The Last Waltz

by John Suchet

  Strauss had left his political past, with its brief flirtation with revolution, firmly behind. He was now a true Establishment figure.

  Jetty continued to cement her hold on the family enterprise, with the well-being of her husband at the forefront of her plans. She decreed that from now on Johann was only to conduct in exceptional circumstances. He was no longer to have permanent contracts with the owners of dance halls. Conducting duties were to be taken over by Josef and Eduard, to allow Johann time and energy for composing.

  If Jetty’s actions might be expected to cause any tension in the family, the opposite was the case. Josef had by now reconciled himself to being an indispensable part of the family enterprise, and had certainly reversed his earlier misgivings about Jetty’s suitability as Johann’s wife.

  When one summer Jetty accompanied Johann and Josef to Pavlovsk, Josef wrote home to his wife:

  Jetty is indispensable. She writes up all the accounts, copies out orchestral parts, sees to everything in the kitchen, and looks after everything with an efficiency and kindness that is admirable.

  Jetty was most certainly happy too. In Pavlovsk (though not as far as we know in Vienna) she gave a number of song recitals, and she wrote to a friend:

  I am the happiest of wives, enjoying an idyllic life with my Jeany-boy … who has made life seem desirable to me again after it had become loathesome and a torment to me.

  Her ‘Jeany-boy’ was now seriously wealthy. Jetty had brought her own considerable earnings to the marriage, and under her supervision her husband was commanding huge fees.

  Johann Strauss had long harboured ambitions to own a house of his own. With Jetty in charge of finances, he was able to fulfil that desire after just five years of marriage. During 1868 the couple bought a house in the most stylish suburb of Vienna, Hietzing, directly opposite the botanical garden of Schönbrunn, part of the palace itself, with views to the west of the hills of the Vienna woods and to the north the city itself with the spire of St Stephen’s Cathedral rising from its centre.

  It was a two-storey mansion, which Jetty was to furnish in elaborate style, and one can forgive her a touch of lèse-majesté in her description of it, written in October 1868:

  Johann has bought a small house here, so really nice and comfortable that we imagine we are living in dear Albion [England]. Opposite us is the Schönbrunn botanical garden, and the inside of our house is lovely.

  Even before the move, in a happy marriage with onerous duties lifted from his shoulders, Strauss’s creative juices were flowing. The magnificent ‘Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald’ (‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’) dates from this period, with its famous solo on Austria’s national instrument, the zither.

  He also composed what could be said to be his first truly great waltz, ‘Morgenblätter’ (‘Morning Papers’), all the more extraordinary when you consider he gave it the opus number 279 – in other words nearly 300 pieces already composed, and literally hundreds more still to come.33

  ‘Morgenblätter’ was written to a commission from the organising committee of the Concordia Ball, which was staged annually by a society of Austrian journalists (and given its appropriate title by them).

  Strauss received another commission at around this time, from the Wiener Männergesang-Verein (Vienna Men’s Chorus). It is slightly surprising that Strauss accepted the commission, given the fate of his last commission from them. It was good that he did so, however, as it resulted in another of Strauss’s best waltzes, ‘Wein, Weib und Gesang!’ (‘Wine, Woman and Song!’).34

  The slightly earlier commission has an interesting history. The society asked Strauss to compose a choral work for them. Strauss accepted, despite the fact he was unused to writing for voices. Maybe he relished the challenge. Maybe Jetty did not, because for the best part of two years he did nothing about it.

  He finally produced a new waltz for them for unaccompanied voices – actually four waltz numbers with introduction and brief coda – using words written by one of the chorus members, who fancied himself a poet. He then sent a hastily written piano accompaniment, with a note of apology: ‘Please excuse the poor and untidy handwriting – I was obliged to get it finished within a few minutes. Johann Strauss.’ (Is it too fanciful to imagine him scribbling this note down quickly while Jetty was out of the room?) Even closer to the first performance he provided an orchestral accompaniment.

