Conducting Electricity

Mozart described his masterpiece Don Giovanni as an opera buffa: a comedy. Yet the work bristles with the political issues of the day, see-sawing between farce and deep seriousness. The Don Juan myth first appeared in European literature in 1630, when Tirso de Molina published The Trickster of Seville, a tale of an irresistibly handsome aristocrat who spends his days seducing and ruining women. Untethered by conventional morality, he escapes retribution for years until finally he is dragged into hell by the ghost of a victim. Over the coming centuries the themes of sexual power, class and privilege, male chauvinism, and, ultimately, justice appealed to artists as diverse as Molière, Byron and Richard Strauss. As in all his operas, Mozart creates characters with whom we fall in

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Every New Year’s Eve and Day the Vienna Philharmonic performs a concert of waltzes and polkas in the beautiful Grosser Saal of the Musikverein. The New Year’s Day concert is broadcast around the world, bringing the grace and charm of fin-de-siécle Vienna with it. The concerts invariably feature music by the Strauss family. Not to be confused with Richard Strauss, the composer of Der Rosenkavalierand Ein Heldenleben, the ‘other’ Strausses were a dynasty of composers beginning with Johann Strauss I, born in 1804. Strauss senior popularized the still new-waltz genre, bringing it into Vienna’s ballrooms with his orchestra. He wrote the famous Radetzky march that nowadays completes each concert with the audience clapping along. But his waltzes were eclipsed by those written by his son,

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