Franz von Suppé / lithograph by Gabriel Decker, 1847

This year marks the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Franz von Suppé. I found videos of his best-known works on the YouTube channel “Classical Music Only.” Except they aren’t classical music––or weren’t considered so at the time they were written.

I’m not making a value judgment. Suppé was a very good composer. But his music has followed the path of so much of the best of “vernacular” music.

Classical music organizations continue to perform it long after changing popular taste has left it behind. How does that happen?

A brief biography of Franz von Suppé

Franz von Suppé / colored wood engraving by an unknown artist, 1881

Suppé was born to upper-class Austrian parents of Belgian descent in what is now Croatia. Today, Croatia is one of the states born from the collapse of Yugoslavia. In 1819, it was part of the Kingdom of Dalmatia, part, in turn of the Austrian Empire

His parents named him Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo, Cavaliere Suppé-Demelli. He was raised largely in Italy, which was also under Austrian rule.

His childhood followed a well-worn cliché. He demonstrated musical talent at an early age, but his parents gave him no encouragement. Like many other well-known composers, he studied law.

He also listened to lots of Italian opera. He became personally acquainted with Rossini, Verdi, and Donizetti. Donizetti, a distant relative, actively supported Suppé’s musical education.

When his father died, Suppé moved to Vienna with his mother. There, he studied music, chiefly with Simon Sechter and Ignaz von Seyfried. Sechter’s other best-known student was Anton Bruckner. Seyfried had studied composition with Mozart and Albrechtsberger, Beethoven’s principal teacher. In 1840, Seyfried helped Suppé get his first job, an unpaid position with the title third Kapellmeister at the Theater in der Josefstadt.

Suppé’s first stage work appeared to excellent reviews the following year. It was a comedy with songs called, in English, “Jolly when Young, Sad when Old.” In all, he composed more than 200 stage works. Besides a couple of dozen operettas, he composed many farces, parodies, and light comic works. And here and there an opera. His fame rests on a few overtures.

What’s the difference between opera and operetta? Operetta, firmly in the popular music realm, has spoken dialogue instead of being sung throughout. It also has mostly light-hearted, frivolous storylines. No one dies in the last act, and no one in the audience can take any of the conflicts seriously.

Opera and operetta in Suppé’s Vienna

Theater an der Wien / anonymous watercolored pen and ink drawing, ca. 1800

The court opera theater (Staatsoper) in Vienna had long favored Italian opera, but when the last Italian music director was hired in 1861, his contract specified that the theater was primarily devoted to the cause of German music. It allowed him to present German translations of Italian and French operas so long as they didn’t appear too frequently.

Of all the classical composers who lived in Vienna during the 19^th century, only Beethoven composed a noteworthy opera. With his training, Suppé could have become a symphonist like Bruckner or a composer of more serious opera, if he had wanted to. The Staatsoper would surely have welcomed a local complement to Wagner.

Instead, Suppé produced a succession of successful light stage works, including a comedy with songs called Dichter und Bauer (Poet and Peasant). Then he became Vienna’s answer to Jacques Offenbach. The Theater an der Wien, which had presented Beethoven’s Fidelio, fell on hard financial times after the continent-wide revolutions of 1848. Only by presenting Offenbach’s operettas did it stave off bankruptcy.

Viennese operetta was born from Offenbach’s success. Suppé’s Der Pensionat (1860) was the first one. By that time, he had become resident composer at Theater an der Wien. He achieved his greatest successes with Gervinus, Flotte Bursche, Fatintza, and especially his masterpiece Boccaccio. These all received at least 100 performances within a few years after their premieres.

Late in life, Suppé turned his attention mostly to sacred music, although he never gave up writing for the theater. A Requiem he composed in 1855 has recently been recorded, and judging from the record review, it ought to be better known. He thought highly enough of a mass he composed at 13 that he had it published years later. Along the way, he also composed symphonies and string quartets.

The fate of popular music

Popular music refers to inherently commercial, industrial music that appeals to a mass audience. Listeners can grasp everything the music has to offer at first hearing. After a while, they tire of it and seek novelty. Classical music specifically means music that rewards repeated hearing. It requires no great education to appreciate it, just patience to listen over and over and notice something novel in it every time.

As a result, popular music does not have a long shelf life. Eventually, popular taste moves on and leaves it behind. Also, audiences for popular music welcome the efforts of people who have little knowledge of music. Charles K. Harris, who revolutionized American popular song, is but one of a long line of successful songwriters who never learned to read or write musical notation.

Plenty of musically illiterate people enjoy great success in today’s American popular music. On the other hand, plenty of other stars have graduated from some of our most prestigious music schools. And being musically illiterate doesn’t mean unmusical. Consider the Beatles.

Among the better educated and trained composers of light music in the 19^th century, Offenbach and Suppé were outstanding. But if any popular music outlives the generation that first consumed it, chances are it survives only because classical music organizations play it.

Suppé’s reputation

Suppé, for example, is now best known for a few overtures, especially Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry. The Metropolitan Opera has performed Boccaccio and some others of his best operettas, but none has achieved repertory status in the US.

American audiences probably first heard these overtures in the soundtracks of movies and cartoons. The Light Cavalry Overture was one of the pieces likely to be background music for any scene that showed someone riding a horse. Never mind that the operetta was not one of his more successful efforts.

Along with Strauss waltzes, symphony orchestras perform Suppé’s overtures mostly on “pops concerts” and not their regular subscription series. Perhaps audiences would enjoy his more “classical” works, too. Surely they have merit. But he didn’t have his heart in that kind of music as in the popular theater. He didn’t devote equal effort to promoting it. So why should anyone promote it now?

Sources:

Franz von Suppé / Rovi Staff, Allmusic
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980): “Suppé [Suppe], Franz (von)” and “Vienna §5(ii): 1830-1945, Opera”
Suppé: Overture to Poet and Peasant / James M. Keller, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra program note [Link no longer works as of 7/2021.]