  Strauss was not present when the men’s choir performed it, having conducting duties elsewhere, but was said to be seriously disappointed at its apparently poor reception. Actually several newspaper critics wrote the next day that the piece was ‘splendid’, ‘catchy’, ‘lovely’. But it is surely a measure of just how popular Strauss’s music was that the fact that the choral piece received just a single encore amounted to a failure.

  Strauss put it to one side with a shrug, apparently saying to Josef, ‘To hell with the waltz. I am only sorry about the coda. I thought that would be a success.’

  More important matters loomed. Strauss had been invited to the most cosmopolitan, exciting, lively city in Continental Europe. His father might have performed in Paris thirty years earlier, but Johann Strauss the Younger never had. In the summer of 1867 that changed.

  The Paris engagement did not begin well. In the first place Strauss had to engage an entirely new orchestra, since his own had commitments in Vienna. Secondly there were general complaints that Strauss played the waltz too quickly, making it difficult to dance to. Most detrimental of all, Paris was staging a World Exhibition: Strauss was merely one of many attractions.

  Everything changed when the newspaper Le Figaro not only praised Strauss and his music, but began to champion it and recommend it day after day. It had the desired effect. Jetty was soon able to write home:

  The receipts have increased every day and the public is so frantically aflame for Jean that I cannot find words to depict this enthusiasm … they are simply crazy for this Viennese music.

  Strauss was suddenly in such demand that he had to find new material, and quickly. One of the pieces he remembered was the set of waltzes he had written for the Vienna Men’s Chorus. He had not played it since, so no one in the Paris audience could have heard it before.

  He wired home to Vienna and asked for the parts to be sent to him. Swiftly he orchestrated the piece, doing away with the voices, and performed it to a packed house.

  Strauss retained the title of the poem that had been the original inspiration for the piece, ‘An der schönen blauen Donau’ (‘By the Beautiful Blue Danube’). This time it received encore after encore. Word spread faster than a forest fire.

  Back in Vienna the soft copper plates used by Strauss’s publishing house wore out after producing 10,000 copies. Before the first print run was over, a hundred sets of plates had been worn out.

  Johann Strauss had produced his most popular and enduring composition. He was now truly at the very pinnacle of his fame, the Strauss musical dynasty dominating music across Europe.

  Things literally could not get better for the Waltz King. But they could get worse. The Strauss family enterprise was soon to endure its own annus horribilis.

  30 Known then and now as ‘fiacres’.

  31 To this day the Ringstrasse holds the most important buildings of government, the largest hotels, the most imposing shops.

  32 Peter Kemp, The Strauss Family, Omnibus Press, 1989.

  33 This is arguably the largest output of quality pieces in the history of classical music, possibly equalled only by the German Baroque composer Telemann.

  34 The exclamation mark is a particularly Straussian touch.

  Josef Strauss, meanwhile, was fast fulfilling his elder brother’s opinion that he was the finer composer of the two. Works were pouring from this reluctant musician, and those in the know were of the opinion that the best of them were better than the works of his elder brother.

  One was a waltz entitled ‘Mein Lebenslauf ist Lieb’ und Lust’ (‘My Life is One of Love and Joy’), a
delightful – even boisterous – waltz with octave leaps, but with passages of unexpected poignancy.

  Delightful and boisterous it might have been but its title could not have been more inappropriate. Josef’s health had never been good. He suffered from intermittent headaches, which became less intermittent and more and more intense as the years progressed. His habit of smoking up to twenty cigars a day did not help. Increasingly these headaches would lead to fainting fits.

  An underlying ailment was undoubtedly exacerbated by increasing tension and rivalry between the three Strauss brothers. While Johann and Josef were away performing in Pavlovsk for the 1869 season, Eduard took advantage of their absence to assert his authority. He not only elevated himself to conductor of the Strauss Orchestra in Vienna, but announced plans to tour independently with it.

