Strauss's Opera The Bat

It is a good thing to return, from time to time, to the Western music we grew familiar with before, so that we may bind the present of our taste to its past, and compare with awareness what is purely classical with what is akin to the classical. Therefore we present this evening a piece by Johann Strauss, called the King of the Waltz (he is the grandfather of the present Johann Strauss, the famous orchestra conductor), and each of the two had a share in spreading this kind of music throughout the world.

Johann Strauss was born and died in the last century. And though there are people who do not count him among the musicians of genius, like Beethoven and Brahms and Bach, or even like Richard Strauss, he was always able to possess hearts, whether by his artistry in melody, or by the tenderness of his feeling, or by the force of his rhythm. It is no small matter that millions of sweet figures today sway elegantly to his strains. It has truly been said of him that he was not merely a musician, but a solace and consolation to humanity; and no wonder, for some of the pieces he composed have faithful lovers — how not, when he is the author of Le Beau Danube Bleu and of the operetta "The Bat," whose overture we shall hear this evening, a piece enjoying a world fame that many pieces by many composers might envy.

To follow this piece, it is enough to picture the chase after a bat, and all the sounds and movements, all the earnestness and playfulness, that may surround it — all this in an atmosphere rich in variety of melody and in the invention of strains that play upon people's feelings and almost set them moving without their intending it. Nor should we wonder at the variety it contains, for this form of music, the form of the operetta, requires that it embrace a great number of kinds.

Nor is The Bat a remnant of the old operetta form, in the days when it drew near to the comic opera of which we once presented "The Barber of Seville" as an example; the operetta in its new form began with this very piece we shall hear tonight, and we may have occasion, at some future opportunity, to listen to another piece of the same kind.