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The Last Waltz
The Strauss Dynasty in Vienna
Saturday 2 July 2016 7.30pm
No-one knows exactly when the waltz came to Vienna. But come it did – floating down the Danube from the
hills of southern Germany, to undermine the old minuet with its free-and-easy ways. You can hear it
bubbling under in Mozart’s German Dances, in Haydn’s Surprise symphony and Beethoven’s Archduke
Trio. Its open-ended three-beat rhythm – always leaning forward into the arms of the next bar – and its
whirling motion seemed at first scandalously sexy, and then deliciously escapist. In the hands of Johann
Strauss I (1804-1849) it escaped from the wine-gardens of suburban Vienna to intoxicate first the city, and
then the world.
Johann Strauss I was the stepson of an innkeeper; but by the 1830s, leading his dance orchestra from the
violin, he sounds like a rock star. “His hair is curly, his mouth is melodious, energetic […] with his bow, he
was pointing to the heavens and the violins were acclaiming the rising of the sun”, wrote one visitor to
Vienna in 1833. “All eyes were turned to him; it was a moment of worship”. He led a rock star lifestyle too;
with exhausting Europe-wide tours, in the course of which he seduced France, Germany and even Victorian
England into the embrace of the waltz. And not just the waltz: the Cachucha Galop is typical of Johann’s
on-the-hoof approach to hit-making. The beautiful young ballerina Fanny Elssler had astonished Vienna
with her sensuous performance of a Spanish dance, the cachucha, in the ballet Le Diable boiteux (The
limping devil). Needing a new dance for a summer ball in August 1837, Johann adapted her tune into a
sprightly galop one hour before the orchestra was due on stage. They played it without rehearsal – and it
was encored three times.
Naturally, his private life was a mess: he squandered his vast income, and ditched his wife and family to
move in with his mistress. In 1848, the year of Europe-wide revolution, he crowned it all by siding with the
Establishment, even writing its marching-tune – the Radetzky March, named after the Austrian Field
Marshal whose armies had crushed the revolution in Italy and Vienna. But by now, the “Waltz King” himself
was facing rebellion. His abandoned teenage son Johann – Schani to friends – had set up his own dance
band. Die Gunstwerber (Wooers of favour) was the very first of his own waltzes that he conducted at his
very first public concert, on 15 October 1844, in the suburb of Hietzing. All of Vienna took sides. Johann I
had told Schani that he “had no talent” and urged him to become a banker instead. But the morning after
that first concert, one journalist announced: “Good evening Father Strauss! Good morning to you Strauss
Junior!” When Johann senior died in 1849, the crown of the Waltz King passed – rather more easily than
the crown of Austria had done the previous year – to Schani, known ever since as Johann Strauss II.
For the next half century, the Strauss dance orchestra became a family business – and a global brand. The
tours continued, the orchestra doubled in size, and Johann II even succeeded where his father had failed –
he broke America. In Imperial Russia, special trains were laid on to carry crowds hear Strauss and his
orchestra. At the 1867 Paris World Exhibition, Strauss’s music all but sealed an alliance between Austria
and France. Piano copies of The Blue Danube sold over a million within their first few years. And in Boston,
USA, in 1871, Strauss’s American fans presented him with an orchestra of 2000, and a chorus of 20,000 for
the mother of all stadium concerts. They used a cannon to give the downbeat.
So in 1853 Johann recruited his reluctant younger brother Josef (a successful civil engineer) to join the
firm. “You are the most talented of us all”, he told him, and Josef went on to write some 200-plus dances,
including one of the most ravishing of all waltzes: Music of the Spheres – written for the Vienna Medical
Association Ball on 21 January 1868. (The press grumbled that its slow, rapturous introduction seemed
almost too heavenly for a ball whose organisers spent their days trying to stop people entering the afterlife).
Six years later, brother Eduard, the baby of the family, also took his place in front of the band, freeing
Johann up to write a sweet, unending stream of the loveliest music ever danced to.
The first thing you get with a Strauss dance is a title. Strauss wrote most of his music for specific occasions;
and as a businessman, Strauss was always happy to write a sponsored polka. There’s a Students’ Polka, a
Fireproof Polka for a firm of ironmongers, and a Jurists’ Polka for a lawyers’ ball. But that wasn’t vital.
