Vienna Philharmonic 2023 New Year's Concert: Rewriting the Strauss Legacy to Make It More "Politically Correct"

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Right now I’m listening to one of the most oddly premised CD boxed sets in history: The Johann Strauss Collection, an eight-CD release from the Japanese Opus Kura label which I acquired about a decade ago and whose first CD contains no fewer than 13 versions of “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” (“An der schönen blauen Donau,” to give it its official title in German), starting with the one conducted by Johann Strauss III (which, despite his name, was not the son of Johann Strauss, Jr., who wrote the piece, but ratner was Strauss, Jr.’s nephew, the son of his brother Eduard Strauss). The disc moves on to versions conducted by “name” musicians Felix Weingartner, Erich Kleiber, Clemens Krauss – along with choral versions by something called the “Lehrer-Gesangverein Berlin-Neuköln,” a Japanese women’s chorus with soprano Shigo Yano, and some at least marginally more famous singers – Frieda Hempel, Maria Ivogün, Selma Kurz, Erna Sack – a dazzling two-piano version by Josef Lhevinne and his wife Rosina, as well as pop versions by John Philip Sousa’s band (though, like most of the “Sousa” records, it was made by his musicians but not actually conducted by him), Victor Young and Barnabas von Géczy. I’m listening to this now because I’m preparing to write about last night’s PBS telecast of the 2023 Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, a tradition started by Clemens Krauss in 1939 because he figured that with Vienna having been occupied, along with the rest of Austria, by Nazi Germany, the people of the city needed an “upper” to lift their spirits and prepare themselves for their new future as part of Hitler’s Reich.

The New Year’s concerts have been going ever since and have become a major cash cow for the Vienna Philharmonic, which not only telecasts them live throughout Austria and much of Europe but makes them available to other countries as well. I first started watching the Vienna New Year’s concerts in the 1980’s when the U.S. version was hosted by Walter Cronkite, whose spiels emphaxiazed the hoary hand of tradition over the events and how much the programming of the concerts was determined by what Clemens Krauss had done in 1939 and throughout the rest of World War II. The concert always ends with three so-called “encores” (I said “so-called” because they’re actually determined well in advance and everyone in the audience, both “live” in the Vienna Musikverein and on TV, knows what they’re about to hear). The first of the nominal “encores” is a piece of the conductor’s own choice, the second is the familiar “Blue Danube,” and the third the “Radetzsky March” composed by the first Johann Strauss, father of Johann, Jr. and his brothers Eduard and Josef. One year my husband Charles was so impressed by the near-perfect unison audience clapping in rhythm to the music of the march (again, one of the traditions that hamstring this concert and pretty much determine what it will be) he joked, “How come we got all the white people who can’t clap?” This ime around I reminded him of that and he said that unlike American audiences, European ones don’t even try to clap along if they can’t.

The PBS telecasts of the concert usually include only the second half, after the intermission, and ini 2022 (while I was in the hospital and not watching under the very best conditions anyway) they sliced it down to just an hour so they could show a feminist documentary afterwards. (I would have ordered the DVD but at the start of 2022 ArkivMusic.com decided to update their Web site and it was literally inaccessible for weeks.) This time, at least, the concert telecast was an hour and a half long and included 13 pieces. The concert telecast was originally produced by the Vienna Philharmonic in association with Austria’s state-owned broadcasting company, ORTF, and one of the tricks of ORTF’s trade with the concert is to shoot a great amount of “B”-roll and make it available to broadcasters in the various countries that air this program showing picturesque sights of old Vienna while local narrators tell us about the historical significance. Some of the locales are interesting, like the Theatre an der Josefstatt, which was opened in 1816 by Ludwig van Beethoven himself and for which he wrote the “Consecration of the House Overture” (which was nice to know; now at last I’m aware of just what house Beethoven was consecrating when he composed that piece). Others are less so, including a mini-documentary on Austria’s premier maker of chandeliers, who was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera (whose then-director, Sir Rudolf Bing, was Austrian-born) for their new opera house as part of Lincoln Center in 1966.

