Vienna Prater life
Wiener Praterleben is a waltz composed by Siegfried Translateur in 1892 , which became popular in Berlin in the 1920s under the name Sportpalastwalzer .
history
In 1891 Siegfried Translateur had settled in Vienna to study music at the conservatory. A year later, at the age of 17, he composed the waltz Wiener Praterleben under the impression of what was then the Vienna Prater . “10 kreuzers had to be paid for each dance. So that the poor could also enjoy a dance, there was a so-called 'preferential dance to 4 Kreuzers' once in the evening, this was announced by the dance master clapping his hands. Translateur included this signal, which was then passed on by the audience, in his waltz. ”He received a fee of 20 marks for this composition.
"Sports Palace Waltz"
In 1923 the piece was played for the first time by the Otto Kermbach Orchestra at the Berlin Six-Day Race in the Sportpalast . The piece was so popular there that it continued to be played regularly and was eventually called the Sports Palace Waltz .
The piece is inextricably linked with Reinhold "Krücke" Habisch , a big fan of the Berlin six-day race, who had to give up his dream of becoming a racing cyclist himself after losing a leg in an accident. “Krücke” Habisch, also called “Olle Krücke”, gradually began to whistle sharply with the four identical notes of the waltz that follow the first two bars of the second waltz sequence - that is, the clapping of hands recorded by Translateur - which is then taken over by the audience has been. These whistles have since been built into most versions of the waltz. This created a musical classic that is still associated with the six-day races today.
Because Translateur was considered a " half-Jew " according to the National Socialist racial ideology , it was forbidden to play the Sports Palace Waltz from 1934 onwards . It was played anyway. However, after January 1934 only two six-day races took place, in Dortmund and Berlin, because they had proven unprofitable due to unpopular rule changes by the Nazi sports leadership (e.g. no jersey advertising, no entry fee). It was not until 1949 that another six-day race took place in Berlin.
The composer Siegfried Translateur was murdered in 1944 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp . Reinhold Habisch died in Berlin in 1964. The Sports Palace, which has hosted six-day races since 1911, was demolished in 1973.
Web links
- Supplementary to the history of the Sports Palace waltz ( Memento from November 5, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
- Daniel Morat: Sport and entertainment culture. The Sportpalastwalzer (Wiener Praterleben). Federal Agency for Civic Education , August 3, 2016 .
- Biographical note on crutch ( memento from July 27, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- Audio sample on YouTube
- Wiener Praterleben (Sportpalastwalzer) : Sheet music and audio files in the International Music Score Library Project