by John Suchet
The main characters may seem one-dimensional at first, but there is more to them than meets the eye. Eisenstein is happy to deceive his wife, but then falls completely in love with her when she is in disguise at the ball. His wife Rosalinde is just as happy to deceive him, but is determined to capture him because she actually loves him deeply. The maid Adele, from the lower classes, might appear vulgar to her employers, but just marvel at the class she shows at the ball when she tries to convince Eisenstein she is a proper lady!48
“Die F ledermaus speaks to all people. There are few who do not appreciate being told to open a bottle and enjoy themselves.”
Over and above every other consideration there is the music. Strauss never wrote a better overture. It sparkles from first note to last. There is gaiety in every note. In the operetta itself there are so many instantly memorable melodies that you leave the theatre with them tumbling around in your head, jostling for priority.
There is, however, one other consideration, one further factor, that contributed to its success in Vienna, and it has nothing to do with Strauss.
Eleven months before Die Fledermaus opened, Vienna decided anything London and Paris could do, it could do better, and on 1 May 1873 it opened a World Exhibition. It was a project of gigantic proportions designed to show off the best of everything Vienna had to offer in the fields of technology and medicine, fashion and interior design. It took the form of a vast display in the Prater public park and VIPs from across the developed world were invited.
The timing of the show could not have been worse. A cholera epidemic was sweeping the city, which put guests off and prevented the public from flocking to attend. Then, on 9 May, there came the great crash of the Vienna Stock Exchange. This was Black Friday. In a classic foretaste of crashes to come in succeeding centuries, too many shares had been issued for too many unsound enterprises. Too many credit notes had been issued, too much money lent. When it all came crashing down, fortunes were lost overnight, resulting in bankruptcy and suicide among Vienna’s moneyed class.
In the ensuing months the number of visitors to the World Exhibition picked up, but the project was doomed. Vienna’s World Exhibition closed on 2 January with a huge and crippling deficit of almost 15 million gulden.
A mere four months later Die Fledermaus opened, and what was its central message? That happy is he who is able to forget what he cannot change.49 In other words, whatever happened wasn’t your fault. It was beyond your control. No need for you to be concerned about it.
So whose fault was it? And what is the remedy? The famous song right at the end of the operetta spells it out. It was all the fault of champagne – that king of wines – and champagne can make it all better again. ‘So let us drink a toast to King Champagne the First!’50
It was precisely the message the bruised and battered Viennese wanted to hear, and it is precisely the message any person from that day to this, buffeted by ill fortune, wants to hear: the pop of a cork, and the effervescence of bubbles poured into a glass.
The central message of Die Fledermaus might be pretty basic, and it might not bear too close an examination. But it speaks to all people of all generations. There are few people who do not appreciate being told to open a bottle and enjoy themselves.
Johann Strauss and his superb librettists Karl Haffner and Richard Genée had created an operetta that would endure for all time.
Strauss was not finished with the operetta form. In the ensuing twenty-three years he would produce no fewer than thirteen more operettas. Only two – Eine Nacht in Venedig (‘One Night in Venice’) and Der Zigeunerbaron (‘The Gypsy Baron’) – achieved any sort of lasting success, and both pale before the supreme example of Die Fledermaus.
Four years and two forgettable operettas after Die Fledermaus, Strauss was working on a new project. It was an operetta entitled Blinde Kuh (‘Blind Man’s Buff’). His newfound enthusiasm for operetta – fuelled by the success of Die Fledermaus – was undimmed, and Jetty was unstinting in her encouragement.
While Strauss was in Paris conducting at the new Paris Opéra, clearly longing to return to Jetty and their home in Hietzing, Jetty wrote to a friend on 20 October 1877, ‘Jean is being drawn to Hietzing by his work desk – where, waiting longingly for him, is “Blinde Kuh”.’
But Jetty was never to see this new operetta. On 8 April 1878 she suffered a heart attack and at 11.30 p.m. she died.
