The Last Waltz

by John Suchet

  That letter pretty much summed up Josef, apart from the anger. He had a shy, gentle character, he was universally liked and content to make his own way in life without interference or influence from outside.

  He had his way over his father, though less from the force of his argument than the fact that Strauss senior was about to leave on an extensive tour lasting the best part of a year and died shortly after his return.

  Now, in 1853, as his elder brother lay ill on sick leave, Josef was attending courses on hydraulic engineering and water-works construction to work towards a diploma in engineering. In May he established his reputation as an innovative engineer by designing, with a colleague, a horse-drawn street-cleaning machine with rotating brushes. At first rejected as impractical, the Vienna Municipal Council later realised its worth and the plans went into production.25

  “Josef could fight his uncaring father, but had no weaponry against his loved ones, those nearest and dearest to him.”

  A quietly satisfied Josef began work on a snow-clearing machine, which was when his mother and elder brother told him they had other plans for him. He was needed as part of the Strauss musical enterprise. Josef was quietly defiant. He had seen his father off over plans to enter the military; he would do the same now.

  Except that Anna and Johann knew exactly how to handle Josef: to appeal to his better nature, to explain to him that the welfare of the whole family – mother, brothers and sisters – depended on him, how they all looked to him to save them from destitution. As a clinching argument they stressed that it would be only a temporary arrangement, until Johann regained his health.

  Josef could fight his uncaring father, but had no weaponry against his loved ones, those nearest and dearest to him. To the childhood friend he would marry in five years’ time, Karoline Josefa Pruckmayer, he wrote on 23 July 1853, ‘The unavoidable has happened; today I play for the first time at the Sperl … I wholeheartedly regret that this has happened so suddenly.’

  ‘Suddenly’ is the operative word. It had all happened so quickly that Josef had no time to become even passably efficient on the violin, so that he had to conduct at the Sperl with a baton – a severe break with Strauss tradition.

  With characteristic dedication he took lessons in the violin and conducting, and even set about composing, mindful that each Strauss concert contained new pieces composed specially for the occasion.

  The arts were not entirely alien to this talented engineer. For several years he had complemented his courses at the Polytechnic Institute with private tuition in drawing and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. He had turned out many drawings, silhouettes, watercolours, all exhibiting great finesse and detail. He was accomplished in the literary field as well. He had written an anthology of poems, and an ambitious drama in five acts for which he wrote the text, visualised the settings and produced sketches of the characters, costumes and scenery.

  By all accounts Josef – ‘Pepi’ to close friends and family – was a shy, sensitive man. The relatively few photographs of him show a gentle, almost soft, countenance, albeit with a firm gaze, prominent chin, and a characteristically Straussian full and flowing head of hair. He felt strongly enough about the upheavals of 1848 to join his elder brother on the barricades, even taking up arms, and at one point found himself the subject of an arrest warrant.

  This seems to have been a passing phase, or rather a good example of that Viennese dual nature, crying on one side of the face and laughing on the other. A journalist described Josef as ‘so audaciously stylish, so high-spiritedly Viennese when in cheerful company, and so artistically dreamy in the realm of music’.

  We have no first-hand accounts of his debut with the Johann Strauss Orchestra at the Sperl, but he was soon booked to appear again – or, more accurately, had no choice but to fulfil his brother’s next engagement, which was for the Parish Festival Ball in the Viennese suburb of Hernals on 29 August 1853.

  This was the moment to find out if he had any talent at composing – I suspect as much for himself as for the orchestra and audience. He composed a piece to which he gave the opus number 1, and chose a title that intentionally left no one in any doubt that this was a temporary departure from his chosen career.

  ‘Die Ersten und Letzten’ (‘The First and Last’) is an extraordinary first work for a trained engineer in his mid-twenties. It begins with an uncharacteristically bold fanfare, for a shy man, repeated several times just in case you missed it. A slow introduction follows, a pause, and then comes a truly delightful passage in three-four time, followed by another. We are unmistakably in Strauss territory. This is music to sway to, swing a wine glass or beer jug to. It is a substantial piece, lasting around ten minutes, and ends with a typical Straussian accelerando, a roll on the side-drum and a flourish to finish.

