The Last Waltz

by John Suchet

  “Olga seemed to relish the obvious power she had over such a famous individual.”

  Johann Strauss, famous throughout Europe, lauded wherever he went, surrounded by admirers and sycophants of both sexes, fell hopelessly in love with Olga. He took to writing her heartfelt and passionate letters, often late at night after a concert.

  ‘I am more and more convinced’, he wrote on 21 July, ‘that you are being destined for me by God, and there is no space within me which could harbour the thought of living without you – Jean.’

  After a concert in which he had played Schumann, he wrote:

  Even before the concert I was hopelessly enveloped in melancholy and this was increased to a supreme pitch by Schumann’s music … Why can I not be like other people? Olga, how unhappy I am! I have never wept for myself before, but today – I could confess it to no one but you – it happened.

  As for Olga, she seemed to relish the obvious power she had over such a famous individual. She was clearly not above taunting him, judging by one note he wrote to her: ‘If you see me suffer, why not tear my heart out completely with just one scornful glance?’ In another he wrote, ‘Naughty little child, why did you scold me so?’

  The two clearly took great pains to keep their relationship secret, but Olga’s parents were keeping a close eye on their daughter, and they did not like what they saw. The family was aristocratic, moving in the highest circles, wealthy and landed, and a match with a mere musician simply was not on the cards. Even a musician with his own orchestra, whose autographed picture they will have seen on sale for 10 kopeks at every station in St Petersburg. A musician was still a musician, and a musician was no catch for their daughter.

  It appears it was Olga’s mother who wore the trousers. On a day in September she summoned Strauss to the sumptuous Smirnitzky palais. One can imagine he set off in high spirits, relishing the opportunity to get to know the woman better who, if things went according to plan, might one day be his mother-in-law.

  But if that was his plan, he was soon disabused of the notion. Olga’s mother left him in no doubt that she and her husband disapproved of the relationship and they were putting an end to it. She went further, stunning Strauss with bitter invective against her own daughter, describing her as meaning not a word of what she said, even of being inspired by the devil.

  Strauss, badly shaken, sent Olga a note saying he had quickly come to hate a mother ‘who could say such insulting things about her own child’. He went on, ‘Her behaviour to me was heartless and indelicate.’ He told Olga her mother had demanded he hand over all her letters to him, ‘but I swore to her that your letters were to accompany me to my grave … that I need those letters to preserve my own life and I cannot do without them.’

  It appears Olga was prepared to side with her paramour to some extent, at least initially. She sent him further notes expressing her love, but the notes soon stopped altogether.

  Strauss left Pavlovsk an unhappy man, but he had other things on his mind. He had to conduct a concert in honour of the centenary of the birth of Friedrich Schiller on 10 November.

  He threw himself into his work, but there were distractions. He was no doubt upset to find that his relationship with Olga was common knowledge in Vienna, and there must have been knowing looks, whispers behind the hand at his concerts, even in the street. Was it also known that he had been seen off by the girl’s mother, that he had been in effect humiliated?

  Stories were told at his expense. One rumour circulated that after a concert a woman approached him and whispered in his ear, ‘If only my name was Olga.’ Whether that was true or not, it is certain Strauss was aware of what wagging tongues were saying.

  They were wagging closer to home too. It was widely believed matriarch Anna gave her eldest son a stern talking to, telling him to pull himself together. His brothers are certain to have taken the lead from their mother and given Johann some fraternal ribbing. For a man in his early thirties, criticism, even derision, from those closest to him might have been the most difficult to bear of all.

  Johann Strauss was an artist, with an artist’s sensibilities. He had been hurt; now he needed to get over it. In this painful task he received help from a totally unexpected source – Olga herself.

  In the spring of 1859 a letter arrived in Vienna for Strauss. It was from Olga.

  Do not condemn me when you read these lines. I will be brief and not embark on long explanation. I have been engaged for two weeks … Forget your unfaithful imp.

