The Light Classical Tradition in Central Europe

The social and cultural changes of the 19^th century that brought about the shift from Classicism to Romanticism also brought about the era of Light Classical Music in Central Europe.  A Number of factors contributed to this development. On the one hand socio-economic changes created a new kind of audience for the arts. As the middle class grew in number, and the arts had increasingly to appeal to common sensibilities.  On the other hand the era of stability in the period from 1815 to 1848 – albeit conservative and even repressive at times – made many artists and society in general concentrate on the domestic and the non-political. We generally refer to the particular mood and set of trends that grew out of these unique underpinnings in Central Europe as the Biedermeier period.

At the same time a number of trends in music – particularly in the area of dance and stage performance – saw forms previously confined to the lower classes conquer middle and upper class audiences as well.  Around 1780 peasant dances known as Walzer, Schleifer and Ländler – dances in which the dancers grasped each other and which were frequently decried as immoral – became fashionable in Vienna, spreading to many other countries in the years to follow. By the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1814 they had become the rage throughout society. Dance halls catering to the middle classes became increasingly popular and a whole group of composers began to meet the demand for these dance forms. Parallel to this, two distinct stage traditions morphed into a new form. On the one hand there was the Singspiel tradition in Central Europe (a form of German-language music drama characterized by spoken dialogue, alternating with musical ensembles and arias and comic or romantic in nature), which continued into the 19^th century.  On the other there was the Classical tradition of musical overtures and interludes to plays. The two gradually came together in the form of “light opera” known as operetta. Vienna became the epicenter of operetta productions in the second half of the century, and these in turn were strongly influenced by the Viennese waltz, which was to become a special distinguishing feature of the genre in its Central European variant well into the 20th century.

On the dance side, two composers in the Biedermeier period created the typical structure that was to become the Viennese Waltz, while also writing prolifically for other forms such as Ländler, Gallop and Marches. The Viennese Joseph Lanner (1801-1843) was largely self-taught on the violin when he began playing in string quartets catering to dance establishments, particularly in carnival season. In 1824 he formed his own small orchestra specializing in his own compositions, which was soon such a success that a second, smaller orchestra had to be formed in 1832 to meet the busy schedule of activities.  Lanner deputized his younger colleague, Johann Strauss, Sr. (1804-1849) to lead this orchestra, but the two soon parted company and a friendly rivalry ensued. Strauss's popularity soon overshadowed Lanner's in the early 1840s, and he began to undertake extensive tours abroad, but in 1843 Lanner succumbed to typhus ending the famous rivalry. Strauss, too, composed waltzes, ländler and gallops, but perhaps his most famous composition was a march he wrote for the victorious Austrian Field Marshal, Joseph Radetzky, shortly before himself succumbing to scarlet fever in 1849.

Strauss Sr. did not wish to see his sons follow in his musical footsteps, but as we saw (see separate posting) his now much more famous oldest son, Johann Strauss, Jr., formed his own orchestra in 1844 and not only became a successful rival to his father but an international celebrity in decades thereafter. His two younger brothers were equally gifted musically and helped inaugurate an era where the Strauss family was to dominate the Viennese dance music scene for well over a half a century. Josef Strauss (1827-1870) trained to be an engineer but joined the family orchestra, along with his brothers in the 1850s.  The success of his early compositions encouraged him to continue in the family tradition of composing dance music. Josef was sickly most of his life and died prematurely after a fall in 1870. His waltzes and polkas might have surpassed those of his elder brother Johann had he survived, since the latter had begun to specialize in stage works by this point. The youngest brother, Eduard Strauss (1835-1916) was more a conductor than a composer and his popularity was overshadowed by that of his elder brothers. Realizing this, he stamped his own mark by specializing in polkas.  Eduard’s musical career was pervaded with rivalry, not only from his brothers, but also from the military bandmaster and dance music composer Carl Michael Ziehrer (1843-1922). Discovered by a publisher who had fallen out with Strauss the young Ziehrer appeared as the head of a newly formed orchestra aimed at toppling the Strauss dynasty at a famous Viennese dance hall in 1863.  Soon thereafter he was made the official bandmaster of imperial army’s 4^th infantry regiment and toured extensively with the regimental band.  When he returned to Vienna, he formed an even larger and successful orchestra that specialized in playing dance music. At this point, his compositions began to gain a wider circulation among the music-loving Viennese and works such as his famous Wiener Bürger waltz were received with great appreciation.  Ziehrer represented the strongest challenger of the Strauss music dynasty. Another bandmaster in the imperial army, Julius Fučík (1872-1916) served in various regiments, writing some of the most famous marches of the Austro-Hungarian army.  As with the other Central European composers mentioned above, marches were composed not just as military music, but also as set orchestral pieces. Perfect examples of this are his Florentiner march and his Entrance of the Galdiators. A late echo of this Viennese musical legacy may be found in the well-known pastiches of the Viennese violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962). One of the most noted violin masters of his day, and regarded as one of the greatest violinists of all time; he was known for his sweet tone and expressive phrasing.

