The Last Waltz
Page 11
With Jetty alongside him, Strauss sat opposite the Sun reporter (who was conversant in German) with, one imagines, a long face and sour mood, since he criticised almost every aspect of the country he was in.
Reporter
How did you like Boston?
Herr Strauss
I did not like it. Boston is Puritanical, stupid, dull. There is no life in the street. There is no display of elegance or luxury. The women are unattractive and do not dress nicely. I don’t like Boston. But [possibly to humour his interviewer] with New York I am perfectly charmed.
Reporter
When do you compose, in the daytime or at night?
Herr Strauss
Always at night. I don’t know of a single waltz that I composed in the daytime. Der über Herrgott! [Dear God Almighty!] Do you know how much I pay here for a shave? Fifty cents! Fifty cents! A whole gulden! Ist das nicht schauderhaft? [Isn’t that appalling?] There is one thing that is very poor here, the beer. Ah! as far as that goes, this country is truly lacking.
Reporter
I thought the beer here was better than in Germany.
Herr Strauss
Oh! dear, dear, no! No comparison. It’s dreadful here, and I am actually sick for want of our delightful Vienna beer.
Frau Strauss
(Chiming in, in support of her husband) The beer is thick and heavy here. Oh! it’s very poor.
Herr Strauss
(Smacking his lips and throwing himself back in his chair, in an attitude of rapture) The beer in Vienna is divine, divine [göttlich]. Go to Vienna, drink beer, and die. Göttlich, göttlich! [Then, probably realising he really did need to humour his interviewer] But in every other respect New York is charming. Life here must be very pleasant. New York is much more lively than London. What a bustle, what an uproar there is here all the time.
At that point in the interview Strauss was called away, and Jetty seized the moment for a little name-dropping. She told the reporter that her husband often went strolling in the Imperial Gardens at Schönbrunn Palace, opposite their house in Hietzing. He is always admitted, she said, and the emperor himself makes a point of always coming over and greeting him with a friendly, ‘Grüss Sie Gott, wie gehts?’ (‘God greet you, how are you?’).
She made sure the reporter was aware her husband was a Knight of the Order of Franz Josef, and always received a standing ovation at court festivities. Jetty was more than just an efficient organiser, she was a brilliant PR woman as well.
This single interview, published in the Sun of New York on Saturday, 13 July 1872, I find utterly compelling. It tells us more about Johann Strauss the man than any number of musicological treatises on his compositions. What a beguiling image it conjures up of the most popular composer and orchestral leader in the world walking along the streets of New York in foul mood, wishing he had never come, disgusted at the price of getting a shave, with not even the satisfaction of a decent beer with which to cheer himself up!
He claimed to his interviewer that he was charmed by New York – though that is more likely to have been intended to flatter the journalist, particularly given his views on shaving and beer – and one wonders whether his opinions might have been improved a mere decade or so later, when the first skyscrapers went up, followed by the iconic Statue of Liberty.
Musically his performances were a triumph, but not to him. He was not particularly impressed that US President Ulysses S. Grant attended the afternoon concert at the Peace Jubilee in Boston on Tuesday 25 June (he was well used to playing before royalty and heads of state). And as for the performances he gave in the larger of the city’s two new coliseums, the one holding 120,000 people, don’t believe a word of what he wrote to the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna, extolling ‘my joyful experience in this extraordinary affair’.
The truth came in a letter he later wrote to a friend. He uses coruscating language, criticising every aspect of these gigantic performances, and using considerable exaggeration for effect. This is the same Strauss angry at the cost of a shave, disgusted at the taste of beer, wishing he had never made the journey to the United States. He obviously feels his initial instincts not to go were correct. Clearly nothing anybody could do – including Jetty – to cheer him up was successful. He must have been a difficult man to deal with in those few short weeks.
“The Us sojourn was a triumph. Strauss’s worldwide fame was assured. Yet he looked back on it as a disaster.”
