Ach, wie so herrlich zu schau'n (Eine Nacht in Venedig)

This was the only Strauss operetta premiered outside Vienna: it opened at the Neues Friedrich-Wilhelmstädtisches Theater in Berlin on 3 October 1883, to a libretto by F. Zell and Richard Genée after an older French vaudeville. The evening went badly. The text was ridiculed, and a line about pigeons became a Berlin joke that followed the piece for years. Strauss revised the score for the Vienna production three days later and went on altering it; further reworkings came after his death, Korngold's of 1923 among them. The waltzes and the gondola music survived every version.