Operetta became a recognizable form in the 1850s in France, when the German-born French composer, Jacques (Jakob) Offenbach, found enormous success with his light and amusing so-called called opéras bouffes or opérettes. Offenbach was unabashed about spreading operetta around the continent. In 1861, he staged some of his recent works in Vienna, which motivated a theater director there to commission his own Kapellmeister (music director) Franz von Suppè (1819-1895), to write German-language pieces in a similar vein. While many biographical details concerning Suppè have undergone dramatic revisions in light of recent research, we know that he grew up in the Austrian Empire’s province of Dalmatia where his initial musical education was with the Cathedral choir of Zadar.  When his Italian-speaking father, an Austrian civil servant, died in 1835, his Viennese mother relocated with her son to the imperial capital where he simplified and Germanized his name. From 1840 on he worked as a composer and conductor for the director of several theatres in Vienna and elsewhere, where he composed overtures and incidental music for stage plays. He composed his first operetta in the Offenbach style in 1860 and went on to compose some 30 more in the following decades. Although the bulk of his operettas have sunk into relative obscurity, the overtures remain popular.  Soon, Vienna became Europe’s hub of operetta performances where composers such as Carl Millöcker (1842-1899), Carl Zeller (1842-1898) and Richard Heuberger (1850-1914) carried on the tradition that culminated in the operettas of Johann Strauss, leading to what is known as the “Golden Age of Operetta.”

The next generation of operetta composers inaugurated what has been called the “Silver Age of Operetta.” Most prominent among these was Franz Lehár (1870-1948). The eldest son of a Hungarian regimental bandmaster of the Austro-Hungarian army, he showed great musical promise at an early age.  In 1880 his father sent him to a gymnasium in Moravia to learn German and two years thereafter to the Prague Conservatory to study violin and composition. After brief experience as a musician in an orchestra in Germany, he returned to Austria and became the youngest bandmaster in the imperial army eventually succeeding his father.  The position involved military postings in different part of the empire culminating in 1902 in Vienna. Leaving the army he became conductor at the historic Vienna Theater an der Wien, and launched his career, becoming the leading operetta composer of the 20th century. His most successful and still widey performed operetta is The Merry Widdow (1905) but he also wrote a number of waltzes (the most popular being Gold and Silver). In the span of the next three decades he would compose some 30 new operettas and Singspiele. Individual songs from some of the operettas have become standards in the recital repertoire. His compatriot Emmerich Kálmán (1882-1953) was born as Imre Koppstein of Jewish parents in the Lake Balaton area.  The family moved to Budapest where they changes their name to the more Hungarian-sounding Kálmán and where Imre studied composition at the Budapest Academy of Music (as a fellow student of Bartók and Kodály). After the successful premiere of his first operetta in Budapest in 1908 he moved to Vienna (again changing his name from Imre to Emmerich) where he achieved worldwide fame through his operettas, including Die Csárdásfürstin (1915) and Gräfin Mariza (1924), which fused Viennese waltzes with Hungarian folk music.  He fled Vienna after the Anschluss, even though Hitler had personally offered to make him an honorary Aryan, as he was one of Hitler’s favourite composers. Moving initially to Paris and then to California, he emigrated back to Vienna in 1949. By then operettas increasingly gave way to musicals and the best-known composer of these declining years of operetta was Robert Stolz (1880-1975). He studied at the Vienna Conservatory and held a succession of conducting posts before becoming a freelance composer and conductor in 1910. In the interwar years he wrote cabaret and film music in Berlin and Vienna, fleeing to New York in 1940. In America, Stolz achieved fame with his concerts of Viennese music and received many invitations to compose music for shows and films. In 1946 Stolz returned to Vienna, where he lived for the rest of his life. Throughout he also composed a series of nostalgic songs very much reminiscent of individual numbers from Viennese operettas. Of the many songs that were composed by many other Viennese composers in that same spirit the most widely sung remains “Wien, Wien, nur du allein” (Vienna, City of my Dreams) by the Viennese composer of Polish ancestry Rudolf Sieczyński (1879-1952), which in many ways can be seen as a wistful distillation of the Silver Age of Operetta.

(N.B.: The composers in this posting are listed in chronological order by date of birth)