Franz von Suppé

Franz von Suppé, born Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo de Suppé (18 April 1819 – 21 May 1895) was an Austrian composer of light operas and other theatre music. He came from the Kingdom of Dalmatia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now part of Croatia). A composer and conductor of the Romantic period, he is notable for his four dozen operettas, including the first operetta to a German libretto. Some of them remain in the repertory, particularly in German-speaking countries, and he composed a substantial quantity of church music, but he is now chiefly known for his overtures, which remain popular in the concert hall and on record. Among the best-known are Poet and Peasant, Light Cavalry, Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna and Pique Dame.
Suppé's parents named him Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo when he was born on 18 April 1819 in Spalato, now Split, Dalmatia, Croatia. His father – like his father before him – was a civil servant in the service of the Austrian Empire. Suppé's mother was Viennese by birth.
The facts of Suppé's early years are disputed. Both during his lifetime and after his death various unfounded statements circulated about his background. The first edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1884) incorrectly states that the Suppés were of Belgian descent, that Suppé was born in 1820 on board ship at Spalato, and that his full name was Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo Cavaliere Suppe Demelli. Other incorrect information is given in a 1905 biography of Suppé by Otto Keller, husband of one of the composer's granddaughters, based on the unreliable recollections of Suppé's widow.
Suppé spent his childhood in Zara, now Zadar, where he had his first music lessons and began to compose at an early age. As a boy he had encouragement in music from a local bandmaster and the Zara cathedral choirmaster. As a teenager in Zara, Suppé studied flute and harmony. According to some accounts his father wanted him to be a lawyer, and sent him to study in Padua, from where he supposedly visited Milan and met Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi and attended performances of their operas. By another account he studied philosophy in Padua and studied law later in Vienna.
After Suppé's father died in 1835 the family moved to Vienna, where Suppé studied music under Ignaz von Seyfried, a pupil of Mozart. Suppé played the flute in various orchestras and taught Italian. (His mother tongue was Italian, and although he learned to speak German fluently he did so with what one journalist called "a decided Italian accent".) In 1837 and 1841 he wrote two operas, neither of which was performed but both of which may have been influenced by Donizetti, allegedly a distant relation of the Suppés.
From 1840 Suppé worked as a composer and conductor for Franz Pokorny, the director of several theatres in Vienna, Pressburg (now Bratislava), Ödenburg (now Sopron) and Baden bei Wien. In Operetta: A Theatrical History (1983), Richard Traubner writes that 24 November 1860 is considered by many to be "the birthdate of the true Viennese operetta", with the production of Suppé’s Das Pensionat (The Boarding School) at the Theater an der Wien. Pokorny’s son, Alois, who ran the theatre, did not have enough money to buy the rights for the first Viennese productions of Offenbach's operas, and he presented instead Das Pensionat, which had, by the standards of the time, an excellent run: it was played for 20 nights in succession, and 34 times in all during the six months it remained in the repertoire. Das Pensionat was the first operetta composed to an original German text, and the first Viennese operetta to be heard abroad: there were productions in Germany and Hungary, and in November 1861 it was given (in German) at the Stadt Theater, New York. Suppé was heavily influenced by Offenbach; he studied Offenbach's works carefully and wrote many successful operettas using them as a model. The operetta specialist Richard Traubner writes that Suppé's early works frankly imitated Offenbach's. Das Pensionat not only emulates Offenbach, but refers to him in the first act, when the heroine, the schoolgirl Sophie, and her friends learn about the can-can and proceed to dance it.
Suppé's most enduring one-act success, Die schöne Galathée (The Beautiful Galatea), dates from 1865. It was modelled, Traubner comments, in both title and style, on Offenbach’s La belle Hélène which had been a great success in Vienna earlier that year. It has had frequent revivals throughout German-speaking countries, and was played in German and in English translation in both New York and London. A full-length operatic success eluded Suppé for some years, and it was not until after the triumph of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus in 1874 that he caught up. His Fatinitza (1876) was a critical and box office success, not only in Vienna but in London and Paris, though less so in New York, where it coincided with and was somewhat eclipsed by the first production there of H.M.S. Pinafore. Suppé surpassed the success of Fatinitza in 1879 with Boccaccio and had his final lasting success in 1880 with Donna Juanita. Traubner writes, "nothing after Donna Juanita has endured, though several were very popular in their time": Der Gascogner (Theater an der Wien, 22 March 1881) was an outright failure, but Die Afrikareise (A Trip to Africa, Theater an der Wien, 17 March 1883) ran for a month, and received several productions, including an American revival with Lillian Russell in the lead, which ran for five weeks in 1887.