  Word reached Pavlovsk and Josef was furious, even more so than his elder brother. The tension this caused spilled over. When Johann told Josef they needed a new polka and asked Josef to write it, he refused point-blank. In some despair Johann put pen to paper. Josef, no doubt somewhat stung with guilt, provided considerable assistance, and together they composed the much needed new polka. Ironically, it is one of the lightest, most memorable and best known of all Strauss polkas, ‘Pizzicato-Polka’, which to this day bears the names of both brothers on the title page.

  “Anna clearly feared that if relations between the three brothers continued to deteriorate, the whole Strauss enterprise would collapse.”

  A measure of the tension between the three brothers, and the effect it was having, comes in an anguished letter written to them by Anna in the autumn of 1869:

  [I] do not sleep, cannot eat, no rest, nothing but cunning, strife and envy among you – [I] will not tolerate any more, you are concerned with nothing but your own families, and we are the whipping-boys … May God one day forgive you for it. I have not deserved this ingratitude.

  She clearly feared that if relations between the three brothers continued to deteriorate, the whole Strauss enterprise would collapse – an enterprise she had done so much to create and sustain.

  But she would never know if her worst fears were to materialise. On 23 February 1870, at the age of sixty-eight, Anna died from ‘suppuration of the lungs’. Her sons were devastated, cancelling a raft of engagements. Tensions were not helped by Johann yielding to an obsessive, almost irrational, fear of sickness and death, staying away from the Hirschenhaus and refusing to attend his mother’s funeral.

  Some months before, Josef had signed a contract to conduct the following May in Warsaw. The terms had not been favourable, committing Josef to a gruelling schedule, but he had signed at a time when relations between the brothers were at their worst, and when he was openly expressing a desire to be free and independent.

  On 17 April, less than two months after his mother’s death, Josef gave a farewell concert in Vienna, then – tired almost to the point of exhaustion – he left for Warsaw. Things went wrong from the outset.

  At the Polish border customs officials refused to allow musical instruments, as well as sheet music, through. That was eventually solved, but on arrival in Warsaw the promised accommodation was unavailable. Far more important than these hitches was the fact that a number of musicians failed to arrive in Warsaw, due to a mix-up on the part of the musical agents.

  Everything had to be delayed. Josef wired frantically to Eduard to send musicians from Vienna, at the same time scouring Warsaw for local talent. On 17 May, two days after the scheduled opening concert, Josef wrote to Johann:

  I am disconsolate. No prospect of beginning. When this letter has reached your hands, the catastrophe will have reached its highest peak.

  Little did Josef know what an understatement that would be.

  The first concert finally took place on 22 May, and was well received. Five days later Josef cancelled his subsequent appearance because he was unwell. He next stood in front of the orchestra on 1 June.

  Things seemed to be going well until it came time to play Josef’s latest composition, a medley entitled ‘Musikalisches Feuilleton’ (‘Musical Supplement’).35 In a particularly tricky passage, strings and wind began to pull apart.

  Josef gestured frantically, trying to give the beat, but the orchestral sections pulled further apart. With unerring inevitability, the piece was coming off the rails. Josef suddenly staggered, lost his footing, fell from the podium, and cracked his head as he tumbled to the floor.

  Bleeding from the nose and ears, he was carried back to his apartment. His wife Karoline rushed to Warsaw, where she found Josef with ‘his limbs paralysed, scarcely able to speak’, as Eduard later wrote.

  Johann, accompanied by Jetty, followed, but not until the end of the month. He himself was in poor health (again). This time he was suffering from jaundice. In the first week of July doctors in Warsaw were attending to both Johann and Josef Strauss.

  Johann was well enough to lead the orchestra at three concerts later in that first week. Josef’s condition, by contrast, had not improved. Karoline decided to move Josef back to Vienna, where medicine was more advanced and there would be no language problems.

  The two-day carriage journey can only have exacerbated Josef’s illness. On arrival in Vienna his condition was clearly critical. Doctors diagnosed a probable brain tumour, which would have accounted for the fainting spells, as well as the sudden loss of consciousness on the podium.

