Carl Michael Ziehrer was a Viennese light music king whose work enjoyed popularity nearly as great as Johann Strauss II himself, and his waltz Weana Mäd'ln (1888) did become part of the intractable literature of the Viennese Bon Bon. Despite his glittering success and the challenge he put to the sons of Strauss, Ziehrer outlived the golden age of Vienna by nearly a decade and died in poverty, already forgotten. The sheer mass of music he produced before his fortunes changed is astounding; it adds up to about 600 works, of ...
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Carl Michael Ziehrer was a Viennese light music king whose work enjoyed popularity nearly as great as Johann Strauss II himself, and his waltz Weana Mäd'ln (1888) did become part of the intractable literature of the Viennese Bon Bon. Despite his glittering success and the challenge he put to the sons of Strauss, Ziehrer outlived the golden age of Vienna by nearly a decade and died in poverty, already forgotten. The sheer mass of music he produced before his fortunes changed is astounding; it adds up to about 600 works, of which 22 to 24 were operettas. Conductor Christian Pollack and the Slovak State Philharmonic assemble a program of the overtures to 11 of Ziehrer's operettas in Marco Polo's Carl Michael Ziehrer: Operetta Overtures. This disc demonstrates that Ziehrer was certainly one of the most interesting composers in the genre; for example, the opening of Der Fremdenführer (The Tourist Guide, 1902) starts with an unpredictable, questing progression with the orchestra swelling in and out of the...
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