Suppé wrote music for over a hundred productions at the Theater in der Josefstadt as well as the Carltheater in Leopoldstadt, at the Theater an der Wien. He also worked on some landmark opera productions, such as the 1846 production of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots with Jenny Lind.
Suppé was twice married: first to Therese Merville, and after her death in 1865 to Sofie Strasser. He died in Vienna on 21 May 1895, at the age of 76.
Suppé composed about 30 operettas and 180 farces, ballets, and other stage works. Although some of the overtures remain popular the bulk of his operettas have sunk into obscurity. Exceptions include Boccaccio, Die schöne Galathée and Fatinitza; Peter Branscombe, writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, characterises Suppé's song "O du mein Österreich" as "Austria's second national song".
Suppé retained links with his native Dalmatia, occasionally visiting Split (Spalato), Zadar (Zara), and Šibenik. Some of his works are linked with the region, in particular his operetta Des Matrosen Heimkehr, the action of which takes place in Hvar. After retiring from conducting, Suppé continued to write stage works, but increasingly shifted his interest to sacred music. He wrote a Requiem for Pokorny in 1855; an oratorio, Extremum Judicium; three masses, among them the Missa Dalmatica [de]; songs; symphonies; and concert overtures. When the Requiem Mass was published in 1997, a reviewer found that it reveals Suppé's admiration for Mozart's Requiem, "from the choice of tonality (D minor), movement layout, and melodic figuration" to a direct quote in the "Mors stupebit" section of Suppé's work from the "Tuba mirum" from Mozart"s "Lacrimosa". The work was revived for a first performance in modern times by BBC Radio 3, broadcast on 5 July 1984. After Suppé's death thirty unpublished songs were found in his papers, as well as the nearly completed score of another mass.
The musicologist Robert Letellier writes that Suppé was a master of three styles, the Italian (opera buffa), the French (opéra-comique) and the German: "He knew how to blend them irresistibly, assisted in the instrumentation by his rich experience as a theatre orchestra conductor, and with a sure symphonic technique deriving from his classical training." Letellier comments that Suppé's overtures were a major feature of his operatic works: "some attaining immense popularity, and securing him an enduring fame in the concert hall ... Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry are among the most famous overtures ever written". To these, the music critic Andrew Lamb adds as outstanding among Suppé's overtures those to Ein Morgen, ein Mittag und ein Abend in Wien (Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna, 1844), Pique Dame (Queen of Spades, 1862), Flotte Bursche (Jolly Students, 1863), and Banditenstreiche (Bandits' Pranks, 1867).
There are many sets of Suppé overtures on disc, but few of his stage works. A complete recording of Die schöne Galatée conducted by Bruno Weil was issued in 2005, the Lehár Festival in Bad Ischl staged and recorded Fatinitza in 2006, Dario Salvi [de] and the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra have recorded Suppé's incidental music for Die Reise um die Erde in 80 Tagen (Around the World in 80 Days) and Mozart. The Requiem was recorded in 1997 with soloists and the Cracow Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Roland Bader. The Musical Times described it as an accomplished piece and singled out the quieter passages "such as the obsessive orchestral motif that backs the Liber scriptus, the lovely oboe solo at the beginning of Recordare, or the high violins irradiating the brief Sanctus".
Collections of Suppé overtures have been recorded by conductors including Sir John Barbirolli, Charles Dutoit, Neeme Järvi, Herbert von Karajan, Sir Neville Marriner, Zubin Mehta, Paul Paray and Sir Georg Solti. The most extensive recorded collection is in six volumes on the Marco Polo label, released between 1994 and 2001 with the Slovak State Philharmonic Orchestra and various conductors.
Most sources have spelled the name with an acute accent. Recently an alternative spelling with a grave accent has sometimes been used, on the grounds that Suppé used it when signing his name (see lead image, above); his name is written with the acute accent on his tombstone and in the baptismal registry it was written without any accent.