  And forget her he did. He returned for many more years to Pavlovsk, but there were no painful reunions, no secret meetings, no regrets. Olga Smirnitzky had dropped completely out of Johann Strauss’s life.

  But Strauss was not finished with love. At around the time he was pining for Olga in Vienna he was introduced to a singer renowned for her fine mezzo-soprano voice. Her name was Henriette Chalupetzky. It is possible, given her musical reputation and the frequency of her appearances on stage, that he made her acquaintance some years earlier. But it was only in the winter of 1861–2 that the relationship become something deeper.

  It was as unlikely a liaison as that with Olga, although for very different reasons. Henriette was lauded for her performances across Europe, some critics even comparing her favourably with the Swedish Nightingale, the soprano Jenny Lind. Mendelssohn and Berlioz, no less, had dedicated songs to her.

  But at a remarkably young age, somewhere in her early to mid-twenties, and already considerably wealthy, she gave it all up for an entirely different life – a somewhat colourful life, to put it mildly. It’s believed that in her twenties she bore no fewer than seven illegitimate children, the paternity of only two of whom is known.

  At the age of twenty-five or thereabouts she became the mistress of the banker Moritz Todesco, a patron of the arts whose sumptuous house on the newly opened Ringstrasse abounded with artists, writers, musicians. It was there that Henriette played hostess to salon soirées, the baron’s wife Sofie apparently complicit, willingly or otherwise.

  If Henriette had ambitions to replace Sofie as baroness, she was to be disappointed. The baron was Jewish, Henriette Roman Catholic, and the law forbade persons of different religions to marry. Henriette was clearly not too upset though, since she remained Baron Todesco’s mistress for a full eighteen years. Two of her children were his.

  Then she met the most famous musician in Vienna, a friendship formed, and at some point it became intimate. They were in love, and Johann Strauss asked her to marry him. She was, technically, a free woman. The only potential problem was her relationship with the baron, but that proved not to be a problem at all. He understood entirely her nature, her artistic passion, and he consented totally to release her. He even consented to Henriette’s request that he should keep custody of their two daughters so they could take his aristocratic title, allowing her access to them whenever she wished.

  Henriette was free to marry Strauss. The path to marriage was not entirely smooth, however. Henriette’s lifestyle was well known: her role as mistress, her illegitimate children, even her professional life as a singer was not regarded as an entirely wholesome career for a woman to pursue. Strauss encountered family opposition, most vocally from Josef, who was standing in for his elder brother in Pavlovsk when Johann announced his engagement. The quiet, reluctant musician conceded that Henriette was ‘very well preserved’, but knew of her reputation, adding that at forty-four she was seven years older than Johann. Matriarch Anna probably allowed herself to be persuaded by the fact that Henriette had a considerable fortune of her own, and was hardly likely to be a ‘gold-digger’.

  On 27 August 1862, in St Stephen’s Cathedral in the heart of Vienna, Johann Strauss, ‘Kapellmeister und Musikdirektor’, married Henriette Chalupetzky, ‘of single status’.

  But Henriette Chalupetzky is not the name by which Strauss’s bride is known to history. Early in her singing career she adopted the more exotic name of Jetty Treffz – the same Jetty Treffz who thirteen yea
rs earlier had shared the stage at London’s Exeter Hall with Johann Strauss senior. What might he have thought then had he known that the singer on stage with him would one day marry his eldest son, making him her father-in-law?

  Jetty Treffz was now Jetty Strauss. Johann Strauss the Younger, just two months short of his thirty-eighth birthday, was a married man. The extraordinary thing is that despite Jetty’s exotic and uncertain past, despite the difference in age, despite family opposition and everything that seemed to mitigate against the marriage working, Johann Strauss could not have chosen a more suitable wife.

  28 Around £90,000–£100,000 in today’s money.

  29 The ‘Bauern-Polka’ is a favourite at the Vienna New Year’s Day concert to this day, with the vocal refrain ‘La-la-la-laa’ traditionally provided by the unsmiling members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Perhaps it was a similar rendition by the Strauss Orchestra in Pavlovsk that made it such a favourite.

