WBecause the “aftermath of New Year’s Eve might affect concert attendance unfavorably”, as the conductor Clemens Krauss feared, the very first New Year’s concert took place on New Year’s Eve – as a charity event in favor of the “Winter Relief Organization”, which uses the net proceeds to help the plight of the “comrades of the community”. “ should alleviate. It was December 31, 1939. War had been going on in Europe for four months. Some comfort, some distraction and lightness were badly needed. A program with the lively works of the Strauss dynasty seemed perfect for this, as it corresponded to the Minister of Propaganda’s wish to establish Vienna as a city “of optimism, music and conviviality”.
It was by no means a matter of course that the Vienna Philharmonic was chosen for this task. Although there were frequent points of contact between them and the Strauss family in the nineteenth century (e.g. the premiere of “Wiener Blut” in 1873), the Gentlemen’s Philharmonic actually considered this allegedly shallow functional and entertainment music beneath their dignity. The compositions by Johann and Josef Strauss were also written by very serious people and musicians such as Richard Wagner appreciated, who after all characterized his colleague as the most musical “skull of the present”. At that time, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the waltz, which had been considered disreputable and raunchy because of the physical proximity of the dancing partners, had long since become socially acceptable and had actually been an essential part of the Vienna Congress of 1814/15 bourgeois life. Time and again, contemporary sources read about a veritable “dance frenzy” that gripped all of Vienna like an illness, and this euphoria seems to have been welcome in the Metternich era of restoration. “Dance heats up the head, has an effect on the sexual system, and thus makes every thought of revolution disappear,” writes the writer and naturopath Maximilian Leopold Langenschwarz in his book “European Secrets of a Mediatized One: Metternich and Europe”. So it is no coincidence that the waltz, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century as an offshoot of the Ländler, found its final expression in the Vormärz. Composers such as Joseph Lanner were involved, and of course especially the Strauss dynasty, whose existence spanned the long nineteenth century, beginning with Johann Strauss the Father, born in 1804, and ending with the death of his youngest son Eduard in the same year 1916 that coincided with the aging Emperor Franz Joseph soon also the Danube monarchy was buried. The countless waltzes, marches, polkas and quadrilles that she penned provide the soundtrack of Kakan conviviality. Well-hearing contemporaries noticed that this music was by no means just cheap by the dozen. “Unfortunately not by me,” Brahms, who lives in Vienna by choice, sighed about the “Danube Waltz”. His “Hungarian Dances”, which he wrote just around this time, are essentially related to the great waltzes of the time: there is a lightness in them that knows how hard it is, a joie de vivre that already knows its transience, one that is just turning and now stands still, staggering, wanting to linger with an enrapturingly melancholic hesitation and demeanor before the maddeningly accelerated tidying finally puts an authoritative end to all soft profundity.