Johann Strauss II’s music is always featured heavily at the New Year’s From Vienna concerts, and this overture shows up on that concert’s program fairly often. Die Fledermaus is an operetta by Strauss that I’ve never seen, though on the basis of this description, I think I’d like to. Who wouldn’t want to see a show that is “a sparkling confection of mistaken identities, illicit liaisons, and champagne-fueled merriment”? Not I!
Strauss was known as “the Waltz King”, since he wrote such legendary and immortal waltzes as On the Beautiful Blue Danube and Tales from the Vienna Woods. So it stands to reason that this effervescent overture contains, among other things, a waltz.
