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"Trefoil". On 1 November 1864 the 21-year-old 'Pretender' to the Waltz King's throne, Carl Michael Ziehrer, conducted the first performance of his waltz Tanz-Brüder (Dancing Brothers, op. 28) at a concert in Vienna's Dianabad-Saal. Ziehrer's publisher, Carl Haslinger - who was formerly the Strauss brothers' publisher before an altercation separated the parties - duly announced the piano edition of the work a month later, on 3 December 1864. Is it conceivable that the title of Ziehrer's waltz sparked an idea in the inventive mind of the ever-resourceful Johann Strauss, resulting in the startling announcement which appeared in the Neue Freie Presse on 19 December 1864: "The Strauss brothers are composing a 'Trifolien-Walzer' for the 'Hesperus Ball' on 13 February [1865] in the Dianasaal". All three Strauss brothers were members of the Vienna Artists' Association, 'Hesperus', and although Johann and Josef had each separately contributed music to previous 'Hesperus' festivities, Trifolien marked the very first occasion on which Johann, Josef and Eduard had collaborated on a single work. On 15 February 1865, two days after the 'Hesperus Ball', the Fremden-Blatt remarked that the new Strauss waltz had received "lively applause" at its première, the conducting of which had fallen to the youngest brother, Eduard, at the head of the Strauss Orchestra. The first public performance of the Trifolien Walzer followed on Sunday 19 February 1865, when the Strauss Orchestra played it at a concert given by Johann, Josef and Eduard Strauss in the Vienna Volksgarten. The inside cover of the dance cards issued at the 'Hesperus Ball' pictured a "really charming drawing of three gnomes endeavouring to entice music from a double bass", one astride the upper bouts (shoulders) of the instrument while the other two operate the bow. Perhaps mirroring the order in which the Strauss brothers' contributions appear in the composition, the unnamed artist has positioned the three gnomes in descending order of age. It was presumably this same piece of artwork which adorned the first piano edition of the Trifolien Walzer which the C.A. Spina publishing house delivered to the music dealers on 17 February 1865. The waltz bears the composers' dedication "To the Artists' Association, Hesperus". In composing the Trifolien Walzer, the brothers chose to divide the workload fairly equally amongst themselves: Johann provided Waltz No. 1, Josef Waltz No. 2 and Eduard furnished not only Waltz No. 3 but also the Introduction and the cleverly-contrived Coda. The three-part waltz was probably short: as Johann Strauss recounted much later, the Trifolien Walzer presented to the publisher C.A. Spina was too short and the brothers were required to extend their own contributions. This would explain the untypical waltz form of Trifolien, with each of the three waltz sections possessing a trio. A particularly fascinating aspect of Trifolien is that it affords the listener the opportunity to judge the very different compositional style each brother stamped on his music. The title of the waltz derives from the Latin noun Trifolium, meaning 'a three-leafed herb', but here specifically referring to the three-leafed clover, Trifolium pratense. The allusion is therefore made between the trifoliate leaves of the clover and this tripartite collaboration by the Strauss brothers.
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Painting: Piano Score Cover for the Trifolein Waltz by C.A. Spina
Slovak State Philharmonic Orchestra, Kosice
Christian Pollack