Anton Paulik

One of the numerous Viennese conductors who were recorded by American record companies active in Vienna after World War II (attracted by the combination of high musical standards and a very favourable currency exchange rate), Paulik made most of his recordings for the Vanguard label which began to record in Vienna from late 1950 onwards. For Vanguard he conducted a series of long-playing records that featured the music of the Strauss family as well as a very wide range of other composers of the waltz, such as Fetrás, Ivanovici, Lanner, Nedbal, Rosas, Eduard Strauss, Waldteufel and Ziehrer, recordings which did much to extend popular awareness of the wealth of material enshrined in the Viennese waltz tradition. Paulik also made two complete operetta recordings for Vanguard, of Johann Strauss’s Der Zigeunerbaron and Millöcker’s Der Bettelstudent: both performances are highly idiomatic.

In addition to his work for Vanguard, Paulik conducted for many other labels. His 1951 Bregenz Festival account of Strauss’s Eine Nacht in Venedig (the cast of which included his wife) and a recording of Suppé’s one-act operetta Die schöne Galatee were both published on the Saga label in the United Kingdom, while Decca issued a recording of extracts from Kálmán’s Gräfin Mariza. Other recordings of operetta extracts conducted by Paulik that have appeared include Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe, Strauss’s Wiener Blut (the soundtrack of a television production) and Suppé’s Boccaccio. In all of these recordings Paulik adopted a straightforward approach to performance that avoided both sentimental excess and inappropriate re-orchestration, whilst retaining the high spirits of the original works. For Vanguard he also conducted the accompaniment to a popular series of recordings of the Viennese baritone Erich Kunz singing German university songs.