Johann Strauss

Austrian composer

• Born: October 25, 1825
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
• Died: June 3, 1899
• Place of death: Vienna, Austria

Strauss built upon the musical achievements of his father and Austrian dance composer Joseph Lanner to raise the waltz to its highest level of development, a point at which it passed from dance music to symphonic music. His achievements in the operetta were less dramatic, for only two of his operettas have received lasting acclaim.

Early Life

Johann Strauss (shtrows) was the eldest child of Johann and Anna (Streim) Strauss, both of whom were musically accomplished. Indeed, the father’s reputation as a composer, performer, and conductor of waltzes was already established when the younger Strauss was born. The younger Strauss early demonstrated his musical gift when, at the age of six, he played a waltz tune on the piano. Despite the considerable musical talent of all of his sons, the elder Strauss forbade them to pursue their interests, allowing them to play only the piano, not the violin, the instrument essential to waltz composition. Strauss’s mother, however, not only preserved his first composition but also successfully circumvented her husband’s prohibition against the violin lessons. The conspiracy between son and mother, who provided one of her husband’s violins and the money for the lessons, was eventually discovered by the elder Strauss, who destroyed the violin and beat his son.

Although his father had enrolled him in the prestigious Schottengymnasium for four years and the Polytechnikum, where he studied business, for an additional two years, Strauss was able to escape the banking career that his father intended for him when the elder Strauss left his family for Emily Trampusch in 1842. Strauss had secretly studied the violin under Franz Amon, whose position as conductor of one of the Strauss orchestras made him familiar with the elder Strauss’s gestures and mannerisms, which the younger Strauss imitated. When Strauss could openly pursue his musical career, he continued his violin studies with Anton Kohlmann, ballet master and violinist at the Kärnthnertortheater, and studied music theory with Joseph Drechsler, organist and composer of church music. Under Drechsler’s tutelage and prodding, Strauss composed a church cantata, though Strauss’s real interest was in waltz composition.

Because of his father’s stubborn opposition, Strauss encountered many obstacles when he attempted to stage his first concert. The elder Strauss, by suggesting that he would musically boycott any ballroom allowing his son to perform, effectively closed the Viennese musical world to his son. Strauss accordingly went outside the inner city and staged his first concert at Dommayer’s Casino at Heitzing, a suburb of Vienna, on October 15, 1844. Despite the somewhat hostile crowd—his father’s business manager, Carl Hirsche, had provided tickets to rowdies to disrupt the concert, which consisted of Strauss’s own waltz compositions—the Sinngedichte (poems of the senses) earned nineteen encores. One reviewer wrote, “Good evening, Father Strauss! Good morning to you, Strauss Junior!”

After his son’s triumphant debut, the elder Strauss offered his son a position as concertmaster and assistant conductor, but the offer was refused. The two men effected a reconciliation of sorts, but their essential differences surfaced in 1848, when civil war erupted. The conservative elder Strauss sided with the Royalists, and his son sided with the rebels. Though neither Strauss’s political commitment was strong, the change from waltzes to marches did produce some notable music. When the revolt was brutally crushed and Francis Joseph became emperor, the younger Strauss incurred royal displeasure, but his father’s fate was worse: a decline in personal popularity, unprofitable tours, depression, and in 1849 death from scarlet fever. With his father’s death, the son began a career that would establish him as “the Waltz King.”

Life’s Work

After his father’s death, Strauss assumed control of his father’s orchestra and at his first concert, on October 11, 1849, played Mozart’s Requiem, thereby winning the loyalty of the Viennese, some of whom had resented his challenge to his father. He also partly atoned for his political “error” of 1848 by his 1854 performance of his popular Annen-Polka at the ball prior to Francis Joseph’s marriage to Elisabeth von Wittelsbach. During the 1850’s, the waltz craze captivated Vienna, and the prolific Strauss produced scores of new waltzes to meet the increasing demand. Although many of the compositions were named for professional associations and societies—the astute Strauss knew how to market his product—only one, the Acceleration Waltz (written for the students of the Vienna engineering school), involved a marriage of title and music.