That letter, which so perfectly captures his stubbornness and irascibility, is worth quoting in full:
On the concert platform were thousands of singers and instrumentalists, and I had to conduct them! A hundred assistant conductors had been placed at my disposal to control these gigantic masses, but I was only able to see those nearest to me. Although we had rehearsed, an artistic performance, a proper production, was unthinkable. I would have put my life at risk if I had refused to appear … Suddenly a cannon fired, a gentle hint for us twenty thousand to begin the concert. ‘The Beautiful Blue Danube’ was on the programme. I gave the signal, my hundred sub-conductors followed me as quickly and as well as they could, and then a fearful racket broke out that I shall never forget as long as I live! As we had begun more or less together, my whole attention was now directed towards seeing that we should also finish together. Thank Heaven, I also managed that. The hundred thousand-strong audience roared their approval, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I found myself in the fresh air again and felt the firm ground beneath my feet. The next day I had to flee an army of impresarios, who promised me the whole of California for a tour of America. I had already had quite enough of the so-called music festival, and returned to Europe with the very greatest possible speed.
Curmudgeonly to the end!
Among the favourites Strauss performed in the US was, as he stated in that letter, ‘By the Beautiful Blue Danube’ (‘The Blue Danube Madness’, as the Sun described it) as well as ‘Artist’s Life’, ‘1001 Nights’, ‘New Vienna’, ‘Pizzicato-Polka’, and several specially written new compositions including a waltz that featured ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in its coda.
The US sojourn was a triumph, and earned Johann Strauss a small fortune. His worldwide fame was assured. Yet he looked back on it for the rest of his life as a disaster, something he wished he had never done. Many times in later years he was invited back, with ever more enticing offers. But he meant what he said in that letter. He never returned.
35 Unpublished and now lost.
36 Where, seventy-nine years earlier, Mozart had been buried in a common grave. The cemetery was closed to burials in 1874, but restored in the early twentieth century and opened to the public.
37 Best known for writing the lyrics to the American Civil War song ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’.
38 He also invited Giuseppe Verdi, who – busy preparing Aida for its world premiere in Cairo – turned him down.
39 Maybe he realised his fear was unnecessary, since he knew perfectly well Jetty would be travelling with him.
40 A fear not entirely without substance. Europe was awash with stories about encounters between settlers and Native Americans, and while Strauss was in America at least two massacres occurred.
There might well have been an underlying cause of Johann Strauss’s intractability during the American sojourn, and indeed before it, and it was artistic. There was a musical problem. Strauss knew it. The impresarios of Vienna – theatre directors, even music publishers – knew it. Most importantly of all, the people of Vienna, the all-important concertgoers and music lovers, knew it.
Strauss was a master of the waltz. The Viennese loved to dance, but there was something they loved more. They loved to go to the theatre. It goes back to the old Viennese dictum that one eye cries, the other laughs. It exactly matches the universal symbol for theatre – a laughing face alongside a crying one. And what sort of theatre did they love most? Musical theatre. Not opera, but a new art form that was sweeping Europe. Operetta. Lighter than opera
and without its complexities, generally of shorter duration, with a wealth of hummable and instantly memorable tunes. An evening’s musical entertainment unlikely to depict tragedy and certain to raise many a smile.
Blame, first and foremost, a German-born composer resident in Paris from the age of fourteen, a certain Jacques Offenbach. Six years older than Strauss, by the 1870s he had written more than eighty operettas. Eighty! Several of them had been performed at Vienna’s theatres to enthusiastic audiences. Across the Channel meanwhile, the partnership of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan was beginning to make a name for itself.
Vienna’s impresarios knew that a good operetta could fill a theatre, and they wanted more. In particular they wanted homegrown pieces that would capture the essence of Viennese humour, with copious expressions and jokes in local Viennese dialect. A bonus would be that they would not need translating, thereby saving costs, and local talent would be likely to be less expensive than Offenbach, whose financial demands were notorious.