PBS has assigned an interesting variety of narrators over the years, starting (at least while I’ve been watching the show) with Walter Cronkite. Their next choice was Julie Andrews, who seemed to have got the gig mainly because her most famous movie, The Sound of Music, takes place in Austira (albeit in Salzburg rather than Vienna). The current host is Hugh Bonneville, a thoroughly boring British actor whose main claim to fame was that he starred in the inexplicably popular (on both sides of the Atlantic) British TV series Downton Abbey. Among the prissiest parts of Bonneville’s narration was his comment that Johann, Jr. and Eduard Strauss were both fond of using their music to seduce young women, but the third Strauss brother, Josef, “considered himself above such debauchery.” It also turns out that Josef Strauss was something of a feminist who wrote a piece called “The Emancipation of Women.” While that’s good for Josef, the producers of this show – either the original Austrian writers or whoever concocted the English Bonneville was speaking – seemed to be trying to re-invent the Strauss family as suitable heroes for the #MeToo era. Ironically, the Vienna Philharmonic was the last major European orchestra to break with their all-male tradition and start hiring women musicians – there were a smattering of women in last night’s orchestra, but only on the instruments traditionally considered “acceptable” for females to play (strings and harp). Bonneville’s narration mentioned that a female violinist, Marie Grüner, conducted a concert in Vienna as early as 1864, and the orchestra and its conductor, Franz Welser-Möst, seemed to get with the program by playing a large number of works by Josef Strauss instead of his good-timey non-feminist brothers.

Of the 13 pieces we got to hear, three were by composers outside the Strauss family (a chant sung by the Vienna Boys’ Choir, Fraz von Suppé’s overture to his operetta Iasbella and the “Bells Polka and Galop” by Joseph Hellmesberger, Jr., written to commemorate the installation of electric lights in the palace of Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef; a few years ago Fanfare reviewed a CD of Hellmesberger’s two symphonies and said they sounded so much like Brahms that if you were a fan of Brahms’ symphonies but disappointed that he wrote only four of them, here were two more that sounded just like him). Two were by Johann, Jr., the “Bandits’ Galop” and the inevitable “Blue Danube”), one by Johann, Sr. (the equally inevitable “Radetzky March”), one by Eduard (a fast polka called “Up and Away,” no resemblance to the Fifth Dimension’s hit), and six by Josef. They were “Pearls of Love,” “Angelica Polka” (written, Bonneville said, as a salute to the Greek gods in general and the Greek goddesses in particular), “Blithe Spirit” (sung in tandem by the Vienna Boys’ Choir and the recently established Vienna Girls’ Choir – get the picture?), “Siskins” (a siskin is a sort of bird and the piece, which includes a part for a toy instrument that imitates a bird’s whistle, was written in tribute to an Austrian ornithologist who made a picture book of various species of birds a century before John James Audubon did), “Allegro Fantastique” and “Watercolor Waltz.” (Apparenty Josef Strauss was also a painter, as well as a published scientific researcher.)

I’d heard before that Josef Strauss was the most musically advanced member of the Strauss waltz family, and the pieces played in th is concert bore that out. At a time when the most innovative composers in the German musical world were Wagner and Brahms (and they were each cherished by committed fan bases that hated the other; if you liked Wagner you were expected to hate Brahms, and vice versa, and when conductor Hans von Bülow’s wife Cosima left him for Wagner, his revenge was to stop conducting Wagner and start conducting Brahms), and unlike his brothers Josef actually seemed to have heard of them. His pieces are full of chromatic harmonies and clever bits of orchestration, and while they aren’t necessarily more tuneful or immediately appealing than those of his brothers (or their dad), Josef’s pieces are quite a bit more interesting in terms of musical adventure. I was glad to hear so much of Josef’s music in one place, even if the emphasis on him seemed to reinforce the sense I was having that the producers and writers of this show were attempting to rewrite the Strauss family’s history into a more acceptable vein for today’s audiences, especially the “politically correct” ones who demand that history be rewritten to coincide with what’s considered good and true in our time, even if that means recasting works of past cultural eras into terms more acceptable to today.