Jenseits vom tanzenden Wien

The waltz taken today for the very essence of the ballroom was originally written for a voice: Strauss composed it in 1882/83 for the coloratura soprano Bertha Schwarz, celebrated at the Court Opera under the name Bianca Bianchi, who sang it for the first time on 1 March 1883 at a charity matinée at the Theater an der Wien; the text was written by Richard Genée, and the piano reduction is dedicated to Alfred Grünfeld. Its great success came only with some delay, on the Russian tour of 1886 and by way of that very piano version, which carried the waltz into bourgeois drawing rooms.

Its opening already sets it apart from his great concert waltzes: where those unfold out of an extended introduction, here the first theme enters at once, and what follows is less a chain of dance movements than a single, breathless ascent. Its origin in the singing voice remains audible in every turn of phrase — in the runs and leaps written for a coloratura soprano, and in the way the melody does not close its phrases but drives them onward.

Daniel Auner’s version for string quartet, published by Universal Edition in 2023, proceeds from the orchestral setting, in which most of the melodic lines are entrusted to the strings in any case; it seeks to translate what is peculiar to this music into a small ensemble of the kind the Viennese salons of the time employed. Since the Viennese string quartet was then usually joined by a double bass, the cello here must carry downwards much of what originally lay beneath it — a shift that takes nothing from the piece, since its momentum comes from above in any case.

The first larger work by the twenty-three-year-old to survive complete bears no opus number, since Schoenberg began his count only a year later with the songs; as models he himself named Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Dvořák. The decisive part, however, was played by Alexander von Zemlinsky, to whom the young composer submitted the manuscript and who advised reworking the first movement and replacing the second entirely — the third, too, was probably newly written in consequence. Only then did Zemlinsky, as a board member of the Wiener Tonkünstlerverein, secure the performance: on 17 March 1898 in private, and publicly on 20 December of the same year by the Fitzner Quartet in the Bösendorfer-Saal.

The Neue Freie Presse spoke of a very agreeable surprise and credited the author with a true talent that had here spoken its first significant word; one understands the verdict on following the buoyant sonata movement with its broadly laid-out second subject, the Intermezzo of song-like grace, the five variations on a theme first presented by the cello, and a finale of robust delight in playing. Anyone hearing the work without its composer’s name would hardly think of Schoenberg, and yet one can already trace how great things are developed here out of the smallest motifs — a procedure for which he later found the term developing variation.

The middle of the three Strauss sons was the most reluctant musician of the family: Josef Strauss had completed a technical training and worked as an engineer and draughtsman before taking over the orchestra in 1853, because his brother Johann had fallen ill — and he stayed with it until his early death in 1870, at the age of forty-three. What he wrote in those seventeen years is held by many to be the musically finest work of the dynasty.

The Polka Mazur op. 129 is not a polka in the ordinary sense: it stands in three-four time, moves considerably more slowly than its sisters, and lives on the displacement of the accent onto the second or third beat — a Polish dance, then, in Viennese dress, whose tenderness recalls Schubert rather than a ballroom.

The circumstances of its composition explain this tone. When Johann broke off his guest season at Pavlovsk near St Petersburg in the summer of 1862 in order to marry Jetty Treffz at St Stephen’s Cathedral on 27 August, Josef had to travel to Russia at a moment’s notice and finish the season for him — while his own wife Caroline, whom he had married five years earlier, stayed behind in Vienna. The piece is addressed to her, and its title means nothing allegorical.

This version for string quartet is likewise by Daniel Auner and published by Universal Edition. In the programme the piece stands on the threshold, behind Schoenberg’s youthful work and before Kreisler’s backward glance from exile.

Kreisler, born in Vienna, a volunteer in the First World War and wounded in it, had lived in the United States since 1915, and it was there that his only string quartet came into being; the première was given on 26 April 1919 by the Letz Quartet in New York. Of the work he said that it was his avowal of Vienna, and he would reveal no more than that — he never engaged with the obvious question of an autobiographical programme.

All four movements carry titles. The Fantasia opens with a cello solo of dark drama and then strings themes and moods freely together before returning literally to the beginning; the Scherzo dances with an agility that owes much to Mendelssohn, and in its calmer middle section gives the floor to the individual instruments. In Introduction and Romance, the extended introduction is set against a song led by the first violin, whose harmony towards the end reaches into adventurous territory over a pizzicato cello, before the finale closes the arc.

The tone is other than in Liebesleid or Schön Rosmarin: here Kreisler sought not the salon piece but the large form, without finding his way back to the idiom of Brahms. What emerged is an attempt to hold on to a city while it disappears. Nineteen years later, after the “Anschluss”, Kreisler, who was of Jewish descent, left Europe for good; he took American citizenship and hung the framed Austrian certificate on the wall of his apartment. He died in New York in 1962.

Korngold was born in the same year in which Schoenberg completed his D major quartet; he too was Zemlinsky’s pupil, and his father Julius was the most powerful music critic in Vienna. Die tote Stadt op. 12, after Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges-la-Morte, was premièred simultaneously in Hamburg and Cologne on 4 December 1920 and made the twenty-three-year-old world-famous; the libretto had been written by the family itself under the shared pseudonym Paul Schott.

In the opera, Marietta’s Lied is not a solo but a duet: Paul, the widower, recognises his dead wife in the dancer Marietta, and in the singing the two images of the woman merge in a dangerous way. It is precisely this double ground that makes the piece the close of the programme — a song about the happiness that has remained, sung over a loss.

The version for string quintet is by Thomas Auner and is published by Schott Music. The second cello, which he takes himself, gives the music the depth and the shadow that Korngold’s orchestral writing has in mind, and lets the vocal line travel through the ensemble rather than resting in one place. From 1933 onwards Korngold’s music was banned from German stages; he went to Hollywood, wrote film music and remained, as he himself knew, a Viennese composer without Vienna.