- "oder zwanzig Jahre in zwanzig Minuten" My orchestration from the Mechetti piano score of this potpourri by Joseph Lanner. It dates from 1838 and is a collection of snippets from the waltzes he had previously written. The original score does not survive, if there even was one. Every excerpt that I recognise is in the key it was in the original waltz, suggesting that the score might have been mostly a set of instructions to the copyist to cut and paste the original music into this piece.

It is very much music to do the ironing to. It does go on a bit and there are ennuis. I nearly gave up several times. I didn’t for three reasons:

These potpourris are never recorded;

I kept coming across good tunes I didn’t know and had to look them up and make notes for future work;

The subtitle is “20 Years in 20 Minutes”. It runs to more than 24 minutes at my tempi. Even allowing for some poetic licence that suggests he took his waltzes at a fair lick. I take them faster than most and made some conscious effort to keep the speed up here. Even so, I’m not close.

Anyway, lots of Lanner tunes, none of them "violet scented". Anyone who can name all of them really ought to get a life.