The overture of Die Fledermaus perfectly captures the spirit of the entire score, because virtually every note of this operetta is inspired by the rhythms of the dances which were wildly popular all over Europe in 1874. Although we think of Strauss as the Waltz King, he was just as prolific in the composition of other dances like the polka and the galop or can can. The polka, a Bohemian dance introduced in Prague in 1837, became so popular that the term 'polkamania' was coined to describe the phenomenon. And in fact there are almost as many polkas in Die Fledermaus as there are waltzes, for example the polkas that appear in Act I accompanying Adele's reading of her sister's letter inviting her to Orlovsky's party and as the trio for Rosalinde, Adele and Eisenstein. Rosalinde gets her own polka at the very end of Act I, as she diffuses the suspicions of Frank the jailer and sends Alfred off to prison in the place of her husband. Act II begins with a polka and most famously the finale of Act II is centered on another polka, the so-called 'Champagne Trio' and chorus, the text of which celebrates the inebriating effects of this sparkling beverage.
But it is the lilt of the Viennese waltz that gives Die Fledermaus its soul and each waltz is fabricated by the composer to match the sentiments of the text. When Alfred invites Rosalinde to drink away their cares as he attempts to seduce her, Strauss accompanies the seduction with a waltz. In Act II, the disguised Eisenstein approaches the similarly disguised Adele, absolutely sure that this woman is his wife's maid; Adele puts him off with the famous waltz, "My dear Marquis". (Strauss seems to be pioneering a compositional method later used by Richard Strauss [not of the same family, by the way!] in his opera Der Rosenkavalier, in which the composer uses the waltz as a musical symbol of deception…in Rosenkavalier, whenever we hear the waltz rhythm, a character is lying about something. One almost wants to say that whenever one hears a waltz in Die Fledermaus, a character is involved in the seduction of another!) There are even waltzes that we don't consciously think are waltzes such as the lovely Brüderlein introduced by Dr. Falke at the climax of the ball to toast brotherhood and love. Suddenly we realize that the waltz is capable of being melancholy, sentimental and wistful, not just danceable. But then, of course, we have the sparkling exuberance of the Fledermaus waltz itself, first heard in the overture and then again as the culmination of the masked ball at the end of Act II.
This score is infectious. The tunes and rhythms seep into your very soul and carry you away. That is, of course, what the producers hoped in 1874 at the Theater an der Wien when Die Fledermaus premiered. The "Black Friday" Stock Exchange crash had occurred the year before (in 1873), the Imperial house of Hapsburg was beginning to crumble and already the elements that would bring about the First World War were appearing as microscopic rips in the glittering fabric that was Vienna. In the same way that the Busby Berkeley film musicals of the 1930s helped Americans deal with the Depression, operettas like Die Fledermaus gave contemporary Viennese audiences a way to escape their very real fears about the decaying world around them.