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THE WALTZ PROGENITOR
By Tim Smith
"The waltz was the first dance where the partners actually held each other close," the late Victor Borge wrote in his witty spin through music history, MY FAVORITE INTERMISSIONS, "and the moralists were shocked at the abominable sight 'of a lady permitting a man to encircle her with his arms and to press the contour of her waist.' Every night the moralists would flock down to the dance halls to watch the contours and get shocked all over again."
"Soon," according to Borge, "reformed Dancing Masters were publishing big exposes, revealing the ballrooms to be 'hot beds of vice within whose treacherous embrace so many sweet young souls have been whirled to perdition.' With recommendations like that, it was only a matter of time before the waltz became the most popular dance on the Continent, and no where did it catch on with greater glitter than in the city of Vienna."
Since 1939, the Vienna Philharmonic has reinforced the city's direct connection to this dance in a big way with a concert in the exquisite Musikverein that celebrates the legacy of the waltzing Strauss family. (For trivia fans, that 1939 concert actually took place on December 31; the tradition of having it on New Year's Day started in 1941, and except for 1945, when the performance was canceled, there has been a concert every year since.)
Now, thanks to televised broadcasts of the event, more than one billion people around the world can bask, almost simultaneously, in the infectious charm of works of Johann Strauss, Sr. and his sons, Johann, Jr., Josef, and Eduard, a remarkable testament to the enduring allure of whirling perdition. Although clearly the best-known and best-loved composers of waltzes, the enormously talented Strausses don't deserve total credit for the genre's staying power. Someone else was largely responsible for sparking the waltz craze, and even for launching the career of the senior Strauss.
The name of Joseph Lanner should be much better known. If Johann Strauss, Jr. was the Waltz King, Lanner was the Waltz Progenitor. Periodically, a little bit of his music turns up on the New Year's Day concert program, as it will for the 2006 celebration, led by Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons. (Jansons will be only the 12th person to lead one of these concerts, joining a distinguished podium roster that includes Clemens Krauss, Lorin Maazel, Claudio Abbado, and Carlos Kleiber.)
The particular Lanner piece that Jansons has chosen cleverly helps this concert honor another Austrian composer at the same time, actually THE Austrian composer -- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose birth 250 years ago (January 27, 1756) will be commemorated the world over in 2006. Given that Mozart lived in Vienna for the last decade of his life, his inclusion on the New Year's program is all the more fitting. (He never wrote a waltz, per se, but his dance-inspired pieces are close enough in spirit.)
This concert provides a perfect start to the Mozart Year with the playing of the sparkling "Overture" to "The Marriage of Figaro." Jansons will complement that familiar music with a comparative rarity, Lanner's "Die Mozartisten," a piece that turns popular tunes from Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and "The Magic Flute" into a group of waltzes. Lanner wrote "Die Mozartisten" in 1842, the year before he died at age 42 of typhus.
Top banner photos: Statue of Johann Strauss, Jr. in Vienna's Stadtpark (Austrian National Tourist Office/Gotschim) and the Vienna Philharmonic. |
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Portrait of Mozart by Barbara Kraft. |
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Host Walter Cronkite. |
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This program is available on DVD and as a double CD. |
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