It is a peculiarity of humankind that we often reserve the highest station for the man who, in art, makes us gloomy. To the man who makes us happy we give quicker recognition, but usually little deference.
If this were not true, the name of Johann Strauss, Jr., would undoubtedly, like Abou Ben Adhem's, lead all the rest. The Strauss waltz is all but synonymous with gaiety, and the lighthearted, carefree movement of young couples enjoying one another's company, and the heady pulse of three-quarter time.

The only category of human who can be said to rate Strauss where he should be rated is the serious composer. Richard Wagner admired him and conducted a Strauss waltz at the end of the inaugural Bayreuth Festival in 1876. Brahms called him " the most musical brain in Europe " and autographed a copy of The Blue Danube with the words : " Unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms." Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, Schumann and Tchaikovsky were numbered among his ardent advocates, and when he died he was buried beside Schubert and Brahms, where he rightly belongs.

The truth of it is that Strauss gives a little too much pleasure a little too freely and easily to be thought quite respectable. The man who can give such I irge amounts of pleasure, like the man who can enjoy them, is a little suspect.
Meanwhile, the true testimony of his stature as a musician — the furious rate at which his pieces are played — continues and will continue as long as there are those who can dance, hum, or even tap a toe.

• Die Fledermaus is Strauss's masterpiece. By bringing the waltz into the theatre, he introduced there a kind of effervescence and magic that the operetta
stage had never known before. Itwas first produced in 1874, Strauss's second attempt at operetta.

The libretto is properly frothy. A certain Baron von Eisenstein is to be arrested for a petty offence. Instead of going to jail, he makes for the brilliant masquerade at the palace of Prince Orloff. Meanwhile, the Baron's wife entertains an old suitor who, mistaken for the Baron, is unceremoniously hauled off to jail by the police. The wife then goes to the Orloff ball where she proceeds to carry on an amusing flirtation with her own husband.
Remembering the French basis for the libretto, Le Reveillon by Meilhac and Halévy, lovers of Die Fledermaus have dubbed it a compound of " Viennese gaiety and French drollery."

H. E. Jacob, in Johann Strauss, Father and Son, indicates the sonata-like structure of the Overture : the exposition, " the main theme with the short transition to the subdominant, to the subsidiary movement," etc. Then he admits the needlessness of such probing. " The Fledermaus Overture is a potpourri and makes no pretence of being anything else. Only his unerring taste (the most unerring . since Rossini) was capable of welding so much wild beauty into the likeness of a sonata."

• The Fledermaus Suite here assembled and arranged by Mr. Ormandy is the outcome of the great success of the streamlined version of the opera in English presented some years ago by the Metropolitan Opera with Mr. Ormandy conducting. The response to that performance was so completely favourable that it demanded " equal time " for a Fledermaus for concert and record audiences.

The Suite, which is beautifully decorated by the flute cadenza work of William Kincaid, includes the infectious introduction, and finale from Act I, the Tick-Tack Polka, Adele's provocative " Mein Herr Marquis," and the waltz finale from Act II.

A Thousand and One Nights is the result of an impossible set of circumstances. It seems that Strauss's first wife, becoming interested in turning her husband's talents from ballroom to theatre, bundled together a set of likely manuscripts that happened to be lying around and took them to the director of the Theatre-an-der-Wien, who had his librettists put together a story and lyrics to the music. When he was shown the results, Strauss gave in and began to work in earnest to make something defensible out of the score. At the last moment, because a certain singer crucial to the production turned out to be under
contract to a rival theatre, the whole libretto had to be re-written. Titled " Indigo, or the Forty Thieves," it was the subsequent argument of some who saw it that the forty thieves referred to had actually been forty librettists. At any rate, the impossible libretto served to get played this delicate and enchanting music, which is no mean accomplishment.

Music of the Spheres (Spharenklange) and Sword and Lyre (Schwert and Leyer) are compositions by Josef Strauss, the second son of Johann Sr. He was a professional engineer and only considered music his hobby until the day he was drafted to replace the ailing Johann Jr. as conductor of the family orchestra.
From then on he was a full-fledged member of the waltz dynasty and even collaborated with Johann on such miniature masterpieces as the Pizzicato Polka.
Music of the Spheres is one of Josef Strauss's most felicitous scores. According to Jerome Pastene, a new Strauss biographer, " it is quite unlike any other set of waltzes, and to its individual tones no better title could have been fitted."

The Philadelphia Orchestra programme notes for this work read, in part : " It opens with a very slow introduction for harp and strings, tremolo, with the harp's arpeggios leading into the first waltz, sung out by the strings. This is then broken up into a typical variation form. The second waltz is of the lively, detached-note type which on the dance floor must have moved the swaying• figures to spirited animation. The third waltz is in contrasting flowing style, with a typical Strauss theme common to all the . family. The fourth suggests a variation on the first, a fifth continues in animated vein, and the usual recapitulation in the form of a coda completes the work . . . "

Sword and Lyre is a title which probably carried some specific reference for those who first heard it. Perhaps it was to the set of patriotic poems, " Leyer and Schwert " (Lyre and Sword) by the German poet and author, Theodor Korner. But no literary connections are at all necessary to sustain this lovely music.
Notes by CHARLES BURR.

• Recent releases by the magnificent Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, include the following records.
Dvorak : Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 95 (" From the New World "). KLC 550.
Wagner : Parsifal. KLC 590.
Bach by the Philadelphia Orchestra. KLC 532.
Rachmaninoff : The Bells, Op. 35 ; Isle of the Dead, Op. 29. KLC 508.
" Ports of Call." Ibert : Escales. Ravel : Bolero ; La Valse ; Pavane pour une infante défunte. Debussy : Clair de lune. Chabrier : Espana — Rhapsody. KLC
510.