  Josef Strauss might have been a reluctant musician, but he had arrived and there was no turning back. The theatrical journal Bäuerle’s Theaterzeitung reported that ‘Die Ersten und Letzten’ was repeated six times at the request of the crowd, and just in case Josef had any doubts about his future in music, it wrote with clear reference to the title:

  This latest flowering of the dance is positive proof of the brilliant talent of Herr Strauss, and we allow ourselves the agreeable hope that this composition will not be the last, but that Josef Strauss … will soon produce a sequel.

  Josef Strauss did more than that. In less than two decades he was to compose more than three hundred pieces and arrange at least five hundred others. To this day musicologists argue that Josef was, generally speaking, a finer orchestrator than his brother, and that his best waltzes – ‘Sphären-Klänge’ (‘Sounds of the Spheres’), ‘Dorfschwalben aus Österreich’ (‘Village Swallows of Austria’) – are as good, if not better, than Johann’s best.

  Johann himself would later be in no doubt. ‘Pepi is the more gifted of us two; I am merely the more popular,’ he would say.

  Josef’s musical life flourished along with the family enterprise he helped save. It is fair to say, though, that he was not as temperamentally suited to it as his elder brother, and his career was to come to a sudden and tragic end.

  Johann Strauss returned to Vienna on 18 September 1853, ‘completely restored after his illness’, and within a very short time he received an offer he could not refuse. The Johann Strauss Orchestra, with Johann once again at its head, was about to become truly international.

  Several hundred miles to the north-east of Vienna, Russia had proudly opened its first railway, a short nineteen-mile stretch linking the capital of St Petersburg with the town of Pavlovsk, a favourite summer resort of the tsar and the nobility. There an elegant music pavilion had been constructed at the railway terminus and named the Vauxhall Pavilion, after the famous pleasure gardens in London.26

  This had happened in 1837 and in the intervening years prominent musicians had been invited from across Europe to perform there for the distinguished visitors to Pavlosk. Franz Liszt and Robert and Clara Schumann had all played there, and the railway management had attempted to persuade Johann Strauss senior and his orchestra to visit Pavlovsk in 1839, but without success.

  The railway company was now under new management and it was time to try again to entice the most famous orchestral leader in Europe to travel to Pavlovsk – if not the father, then this time the son. Accordingly, in 1854 the new director of the Tsarskoye-Selo Railway Company led a delegation to see Johann Strauss the Younger.

  “Pepi is the more gifted of us two; I am merely the more popular.”

  Johann Strauss’s tribute to his brother.

  The offer on the table was an invitation to conduct the summer concerts at Pavlovsk two years hence, in 1856. To keep costs down it was proposed that Johann make use of local musicians.

  How could he possibly say no to this? An invitation to travel to the imperial capital of Russia, to perform before the crème de la crème of Russian aristocracy, including most probably the tsar himself and his tsarina. If he could make a succes
s of this, his name would truly be established internationally.

  But Johann was worried on two counts. First, there was the problem that he would be working with musicians unused to playing his music, compounded by language difficulties. Secondly, and rather more concerning, were the reservations he had about leaving the Johann Strauss Orchestra in the hands of brother Josef in Vienna.

  Josef had shown he could conduct and compose, but in these early and critical years was his heart really in a musical career? Johann was not sure. Fickle as the musical world was, he knew it would take only one or two poor concerts and the reputation of the orchestra could be irretrievably damaged.

  It is at this point that the third Strauss brother, Eduard, enters the story. He was nearly ten years younger than Johann and almost eight younger than Josef. There is scant information on Eduard’s early years. Too young to have become politically active during the 1848 uprising, and with his father so often away on tour and at home with his mistress when he was in Vienna, it is unlikely that Eduard was able to develop a close relationship with him. Strauss senior died when Eduard was just fourteen.