  On the afternoon of 22 July 1870, one month short of his forty- third birthday, Josef died. Doctors asked permission of Karoline to carry out a post-mortem so they could establish if suspicions of a brain tumour were correct, but Karoline was adamant in her refusal. Accordingly the inquest found that Josef had died of ‘decomposition of the blood’, and the true cause of his tragically early death will never be known.

  Josef was buried alongside his mother in the Strauss family grave in the St Marx Cemetery outside the city boundary of Vienna.36 Once again, as with their mother, Johann Strauss did not attend the funeral.

  The decade that began with trauma for Johann Strauss would have more shattering news for him before it was finished, but in the year following the double deaths in the family he was distracted by a visit from an Irish-born composer by the name of Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore.37

  Gilmore had been put in charge of organising the World’s Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival planned for the following summer in Boston. Everything about it was to be big. It would feature massive ensembles made up of several bands, and two huge coliseums were to be specially built, one holding 60,000, the other 120,000. Gilmore wanted, as his star turn, the Johann Strauss Orchestra with its founder at its head.38 After Boston, Gilmore assured Strauss he would arrange dates in New York, to increase his popularity even more, as well as bringing in considerably increased fees.

  If there was just one market left for Strauss to conquer, it was the United States, and what a market it could be. Huge audiences guaranteed, fees that in Europe Strauss could only dream of, and the final cementing of him as a world-renowned musician.

  Which makes it all the more surprising that he had no desire to go. The reason gives us an insight into Strauss’s character. In fact the whole trip – which he finally agreed to under pressure from Jetty, which lasted less than a month, and of which he hated every minute – gives us perhaps the most complete picture we have of Strauss as a man, thanks to the diligence of the American press.

  I have already described Strauss’s fear and detestation of anything to do with death. Well, he had a morbid fear of any activity that could lead to it too, and that included a sea voyage across the Atlantic. Accordingly, on 19 May 1872, two weeks before the planned departure, Strauss drew up his Last Will and Testament, naming his wife as his sole heir and main beneficiary.39

  He expressed this fear of death, albeit in somewhat laconic tones, to Gilmore himself as one of the reasons for his initial refusal to go. ‘And what happens when your Indians massacre me?’ he asked.40

  Once
in New York he addressed the possibility of a violent end in an interview with a reporter from the Sun newspaper: ‘I want to mention something else to you that is perfectly awful, monstrous. There are no Fahnwächter [flagmen] on the railroads here. It is perfectly monstrous.’

  Jetty, in the hotel room for the interview, confirmed Strauss’s fear. ‘My husband says he’d rather be killed swiftly, and be done with it, than to take another trip on an American railroad. He knows he’d be a dead man anyhow.’

  The reporter for the Sun describes Strauss as ‘tall, good-looking, with a black moustache, long flowing black whiskers, a fine forehead, black hair which is brushed back, a quick expressive eye, and an honest genial expression of countenance’.

  Other accounts concur except in the matter of Strauss’s height. The same newspaper, reviewing a concert, says he seems a ‘quite handsome, dark-haired, pale-faced little man, with a gentlemanly bearing and genteel figure’. In the same review it sees ‘something wild, goblin-like, almost maniacal, we might say, about the man when under the inspiration of music … who seemed surprised and pleased at the storm of applause which greeted him, causing him to bow again and again, and a dozen times more before he could find the opportunity to begin’.

  The German language New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung (New York State Newspaper) describes him as a ‘small energetic man with curly black hair’, and again as ‘the little man in the black tails’.

  The New York Herald, in colourful language, depicts a ‘mercurial little man, who conducts with fiddle, bow, head, arms and legs, and even his coat tail seems instinct [sic] with expression’.

  The Sun again writes of ‘Strauss, the man-torpedo’. Its reporter, in the most comprehensive interview that Strauss gave, makes the point that he speaks no English, unlike his wife Jetty, who greeted the reporter ‘cordially, and addressed him in very good English … She was dressed with exquisite taste after the latest Viennese fashion.’