My orchestration from the piano score of this waltz by Johann Schrammel. One of my guilty pleasures.

A pleasure because Johann Schrammel is one of my very favourite composers in this style. He writes good tunes in the proper Viennese idiom. I don’t know of anyone who sounds more Viennese than he does and he would certainly make my top five of composers in this style. Given the number of Strausses and Lanners around that’s high praise. “Guilty” because I am not sure I am doing him any great favours by doing this.

His music is written for his own quartet of two violins, clarinet (often a short clarinet) and double guitar and is designed around that ensemble. The basic sound is two violins doing the melodic work, the guitar doing the accompaniment and the clarinet playing around with contrasting music. In making the piano score, the clarinet music is lost. The arranger needs to preserve the melody and accompaniment and a pianist only has two hands. The clarinet is also operating in the same register as the violins. You end up with a generic piano piece that retains the tunes and harmonies of the original but loses a lot of the interesting detail. In orchestrating the piano score, it is not really practical to put that music back. The balance wouldn’t work.

Normally when I am doing orchestrations I have the advantage of being able to study other works by the same composers to get a better idea of how they work. As I am reconstructing works that were originally conceived for orchestra, the music usually fits properly. I get no help here. Schrammel rarely wrote for orchestra; certainly not enough to develop an individual style. What comes out at the end of my work is more or less a generic orchestration of a waltz written for dancing in about 1880. It is not obvious that Schrammel wrote it for people to dance to in the first place. So it’s pretty and I think it works but it’s probably not right.

As it happens you can hear the “right” version of this piece as there is a very good recording on YouTube by the Symphonisches Schrammelquintett Wien. It’s great and they are playing all of the right notes too on a real Schrammel Quartet too, with clarinet and not the cursed accordion.

Which is right? Well in my view it’s neither or both. Mine is the wrong ambience. The quartet one is maybe too sentimental for the period. We’ve had a century and a half of Sachertorte and Schnitzel to add to the nostalgia associated with an Alt Wien that probably never existed. I think both work. Music wouldn’t be music if everybody played it the same way every time.