Summer in Vienna

Vienna in summer is oppressively hot, but it smells like linden blossoms. The Viennese people typically retreat from the city center, congregating instead at the cooler Heurigen  (wine taverns) on its verdant outskirts. In centuries past, the Habsburg monarchs spent the season in their summer palace at Schönbrunn. Since the 1920s, the Vienna Philharmonic has left town in the warmer months, too, giving its summer concert series for international audiences at the Salzburg Festival. (The Philharmonic has also given an annual “summer night concert” at Schönbrunn since 2004.) Back in the city, life takes a slower pace. Business lulls. One dreams of respite in the cool vestibule of a 19th-century building, the shade of forest bowers, the magic of another place or another time.

Music, of course, allows listeners to get away without need for travel — and that kind of escape has a rich history in Vienna, too. Tonight’s program explores such journeys, charting where music might take us on a summer evening.

The dance and operetta music of the Strauss family sounds throughout Vienna to this day. In their time, Johann Strauss, Jr., his father, Johann Sr., and his brothers Josef and Eduard composed the soundtrack of cosmopolitan urban leisure. Known as the “Waltz King,” Johann Jr. was one of the great musical stars of the late 19th century. His enormous output won him fans the world over and drove a new, global market for popular classical music.

Many of these pieces offer an imaginary geographic escape, carrying listeners beyond the Habsburg metropolis of Vienna. The Carnival in Rome (1873), Johann Jr.’s second operetta, is based on a French comedy set in Rome at carnival time. Strauss’s operetta paints the sunlit Italy of northern dreams, full of tarantella rhythms. The entr’acte from A Night in Venice (1883) extends the fantasy to the floating city, granting Vienna its own Venice in three-quarter time. Some works turned toward other sorts of exoticism: The Gypsy Baron (1885), for example, unfolds at the margins of the Habsburg lands near Timișoara in present-day Romania, indulging a fantasy of Romani otherness that loomed large in contemporary Viennese culture.

If these pieces carried their first audiences abroad, the same waltzes, polkas, and quadrilles take modern-day listeners back to an idealized version of the Viennese past. In this 19th-century idyll, infectious music swirls through opulent ballrooms as dancers leave their troubles behind. Johann Jr. wrote his rustic, French-inspired Bauern-Polka (Peasants’ Polka) in 1863. The polka, a dance featuring two quick steps and a slide, was the center of a 19th-century craze across Europe — although not quite at the scale of the Viennese waltz. Also in the ballroom, the bittersweet Friedenspalmen Walzer (Peace Palm Waltz) of Josef Strauss — Johann Jr.’s middle brother — is a return home. Composed in 1866 in the aftermath of the Austro-Prussian War, this waltz and others helped stage Viennese identity for a foreign audience during a time of reconstruction and renewal. With this music in the air, we sense an earlier Vienna; the complexity of its present temporarily wiped away.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 34 belongs to a still older Austrian past: one of Classical clarity, before the 19th century’s commercial markets reshaped musical life. Mozart wrote this symphony in Salzburg in 1780, his last before moving to Vienna the following year. The work’s compact three-movement form, its key of C major, and its declamatory dotted rhythms evoke a period of courtly sociability, but the work also anticipates the complexity that would emerge in Mozart’s later works. The young composer’s career was ascendant, his greatest successes ahead of him. This period, too, has become the stuff of Austrian national myth. In today’s Vienna, the Mozartian and Straussian pasts intermingle freely, costumed orchestras and infectious melodies offering retreat to a past that never quite existed.

The 1938 opera Daphne by Richard Strauss — no relation to Vienna’s Johann or Josef — stages a more total escape in its reframing of Greek mythology. Tonight, we hear the work’s introduction and transcendent finale. The full opera opens on the eve of the festival of Dionysus, with the nymph Daphne full of dread. Alone in the forest, she sings to the trees, rejecting the adult human world and its demands. A plaintive oboe melody previews the accompaniment of this song to the trees. When Daphne’s childhood friend Leukippos appears and confesses his love, she refuses him — she desires only the plants, the wind, and the light. The god Apollo arrives in disguise, also taken with Daphne’s beauty. He and Leukippos quarrel, and Apollo, revealing himself, kills Leukippos with an arrow; Daphne, devastated, blames herself. The repentant god begs that she be granted her one true desire: union with the nature she so loves. The opera closes in a wordless scene as Daphne transforms into a laurel tree, her voice rising without text — sublimated at once into nature and into the music of the orchestra.

Set beside Daphne’s transfiguration, the Strauss family’s sunlit Rome and welcoming Vienna might look like the lightest of diversions, and Mozart’s Classical poise like an anachronism. On another level, however, we can hear these works as variations on a single idea. Each offers a way out: abroad to an exotic elsewhere, backward to an idealized past, or inward, beyond the self entirely. The spirit of the Viennese summer elevates such escapes as part of everyday life. For this concert, then, it is only fitting to let the trees sing, the carnival glitter, and the music transport us where it may.

— Rebecca Epstein-Boley

Rebecca Epstein-Boley is a cultural historian based in Chicago, Illinois.