41 Echoes of Beethoven who, asked why he did not write more opera, replied that when he heard music in his head, it was always the sound of the instruments of the orchestra, not the human voice.
42 The old name for the Theater an der Wien.
43 Strauss, like many great composers, was not one to waste a good tune. Some passages from all his failed operettas resurfaced later in different forms and in other works.
44 Steiner’s grandson, also Max, was known as the ‘father of film music’. He composed over 300 film scores, winning three Academy Awards, although not, inexplicably, for his best known, Gone with the Wind.
45 From the first performance to this day, this male role is taken by a female singer.
46 Substantially revised and under a new title, La Tzigane (‘The Gypsy Girl’).
47 Modern directors delight in putting star turns into Count Orlofsky’s ball, characters who otherwise take no part in the performance. In 1990 the great Australian soprano Dame Joan Sutherland was joined on stage at Covent Garden by tenor Luciano Pavarotti and mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne for several numbers to mark her retirement.
48 Her aria ‘Mein Herr Marquis’ is, I think, one of the most seductive and beguiling in all operetta, or opera for that matter, on a par with Musetta’s waltz, ‘Quando me’n vo’’ in Act II of La Bohème.
49 See chapter 1, page 5.
50 ‘Jubelnd wird Champagner/Der Erste sie genannt!’
In eight short years Johann Strauss had lost his mother, his brother and his wife. His reaction each time seemed to surpass what was normal. Grief is one thing, but Strauss’s behaviour bordered on the irrational. His morbid fear of anything to do with death led him to stay away from the funerals of his mother and brother, as I have recounted. Now, once again, his reaction was extreme.
He not only refused to attend Jetty’s funeral, he adamantly refused to have anything to do with arranging it. As with the previous two deaths in the family, his younger brother Eduard was left to make all the arrangements. This was such a clear abrogation of duty that it caused considerable antagonism on Eduard’s part.
Johann went further. The same night he found Jetty’s lifeless body, he fled the house in Hietzing that was their home and never set foot inside it again. He took refuge in Eduard’s house and told him he wanted nothing to do with what now needed to be done. Eduard was left to pick up the pieces. It was Eduard who had the body taken away, Eduard who arranged the funeral, walked behind the coffin, and dealt with the legal formalities.
Johann, we know, had a horror of death and everything associated with it, but in this case it might have been exacerbated by the unquestionable fact that his marriage had been running into trouble. The seven-year age gap began to show as Strauss turned fifty years of age, and Jetty drew closer to sixty. Her health had not been good for some time. She was prone to speak of herself as ‘a poor old cripple’, and infirmity had robbed her of her looks, and to a certain extent her charm. Her ill health cannot have helped marital relations and might even have contributed to their deterioration.
There was also the issue of her complicated former life. It is possible Strauss was aware only of the two illegitimate daughters Jetty had by Baron Todesco, and not of the five others. Certainly he was taken totally by surprise when, in the autumn of 1876, a young man turned up at the Hietzing house, addressed Jetty as ‘mother’, and asked for money.
Strauss threw him out of the house, but the man then wrote to his mother asking for money, making increasingly unreasonable demands. On the day of her death she received a letter from her son that appare
ntly amounted to blackmail. Strauss had no hesitation in saying it was the shock of this letter that induced the fatal heart attack.
It had been an open secret in Viennese musical circles for some time that the Strausses’ marriage had become rocky, and Strauss was known to have developed a roving eye. It had roved particularly towards a young actress by the name of Angelika Dittrich, who had come to Vienna in search of a theatrical career.
Strauss first met her in the lobby of the Hotel Victoria, where he had taken up residence after leaving the house in Hietzing. He was immediately attracted to the pretty, vivacious young woman, who lost no time in telling him she had loved his music since childhood, flattering him with almost every word she uttered.
Angelika, known as Lili, was intelligent enough to know that looks alone were not enough for her to make her name as an actress, and that she had more looks than talent. Her ambition therefore was to enter theatre management, and she knew there was no one in Vienna who could be of more use to her than the famous Johann Strauss.
