NEW YORK, NY.- If the Vienna Philharmonics annual New Years Concert is a global success, its legacy and reach rest on five pillars: a marvelous orchestra; internationally renowned conductors; a timeless repertoire, by the Strauss family and other composers of the 19th century; a splendid location, the gilded Musikverein; and TV broadcasts watched most recently by some 1.2 million people in 92 countries on five continents.
The event, which returns this weekend with Franz Welser-Möst leading the Philharmonic, is by now a familiar one, and a multiday affair with three concerts. Between the preview performance, the New Years Eve Concert and the New Years Concert, conductors and the orchestra are faced with the extreme demands of an emotionally and physically challenging marathon. Just days after the series of concerts, CDs and DVDs of the Jan. 1 concert are released for sale worldwide.
In the 19th century, the repertoire of todays New Years Concert was part of a diverse concert business in the many entertainment venues that existed in almost every district of Vienna, including open-air stages. On weekends, this mixture of Viennese popular music, including swinging waltzes, wild polkas and military marches, enthused thousands of visitors, often as many as 10,000.
Gerald Heidegger, the editor-in-chief of the Austrian Broadcasting Corp.s online services, rightly said in the series Straussmania on Topos, produced with the Vienna Institute of Contemporary and Cultural History: Our image of the Biedermeier era is slightly distorted. It is not completely true that the era of the authoritarian state of Chancellor Metternich only led us to retreat into a private sphere, when one considers the music played in public.
This kind of popular music was revolutionary in terms of its exuberance and the physical proximity encouraged by new forms of dance, and it accompanied Viennas booming development into one of the worlds largest cities in the rapid globalization during the years leading up to World War I. Today, in another era of fast-moving developments in technology and politics, the music has not lost any of its emotional impact; people still seem to seek joyful distractions.
The ostensible lightness of the countless waltzes, polkas and marches, however, hides a technique that challenges the musicians. Crucial to pulling it off is a nonverbal rapport between the orchestra and the conductor another characteristic quality of the New Years Concert. And the selection of the repertoire requires an exciting dramaturgy in the combination of familiar and unknown pieces. This year, Welser-Möst has dedicated some 70% of the program to new works.
In the 19th century, the Strauss bands were very much competitors of the Philharmonic, which as the Vienna State Opera orchestra thrilled audiences in the Court Opera Theater while having to play for additional income as the private company known as the Vienna Philharmonic. Conductor Ernst Theis has researched the early interactions between these orchestras and noted that Eduard Strauss gave a New Years concert with a 60-person orchestra as early as Jan. 1, 1871, playing not only waltzes and polkas, but also lieder and opera excerpts.
A report from 1872 shows, however, that many members of the Philharmonic thought the Strauss clan and their music harmed the reputation of the Philharmonic concerts. Still, in 1894, the Philharmonic played at the celebrations marking Johann Strauss IIs 50 years in the business, and a few months before his death in 1899, he conducted the Court Opera orchestra during the performance of his Die Fledermaus for the first and last time, the final success of a remarkable career.
This ambivalence toward the Strauss family would change after World War I. From 1927 onward, conductor Clemens Krauss in particular repeatedly chose to perform pieces from the Strauss repertoire, including at the Salzburg Festival. It was only in 1934, when he succumbed to the temptations of the Nazi regime and abruptly left Vienna for Berlin, that the Philharmonics infatuation with Strauss ended.
After the Anschluss in 1938, Krauss returned to Austria and revived the tradition of Johann Strauss concerts (a reference to both father and son). Musician Clemens Hellsberg, writing in 1992, and historian Fritz Trümpi, in 2011, have emphasized Krauss role as the initiator of the Johann Strauss concert then termed an Extraordinary Concert as the calendar turned from 1939 to 1940. The proceeds went to the National Socialist wartime winter relief fund.
Krauss soon developed the next important pillar of the New Years Concert on its way to becoming a global music event: radio broadcasts throughout the German Reich. In November 1940, a contract with the Reich Radio Corp. established that there would be four Philharmonic Academies in the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna played for Greater German Radio on Dec. 13, 1940, and Jan. 1 (a Johann Strauss concert), Jan. 25 and March 15, 1941 conducted by Krauss.
Without any intervention by Nazi potentates, the refreshing and emotionally uplifting waltzing bliss was a perfect fit with National Socialist propaganda, in particular its broadcasting policy as were Mozart and Lehár. The program notes for the first of these series performed in Vienna not only stressed the intended mass impact of the contribution to German music, but also included ideological emphasis on the early history of waltz compositions in suburban inns as an expression of the East Bavarian tribe that stood here on advance border watch, which was, of course, a complete distortion and misinterpretation of the cultural developments in Vienna during the Biedermeier period.
The politicization of the music of the Strauss family and their milieu was taken to extremes when Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels even had the composers partly Jewish descent covered up by falsifying the baptismal registers in Vienna. Incidentally, this act was accompanied by a diary entry in which Goebbels revealed the sheer absurdity of his antisemitic beliefs:
Some clever so-and-so has discovered that Joh. Strauss is an eighth Jewish. I forbid this from being made public. For firstly, it isnt proven, and secondly, I do not want to have German cultural heritage in its entirety gradually undermined in this manner. In the end we will be left with only Widukind, Heinrich the Lion and Rosenberg. Thats not a lot. Mussolini goes about things much more cleverly here. He occupies the entire history of Rome from the earliest days of Antiquity for himself. We are just parvenus in comparison. Im doing what I can about it. That is also the Führers will.
The selling point the New Years Concert enjoys today as a global event applied neither during World War II nor in the years that followed; it remained limited to Germany and, after the war, Austria. The former Johann Strauss concert was firmly a tradition, and Josef Krips, who conducted the Jan. 1, 1946, concert the first to be billed as a New Years Concert noted succinctly: I began 1946 with the first New Years Concert in peacetime.
Krips, stigmatized by the Nazis as a half-Jewish conductor, clearly had no problem with the continuation of the concert, whose last performance had taken place when the mood was apocalyptic. The New Years Concert lived on as solely Austrian cultural heritage with Krauss as conductor until 1954, followed by Willi Boskovsky, the Philharmonics concertmaster, until 1979.
In 1959, the New Years Concert began to develop into an international event with its first television broadcast. The first color broadcast took place a decade later; the first overseas one, in 1972. And since 1980, the New Years Concert has been led by alternating, international conductors a move that reflected its global interest.
But the formative phase of the New Years Concert the Nazi era went unexamined in Austria and abroad until the past decade. Today, those years are extensively documented on the Philharmonics website. International music history in particular can make an important contribution to a critical assessment of Austrias role in National Socialism, World War II and the Holocaust.
In 2013, for instance, after much preliminary work, Clemens Hellsberg, then the chair of the Vienna Philharmonic, initiated a critical documentary on the orchestra and commissioned a comprehensive study by a team of historians including me on members of the orchestra who were persecuted, murdered or forced into exile. This was followed in 2014 by the international conference The Arts of Vienna: A Proud History, A Painful Past.
Those artists whose lives were sidelined by the Third Reich will be memorialized with stones, placed at the sites where they last lived, that Daniel Froschauer, the Philharmonics chair, will present to the public on March 23. In 2023, then, the orchestra aims to broadcast not just a rich tradition, but also a message of peace.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.