Summer Night Concert 2025

Of Dances and Desires

This year’s Summer Night Concert from the Vienna Philharmonic marks no fewer than three débuts: Tugan Sokhiev, Piotr Beczała and the Vienna Boys Choir. They are all appearing in an extremely varied programme featuring music dating from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Both the conductor and the soloist can in fact look back on a long association with the Vienna Philharmonic: Tugan Sokhiev first appeared at the helm of the orchestra in 2009, while Piotr Beczała made his début in 1996.

On a sad occasion, the concert begins with the Air from the Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major by Johann Sebastian Bach. "Music also speaks where words fail. Out of our deep sorrow, we will begin the Summer Night Concert with Johann Sebastian Bach's Air. Our thoughts are with the bereaved families and friends," said Daniel Froschauer, Chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic. Following an attack at a school in Graz which claimed the lives of eleven people three days before the concert, Austria is in a state of national mourning.

Jacques Offenbach tried to succeed in Vienna not only with his operettas, but also as an opera composer. He received a commission from the Court Opera to compose Die Rheinnixen (The Rhine Nixies). The work combines the world of a Romantic opera involving fairies and pseudo-historical figures – it is set in South-West Germany in the early sixteenth century during the time of the Knights’ Revolt – with that of a French grand opera. It received eleven performances between its opening night on 4 February 1864 and the end of October but failed to retain a place for itself in the repertory, in part as a result of problems with its singers. The orchestra at these performances was the Vienna Philharmonic in its secondary role as an opera orchestra. It may be added that Wagner held it against Offenbach that the French composer had made his début at the Court Opera at a time when he himself was struggling to mount his own music drama Tristan und Isolde. After dozens of rehearsals, the Viennese management gave instructions for Offenbach’s work to be put into rehearsal instead, so Wagner’s work was abandoned, unperformed. The fact that Wagner had already written Das Rheingold gave wags a chance to poke fun at Offenbach’s attempt to earn “pure gold” (“reines Gold”) while Wagner was achieving nothing at all (“rein nix”) in Vienna. The melody of the Chorus of Elves in Act Three is already heard in the Overture, Offenbach playing with motifs of reminiscence in the way that Wagner did with his leitmotifs. Offenbach later recalled this chorus in his final opera, Les Contes d’Hoffmann, where the song of the Rhineland elves is transformed into a Venetian Barcarole.

In 1872, Georges Bizet wrote the incidental music for Alphonse Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne. Central to the play’s plot is the love of a Provençal peasant called Frédéri for a young woman, who does not appear in the play and is known only as “the woman from Arles”. Frédéri ends by taking his own life. Bizet’s incidental music found its way into the concert hall in the form of two suites, the first of which was prepared by the composer himself, while the second was made posthumously in 1879 by his friend Ernest Guiraud. The final farandole is a Provençal folk dance performed on the Feast of Saint Eligius, the patron saint of horses and husbandry. The two numbers from the incidental music that Guiraud combined with each other – a marchlike chorus and a fleet-footed dance – are initially easy to identify but are finally overlaid at a speed that is positively frenzied.

Bizet’s opera Carmen received its first performances at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in March 1875. The realistic depiction of working-class people and, above all, the portrayal of an independent woman who lives her life beyond the confines of bourgeois convention meant that the work was initially denied the success that its composer was hoping for. His health was already failing and he died only three months later. By the October of that year, however, the work was already setting out on its triumphal progress through the world’s opera houses, starting at the Vienna Court Opera, albeit in a version in which Ernest Guiraud, who would later assume responsibility for the Second Suite from L’Arlésienne, replaced the spoken dialogue with sung recitatives. The Prelude to Act Three introduces us to the picturesque mountain setting of an Andalusian smugglers’ den, where Carmen and Don José – a former army officer who, now a deserter, is consumed by his jealous love – go about their nightly business. Don José’s Flower Song from Act Two takes us back to the start of his fatal relationship with Carmen: one of the workers in a cigarette factory in Seville, she is arrested for injuring a fellow worker but he helps her to escape and as a result is thrown into prison himself. Carmen smuggles a file into his cell but his honour as a soldier prevents him from using it. She also throws him a flower which, now withered, symbolizes his love for her and impels him to see her again. The fatal outcome of this love is already indicated by a motif on the English horn that is associated with fate and that is heard at the start of his aria.

Whereas Don José’s aria pays homage to a single cassia flower, the Waltz of the Flowers from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is part of a divertissement in which the male and female dancers celebrate the successful rescue of the Nutcracker Prince by a fearless young woman after he has been captured by the Mouse King. The individual scenes are only loosely held together, a feature of the work that was criticized when it was first performed at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1892, but this very feature has proved ideal for all manner of later interpretations. Nine months before the first night Tchaikovsky had already prepared and conducted a Nutcracker Suite. It too ends with the Waltz of the Flowers.

Edvard Grieg’s music for Peer Gynt was likewise intended for the theatre and was first heard in 1876 in the form of incidental music for Henrik Ibsen’s play about a peasant boy who travels through a world inhabited by both humans and fabulous creatures. The performances were given in Christiana (modern Oslo) in 1876. In 1888 and 1891, Grieg drew on the incidental music for two orchestral suites that he arranged for the concert hall. The first was prepared in Leipzig, where Grieg was staying at the time, and begins with the Romantic “Morning Mood”, an Allegretto pastorale in which gentle woodwinds and strings describe an idyllic dawn.

