The Carousel Waltz (orch. Don Walker)

Program notes

About the Work

Carousel opened at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway on 19 April 1945, two years after Oklahoma! and with the same team: music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Its source was Liliom, a 1909 play by the Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár about a fairground barker and the servant girl who loves him, which they moved from Budapest to the coast of Maine.

The show begins in an unusual way. There is no overture. Rodgers and Hammerstein open instead on a wordless scene at an amusement park, mimed and danced to this waltz, in which the audience meets the mill-girl Julie Jordan and the barker Billy Bigelow and watches them ride the carousel together. By the time anybody speaks, the situation has been set out and the love story has begun. The waltz has had a second life in the concert hall. Robert Russell Bennett began the orchestrations for the original production and scored the waltz before Don Walker took over the show; it is Walker’s name that the LSO attaches to the version played here.

What to Listen For

The piece starts with a fairground organ slightly out of tune with itself: woodwind chords that wheeze and slide, a few halting attempts at a rhythm, as if the machinery were being cranked into motion. Then the main waltz arrives, a broad, swinging tune.

It is a chain of waltzes more than a single one, in the Viennese manner, and each new strain is a little louder and faster than the last. Listen for the way Rodgers keeps pulling the harmony sideways when a cadence seems certain. The ending whirls the first waltz round at full tilt, with the whole orchestra and cymbals, as the carousel reaches top speed.