Die Fledermaus Johann Strauss II Revenge is a dish best served with champagne. Conductor: GARY THOR WEDOW Stage Director: DOROTHY DANNER Performed in English with English Supertitles

 It’s late 19th century Vienna, the home of Gabriel Von Eisenstein, a wealthy man about town, who loves a good practical joke, even if it humiliates a friend. But what happens when that friend hatches an elaborate scheme to teach the womanizing Von Eisenstein a lesson he won’t soon forget? The answer is revealed in the grandest masked ball of the season, where the champagne flows freely and identity is obscured!

About the Composer

Johann Strauss II 

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899) was born into the Viennese musical family known as “The Waltz Kings.” In the early part of the nineteenth century the elder Johann Strauss (1804-1849) had refashioned the rural dances in three-quarter time known as Ländler, smoothing them out for elegant Viennese balls, making them “glide.” Strauss had three sons--Johann, Josef, and Eduard--whom he did not want to become musicians, for he knew it was a precarious life. Their mother, however, made sure her sons had music training and in 1844, when he was nineteen, young Johann made his debut as a musician, conducting his own waltzes at the famous Dommayer’s café in the suburb of Hietzing. Supposedly his father hired thugs to interrupt the concert but they, along with the rest of the audience, were enchanted with Strauss’ music and failed to do so. Much was made of the rivalry between father and son, which lasted for five years, until the elder Strauss’ death in 1849. Johann’s brother Josef had studied both music and engineering but eventually succumbed to his elder brother’s wishes to help conduct his orchestra, which had acquired an international reputation during immensely successful concert tours. Josef also composed waltzes, and such is their quality that they are often mistaken for the work of his more famous brother. Sadly, the self-effacing Josef died young, falling from the conductor’s podium in Warsaw. Johann’s relationship with Eduard, a capable but not brilliant musician, was quite different. Eduard remained poisonously jealous of his brother and after his death started a huge bonfire, in which he burned Johann’s unpublished manuscripts. All of the Strausses wrote waltzes but Johann II was the only one to compose vocal music. During a meeting with Strauss in 1865, the master of French operetta, Jacques Offenbach, whose works were currently enjoying triumphs in Vienna, suggested that he write for the stage. At first Strauss was perplexed by this. He had never considered such a thing and in any case the local demand for operetta was being fulfilled by Franz von Suppé. For a while Strauss remained adamant, even though urged by publishers and theater managers to write for the theater. Eventually he changed his mind--his wife, Jetty, a singer, played a major role in this--and with Offenbach’s works as his model, Strauss created sixteen operettas in the years between 1870 to 1890. The first work from his pen was to a libretto by Josef Braun, von Suppé’s librettist, Die lustigen Weiber von Wien (The Merry Wives of Vienna). It never saw production, however, for the two Viennese “goddesses of the light muse,” sopranos Marie Geistinger and Josefine Gallmeyer, quarelled bitterly over who should undertake the principal role. Strauss withdrew the piece in disgust. Strauss was on the podium at the Vienna Opera, conducting Die Fledermaus on 22 May 1899; he became overheated from exertion and developed a fatal case of pneumonia while walking home in the chilly evening weather. Hans Fantel, the author of a history of the Strauss family, The Waltz Kings, has the following perceptions about Johann’s place in musical and political history: There is a certain fitness in the fact that Strauss did not live to see the dawn of the twentieth century. He would not have been at home in it. . . . According to an Austrian quip, “The Emperor of Austria ruled until the death of Johann Strauss.” The joke contains historic truth. With the passing of the Waltz King, the real cohesion of the Austrian empire had gone. What held Austria together was the force of a myth--perhaps the profoundest element within the political imagination--and Johann Strauss, without knowing it, had become a keystone in the structure of that myth.

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