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New Year Concert success belies Nazi past

The Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Day concert was broadcast to over 90 countries around the world - but few know of its Nazi origins.

Published: 2 January 2015 18:52 CET
New Year Concert success belies Nazi past
Conductor Zubin Mehta leads the Vienna Philharmonic for the fifth time. Photo: APA/HANS PUNZ
The Vienna Philharmonic on Thursday welcomed the new year with its traditional New Year's Concert in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein. On the podium this year was Zubin Mehta, a veteran of the classical music events.
 
For the fifth time the 78-year-old wielded the baton, making Strauss a cornerstone of the repertoire.
 
Also celebrating its 200th anniversary this year was the Technical University (TU), to which the "electro-magnetic" polka was dedicated.
 
As a special feature, soloist Shkelzen Doli from Albania led the orchestra into a four minute celebration of Albanian traditional music.  The Vienna City Ballet also performed.
 
The broadcast of the concert by Austrian State broadcaster (ORF) was seen in at least 90 countries around the world, including for the first time in the Bahamas.
 
The New Year's Day concert tradition is not as old and revered as some may think.  It started in 1939 as part of the Winterhilfswerk, an annual fundraising drive devised by the Nazi party to buy fuel for the needy in the coldest months of the year.
 
The Nazi party's cultural rulers saw the concert as a unifying event that could be broadcast live across the Third Reich. It was moved to New Year's Day in 1941, and Strauss continued to feature despite his Jewish ancestry.
 
Nazi sympathies were to continue in the orchestra until the 1960s, when its leaders honoured a former Nazi who had been released from prison.
 
It wasn't until 2013 that the orchestra finally cut its last ties with Austria's dark past by revoking the honours it had conferred in the past to Nazi leaders.
 

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CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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