From Norway, we travel to Bohemia for the first of Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances. In 1878, the composer was inspired by the rhythms and motifs of his native country to write eight dances for piano duet, which he orchestrated soon afterwards. This first set of dances opens with a Furiant notable for its characteristic alternation of duple- and triple-time metres. Dvořák’s model was the Hungarian Dances of Johannes Brahms, who did much to promote the young Bohemian composer’s career, recommending him for a bursary in Vienna and acting as a go-between with his own publisher, Fritz Simrock.

With Pietro Mascagni, the scene shifts to Sicily. His opera Cavalleria rusticana (Rustic Chivalry) takes place on Easter Day. The Intermezzo depicts a village atmosphere while the villagers are attending Easter Mass. This contemplative scene is in stark contrast to the dramatic events that follow in this verismo opera and that culminate in a deadly duel. The world première took place in Rome in 1890. Two years later, Mascagni conducted his opera at the International Music and Theatre Exhibition that was held in the Prater in Vienna. “It is a unique spectacle, this sudden elemental emergence of such a talented composer,” the Vienna press wrote about Mascagni’s one-act opera, which had won a competition for such works and become an overnight success. Mascagni also conducted a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Musikverein in 1901, returning to the city to conduct a handful of other operas in the 1920s.

Giacomo Puccini was another frequent visitor to Vienna between 1907 and 1923. By the time of his final visit he was already seriously ill but he was still able to play excerpts from his new opera, Turandot, on the piano to some of his friends in the city. In the event he was unable to complete the score of the opera, which was premièred in Milan in 1926, two years after his death. Audiences at the Vienna State Opera heard the work later that same year. The most famous aria, “Nessun dorma”, is a key moment for Prince Calaf at the start of Act Three. Princess Turandot has ordered her courtiers to find out the name of the unknown prince before dawn. By now he has already answered the three riddles that the cruel princess sets all her would-be suitors, the first candidate to do so. Not only has he saved his own life, he has also won the right to marry her. But he agrees not to go ahead with the wedding if she can discover his true identity before dawn. In his aria – its title means “None shall sleep” – Calaf suspects with good reason that Turandot has learnt to know what love is as a result of his encounter with her and that he will be victorious when the new day dawns.

Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera Samson et Dalila, which was premièred in Weimar in 1877, introduces us to the Old Testament conflict between the Israelites and the Philistines. The second scene of Act Three is set in the Temple of Dagon, where the Philistines are holding a Bacchanalian celebration to mark their victory over the mighty Samson, a victory that they owe to the seductive wiles of their priestess, Delilah. Thanks to its harmonic play with its leading notes and the pseudo-exotic colouring that these acquire in consequence, the Danse bacchanale has an ability to beguile its listeners, first through its opening oboe solo, then in an incessantly propulsive dance interrupted by a rhapsodic episode.

A Hungarian march and a play – Goethe’s Faust – that is set in various places in Germany. The idea of combining the two of them is one that raises questions, but this is precisely what Hector Berlioz did in his “dramatic legend”, La Damnation de Faust, which received its first performance in 1846. Here, the hero does indeed wake up on the Hungarian puszta, where he meets a band of soldiers on their way to battle. This was a device that allowed the composer to introduce his version of the Rákóczy March at this point in his score. This march is based on a melody from the early eighteenth century with which the Hungarians bewailed their oppression by the Habsburgs and hailed their leader, Franz II Rákóczy, as their liberator. When this March is set alongside Saint-Saëns’s Bacchanal, the listener cannot fail to be struck by the exotic, pseudo-oriental character of both pieces, a characteristic that set out from nineteenth-century Paris and led to the most varied of eastern locales.

With the Overture to the opera Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor), the orchestra recalls its founder, the Königsberg-born composer and conductor Otto Nicolai. At the time that the Vienna Philharmonic was founded in 1842, Nicolai was living in the building on the Seilerstätte that since 2000 has housed the Haus der Musik, which includes the Vienna Philharmonic Museum and Historical Archive. To mark the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the opening of this Haus der Musik the Vienna Philharmonic is dedicating this performance of Nicolai’s Overture to one of Vienna’s most important musical institutions. The Vienna Court Opera declined to give the first performance of Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor and the composer’s resultant disappointment was the main reason for his premature departure from the city in 1847. The opera was premièred in Berlin in 1849 and it was there that Nicolai died only a few weeks later.

The song “Wenn es Abend wird” is one of the most popular of all operetta hits. (The refrain runs “Say hello to the sweet and ravishing women of fair Vienna”.) It comes from Emmerich Kálmán’s operetta Gräfin Mariza (Countess Maritza), which received its first performance at the Theater an der Wien in 1924. When the curtain rises on Act One, Count Tassilo of Endrödy-Wittemburg is brooding on the sad fate that he shared with many other aristocrats six years after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy. Following the loss of his possessions, the former landowner, now down at heel, is working as a bailiff on Countess Maritza’s estates, where he is living under an assumed Hungarian name. Tassilo sings this song while hankering after a better past and thinking fondly of the former imperial metropolis.

Silvia Kargl and Friedemann Pestel

Translation: texthouse