  Given this, I think we can also assume that Strauss senior was too uninterested and distracted to bother trying to dissuade his youngest son from a career in music, for this – remarkably – is what Eduard seems to have pursued. Anna must have been incredulous when it became obvious to her that Eduard, like his brothers, was extraordinarily gifted musically. All three sons, each of them highly talented musicians from an early age. Anna had had her revenge on her husband three times over!

  In 1855, at the age of twenty, Eduard was playing harp in the Johann Strauss Orchestra. Vienna was now growing accustomed to seeing the three Strauss brothers all involved in the same enterprise, often appearing at the same venue together – or at least two out of the three – deputising for each other, and generally running light-music activities at the city’s dance halls.

  The Strausses – all three of them – were on the musical map, and it became obvious to them, and the people of Vienna, that they would never leave it. It was at about this time that Johann took to adopting the French version of his name, Jean.27 Josef, as we have seen, was known as Pepi, and Eduard as Edi — later ‘der schöne Edi’ (‘beautiful Edi’) due to his good looks, coupled with a fondness for smart clothes and fashion.

  With his two brothers now involved with the orchestra, Johann overcame his earlier doubts regarding Josef’s commitment and accepted the invitation to Russia. The first concert at Pavlovsk was the best part of two years away, which would give him time to prepare and make sure that all was in place in Vienna before he left.

  In the event the invitation to Russia was to prove far more of a commitment than he could possibly have imagined. It was to change his life, and not just musically. He would – as far as we know, for the first time – fall head over heels in love.

  25 Apart from obvious advances in technology, the basic design remains largely unchanged to this day.

  26 Thus giving the word vokzal, meaning central railway station, to the Russian language.

  27 He was not alone among composers for adopting more exotic forms of their names. Beethoven was fond of signing manuscripts and letters Louis or Luigi van Beethoven.

  To say that the concerts went well in the summer of 1856 would be an understatement of huge proportions. At the opening concert in Pavlovsk on 18 May, which included pieces by Strauss father and son, as well as Verdi and Meyerbeer, there were so many demands for repeats and encores that the concert lasted until 1 a.m.

  Word quickly spread. The aristocracy of St Petersburg made the train journey to Pavlovsk several times a week. It was soon impossible to get tickets at any price for a Strauss concert. It was reported that more than once, when a bell was sounded to announce the departure of the last train to the capital, the audience paid no attention, refusing to allow Strauss to stop, knowing it would mean camping down somewhere for the night away from home.

  It was only a matter of time before the tsar himself, accompanied by members of the royal family, took their places in the imperial box. Once the tsar was seen to clap enthusiastically, there was not a single personage who did not follow his example. Johann Strauss, idol of Vienna, was soon known and lauded throughout Russia west of the Urals. His fame was truly international.

  Hardly surprisingly, in the autumn of 1856 Strauss was signed up for the following two years. The demands on him were quite extraordinary. He was to give daily concerts from 2 May to 2 October with an orchestra of not less than thirty musicians. Daily concerts for five months – it’s a schedule that would cause any of today’s globe-trotting maestros or virtuosos to blanch. In fact it’s unlikely any would agree to such a punishing schedule.

  Nor was he totally free to select the music. He was to choose pieces from classical opera as well as garden and dance music, but ‘in this he is to follow the taste of the local audience’. He would be expected to feature his own compositions, but ‘he is also to perform the most popular and latest compositions of other famous masters, with a full orchestra under his personal direction’.

  The remuneration, on the other hand, was exceedingly generous. He received 18,000 silver roubles for the five-month engagement each year, including his own and his orchestra’s wages and travel costs.28 He and his players also received free accommodation, and were permitted to give four benefit concerts each season, meaning all proceeds accrued to Strauss and the orchestra.

  In the first season he had accepted the offer of local musicians to keep costs down, but this new contract required him to organise his own orchestra. It’s possible Strauss himself insisted on this to ensure the players were up to scratch. In this he most certainly succeeded. He brought just a nucleus of musicians from Vienna, supplementing them with hand-picked players from Berlin to reduce costs, as the journey from Berlin was direct and therefore cheaper. It was a good move. In May 1857 he wrote to his music publisher in Vienna, ‘My orchestra is causing a sensation, and they deserve it too, for would to God I had such a band in Vienna. I cannot speak too highly of this one …’

  “My orchestra is causing a sensation, and they deserve it too, for would to God I had such a band in Vienna.”

