Viennese New Year

Video Finds of the Day

Still looking for that polka, I come upon the Viennese New Years Concerts held each year New Years Eve/Morning by Wiener Philharmoniker, which traditionally (for 6 decades, about) has ended with encores of a polka, a performance of Blue Danube by Johann Strauss Jr., and the Radetzky March by J. Strauss Sr. Still not the sort of polka I'm looking for, with the Polish women and beer all over the place, but we're getting closer.

Strauss, Unter Donner und Blitz, Polka schnell, op. 324



Of all the videos I could have chosen to present the Blue Danube Waltz, I simply had to go with this one. If you have lately been over to Apesma's Lament, Tim Harris' blog, you may have seen Swing Social, an MGM cartoon Tim discovered on YouTube from 1940 that has come to appear racist with the passage of time. Here, representing Strauss, is an MGM cartoon that with the passage of time could come to appear pedophilic! And Rudolph Ising was involved with both? Who IS this guy?

The Blue Danube (1939, MGM Cartoon)



The traditional closing of the show, complete with multiple New Years greetings:

Radetzky March with Happy New Year on Neujahrskonzert 2002

The Cuckoo Clock Speech

Video Find of the Day

After Forbidden Zone, my next favorite movie is The Third Man, which was released in 1949, the year I was born. And my favorite scene in that movie is this one, in which Holly confronts Harry Lime at the Riesenrad, the Ferris wheel in Vienna's Prater amusement park, and Harry (who has faked his own death to put the police off his trail) threatens to kill his old friend Holly to protect his cover, until he learns that the jig is already up. Then on the ground he gives the cuckoo clock speech. The speech was Orson Welles' addition to the script. It's not at all historically accurate. the Swiss didn't even invent the cuckoo clock, and the 500 years of peace is an extreme stretch of the imagination. But even so it makes poetry.

The Third Man (Carol Reed)