PBS's "A Salute to Vienna" November 15: Fun, but Way Too Much Whipped Cream

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 15) I watched a rather odd show on KPBS called A Salute to Vienna, which is apparently a revue-type show that has been touring the world for 25 years even though I’d never heard of it before. I’d seen the promos for it on KPBS previously and it seemed mildly interesting, and since there was nothing else on I wanted to watch (Lifetime is showing Terry McMillan-produced romantic dramas and Turner Classic Movies was running an absolute masterpiece, Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film noir High and Low – recently remade by Spike Lee – but my husband Charles was scheduled for a 1 to 10 p.m. shift, he’d be getting home in the middle of it, so instead of watching it last night I chose to order the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray so he and I can watch it together) I decided to take my chances with it. It became clear early on that this show’s “salute to Vienna” wouldn’t be about the truly great music that was composed there by people like Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, and Brahms. Instead it would be about the schlocky side of Vienna’s musical heritage: mostly Johann Strauss, Jr. and the operetta composers like Franz Lehár, Robert Stolz, Ralph Benatzky, and Emmerich Kálmán who followed in his wake. The show opened with Strauss’s “Thunder and Lightning Polka,” played as an instrumental but with plenty of athletic male dancers bounding around on stage during it. The moment the second song came out, an aria from something called The Bird Seller by someone named Rudolf Ziehrer (whom I’d only vaguely heard of before) sung by a woman dressed in the red-and-white uniform of a postal messenger, I knew I was in the wrong place. I talked back to the TV, “Would someone please turn off the Schlag already?” (Schlag, in case you didn’t know, is German for “whipped cream.”)

The third song was a quite nice performance of “Serenade” from Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince (I hadn’t realized Romberg was born in Hungary in 1887, while the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still a going concern, and his birth name was Siegmund Rosenberg; he emigrated to the U.S. as a young adult in 1909) by tenor Russell Watson. Alas, he was laboring under the shadow of a previous generation’s performer who had sung the song far more soulfully than he. In this case, the long shadow Watson was singing under was Mario Lanza’s; he recorded songs from The Student Prince twice, in 1951 and 1959 (the remake was so his label, RCA Victor, would have a stereo version). In fact he did the score three times; in 1953 he made a set of pre-recordings for an MGM film of the operetta, only he was fired from the movie after then-MGM studio head Dore Schary decided he was way too hard to work with, and Schary hired actor Edmund Purdom to play the title role and mime to Lanza’s pre-recordings. (Lanza sued but, according to Schary’s memoir, his complaint was so full of obscenities and non sequiturs the judge threw it out of court.) Whatever his failings as a human being, though, Lanza poured his heart out in “Serenade” and no one since has come close to matching his intensity. Then the show trotted out more operetta excerpts: the “My dear Count” song from Johann Strauss, Jr.’s Die Fledermaus (literally “The Flying Mouse,” but usually rendered as “The Bat”); “Let’s Go to Vienna” from Emmerich Kálmán’s Countess Maritza; and another bit of Die Fledermaus, a choral number called “Little Brothers and Sisters.” The orchestra was that of the Vienna Volksoper, the city’s principal theatre for operetta (as opposed to the Staatsoper, Vienna’s main opera theatre), and for most of the evening the conductor was a white-haired man named (as nearly as I could make it out in the quickly barked introduction) Peter Gut. But for the Countess Maritza and second Die Fledermaus excerpt he was replaced by a young, hunky Venezuelan conductor named Manuel Lopez Garcia, and I found myself wishing he can find asylum somewhere else and doesn’t have to go back to Venezuela.

The show was hosted by two veterans, opera star Frederica von Stade (an American, despite her German-sounding name) and veteran actor Maximilian Schell. Von Stade opened the second of the show’s five parts (yes, it was broken up by those damnable “pledge breaks” which are almost as long as the segments of the actual program, and now that the Trump administration has ended all federal funding to PBS we can expect the network to become even more insistent in its begging than ever) with a lovely rendition of “Vilia” from Lehár’s The Merry Widow. Once again she was singing under long shadows; in this case, from Jeanette MacDonald’s magical performance in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1934 film of the operetta. Still, von Stade was quite fine and I was impressed with how much voice she still has even in her late 60’s, which she was when this show was filmed (she was born June 1, 1945). After that she and Russell Watson sang a rather odd duet to the tune of the waltz from Lehár’s operetta, and the reason it was odd was that she sang her part in English and he sang in German. Then there were two more excerpts from The Merry Widow, “Come to the Pavilion” and “How to Handle a Woman,” with the song “Meine Lippen sie Küssen so heiss” (“My Lips Kiss So Hot”) from another Lehár operetta, Giuditta (which was his longest and most “serious” work with a plot reminiscent of Bizet’s Carmen) in between. The Giuditta excerpt was sung by mezzo Alexandra Ruprecht, who wasn’t in von Stade’s league but was quite good and appropriately sexy for the Carmen-like character she’s playing. “How to Handle a Woman” was the song Maurice Chevalier sang in the Lubitsch film of The Merry Widow as “Girls! Girls! Girls!,” and once again the shadow of a long-dead performer hung heavy over the live ones (six men with O.K. chorus voices) heard here.

