Johann Strauss II - Biography
Johann Strauss the great waltz king was born in Vienna October 25th 1825 and died in Vienna on June 3rd 1899. His father Johann Strauss Sr. (1804-1899) was himself a great composer of dance music and his brother Josef Strauss (1827-1870) and Eduard Strauss (1835-1916) were also composers of distinguished dance music. Johann Strauss Jr. and his family to be thought of in context of the Austro/Hungarian Empire particularly the nearly seventy year reign of Kaiser Franz Jose the Second (1830-1916). Vienna was just not the capitol of present Austria but a vast Empire that included much of Eastern Europe and parts of Northern Italy. The social life of this powerful world capitol was full of glittering balls that were scheduled around holidays and national celebrations. These balls and galas invariably had a small orchestra that performed Waltzes, Polkas and Quadrilles. His father was opposed to young Strauss having a musical career and wanted him to study the law. His mother secretly arranged for him to have lessons with his father’s concertmaster. His father left their family when the younger Strauss was seventeen for a mistress and he was then able to formally pursue musical instruction with Anton Kollmann and Joachim Hoffmann distinguished court musicians. By 1844 he able to create a dance orchestra that was to become a rival to his fathers. This caused a rift with his father who under a circumstance didn’t get along with his son. His father in fact attempted to boycott musicians who performed with his son and locales that would hire his orchestra. In 1847 the son’s position was made somewhat more secure when he was hired into a permanent position held by the recently deceased Josef Lanner another well known Viennese dance composer.
Vienna like the rest of Europe went through the general revolutionary ferment of 1848. Strauss Jr. favored the revolutionaries his father predictably was a staunch supporter of the Hapsburg monarchy and in fact wrote his most famous piece the Radetzky March named after the general who put down the unrest. The next year his father was to die of scarlet fever. Soon after his father’s death he was to combine both of their orchestras. Though he was quite prolific the waltzes that were to assure his immortality were not to come for quite a few years. He did write in the 1850’s the Explosion Polka the well known Annen Polka, Tritsch-Tratch Polka and the Perpetuum Mobile. The waltzes from the 1850s are fine but less well known; Idyllen, Liebeslieder, Glossen and Nachtfalter are a sampling.
The performing pace that Strauss maintained took a toll and he suffered a mental collapse in 1853 and while he recuperated his brother Josef took over his orchestra. He recovered soon enough and starting in 1856 he was to tour Russia for ten consecutive seasons. In 1862 he married for the first time to singer to singer Jetty Treffz (their romance was to be somewhat fictionalized in the movie the Great Waltz). By this time Strauss was to start composing his great waltzes; Accelerations, Morning Papers, Vienna Bon Bons, Artists Life culminating with the great Beautiful Blue Danube and Tales of the Vienna Woods. Strauss greatly admired Jacques Offenbach and wanted to have a similar success as an operetta composer and he was to write nearly a score of them many of them had limited success and are known mostly from the Overtures, Polkas and Waltzes extracted from them. One exception was the domestic comedy Die Fledermaus (The Bat) from 1874 which is hugely popular to this day.
Strauss embarked on a tour of the United States in 1872. This tour culminated in a concert in Boston that was attended by nearly 100,000 people and had well over 10,000 performers. He had a huge success financial and artistic success. The famous works kept on coming, the waltzes Wine Women and Song, Weiner Blut, Roses from the South, Du und Du, Where the Lemon Trees Bloom, Wine Women and Song, Voices of Spring and a Thousand and One Nights. His second great operetta the Hungarian themed ‘The Gypsy Baron’ appeared in 1885.
Strauss’s wife died in 1878, soon after her death he married a much younger women who seemingly was not interested in him except for his fame and money and was often indiscreet with other men. Strauss was so unhappy in this relationship that he left the Catholic Church and changed his citizenship to Saxe -Coburg a Protestant state in Germany that permitted him to divorce. Strauss’s third marriage in 1882 to Adele was evidently happy and serene. By the end of the 1880’s he was to complete another successful operetta A Night in Venice. The last series of waltzes were to include the Lagoon Waltz, Treasure Waltz and perhaps his greatest waltz the Emperor.
In the 1890’s the aging Strauss was write his first full scale opera Ritter Pasman, it was not a success. Strauss’s health was beginning to fail him he still insisted in his seventies to dye his hair jet black so he would resemble the dashing figure of his youth. Strauss within his realm was universally admired by his contemporaries, Wagner who had contempt for most of his fellow composers had admiration, Bruckner loved his music and Brahms who was a close friend once autographed a fan presented to him by Adele Strauss notating the opening bars of the Blue Danube and added the postscript “unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms”. Strauss was starting to work on a ballet Aschenbrodel when he died on June 3rd 1899. HIs death stirred a deep mourning in Austro Hungarian Empire.
Johann Strauss Jr. is often viewed by the unenlightened as a lightweight composer rather than a great composer of light music. His music is a sort of soundtrack for the glamorous era when Franz Joseph and his beautiful queen Elisabeth ruled a great Empire. So popular was Strauss in German speaking countries that during the Nazi period Strauss’s small amount of Jewish ancestry was suppressed by Goebbels so as not to let Hitler and his subjects know that one of his favorite composers was “racially tainted” Many great German conductors like Furtwangler and Walter and Karajan gave superb performances of his music but a special niche must be set aside for the Austrian Clemens Krauss who led the magnificent Vienna New Years Concerts in the from the forties to his death in 1954 and also made imperishable recordings of his music.. For many decades the mantle was picked up by the Concertmaster of hr Vienna Philharmonic Willy Boskovsky who until his retirement in the 1990’s led the New Years Concerts. They are now led by alternating famous conductors.
