Waltz (Bay Ganyo Suite)

The waltz comes from Veselin Stoyanov's suite drawn from his opera Bay Ganyo, after Aleko Konstantinov's satirical figure — the Bulgarian who travels through Europe and understands nothing of it. Stoyanov, one of the founders of the Bulgarian symphonic school, wrote the opera in the 1940s and extracted the suite for concert use; the waltz is its lightest number, a piece of deliberate salon charm placed inside a work whose subject is provincial vanity. The irony is in the placing rather than in the notes.