So popular were Strauss’s waltzes and so exhausting was his conducting schedule (he conducted daily, and often more than one of his orchestras) that in 1853 he had to convalesce in the Alps. It was this hectic pace that resulted in his drafting his brother Joseph, who was an engineer, as a conductor. (Strauss later persuaded his brother Eduard to assume a similar role.) Because he had been freed from sole responsibility for the family business, Strauss could tour and perform abroad as his father had done. In 1854, he signed a contract to perform yearly in Russia at the resort of Pavlovsk, and he toured Europe with an orchestra between 1856 and 1886.

Aside from his abortive relationship with Olga Smirnitzki, whom he had met in Pavlovsk, Strauss had only casual liaisons with women until 1862, when he met and married Jetty Treffz, an older woman who had been mistress to Baron Moritz Todesco. In a sense, Jetty replaced Anna Strauss. Released in 1864 from all contractual obligations as conductor of the family orchestral business, Strauss turned to composition at the mansion he and Jetty had bought at Heitzing. The 1860’s were marked by Strauss’s greatest waltzes, Tales from the Vienna Woods and The Blue Danube , though the latter, which was originally written for performance with a choral group, was initially a failure, primarily because of the lyrics. When it was later played in Paris as a purely orchestral performance, it was so well received that it became the musical motif of the International Exhibition of 1867.

Strauss’s triumph in Paris resulted in an invitation to England in 1867, where he won more critical acclaim. His most notable tour, however, occurred in 1872, when he was paid $100,000 to appear at the World’s Peace Jubilee in Boston. There, before an outdoor audience of 100,000 people, he conducted, with the help of many assistant conductors, an orchestra of 1,087 instruments. This musical extravaganza, later repeated on a more modest scale in New York, appalled Strauss, who nevertheless thereby became the richest musician of his time.

Even though the waltz was virtually synonymous with Strauss and Vienna, another musical form began gaining favor among the Viennese. Jacques Offenbach had popularized the operetta, a kind of parodic opera with a socially subversive message. Jetty and Maximilian Steiner, impresario of the Theatre an der Wien, persuaded Strauss to apply his talent to the operetta. Had he remembered the fate of The Blue Danube, Strauss might well have foreseen that music without a suitable libretto was doomed to failure. In addition, Strauss seemed an unlikely composer for operetta because he had had practically no exposure to theater and consequently knew little about dramatic composition; he was simply more comfortable with music than with language. On the other hand, he already had found the constraints of the waltz formats incompatible with his developing symphonic interests.

The first operetta was not staged because of casting problems; the next two, with mediocre librettos, were comparative failures with brief runs. However, Die Fledermaus (1874; the bat), his third effort, proved to be an enormous success, though its farcical content was at odds with a depressed Vienna, which had just suffered a stock market crash. The operetta, involving a masked ball and a confusion of characters, was adapted from a play and had a good plot; the libretto by Richard Genée and Karl Hafner was exceptional. In fact, Die Fledermaus marked the zenith of Strauss’s career in operetta, and, though he wrote several more, he did not return to the form until 1885, when Der Zigeunerbaron (the gypsy baron) was staged. Like Die Fledermaus, Der Zigeunerbaron succeeded because the music and the libretto, which was by Ignaz Schnitzer, were complementary rather than at odds.

During the eleven years between his operetta successes, Strauss’s life changed dramatically. Jetty, the inspiration for his more serious music and his operetta efforts, died in 1877. After a disastrous five-year marriage to Angelica Dietrich, who was thirty-three years his junior, he married in 1887 Adele Deutsch Strauss, a young widow, with whom he spent his remaining years. In order to divorce Angelica and marry Adele, he had to become a Protestant, surrender his Austrian citizenship, and become a citizen of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

Strauss’s marriage and his developing friendship with Johannes Brahms made Strauss’s last years contented ones. He continued to write operettas, as well as some orchestral waltzes. One of his most notable waltzes was the Kaiserwaltzer (1888; emperor waltz), written in celebration of Francis Joseph’s forty-year reign. This piece is both waltz and march, suggesting the emperor’s glory, and has been regarded as more tone poem than dance. Such was the identification between “the Waltz King” and Francis Joseph that Strauss’s death on June 3, 1899, was regarded as the end of a political as well as a musical era.