As for Strauss, the unremitting attention of a pretty young woman was irresistible. He apparently did not consider the age difference of twenty-five years to be any sort of barrier, and after a whirlwind romance Strauss and Lili were married. It was just seven weeks since Jetty had died.
Strauss’s choice of bride this time was as unfortunate as his first choice had been serendipitous. Lili did not realise what she had taken on. Johann Strauss was what we would today call a workaholic. When the creative spark was in him he simply could not stop, and it was in him for much of the time.
We have already seen Strauss himself tell the New York Sun reporter that he always composed at night. Another journalist, a German this time, gives a riveting account of Strauss’s compulsive work ethic, and his extraordinary, and frankly inexplicable, lack of self-confidence. He also describes how utterly essential Jetty was to her husband’s creative process:
Strauss works ‘feverishly’. He composes with the same nervous energy with which he conducts the orchestra. His workroom is everywhere. In a velvet suit and top boots, his hair in a mess, he rushes through his apartments … Madame Strauss sees to it that in every room there is a table with writing implements … Whether Strauss is composing an operetta or a polka, he gets into an indescribable state of nervous excitement. After two or three hours of such work, he is as exhausted as a native bearer … Strauss always believes that his best work is already behind him. He belongs to that breed of artists who spend their lives doubting themselves.
There is a photograph of Strauss, some years later, showing him at his composing desk – standing up!51 This is how he preferred to compose, and it perfectly fits the journalist’s description of him as composing in a fit of nervous energy.
Later still, a portrait by the celebrated German painter Franz von Lehnbach captures to perfection the tortured, almost manic, intensity of Johann Strauss. His eyes are blazing and his jaw is set, as if he is imploring the artist to be done so he can get back to work.52
This was decidedly not the kind of man Lili thought she was taking on. She had anticipated a glamorous life in theatrical circles, attending premieres, soirées, attracting admiring glances as she walked on the arm of the famous Johann Strauss, a man universally admired but belonging to her.
To an extent this happened, at least in the early months of their marriage – Strauss as keen to show off his beautiful young wife as she was ready to play the part. But no one with Strauss’s ferocious appetite for work could behave like that for long.
Some years earlier, with money earned from the eventual success of Die Fledermaus, Jetty had persuaded Strauss to purchase two adjacent plots of land in the Wieden district of Vienna. She knew that, much as he hated the social whirl that accompanied the musical life, he needed to play the role and play it in a manner befitting his status. The villa in Hietzing was neither impressive enough, nor close enough to the city centre, to enable him to do this.
The land bought, Jetty supervised the construction of a luxury mansion – a Stadt-Palais (‘city palace’) – that would meet his every need. Apparently (despite the German journalist’s depiction of Strauss as all work and no play) he did have a passion for billiards. Jetty ensured the new house had a billiard room, as well as stables, and a large and elegant reception room where he could entertain eminent guests.
Jetty did not live to see the building completed. After their honeymoon in Wyk, with its beautiful if rather windswept beaches, on the North Frisian Island of Föhr in the North Sea, Strauss and his new wife moved into the newly completed mansion on the Igelgasse in an exclusive district of Vienna.53
The reception room was everything Jetty had wanted it to be, and here Strauss entertained such eminent musical guests as Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner and Giacomo Puccini. A contemporary print shows Strauss seated at a large ornate desk, dressed in a sharply cut and immaculately tailored suit, a bearskin rug under his feet, and a tasteful nude painting on the wall.
These names and this lifestyle were totally unfamiliar to Lili. She was out of her depth and out of her class, and that twenty-five-year age gap must have weighed on her heavily. Matters were not helped – in fact they were considerably exacerbated – when Strauss’s newly completed and much awaited new operetta, Blinde Kuh, premiered on 18 December 1878, less than seven months after Strauss and Lili were married.
Lili no doubt enjoyed a glittering evening at the Theater an der Wien, where all the talk was of the brilliant and charismatic Alexander Girardi in the principal role. The combination of Strauss and Girardi. What could possibly go wrong?
