My orchestration from a piano score of this waltz by Waldteufel. I’m ashamed to say this has been sitting on my computer for over five years. Some time ago I did an orchestration of his waltz “Les Lointains”. I wasn’t overly impressed with it and said so whereupon one of the correspondents sent me a link to this waltz which he thought was underrated, unrecorded and more Straussian than most Waldteufel waltzes.

Having just done a Waldteufel waltz and not being his greatest fan (I think he’s very talented but his style is not very Viennese and the waltzes have flat patches which I think are part of the French style and don’t appeal to me) I put it on one side. A couple of years later I had a go at it but was unhappy with what I was doing and laid it aside again. A few weeks ago I was prompted on an unrelated issue about French Second Empire period music and gave it another go. This is the result.

It’s a good waltz, although I think its roots are more Lanner than Strauss. Waltz 1A could have been written by Lanner (although the orchestration is appropriate to the 1860’s so perhaps it’s not obvious), several phrases end with Lanner’s signature dum de dum ending and there is a chunk of new music in the coda of a kind that Lanner often did. It often doesn’t work when Lanner does it and I don’t think it works here either.

There are a couple of places where we’re just not on the same wavelength. The introduction is very sparse in the piano score and needed a lot of imagination. It’s why I put it aside the first time. Perhaps there’s too much CPE and not enough Émile. I don’t understand waltz 4B. There’s a fairly plodding tune marked “largamente” It should be the climax of the piece but I think it just kills the energy of it. There is another recording of this, for synthesised piano I think, and the transcriber just ignores the marking. I didn’t feel it was right to do that but I didn’t want to broaden it out too much.

However, it is too good a waltz to be lost so I thought it was still worth a release this time.