About this Piece

In 1860, Viennese audiences got their first taste of operetta when Jacques Offenbach’s delectable Orpheus in the Underworld, which had been a runaway success since its Paris premiere two years earlier, was staged at the city’s Carltheater.

This lighter cousin of opera, often tempered with a dash of timely satire, was embraced by the Viennese public. Two revivals of Offenbach’s Orpheus were staged the following year, and local composers immediately made their own contributions to the form. One of these figures was Franz von Suppé, who had been writing musical accompaniments for the city’s Volkstheater productions for nearly two decades. Within months of Orpheus’ Viennese debut, Suppé started churning out his own operettas. The Overture to Pique Dame was written in 1862, originally intended as a curtain-raiser for the operetta Die Kartenschlägerin (The Fortune Teller). Suppé later revised the work around the loose structure of Alexander Pushkin’s 1834 story The Queen of Spades, or Pique Dame in French (which would also inspire a Tchaikovsky opera 25 years later). The overture opens with a mischievous laughing motif that darkens before exploding into a bright gallop reminiscent of Offenbach’s “Can-Can.”

Underneath its frothy tunes and silly plots, the operetta served a political purpose in the vast and ethnically diverse Austro-Hungarian Empire. Within its unified framework, it brought together musical traditions from across its lands: Viennese waltzes, Polish mazurkas, Hungarian czardas, and Czech polkas all whipped together into a delicious evening of entertainment.

This melting pot of cultures influenced composer Franz Lehár. Born into an ethnically Hungarian family in what is now Komárno, Slovakia, he studied at the Prague Conservatory before joining the Austro-Hungarian military as a bandmaster. Lehár’s first major success, for which he is still best known, was The Merry Widow (1905). But he continued to produce popular operettas for decades after World War I precipitated the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Premiered in 1934, Giuditta is one of Lehár’s final works and one of his most ambitious. It tells of the beautiful Giuditta, who leaves her husband to accompany the dashing Captain Octavio on his excursion into North Africa. The lovers are separated when Octavio is reassigned to a military regiment, and Giuditta must support herself as a nightclub dancer. Giuditta’s “My lips, they give so fiery a kiss,” alternates between a sizzling, Iberian-inflected dance and a passionate waltz as she embraces her new life in the nightclub. Octavio’s aria “Friends, life is well worth living,” comes in the first act and is filled with promises of exciting adventures and tender caresses.

Lehár’s Eva, dating from 1911, was one of a string of the composer’s hits from the pre-World War I era. It’s a classic boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl-only-to-win-her-back tale. In “Love is a pilgrim,” the title character, the foster daughter of a factory owner, sings a dreamy waltz on the occasion of her 20th birthday.

“You are my heart’s delight” was written for the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber, who helped revive Lehár’s career in the 1920s as inspiration for the composer’s later heroic tenor roles. Lehár’s soaring arias that showcased his muse are still called Tauberlied. This prime example of Taublerlied was initially included in the 1923 operetta The Yellow Jacket and repurposed for 1929’s The Land of Smiles, a bittersweet tale of an ill-fated love affair between a Viennese countess and a Chinese prince.

No evening of operetta would be complete without the Strauss family. Though overshadowed by his father Johann and older brother Johann, Jr. (the so-called “Waltz King”), Josef Strauss wrote a number of popular waltzes, polkas, and marches—some now believed to be credited to his more famous brother. Josef initially pursued an engineering and architecture career before entering the family music-making business. Die Nasswalderin Polka is a gentle, lilting polka evoking the bucolic life of a girl from the Alpine village of Nasswald.

Johann Strauss, Jr.’s Die Fledermaus (1874) brings us back to the gilded center of 19th-century Vienna, filled with illicit flirtations, seductive guises, and clever comeuppances soaked in a flood of effervescent champagne. These elements are at play in the second act’s Watch Duet. Set amid a masked ball, Rosalinde (disguised as a Hungarian countess) snatches the watch of her husband, Eisenstein (who is less convincingly pretending to be a Frenchman), as proof of his infidelity. While Eisenstein’s unfaithfulness is eventually revealed, champagne is blamed for his indiscretions, and all is forgiven.

Tonight’s first half closes with what else but a prime example of a Strauss waltz. Written the year before Die Fledermaus, Wiener Blut premiered on April 22, 1873, to celebrate the wedding of Archduchess Gisela Louise Marie, daughter of Franz Joseph I, and Prince Leopold of Bavaria. Its regal opening eventually melts into a familiar sighing melody in the strings that builds momentum as oom-pah-pahing brass and percussion join. A secondary theme offers the slightest tinge of melancholy before indulging in the gilded splendor of the age.

—Amanda Angel