On 17 February 1887 the Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt informed its readers: "Johann Strauss has finally found a libretto. The maestro who, since last summer has begun the composition of three libretti and then given up, has completely rejected 'Die Seelenwanderung' [The Spiritual Journey], 'Salvator Rosa' and the 'Schelm von Bergen' [Hangman of Bergen] and has decided on a libretto by Herr Victor Léon, who has become a renowned young man through the happy success of the "Doppelgänger" ['The Double': music by Alfred Zamara], performed in Munich and other cities. We are genuinely pleased that our favourite, Jean, can at last set to work, because any further delay would have robbed us of the enjoyment of a new Strauss work in the coming season too".
The libretto which had so fired the 61-year-old Strauss's imagination and led him to sign a contract with the relatively inexperienced Viennese librettist Victor Léon (the pseudonym of Viktor Hirschfeld, 1858-1940), was entitled Simplicius Simplizissimus, and was a treatment of H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen's famous novel of 1669 set at the time of the Thirty Years' War, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (Adventurous Simplicissimus). Léon's avowed goal was the "surmounting of operetta nonsense" - he was later the co-librettist of Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow, 1905) for Pranz Lehár! - and this coincided with Johann Strauss's desire to concentrate on more serious theatre fare. The composer intended to create a modern drama with music, though his contract of assignment (8 April 1887) with the theatre-agent Gustav Lewy describes "Simplicius (Simplicissimus)" as an "Operetta (comic opera)" and the work reached the stage of Vienna's Theater an der Wien on 17 December 1887 as Simplicius, an "Operetta in a Prelude and 2 Acts".
From the large store of melodies which he had lavished upon the score of Simplicius, the composer arranged six separate orchestral numbers which August Cranz duly published after the operetta's première - a waltz, a march, a quadrille and three polkas. Later, the Cranz publishing house issued two further works on themes from Simplicius: the Altdeutscher Walzer (Old German Waltz, 1888) and the Jugendliebe Walzer (Young Love Waltz, 1890). Among the first works to appear in print was the Reitermarsch, the first performance of which by the Strauss Orchestra was given under Eduard Strauss's conductorship in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein on 15 January 1888. A performance may, however, have taken place almost a month earlier on 18 December 1887 - one day after the première of Simplicius - when Karl Komzák II (1850-1905) conducted a concert with the Freiherr von Bauer Infantry Regiment No. 84 in the Vienna Volksgarten. The programme for this concert included the first performance of a work described as the "Simplicius-Marsch", although this was quite probably the Reitermarsch. The Reitermarsch itself proved very successful, and was immediately taken into the repertoire of other military bands stationed in and around the Austrian capital.
The greater part of Johann's score for Simplicius was created in Coburg in summer 1887, where the composer was living with the woman who was to become his third wife, Adèle Strauss (née Deutsch, 1856-1930). Strauss and his former wife, 'Lili' Dittrich (1850-1919), had earlier been granted a divorce by consent, but as the Roman Catholic Church would not recognise the dissolution of marriage, the couple sought to overcome this barrier by first converting to Protestantism and then acquiring the citizenship of Coburg-Saxe-Gotha as a prerequisite for entering upon a legally recognised marriage. (They finally achieved this goal on 15 August 1887, through the personal intervention of Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.) In one of his first letters from Coburg, written on 22 June 1887 to his lawyer friend Josef Trutter (1839-1911), Johann mentioned that he was "secretly slipping into my ['Simplicius'] score genuine Austrian shouts of jubilation". The score of Simplicius is punctuated throughout with examples of these joyous outbursts (in Viennese dialect: 'Juchezer'), for instance in the trio section (2B) of the orchestral Reitermarsch.
Director: Franz Welser-Most
Orchestra: Wiener Philharmoniker