Alt-Wiener Tanzweisen

Alt-Wiener Tanzweisen (Old Viennese Melodies) is a set of three short pieces for violin and piano, written by Fritz Kreisler.

It is not known when he wrote them, but they were published in 1905, deliberately misattributed to Joseph Lanner. They had become parts of Kreisler's repertoire well before September 1910, when he copyrighted them under his own name.[1][2]

The three pieces are usually performed or heard separately, and are:

Kreisler often played these pieces as encores at his concerts. In 1911, he published his own piano solo arrangement of Liebesfreud. They have appeared in numerous settings for other instruments, or orchestrated.

Two of them, Liebesfreud and Liebesleid, were the subject of virtuoso transcriptions for solo piano by Kreisler's friend Sergei Rachmaninoff (1931)[3], who also recorded these transcriptions.

The three pieces, played by the composer, can be heard on Youtube:

Notes