit metopera.org
35
backdrop is more chronicle than caricature. In the mid-18th century, Europe’s
great capital cities were playgrounds for the fabulously rich aristocracy, each
trying to outdo the others with pure excess in their pursuit of pleasure. Particularly
insatiable were a series of Russian princes who traveled west, especially to Paris,
to spend obscene amounts of money and enjoy the renown—and debauchery—
it bought them. To contemporary audiences, then, Orlofsky and his antics would
have been not only believable but familiar.
By the time Die Fledermaus made it to the stage, however, Vienna’s great
celebrations of self-indulgent abandon were beginning to look like a thing of
the past. On May 9, 1873—less than a year before the work’s premiere—Vienna
and its empire suffered a catastrophic stock market crash. The fortunes of
many real people resembling the characters on stage evaporated overnight,
and extravagance gave way to austerity. Furthermore, unrest was brewing
throughout Europe, and though they didn’t know it, the first of the 20th century’s
cataclysms was just around the corner. In less than 50 years, Austria-Hungary
would no longer exist, Vienna would be the capital of a nation only a fraction
of its empire’s previous size, and that nation would be a republic, leaving the
aristocracy stripped of most of its power and income. Placed in this context,
Die Fledermaus—so often thought of as one of the operatic repertoire’s silliest,
fluffiest works—takes on more profound significance. It embodies both fond
reminiscence and biting satire, reveling in past carelessness and profligacy while
hinting at where it can lead—a lesson that has become no less relevant almost
150 years later.
—Jay Goodwin
36