It is time to axe this relic of the Nazi era
The time is fast approaching when millions of musiclovers worldwide turn on the telly, turn off their critical faculties, and sink into the warm bath of nostalgia that is the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s New Year’s Day Concert. There’s something about the sight of 80 or so chaps (it is mostly chaps) in their penguin suits, playing music much of which was already backwardlooking when it was written – Vienna was beset by political and social strife in the mid 19th century and needed a comforting myth of “old Vienna” – that makes normally sane and balanced people go all soft in the head.
It wasn’t always thus. There was a time when the waltz, far from being an embalmed relic, actually energised people and made them misbehave. In the 19th century, visitors to Vienna such as Mark Twain were shocked at how lascivious the dance was. When the great fin-desiècle Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler wrote Reigen about a group of people who move from one amoral erotic encounter to another, the waltz was surely the “round dance” he had in mind.
But by the late 19th century, misty-eyed sentiment was taking over, and the waltz has now been thoroughly tamed. It’s become the symbol for “good old Vienna”, a sentiment the whole world seems to have adopted. And the focus of that nostalgia, the moment when the entire planet seems to be swaying gently in three-four time with tears of sentiment in its eyes, is the New Year’s Day Concert.
There are only two thousand or so audience members for each of the three performances in the opulent Golden Hall of the Musikverein, the Vienna hall where the concert takes place, but around the world in almost a hundred countries there will be more than 60million viewers, for the broadcast of the third concert on January 1. Even in the People’s Republic of China, they’ll be swaying to the sounds of a waltz.
This transformation of something which well into the 19th century was a true local dance rooted in the rustic ländler of Beethoven and Schubert, into a stiffened “globalised” ritual has been astonishingly swift. Many people think the New Year’s Day Concert must be as old as the orchestra itself, which was born in 1842. In fact, the idea of a year-end concert celebrating the great dance composers of Vienna, focused on the so-called “waltz kings” of the Strauss dynasty but on occasion stretching back to Mozart and outwards to Verdi and Tchaikovsky, was actually born as recently as 1939.
Vienna had by that date been absorbed into the Nazi imperium by the Anschluss, and the orchestra enthusiastically set about purging its ranks of Jews and communists, and its programmes of Mahler (not that they had embraced the great Viennese composer with any great enthusiasm before that). To suck up to the Nazi gauleiter of Vienna, the icily murderous Baldur von Schirach, the orchestra’s conductor Clemens Krauss suggested a fundraising concert for a Nazi charity. Schirach agreed, and on December 31 there was a concert entirely of Johann Strauss II.
Thus the world’s best-loved annual concert was born. It is true that Krauss, far from being a Nazi sympathiser, actually helped many Jews to escape from Munich in the Thirties. But the fact that the orchestra didn’t own up to its Nazi past until 2013 gives the impression of an organisation that suffers from stiffened intellectual and emotional sinews. Things change with glacial slowness. Even now, some of the orchestral player positions are like family businesses, passed down from one member to the next, and the number of female players remains glaringly low compared to other European orchestras. The New Year’s Day concert is similarly hidebound. The programme may change a little – a bit more Von Suppé, a bit less Strauss the Younger – but The Blue Danube and
Radetzky March must always be included in the encores.
The upside, we’re always told, is the orchestra’s deep-rooted sense of tradition, revealed in its special deep-grained sound (those Viennese horns!) and the enticing way the second beat arrives a touch early, features that make this orchestra’s waltzes particularly authentic.
But even those virtues can wear thin, if harped on for too long, too uncritically. In recent years, I’ve heard more lively performances of Viennese waltzes and polkas from American and British orchestras. There’s no chance the New Year’s Day Concert could ever be retired; it’s too much of a money-spinner for that.
But there are times I wish it could be.
Vienna’s New Year’s Day Concert was conceived in 1939 as a fundraiser for a Nazi charity