Concert in Suzhou

Johann Strauss II
Csárdás from the opera «Knight Pásmán»
op. 441 (1892)

In his review of The Gypsy Baron the music critic and writer Max Kalbeck caught people’s attention with the following remark, ‘After the interesting indications which Johann Strauss II has given us in this his latest work, we cherish more intensely than ever the happy hope that we will soon be able to greet the graceful muse of this composer of genius in the place where we have long wished to meet her: in the opera house.’
Comments like these certainly fell on fruitful ground with Strauss, as his own artistic intentions were themselves heading in the same direction. However, it was a path that would lead the composer to failure. While his Simplicius, with its leanings towards Wagner and a patriotically old German atmosphere, was a strange hybrid of opera and operetta and no more than a modest success, the work which Strauss composed for the Court Opera House, Knight Pasman, op. 441, first performed there on New Year’s Day 1892 and specifically described as a ‘comic opera’, was a resounding flop.

Although the audience at the eagerly awaited premiere gave the work a reasonably friendly reception, the reviews which appeared over the following days unsparingly laid bare its weaknesses. While there was overall agreement that the opera was a failure, the critics did concede with the same unanimity that the ballet music at the beginning of the third act was an absolute masterpiece, and that it was its czardas that was particularly captivating. There are very few such dances among Johann Strauss’s works; one thinks of the Pest Czardas written in 1846 for the Hungarian city of (Buda)pest and Rosalinde’s aria from the second act of Die Fledermaus.

It is astonishing how well Strauss was able to empathize with what were for him exotic musical idioms. This is especially the case with the Hungarian style, or more exactly what people thought of as such before Bartók and Kodály — and the czardas from Knight Pasman is a brilliant example.

Synopsis: Dr. Thomas Aigner

Translation: Dr. Leigh H. Bailey

Johann Strauss II. : Opera «Ritter Pázmán»
© by WJSO-Archive

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