“Vienna’s impresarios knew that a good operetta could fill a theatre, and they wanted more.”
They turned, naturally, to Johann Strauss as early as 1862 or 1863. Strauss was quick to say no. He had just married Jetty and was fully tied up with engagements both in Vienna and Pavlovsk.
He was pleased to have adequate reason to decline. He knew, instinctively, that composing for the theatre was not for him. He had little sense of theatre and lacked an intuitive dramatic sense. Asked once by a publisher to write down his reminiscences, he replied, ‘This has to do with words. For me words have always been difficult and demanding.’41
But he reckoned without the formidable Jetty. From the first time that her husband had been approached and asked to write an operetta, Jetty had encouraged him. Her motives were twofold. First, the practical incentive: works for the stage, unlike music for dancing, attracted royalties. Second, Jetty had been a professional singer. She knew the art form and she knew the people associated with it. She understood how to talk to theatre managers.
Jetty was the one person who knew how to influence Johann Strauss. There is a story that the manager of the Theater an der Wien – the small privately owned theatre outside the city centre which was a favourite of Beethoven’s and had seen the premiere of many of his works, including the first version of his only opera Fidelio, but which now specialised in lighter musical theatre – entered into a charming conspiracy with Jetty.
He persuaded her to steal some of her husband’s manuscripts. He then employed librettists to put words to the pieces. One morning a group of singers turned up at the Strausses’ house in Hietzing, gathered round the piano, and sang Strauss’s music to him, with words. Given that, as far as I am aware, none of these vocal versions has survived, the story is unlikely to be true. But its existence attests to the efforts that were being made to persuade Strauss to attempt operetta, and Jetty’s leading role in the persuasion.
Whatever the tactics, Strauss respected his wife’s business and artistic acumen, and some time in the early 1860s he began to compose operetta.
Word quickly spread about this new direction, but Strauss was not saying a word. He rebuffed all attempts to make him talk about it. He knew he needed to learn a new art form, and that it would be a struggle. He wanted to be left alone while he turned his hand to it.
He did not underestimate the challenge. Despite the Viennese newspapers announcing in January 1864 that Strauss would soon produce his first stage work, his first two attempts – Don Quichotte and Romulus – were stillborn. Strauss had actually completed two acts of Romulus before abandoning it. Things were not going well for him in the field of operetta.
Strauss was content to put operetta to one side while he concentrated on appearances in Pavlovsk and a full concert schedule at home. Then in October 1868 Jetty let the cat out of the bag by writing to a friend that Johann had declined offers to appear in Frankfurt, London and America, because he wanted to spend the winter ‘working on an opera for the Wiedner Theatre’.42
The newspapers soon knew about it, and on 6 November 1868 Die Presse announced that Strauss was near to completing an operetta which he had entitled Die lustigen Weiber von Wien (‘The Merry Wives of Vienna’).
He certainly was. It premiered soon after, and vanished soon after that. But Strauss had caught the bug, or more likely Jetty kept up an encouragement offensive, greatly helped by an amazing deal that was on offer. In return for signing an exclusive contract with the Theater an der Wien for the seasons 1870–1 and 1871–2, Strauss was offered a raft of benefits, of which the most attractive was a guaranteed 10 per cent share in the profits on the gross receipts of each performance.
There was no way Jetty was going to let him turn that down. And so he tried again, this time with the story of Ali Baba, which premiered to a full house on 10 February 1871 as Indigo und die vierzig Räuber (‘Indigo and the Forty Thieves’).
To say that reaction was mixed is an understatement. The highly respected music critic of Neue Freie Presse, Eduard Hanslick, was unremittingly scathing. He slated the ‘dreadful libretto [which] provides the composer with no characters … but with stuffed dolls which have neither point nor reason’. And in the event that Strauss was under any illusion that the criticism was aimed more at the librettists than at him, he had to suffer the indignity of reading this:
A man of Johann Strauss’s reputation and talent would have done better not to have had anything to do with it … If only it had been over quickly. But this ‘operetta’ lasts almost four hours!