  Another, more historically significant, wedding had taken place in Vienna eight years earlier. It united two people totally unsuited to each other, temperamentally, emotionally, and even as first cousins genetically. It was a marriage that would be critically damaged by misunderstandings, divergent interests, absences and separation, and wounded beyond repair by suicide and murder.

  On 24 April 1854, in St Augustine’s Church alongside the imperial Hofburg Palace, Emperor Franz Josef married Elisabeth of Bavaria, known to history as Sisi. The emperor’s accession to the imperial throne as a young man of eighteen, following the street revolution of 1848 and the enforced departure of Chancellor Metternich, ushered in a new era in every sense in Vienna.

  A city that had been more or less in shutdown for more than thirty years revelled in its newfound gaiety. At last people could talk openly in the street, in cafés and in the back of horse-drawn cabs;30 spies were a thing of the past; it was safe to go out at night; new dance halls opened and flourished; the waltz shook off any suspicion and the music of the Strauss family swept the city. Metternich was gone, there was a new young emperor on the throne. The refuge sought in cosy domesticity during the Biedermeier era was no longer required.

  It was, admittedly, an earlier emperor who, responding to a proposal to construct licensed brothels, replied, ‘The walls would cost me nothing, but the expense of roofing would be ruinous, for it would be necessary to put a roof over the whole city,’ but it might have applied just as aptly as Vienna entered the second half of the nineteenth century, and with considerably more openness.

  The single most potent symbol of a new era dawning came about as a result of an order by the new emperor that the Bastei should be pulled down and replaced by a wide boulevard encircling the city.

  This massive, metres-thick, city wall – so wide that a spacious walkway on top provided a fashionable area for people to stroll along, and for jugglers and street entertainers to ply their trade; so impenetrable that gates set into it at regular distances provided the only points at which it could be passed through – had been built nearly three centuries before, following the first Turkish invasion in 1529.

  Now not only had the threat from the Ottoman empire dissipated, but Vienna was witnessing the most rapid expansion in its history. In under a decade in the mid-nineteenth century the population soared by 30 per cent. The city was spreading well beyond the city wall. Where once a few carriages might have clattered along rarely frequented alleys, now there was all the bustle of a burgeoning city.

  The Bastei had done its job. It had to go, and so Emperor Franz Josef – well aware he was upsetting the traditionalists – ordered its demolition. It was to be the largest building project in Vienna’s history, turning the imperial capital into a vast building site. It was carried out carefully and painstakingly. Experts had to calculate exactly the right amount of explosives to demolish the wall, and not vast areas of the inner city with it.

  In one way or another – a new building here or another one there – the work took more than two decades. But the all-important task, the demolition of the Bastei itself, symbol of Vienna’s past, took seven years. On 1 May 1865 the emperor and his empress rode in a ceremonial carriage along the new boulevard (or at least that part of it that was complete) and officially declared it open.

  The Ringstrasse, as it was named then and still is today, would come to encircle the inner city of Vienna. It soon became nearly two hundred feet wide, comprising a broad central section for carriages and later vehicles, flanked by two tree-shaded lanes for horse riders, and ample pathways for promenaders under double rows of trees.

  The city’s largest and most imposing buildings began to be sited along the Ringstrasse. The first of these was the Opera House, soon followed by the Parliament building, the City Hall, the Stock Exchange, the Imperial Theatre.31

  Vienna was changing. It was entering a new era, and there was no going back.

  This was the Vienna in which Johann Strauss was making his name. His music – and to a lesser extent that of his brothers – symbolised the new era. It also encapsulated the mood of the Viennese, celebrating their liberty, their new ruler, a newly thriving economy. There was employment to be had, and when a day’s work was done, what better entertainment than to go to one of the dance halls, eat and drink, and dance to Strauss?