Everything. In fact there had been an ominous piece of bad luck in the run-up to the premiere. Several numbers Strauss had already composed were lost in the move to the new mansion. He was forced to compose twelve new numbers. Is it too fanciful to imagine him furiously accusing Lili of mislaying them, of not looking after his precious manuscripts properly, as Jetty surely would have done?
The operetta was a huge flop, in fact the only complete failure of his career, humiliatingly withdrawn after only sixteen performances. He could take small comfort that the inane libretto by one Rudolf Kneisel took most of the blame. Reviews were excoriating – ‘Among his other talents, Johann Strauss also possesses that of selecting the worst possible text’, and (the pun working in English as well as German), ‘Johann Strauss personally conducts – the audience to the outside of the theatre.’54
Strauss had a secure enough reputation to survive a flop, particularly when it was the librettist who took most of the criticism. But it was another nail in the already fragile coffin that was his marriage to Lili.
His next operetta, the seventh, Das Spitzentuch der Königin (‘The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief’), received an opening-night ovation greater than any since Die Fledermaus, but fickle as these things are, it swiftly disappeared into obscurity, possibly sped on its way by the fact that at least four librettists, and subsequently even more, claimed a share of the profits, resulting in a messy court case.55
“It transpires that Strauss might not only have been aware of his wife’s infidelity but might not have been entirely faithful himself.”
A similar fate befell the eighth, Der lustige Krieg (‘The Merry War’), praised in the Neue Freie Presse as ‘the work of a brilliant talent’, but on this occasion the cause might have been something entirely unrelated, which devastated the city and changed Viennese theatrical life.
Less than two weeks after the opening of Der lustige Krieg, on 7 December 1881, the Ringtheater, one of the most imposing buildings on the still newly completed Ringstrasse, presented the German-language premiere of Offenbach’s hugely popular Hoffmanns Erzählungen (‘The Tales of Hoffmann’).
The following night, brilliant reviews combined with a public holiday ensured a full house. Minutes before the curtain rose, an ignition fault with the gas lighting backstage started a fire. It quickly spread unchecked across the auditorium, engulfing the audience. In total 386 peo
ple died in a tragedy unprecedented of its kind in the city’s history.
In the long term it led to a complete overhaul of safety in theatres, with new and stricter regulations. In the short term people simply stayed away. A measure of Strauss’s popularity is that Der lustige Krieg, playing at the Theater an der Wien, seemed to buck the trend, running for more than a hundred consecutive performances before it faded into relative obscurity.
In the previous year Strauss had purchased an imposing country retreat at Schönau-bei-Leobersdorf about twenty miles south-west of Vienna, to give him peace and quiet and an escape from the city and even from the house in Igelgasse, where he was constantly called on by visitors.
Musically speaking it was an inspired move; on a personal level a disaster. Strauss composed his two most popular operettas after Die Fledermaus at Schönau – Eine Nacht in Venedig (‘One Night in Venice’) and Der Zigeunerbaron (‘The Gypsy Baron’) – but it took him away from the city, the social whirl and the bright lights. Good for Strauss, not so good for his wife.
Lili still harboured ambitions to pursue a career in theatrical management. In May 1880 the director of the Theater an der Wien, Maximilian Steiner, died and his son Franz took over.
Lili knew father and son well from their dealings with Strauss – in fact Max Steiner is often credited for the making of Strauss as a composer of operetta. Whereas Steiner senior was a serious and dedicated theatre manager, whose premature death was said to have been brought on by the precarious finances of the theatre, his son was in another mould. A sole photograph shows an unsmiling young man, but with tousled dark hair and fashionable pencil moustache, and a bow tie tied at a louche angle. It is easy to imagine the face breaking into spontaneous laughter.
It is not exactly clear when Lili began an affair with Franz, but it was certainly under way in 1882, two years after the purchase of the villa in Schönau, when Lili was thirty-two years of age and Steiner three years younger.