The Fremdenblatt newspaper disagreed. It considered ‘the whole thing an estimable piece of work’ which promised ‘the most splendid expectations for the future’.
In fact both were close to the mark, one in the short term, one in the long. Indigo actually played for forty-six performances at the Theater an der Wien, with further productions across Austria, Hungary and Germany, finally reaching Paris in 1875. But after that, it disappeared.43
It was soon after returning to Vienna from the Berlin premiere of Indigo that Strauss received the visit from Patrick Gilmore that led to the trip to the United States. For the moment, any question of another attempt at writing operetta was put aside.
But only for the moment. Max Steiner, co-director of the Theater an der Wien, was convinced Strauss had the potential to write a truly successful operetta, and in that belief he knew he could count on Jetty as an ally.44
He was right. The origin of the best operetta ever written is convoluted. All that matters to us is that some time around the middle of 1873 Strauss began to write a comic piece based on a fanciful plot involving a lawyer exacting revenge on his financier friend Eisenstein by taking him to a party, just before he is due to go to prison briefly for insulting an official, knowing his friend’s wife will be there in disguise. There will, the lawyer knows, be flirting, infidelity and plenty of champagne drunk.
Die Fledermaus (‘The Bat’), named for the costume the lawyer wore when he was the subject of an earlier practical joke at the hands of Eisenstein, was born. Legend has it that in a white heat of creativity Strauss sketched out much of the score in just ‘42 days and nights’. Certainly he worked quickly. The operetta was all but completed in two months.
Die Fledermaus premiered at the Theater an der Wien on Easter Sunday of the following year, with Strauss himself conducting. It got off to a stuttering start, but only because the theatre was already committed to staging performances of other works by a touring Italian company. Things were not helped by the mezzo-soprano singing the role of Count Orlofsky becoming ill.45
In the autumn Die Fledermaus had the theatre to itself, and a new young actor and tenor in the role of the notary, Dr Falke. This was Alexander Girardi, who was to become the most famous operetta star in Vienna, forever associated with the music of Johann Strauss.
The production was a triumph. A month later, in July 1874, it opened in Berlin and spread swiftly to theatres across Germany. Soon it would be staged across
Europe, before crossing the Atlantic to America, and much further afield to Australia. In December 1876 it became the first Strauss operetta to be performed in London, and the following year it reached Paris.46
A number of years later, in 1894, Die Fledermaus was to receive its highest musical compliment. That über-serious, deeply emotional composer Gustav Mahler, in his capacity as music director of the staid, conservative, traditional Vienna Court Opera, introduced the ‘operetta of all operettas’ into the repertoire.
It played to packed houses, but there is a suggestion that even an admirer such as Mahler felt it a shame that Viennese audiences seemed to favour operetta over more heavyweight opera. This was, after all, the city of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms – and, albeit briefly, Wagner.
After a sell-out on a hot August day, Mahler said to a colleague:
Excellent [that it’s a sell-out], but it’s Fledermaus instead of Walküre, which I gave the night before last. I value Fledermaus and am pleased that it brings in money, but it is nonetheless sad that Fledermaus packs the house, and not Walküre.
So what is it about Die Fledermaus, which seemed to come out of nowhere after a string of failed attempts, even flops, from Strauss that makes it the best-loved, most enduring of all Viennese operetta, to the extent that the still conservative and traditional Vienna State Opera stages a new production every New Year’s Eve?
It is, of course, light-hearted, even superficial, with an utterly implausible plot. But then what operetta does not fit that description? Above all, it is fun. I have been known to sit through an entire production with a smile from ear to ear that never fades. Its centrepiece is a boisterous party, a ball. The first act leads up to it, and the third act unravels the knotty relationships that are formed at the event.47