After the second pledge break, the next piece up was “The Woods of Vienna Are Calling” from an operetta by Robert Stolz called The Viennese Song, and this time around it wasn’t the singers (the Vienna Boys’ Choir, who were surprisingly racially integrated; among the boys were a few Blacks and Asians) who were under a long shadow, but the composer. One of Johann Strauss, Jr.’s most famous and beloved waltzes was “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” and compared to that I think Stolz should have left the Vienna woods alone. After that there was an odd interlude, the “Song of the Emperor” from Ralph Benatzky’s The White Horse Inn, sung – in a manner of speaking – by Maximilian Schell, who died in 2014 right after making this appearance. (I hadn’t realized how old this show was.) He sort of talk-sang through the number much the way Walter Huston did with Kurt Weill’s “September Song” in Knickerbocker Holiday or Rex Harrison did in My Fair Lady. Then Manuel Lopez Garcia returned as conductor and Russell Watson as tenor for “You Are My Heart’s Delight” from another Lehár operetta, The Land of Smiles. (The titular “land of smiles” is China, by the way.) After that the troupe performed “Yes, My Brothers” from Kálmán’s Countess Maritza and a tenor named Dmitry Korchuk – supposedly a star in France despite his Russian-sounding name, and dressed in a really stupid red-and-white striped shirt – sang the Gondolier’s Song from Johann Strauss, Jr.’s A Night in Venice. After yet another pledge break, the concert resumed with Johann Strauss, Jr.’s most famous piece, On the Beautiful Blue Danube, in a truncated version featuring totally unnecessary singing from the Vienna Choir Boys. I’ll never forget the galvanic experience I had when I first heard this piece in the full nine-minute length Strauss intended. It was on an RCA Victor 78 by the Philadelphia Orchestra (though I don’t recall if the conductor was Leopold Stokowski or Eugene Ormandy), and after hearing the shortened and often popped-up versions that had crossed my path before it was a revelation to hear the full original. Later I heard Herbert von Karajan’s equally sweeping and symphonic version – the one used on the soundtrack to the cinematic masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey – and those remain my favorite performances of it. The only vocal version that’s ever worked for me was an RCA Victor 12-inch 78 featuring coloratura soprano Lily Pons chirping away with André Kostelanetz (her husband) leading the orchestra behind her. Since it was on just one side of the record, that meant it was a cut version, but that didn’t bother me in this context.

Then they did another bit from Ziehrer’s The Bird Seller, “Roses in Tyrol” (it was a duet and the male singer went onstage with a bouquet of roses and gave them, one by one, to audience members), and another number from Die Fledermaus, “Champagne Is King.” This time the choristers drank what was obviously supposed to be champagne (but was more likely the usual on-stage substitute, ginger ale) from rather tacky-looking glasses. After yet another pledge break, the show cut to the final number, Johann Strauss, Sr.’s “Radetzky March,” complete with audience clapping. The clapping wasn’t quite in as perfect unison as it is when the Vienna Philharmonic invariably closes with this during their New Year’s Eve concert – I remember one year in which Charles and I watched that together and he turned to me and said, “How come we got all the white people who can’t clap?” – but it was fun enough and the orchestra’s snare drummer really had a blast. I was startled at the number of women in the orchestra – the Vienna Philharmonic was notorious for years as the last major orchestra in Europe to gender-integrate, but I guess the Vienna Volksoper was ahead of the game on this – and I was a bit surprised at how informally much of the audience was dressed. One woman came in an electrifyingly red pantsuit that looked like it was made of velvet. The pledge breaks were heavily promoting the performance the Salute to Vienna troupe is going to be giving in San Diego on January 1, 2026 at 2:30 p.m. in the Jacobs Music Center, 720 “B” Street in San Diego (formerly the Fox Theatre, where I saw Lou Reed perform in 1983 before the San Diego Symphony took it over). They kept reiterating that for a $300 donation to KPBS, two tickets to this event could be yours, though they were giving them out on a first-come, first-served basis and so the sooner you called, the better your seats would be. I have no idea how many people took them up on their offer, but I wish them all the best even though I’ve never given to public television in my life.