Significance

The Strauss family’s virtual control of the music business in Vienna paralleled the dominance of the Habsburg dynasty, which in the nineteenth century enjoyed one of its most opulent and successful periods. The waltz and the beauty and harmony it represented became a kind of opium of the people, and the Habsburg prosperity created a mood receptive to it. The acknowledged “Waltz King” was the younger Johann Strauss, arguably one of the most Viennese of composers.

Strauss found in the waltz the almost perfect vehicle for his own personality, which had its dark side. Beneath the sweeping vitality and lush sweetness of the waltz was a wistful melancholy especially suited to Strauss. The waltz, however, became a prison for him as he attempted to force his musical inspiration into the tyranny of monotonous three-quarter time. As he developed, absorbing not only the waltz influence from his father and Joseph Lanner but also the more liberating influence of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, he was drawn toward the symphonic and away from the demands of the dance industry. His waltzes accordingly changed; the introduction and coda became almost as long as the waltz proper.

For his operettas, Strauss used the work of Jacques Offenbach and Franz von Suppé as the foundation for his own efforts. In his Der Zigeunerbaron, however, he transcended his predecessors and actually gave the operetta a new direction that was followed by others, including Franz Lehár. Strauss, in effect, brought both nineteenth century music forms to their artistic heights, but neither form was to survive the cultural and political upheaval that also accounted for the Habsburgs’ demise. Strauss embodied the nineteenth century, and his grave, opposite Schubert’s and next to Brahms’s in the Central Cemetery in Vienna, testifies to his stature not only in Austria but also in the universal world of music.

Bibliography

Crittenden, Camille. Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Crittenden describes how, and why, Strauss’s operettas expressed Viennese pride and anxiety during the late nineteenth century. Provides a general overview of Viennese operetta, analyzes the interaction between Strauss’s operettas and their audience, and discusses Strauss’s role as a national icon during his lifetime and the twentieth century.

Fantel, Hans. The Waltz Kings: Johann Strauss, Father and Son, and Their Romantic Age. New York: William Morrow, 1972. Although Fantel provides biographies of the two Strausses, he stresses the relationship of music to politics so that the reader has a broad cultural and political context for tracing the evolution of the waltz. The well-written, informal text is well indexed, and Fantel provides a good bibliography, particularly of the extramusical context, and a list of the compositions of father and son.

Gartenberg, Egon. Johann Strauss: The End of an Era. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974. Places Austria in a broader European political context and provides an interesting account of the predecessors of the waltz. Gartenberg analyzes Die Fledermaus in detail and explains why Strauss’s operettas, with two exceptions, did not succeed critically. Profusely illustrated, well indexed, and documented; contains bibliographies concerning the Strauss family, as well as the literature and music of the period, the Habsburg dynasty, and the political context.

Jacob, Heinrich E. Johann Strauss, Father and Son: A Century of Light Music. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1939. Jacob stresses the conditions in Vienna that facilitated the development of the waltz, relates Strauss’s waltzes to other contemporary music, and devotes much attention to the operettas. Although the focus is on the Strauss family, Jacob does discuss the heirs, notably Franz Lehár, to the Strauss tradition.

Pastene, Jerome. Three-Quarter Time: The Life and Music of the Strauss Family of Vienna. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971. Pastene divides his book into three parts: Johann Strauss, the father; Johann Strauss, the son; and the other Strauss sons and Lehár. Pastene, himself a conductor, provides lengthy analyses of several major works and also includes a catalog by opus numbers and the works by the four members of the Strauss musical dynasty.

Wechsberg, Joseph. The Waltz Emperors: The Life and Times and Music of the Strauss Family. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973. Wechsberg discusses the origins of the waltz, defines the era of the waltz as beginning with Joseph Lanner and ending with Strauss’s death in 1899, finds Strauss’s best waltzes really symphonic music, and explores the psychological side of his subject. The book is profusely illustrated (many of the illustrations are in color) with memorabilia and lithographs.