Many years ago I was on a concert tour of the United States when I met a solitary instrument maker in a village miles from nowhere. He told me about a flute quartet that met there every month and that had just played “I bin a Steirerbua“ (I'm a lad from Styria) from a collection of German folksongs, Der Zupfgeigenhansl. He sang it to me, and I was amazed at the transformation that this old familiar song had undergone in the maple forests of New england: although the performers were convinced they were reproducing the music note-perfect, I could hear an American Puritan swing behind the notes of my muchloved song. It was almost impossible to recognise it arty longer. Once again I was forced to realise that the sort of music notation that is second nature to me with its lines and dots and circles is simply impossible to read when it comes with no instructions and the user has no idea what it means.
Dividing a note-value into minims, crotchets and quavers - or into triplets and so on - may produce arithmetical divisions, and may even be done in good faith; but the result is a monotonous metrical drone or the jeu perlé of many pianists that fills me with feelings of fear bordering on panic and that confuses identical cultured pearls with their multiform natural counterparts. In genuine folk music, be it from Styria, Bavaria, Hungary, Romania or wherever, the most complex rhythms are reproduced by very simple people with absolute assurance; but this is also the source of art music, and it is entirely possible, not to say probable, that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven would be just as shocked by the way we interpret their music as I myself was shocked by my little song.
Schubert and Johann Strauß are the only echt Viennese composers of international stature. Both of them naturally assume that musicians will understand their "language", which is the musical dialect of Vienna. The rhythmic subtleties, the deviations from what is metrically notated (metre and rhythm are by no means the same), and the breaks and joins in the melodic line cannot be expressed in notes: you have to know and understand and love them. - Naturally, all the little “tricks” and dialectal nuances in performance tend to become more and more pronounced from one generation to the next: what was originally a tiny pause in the Fledermaus Waltz is now interpreted as a noticeable break and said to be "echt wienerisch"- but not, I hope, today. And the famous “oom-pah-pah" - or, as the Viennese say, “ess-tam-tam” - in a waltz accompaniment is a thing of great delicacy whose rhythms resemble the complex pounding of the heart. To perform it is simple, but not at all easy! The second beat should be a little too early, but if it is, then it really is too early. Tradition is something that is handed down from generation to generation, but each time it is passed on, a little mud sticks to it. When I arrived in Vienna after the wart, there were still many players in the great orchestras whose fathers had perforrned in Strauß's band. Today's players are their grandsons and great-grandsons. Strauß was keen that his waltzes should not be played too quickly: the thrilling sense of momentum that sweeps you along with it was to come from a sense of calm motion. But recent fashions have changed all this. And there is now also a tendency to ignore the element of melancholy that is such an integral part of even Strauß's most carefree-seeming music.
And how much rnore difficult it is to tap in to the roots of Schubert's Viennese character, something that goes much further back in time and that is additionally based on the curiously sad dance tunes that Schubert is believed to have played so wonderfully well on the piano. Smiles and tears in Schubert and Strauß, but with the emphasis inverted.
Strauß was everywhere loved and wanted, and Berliners, too, were captivated by this expression of the Viennese way of life, with its sophisticated blend of the world of the intellect and that of feeling. He had already visited the city on a number of occasions to conduct concerts (for the first time with his own orchestra in October 1852), and his operetta A Night in Venice had been premièred here in October 1883 (the Pigeons of San Marco Polka comes from this work, and the brilliantly brief original “Berlin” version of the Overture is receiving its first performance here as the 20th century draws to a close) when he was invited to conduct a number of his own works at the official opening of the "Königsbau" in 1889. Of the 100-strong orchestra, he wrote to his step-daughter, "Alicerl", that it "is going through thick and thin with me. [...] I'm conducting with my little finger, I need only to flash my eyes at them and there’s no holding them back.” Among the works that he conducted at his concert on 19 Octobee were the Overture to Die Fledermaus, the Tritsch-Tratsch Polka and the Simplicius Waltz (published under the title Donauweibchen). But the great sensation was undoubtedly the first performance, on 21 October, of the Emperor Waltz that he had written specially for the occasion. Originally called Hand in Hand, it was intended to celebrate the alliance between the two emperors, Franz Joseph and Wilhelm. that had heen reaffirmed shortly beforehand in Berlin. The piece was twice encored and enthusiastically described in the newspapers: "The Emperor Waltz begins on a note of Prussian bellicosity, you can literally see and hear Old Fritz’s Guardsmen marching past - but then [...] everything again assumes an echt wienerisch dash and verve.”
In short, all the works included in the present recording are in some way related to Berlin. The waltz Seid umschlungen, Millionen was written for the International Exhibition of Music and Theatre and dedicated to Strauß's friend, Johannes Brahms, who returned the compliment by prevailing on his own publisher, Fritz Simrock, to issue it. It was the respect that Strauß felt for its dedicatee that inspired him to write the work in the first place. It was, he said, "spiced and seasoned without forfeiting the aim of a waltz". Brahms expressed his delight following the first performance in Vienna's Musikvereinssaal. The Kiser Franz Joseph I. Rettungs-Jubel Marsch  (Emperor Franz Josef I March of Rejoicing) was Strauß's reaction to the failed attempt to assassinate Franz Joseph on 18 February 1853. The quotation from the Austrian national anthem, Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser (God preserve the Emperor Franz), should presumably be parsed as a past tense here: God preserved the Emperor.