  Johann Strauss on his success in Russia

  A ‘sensation’ the Strauss Orchestra most certainly was. The initial single-year contract, as we have seen, was extended for a further two years. In the event Johann Strauss was to appear with his orchestra in Pavlovsk every summer for almost a decade, from 1856 to 1865, and again in 1869 and considerably later in 1886.

  The Russian nobility was almost as familiar with Johann Strauss and his orchestra as were the concertgoers of Vienna. In some senses even more so. Two of Tsar Alexander’s brothers were accomplished cellists. Both asked if they could sit in and play with the orchestra. Strauss readily agreed.

  The ‘Russian summers’ produced some of Strauss’s best-loved works, many of which received their first performance in Pavlosk, among them ‘Pizzicato-Polka’, ‘Champagner-Polka’, and ‘Krönungs-Marsch’ (dedicated to Tsar Alexander II on his coronation in Moscow).

  One work, ‘Bauern-Polka’ (‘Peasants’ Polka’), a catchy, instantly memorable little piece with vocal refrain, was more than a success. One report accorded it the ultimate accolade. The piece ‘brought a storm of applause such as no movement from a Beethoven symphony could yet have received’. It was demanded over and over again by so many audiences that Strauss himself was apparently driven to distraction.29

  One other composition deserves particular attention. It remains to this day one of his best-known and most often performed pieces and its origin is, to say the least, interesting.

  It is hardly surprising, given not just his celebrity, his extraordinary musical talent, but also his extreme good looks – dark lustrous hair, swarthy skin and blazing eyes, an eye for fashion and always immaculately turned out – that Johann Strauss was a magnet for Russian women. It soon became de rigueur for the ladies to vie
for his attention by brandishing cigarette packets that bore his portrait and autograph.

  Word quickly spread back to Vienna, where rumours abounded of ‘Dashing Jean’s’ amorous relationships in Russia. These were soon picked up by the satirical journal Tritsch-Tratsch (‘Gossip, or Tittle-Tattle’). The truth, or otherwise, of these rumours is impossible to ascertain at a distance of more than a century and a half, but it remains a fact that Strauss dashed off a lively little polka which he entitled ‘Tritsch-Tratsch’.

  Did he compose it as a riposte to the rumours being printed about him, or even a subtle endorsement? Either is possible, given his willingness to compose new pieces relating to current events. Whatever the truth of the rumours, Strauss was a single man and they cannot have hurt his reputation.

  Certainly back in Vienna the coincidence will not have gone unnoticed. Indeed it was in Vienna, not Pavlovsk, that the piece was first performed. It was an instant sensation. One reviewer wrote, with possibly a hint of double-entendre, ‘Seemingly no dance composition of such freshness, humorous colouring, and spicy instrumentation has been published in years.’ The piano sheet music sold out practically overnight.

  Whether or not the reports of amorous affairs were true, there is one that most certainly happened. Her name was Olga Smirnitzky.

  Exactly how Strauss met Olga we do not know, but it seems the two came to know each other in 1858, Strauss’s third year in Pavlovsk. Olga was twenty years of age, Strauss thirteen years her senior. She was musically gifted and the daughter of aristocratic Russian parents. Intelligent, well read, able to converse in French, she was also ‘romantic, sentimental, with a sense of humour and tantalising moods’, according to a friend of the family.

  Of those qualities it was ‘tantalising’ that most made its mark on the impressionable Strauss. He nicknamed her ‘L’Espiègle’ (‘The Mischievous One’) and was later to compose a piece he called ‘L’Es-piègle’, published in Vienna as ‘Der Kobold’ (‘The Imp’), with a theme as flighty and unpredictable as the woman it depicts. But there is a core of steel running through the piece, and it ends with firm and final chords – an accurate depiction not just of Olga, but of their relationship too.