The Waves of the Danube

 

With just a hint of a smile
the young woman looks slightly past the camera.
She wears long pendant earrings
with a wide hat stylishly tilted
and a fur stole draped over her shoulders.
It's a fine portrait,
not often found printed on a postcard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 A second postcard portrait shows her
with a more distant, pensive gaze.
Now she is dressed in a white gown,
a corsage pinned to the front.
And we see that she is a musician
as she holds a violin at rest.

Her name is Elsa Goldstein.
She was a member of the
Original Wiener Damenorchester «Donauwellen»

The occasion for her portrait may have been when she posed
in the same white gown, though also wearing a sash,
with her full ensemble of six women.
According to the postcard's caption
the group's director is Paula Goldstein.
Perhaps her mother or sister.

 

 

 

This Austrian ladies' orchestra was one of thousands of musical groups made up of female musicians who performed at restaurants, cafes, and wine and beer gardens throughout central Europe from about 1870 to 1930. In my collection I have hundreds of their souvenir postcards that date from 1899 to the 1920s. The German term damenorchester described two different types of ensembles, generally divided by different instrumentation. One used brass instruments, sometimes with a few woodwinds, which in English would be called a band. The other orchester was a kind of chamber orchestra with mainly string instruments, though it also used a few wind instruments. The dynamics of the instruments typically  characterized the venues where the damenorchesters performed. Brass was for outdoors with about 12 to 18 musicians. Strings played indoors using fewer, perhaps 5 to 10 members.  However for certain alfresco settings where quiet music was desired a string ensemble like Elsa Goldstein's Donauwellen orchestra might play in the open air.

 

 

In July 1902, the Wiener Damen-Orchesters «Donauwellen» played in the garden of the Café Kaiserhof in Urfahar, a borough of Linz, Austria, on the left bank of the Danube or Donau River.

 

 

Linzer Volksblatt
2 July 1902

 

It was typical for most of the Damenorchestern to be led by a man. An all-female ensemble directed by a woman, as the Donauwellen was, is less common. Even though some ladies' ensembles also included a few male musicians, all promoted the feminine side of their entertainment by dressing in elaborate costumes.

 

 

In this next postcard, the Original Wiener Damen-Orchester «Donauwellen» have eight women dressed in a traditional folk costume of matching frocks, vests, and head coverings. They are arranged in a classical sprawl on the set of a photographer's studio. None of the women have instruments. The director is again named as Paula Goldstein. I suspect that she is the older woman seated right, and the same woman seated with a book in the previous postcard.

 

This card was sent from Chemnitz, Germany to nearby Dresden on 5/6 July 1906.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This next postcard of the Original Wiener Damen-Orchester «Donauwellen» was also sent from Chemnitz in May of 1906 and has the same women dressed in similar costume but with striped frocks. Three are playing mandolins and the grouping suggests they also sang. 

 

 

 

To judge by the huge number and endless variety of Damen-Orchestern postcards preserved into the the 21st century, these female musical ensembles were evidently extremely popular throughout the vast empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary. However it is very difficult for me to do research on them as the archives I use are primarily for English language documents and newspapers. But this week I got lucky using the ANNO Historische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. This archive, which is easily searchable and FREE, has a large collection of Austrian newspapers and magazines from the 19th and 20 centuries. I found three references to a Damen-Orchesters «Donauwellen» from 1901 and 1902 which are reviews not unlike the kind we read today for a traveling band playing a week at a popular restaurant. 

 

Linzer Volksblatt
8 July 1902

 

The Donauwellen ladies' orchestra has been giving concerts in the Cafe Kaiserhof in Urfahr for a few days with great success. Much praise is due to the song singer Miss Beriha Hilberger, who herself provides the accompaniment on the piano for her singing lectures. Mr. Louis Rischanek, as well as all the members of the orchestra, received the greatest applause and were thus induced to repeat most of the numbers. The concerts take place in the beautiful and large cafe garden and it is Mr. Limberger's eager endeavor to attract his guests to his establishment through the commitment of recognized good music bands and singers and to satisfy them in every way. The band intends to stay here for a long time.