Tritsch-Tratsch (1858) is the most Viennese of pastimes – “chit-chat”, or gossip (though it might also
have been a nickname for Johann’s wife Jetty’s pet poodle). The New Pizzicato Polka (1892) does exactly
what it says on the tin: it’s a sequel to the hugely popular Pizzicato Polka that Johann had co-written with
Josef in 1869, and the gimmick (audiences loved gimmicks) was the same – the string instruments are
plucked (pizzicato) all the way through. Then there were exotic variants: the Austrian Empire stretched
from the Adriatic to the borders of Russia, and its subjects of every nation gathered in Vienna to party. The
Polka-Mazur combined the graceful pace of a slow polka with the aristocratic rhythms of the Polish
mazurka. Josef’s beautiful Woman’s Heart, composed in September 1864 as a public love-letter to his
wife Caroline before he travelled to Poland on business, shows once again why even Johann regarded him
as a genius.
Tic-Tac, meanwhile means – no prizes for guessing – “tick tock”. It’s an adaptation of a number from
Johann’s great operetta Die Fledermaus (1874), in which the flirtatious Gabriel von Eisenstein attempts
to charm a masked Hungarian countess with the ticking of his expensive new watch… unaware that she’s
actually his own wife Rosalinde in disguise. Don’t worry though: after a spiral of misunderstandings, a
string of botched seductions, and a glittering all-night party hosted by a teenage Russian millionaire,
Gabriel and Rosalinde kiss and make up: “It was all the fault of champagne!”. And few operettas fizz or
sparkle more irresistibly than Die Fledermaus: even the very first notes of the Overture sound like corks
popping out of bottles. What follows is the ultimate Viennese dance demo-track, Johann laying out his
wares from lilting polkas to melancholy ballads, plus – of course – an unstoppably whirling waltz.
And of course, waltzes were what really counted. Johann certainly wrote them to commission, but the Waltz
was the royal domain of his dynasty, and all the Strausses treated them with respect. The title might refer to
the terms of the commission – Morning Papers, for example, for a journalists’ ball. But it might be a
fragment of poetry – On the Beautiful Blue Danube, Vienna Blood – or simply an invitation to enjoy the
pleasures of life in the Imperial city: Voices of Spring, Roses from the South, Tales from the Vienna Woods.
And that’s how Strauss waltzes begin – taking the listener by the hand and leading them into the dance.
Tales from the Vienna Woods (first played in an open air concert in the Volksgarten in June 1868)
begins with a miniature tone-painting of Vienna’s country playground, complete with horn calls, birdsong,
and a loving evocation of the sentimental Schrammelmusik played in the inns and wine gardens. The noble
Emperor Waltz – written for a residency in Berlin in August 1889, as a joint compliment to the Emperors
of both Germany and Austria – opens with a military march, first crisp and quiet, then swelling with
grandeur. But whatever the subject, what happens next is unmistakable. The orchestra pauses, a solo cello
or a horn sighs, and the first of a several waltz melodies eases in. But everyone present is already more than
aware that for Strauss, the waltz is about more than just the dance. And after the dance has swept past,
there’s a pause for recollection – a moment of sweet nostalgia before the brilliant final flourish.
“The same goes for all of them”, wrote the Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick, shortly after Strauss’s
death in 1899, “each waltz is a little love-story of bashful courtship, impulsive infatuation, radiant
happiness, and here and there a little breath of easily-consolable melancholy”. As Austria lost one war after
another, and the dashing young Emperor Franz Joseph of 1848 became the bewhiskered great-grandfather
of Europe, the Empire’s gaily-uniformed, hopelessly unwarlike armies seemed to have less power than the
glowing stream of dance music that flowed from Strauss’s pen and around the world. “Franz Joseph can
reign only as long as Johann Strauss lives”, quipped one Viennese wag – and he wasn’t far wrong.
“The most musical man in Europe” – that was Richard Wagner’s verdict on Strauss. “Sadly not by me”,
scribbled Johannes Brahms over the opening bars of The Blue Danube (1867). Make no mistake - this
music can hold its head up beside Beethoven. Take those opening bars. With a hushed shimmer of violins
and three simple notes on the horn – the most basic of all musical ingredients – Strauss creates the most
recognisable, most spine-tinglingly beautiful opening in all music. It could be no other piece, by no other
composer. To do that takes a Mozart, a Beethoven, a Wagner – or a Johann Strauss. The 19th-century
Viennese enjoyed this miracle all year round. So why wait until New Year?
Programme notes by Richard Bratby © 2016