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Sacher Torte Set to Music
| Article
# : |
18500 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
1,638 Words |
| Author
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Alwyn Reger
Alwyn Reger is an arts writer who lives in Manchester,
England. |
When Ecclesiastes wrote that there is a time to dance, he could, with a prophet's foresight, have been thinking of Johann Strauss the Younger. He might have added that there is also a time to sing. The music of this great Viennese composer is the full-throated song of a devil-may-care good time; it drowns out solemnity, it refreshes the spirits, and offers a rousing proof that civilized hell-raising is also an important and useful part of a full life. Strauss' music is not "serious," but composers who were serious showed great respect for it. When Strauss'wife asked Brahms for his autograph, he scribbled the main theme of The Blue Danube on his cuff, wrote under it "unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms," and presented this to Mrs. Strauss.
Paradoxically, Die Fledermaus, one of the most delightful and lighthearted of Strauss' works, was not composed against a background of gaiety and, so to speak, flowing champagne. In May of 1873 there was a huge stock-market crash in Vienna, with the consequences that we know from such events in our own time. Some of the financially ruined chose to commit suicide, while a general gloom, despondency, and despair settled over survivors in the community of investors and speculators. Preoccupation with such things caused many of the Viennese bourgeoisie to suspend their habit of going to the theater, which meant that entertainers too became depressed.
Unlike the poor rentiers, theater professionals did not lose heart. In the classic manner of entertainers everywhere, they bounced up with determined efforts to woo their audiences back again. The writer and composer Richard Genee was asked by an agent, Gustav Lewy, to adapt a French hit, Le Reveillon, as a libretto for Johann Strauss. It was done, and the script given to Strauss. The two men collaborated on the score (though Strauss was given all the credit for it), and the show, now called Die Fledermaus, was completed in about six weeks. Its reception was expressed in a double cartoon of the two men, one figure labeled "Genee" and the other (Strauss), "Genie," or genius.
The work became internationally popular on the operetta stage and in 1894, twenty years after its premiere, it was played in the Vienna Court Opera. Strauss worried about the change to a venue "where everything is done by operatic forces," but this made no difference to the appeal of Die Fledermaus, nor to its success, which has lasted into the last decade of this century and shows no sign of fading away.
This durable fame for the show (apart from the score) is puzzling: The libretto is
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