Pizzicato-Polka

The Pizzicato-Polka was written jointly by Johann Strauss II and his brother Josef in 1869 and first played that summer at Pavlovsk, where the family held the Russian concert contract. It carries no opus number, because the brothers never settled how to divide the authorship between their catalogues. The whole piece is played without bows: the string orchestra plucks throughout, with a triangle marking the trio. Joint composition was not unusual between the two — Josef, trained as an engineer, had been drawn into the family business reluctantly and wrote several hundred dances of his own.