 

 

It's quite possible that because there is no mention of a Paula Goldstein, but of a man named Rischanek, that this is a different «Donauwellen» group. However I'm sure that the ladies of Frau Goldstein's  got similar reviews.

 

 

The portraits of Elsa date some time later than the postcards of her group. Here in the one with her violin, she appears about age 16-18. In the caption at the top of the card, she is Elsa Goldstein, Dirigentin or Conductress. There is a long message written in pencil along the side and bottom and continued over to the back. The postmark date is 19 August 1915 and sent free via the German military Feldpost from Gera, Germany the third-largest city of Thuringia,  after Erfurt and Jena. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elsa's portrait with violin was listed along with the first one by the same dealer, but it was her artful pose without an instrument that first attracted my attention. To my eye, she resembles the self-possessed young woman in the iconic painting, Girl with a Pearl Earring by the Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer, in about 1665. For all we know, hidden below the canvas, Vermeer's girl is holding a violin or a mandolin.

 

 

Girl with a Pearl Earring
    Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665
Source: Wikimedia

 Unlike Vermeer's mysterious unknown girl, the director of the Original Wiener Damen-Orchester «Donauwellen» has a name. Yet time has erased all the easy paths to properly identify her. It seems likely she was from Wien-Vienna, but not certain. Her estimated age suggests a birth year of 1898-99 but there are few archives from the Austria-Hungary empire that have survived with complete census and birth records.

 

It seems very probable that Elsa Goldstein was Jewish, as the surname Goldstein is of Yiddish origin and very common among Ashkenazi Jews. The name translates as gold stone, which means a touchstone slate used for assaying precious metal alloys. But from our advantage of 21st century hindsight we know that if this is true, the future for Elsa after 1933 will be very grim indeed if she stayed anywhere in Europe.

For these reasons, it is unlikely that I will ever learn more about this pretty young violinist. I believe she is the leader of a family group, her mother being the stern-faced Paula Goldstein, and some of, if not all, the other women, are her sisters or cousins. But I doubt many newspapers in Austria ever listed a full roster of the players in a Damenorchester.

 

What we are left with is trying to understand the context of the Original Wiener Damen-Orchester «Donauwellen». The Original implies that there was competition from other Wiener Damen-Orchesters.  My collection has dozens of postcards of other female ensembles from Wien, and as the brief 1902 notice in the Linzer Volksblatt suggests there may have been other groups with this name. 

 

However the name «Donauwellen» is special in another interesting way. It translates as Donau waves, i.e. the Waves of the Danube. It turns out that this was the name of a well-known waltz by the Romanian bandmaster and composer, Ion Ivanovici, (1845–1902). 

Ion Ivanovici, composer (1845–1902)
Source: Wikipedia

Ion Ivanovici, a.k.a. Jovan Ivanović, Iosif Ivanovici, Josef Ivanovichor, published the "Donauwellen", or the "Waves of the Danube" in Bucharest in 1880. The composer Émile Waldteufel orchestrated the piece in 1886, and it was first performed at the 1889 Paris Exposition where it won a prize and quickly became an audience favorite. Though Ivanovici wrote many waltzes, marches, and other works, his "Donauwellen" has remained his most recognized piece. In the United States, it is often called "The Anniversary Song" which was the song title given to an adaptation of the music by singer Al Jolson and composer Saul Chaplin in 1946. A recording of this song, without any credit to Ion Ivanovici, made the Billboard charts in February 1947 and lasted 14 weeks, peaking at #2. Nineteen other artists have recorded the tune, but Ion Ivanovici never made a penny.


To conclude this story of Elsa Goldstein's Original Wiener Damen-Orchesters «Donauwellen», here is a video of a performance of Iosif Ivanovici's Donauwellen Walzer played by violinist Doina Fischer and friends. I think it safe to say that Elsa played this piece in this way. And she surely would approve of Doina's gown.

 

 

 

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This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday
where hats and furs make the woman.