"Pleasure-Seeker". On 3rd July 1860, Josef Strauss announced in the newspaper Fremden-Blatt that on that evening in the Vienna Volksgarten a festival concert would be organised for his benefit. He promised to perform some new works, including excerpts from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the Overture to William Vincent Wallace’s opera Loreley and Schumann’s Overture to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, none of which had been heard in Vienna. Of his own compositions, his waltz Lustschwärmer and the Polka française Mignon were promised, and the finale was to include fireworks by Anton Stuwer. The waltz Lustschwärmer was not among the pieces in fact played on that evening in the Volksgarten. According to the composer’s notes, as well as those of horn-player Franz Sabay, the first performance of this amusing work actually took place on 24th July 1860. Naturally, one wonders what the composer had in mind when he chose the title Lustschwärmer. For the illustrator of the piano score title-page, the person alluded to is a man in his prime in a moment of reverie at a festive ball, with a cigar in his hand and a bottle of wine nearby. The picture also shows a pair of sweethearts in a drawing room and another couple entwined and suspended in the air. Contemporary reports give no information regarding the musical content of the waltz: the listener is thus instructed to follow his own imagination. It is a thoroughly merry, varied and, on the whole, very melodious work. The piano and orchestral scores of the Lustschwärmer waltz were published by Carl Haslinger in October 1860.
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Painting: A Parisian Bal
Artist: Jean Beraud
Date: 1880
Wiener Philharmoniker
Lorin Maazel
Neujahrskonzert 2005
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