The 2008 New Years Concert
A French Start to 2008
Georges Prêtre Conducts His First New Year’S Concert
Georges Prêtre is the first French conductor ever to direct the Vienna Philharmonic in a New Year’s concert, but his ties to the Austrian capital go back as far as the early 1960s. In 1962, at the invitation of the then State Opera director Herbert von Karajan, he conducted several performances of Richard Strauss’s opera Capriccio at the venerated house on the Ringstrasse. The success was such that Karajan offered Prêtre a première for the next year: Gounod’s Faust.
photo: Terry LinkeBefore the curtains parted, the conductor from the northern French town of Waziers, near Douai, who was then only 29, introduced himself at the Musikverein in the Vienna Philharmonic’s series of subscription concerts. Hans Knappertsbusch, who had been scheduled to conduct, was ill; by standing in for him, Prêtre ended up making two Viennese debuts on the same day. Thanks to his fiery temperament, the Philharmonic audience experienced a blistering Beethoven’s Fifth, while the opera-goers delighted in a passionate performance of Faust that allowed them to brush aside the botched staging.
Over the following decades, Prêtre — who became music director of the Paris Opéra in 1966 and inaugurated the Opéra Bastille in Paris with a concert on Bastille Day in 1989 — chiefly appeared at the world’s great opera houses, including the Metropolitan in New York and La Scala, Milan. He also regularly conducted the leading American and European orchestras, accompanying them on extended tours of Europe, Japan and the USA.
From 1986 to 1991 Prêtre held the position of principal guest conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, with whom, on several occasions, he demonstrated his affinity for the music of the Strauss waltz dynasty. In recent years he has made frequent guest appearances with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle and several French and Italian ensembles, as well as with the Vienna Philharmonic.
Prêtre’s engagement for the 2008 New Year’s Concert is therefore only surprising at first glance. And, in any event, he adds new colour to the line-up of previous conductors Willy Boskovsky, Lorin Maazel, Herbert von Karajan, Claudio Abbado, Carlos Kleiber, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Seiji Ozawa and Mariss Jansons. This is reflected in the programme’s French emphasis as it combines traditional selections with a number of novelties.
photo: Terry LinkeBeing heard for the first time at a New Year’s Concert is the Napoleon March op.156. With this work, which had its premiere in 1854, Johann Strauss sided in the Crimean War with the English and the French under their ruler Napoleon III, to whom the piece was dedicated. That it was possible to put one over on a regime as strict as Prince Metternich’s in Austria was proved by his father, the elder Johann Strauss, with the waltz Paris, composed in 1838 for his Paris concerts: in this piece he quotes the Marseillaise, which had been banned by Metternich. It took some courage for the publisher Haslinger to issue the work shortly after its premiere, in spite of the Paris waltz’s highly political finale. Another product of Johann Strauss senior’s visit to Paris was the Versailles Galop, in which the woodwind with virtuosic staccati engage in a brilliant duel with the strings playing pizzicato. “Here Beelzebub is making music with a full orchestra”, commented Heinrich Heine.
Greeted with thunderous applause at its first performance in April 1860, the Orpheus Quadrille was the Waltz King’s response to the successful Viennese premiere of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld at the Carltheater. That also explains the many echoes of Offenbach in this rousing piece.
The fifth novelty in this New Year’s Concert comes from the pen of Josef Strauss, whose Laxenburg Polka celebrates the birth of Crown Prince Rudolf von Habsburg in the Vienna suburb of Laxenburg. And the programme presents two further examples of the Waltz King’s younger brother’s genius: his classic waltz from 1864 Dorfschwalben aus Österreich (Village Swallows from Austria), inspired by August Silberstein’s collection of stories of the same name, and the gossamery polka mazurka Die Libelle (The Dragonfly).
photo: Terry LinkeThe first encore, traditionally followed by the Blue Danube Waltz (1867) and Radetzky March (1848), is also by Josef Strauss: with his Sport Polka (1864) the Philharmonic allude to the European Football Championship, which is being held in Vienna in 2008. The year’s second great sporting event, the Summer Olympics in Beijing, is saluted by the orchestra with an early work of the elder Johann Strauss, his exotically coloured Chinese Galop (1828) with its echoes of Mozart’s “Turkish” March.
Joseph Hellmesberger junior, erstwhile Konzertmeister of the Court Opera and conductor of the Philharmonic, is represented with his galop Kleiner Anzeiger (Classified Advertiser), composed in 1876 for the annual ball of the Concordia press club, Joseph Lanner with his 1840 waltz Hofball-Tänze (Court-Ball Dances). Otherwise, the 2008 New Year’s Concert is dominated by works of the Waltz King, Johann Strauss junior: the overture to his first stage work, Indigo und die 40 Räuber (Indigo and the 40 Thieves, 1871) and the quick polka Die Bajadere (The Bayadere) based on motifs from that operetta; the waltz Freuet Euch des Lebens (Enjoy Life, 1870), dedicated to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde; the polka française Bluette (1863), composed with his wife Jetty in mind; the Tritsch-Tratsch Polka (1858), inspired by the famous Viennese playwright Johann Nestroy’s farce with songs Der Tritschtratsch (The Gossip); the Russian March (1886) written for Tsar Alexander III; the Kaiser-Walzer (Emperor Waltz, 1889), composed for the visit of the Austrian emperor to the German emperor and first performed at the opening of Berlin’s new Königsbau concert hall; and the polka française Die Pariserin (The Parisienne, 1860), intended for a trip to Paris that failed to materialize.
Walter Dobner © 2007
Translation: Richard Evidon