  As for the composer, demand for his music – and for the man himself – was so huge he simply could not keep up with it. He needed to make changes in order to cope. On 5 February 1861 it was announced: ‘For the first time in Vienna. THREE BALLS IN ONE EVENING. Three large orchestras.’

  Each one was a Strauss orchestra. How was this to be done? Johann took the decision to elevate his youngest brother Eduard to the podium. Each of the three brothers was now conducting a Strauss orchestra.

  Still the toll on Johann was heavy. He was not just the most prolific composer: essentially he was running the whole enterprise. He also knew he was the one the audiences wanted to see. In 1862, preparing to leave for his seventh season in Pavlovsk, he received an offer to appear in Paris with his orchestra for three consecutive years for an annual fee of 100,000 francs. The work would simply not stop coming in. He turned it down, which just a few years earlier would have been unthinkable.

  While in Pavlovsk Johann Strauss fell ill again. It was an intermittent ailment and the doctors did not make a diagnosis. Strauss handed conducting duties over to a deputy, to the disappointment of audiences. In July he wired home for Eduard to take over from him. Anna intervened and insisted Josef should go instead.

  Josef was angry. A reluctant musician in the first place, he objected to having his life disrupted at the whim of his elder brother. Once in Pavlovsk, and sharing conducting duties with Johann on the first night, he was resentful and deeply suspicious. On the morning Johann left for home, Josef wrote to his wife, ‘He was more fresh and healthy than ever before. This time he has fooled physicians, doctors, everybody.’

  He might well have been right. Strauss was clearly tired, if not close to exhaustion, but fundamentally it seems there was nothing wrong with him. Exactly three weeks after leaving Russia, Johann Strauss was well enough to marry Jetty Treffz.

  The newest member of the Strauss family now proved herself to be not just a deeply caring wife, but also a highly efficient organiser. As one modern biographer puts it, Jetty became the complete companion for her husband – ‘wife, lover, artistic adviser, private secretary, organiser, music-copyist, and even [as we shall see] nurse’.32

  Jetty quickly saw that it was the conducting engagements that drained her husband most, not just the constant late nights but the extraordinary physical demands, given the way Johann threw himself into leading the orchestra from the violin.

  As early as their honeymoon in Venice she tried to get him to relax, to have ‘a complete rest’ as she wrote to a friend. He did not entirely obey, composing the waltz ‘Carnavals-Botschafter’ (‘Carnival’s Ambassador’) and also – possibly to placate her – the delightful little ‘Bluette, Polka française
’, which he dedicated to her.

  Once back in Vienna, Jetty to all intents and purposes took over the running of the Strauss family enterprise. Her mother-in-law, now in her sixties and in the final decade of her life, was content to relinquish any remaining duties, and Jetty took over the organisation of concert tours, as well as contracts with performance venues.

  As an artist herself, she had an innate understanding of the world in which Johann operated, and unlike many artists (then and now) she also had a keen business sense, certainly better than her husband’s. Johann, recognising this, was content to leave all financial matters in her hands.

  Jetty also insisted on a move out of the family home. She chose an apartment that was close to the Hirschenhaus, recognising the need for Johann to be near to the family, but not smothered by it. In the following two years Johann and Jetty moved twice more, as she got a grip on the finances and their situation improved.

  She also made a determined effort to right a past wrong, which she knew would lift her husband’s self-esteem beyond measure. Twice before, in 1856 and 1859, Strauss had applied for the coveted post of Imperial Music Director and was turned down both times. A secret police report in 1856, nearly a decade after the street revolution, described him in extraordinary terms as ‘a reckless, improper and profligate person’, as though he could not escape his past activities and allegiances.

  Now, on 20 February 1863, he applied for a third time at his wife’s urging. One can almost imagine Jetty standing over him as he wrote the application. Five days later he was awarded the honorary title by decree, which noted that his questionable civil and moral behaviour of the past had now been mitigated by his ‘many artistic, patriotic and charitable’ accomplishments.