The Last Waltz

by John Suchet

  On Monday, 28 January 1889, Crown Prince Rudolf and his mistress Mary Vetsera left separately for the fifteen-mile carriage ride to Mayerling. There was no secret about the trip, at least among those close to Rudolf. His father knew he was at Mayerling, and two close friends of Rudolf were there too, a prince and the court chamberlain, as well as a valet.

  The following day the men went hunting, and in the evening they sat down to a hearty dinner. Mary stayed closeted in Rudolf’s bedroom. Rudolf joined her there, with orders to be called at 7.30 a.m. for breakfast.

  The next morning, after failing to get a response from inside the room, the drastic decision was taken to break down the door. Inside was a horrific scene. Mary Vetsera, fully dressed, was stretched out on the bed, hair flowing loosely, hands cupping a rose, blood already dried and caked from a gunshot wound to the temple.

  “Rudolf had shot his mistress, and then several hours later turned the gun on himself. In a single night the history of the Habsburg empire had changed.”

  Archduke Rudolf was half sitting on the bed, leaning against a night table on which stood a mirror, which had helped him perfect his aim. The blood was still flowing from his mouth. To even an untrained eye it was obvious what had happened: Rudolf had shot his mistress, and then several hours later turned the gun on himself.

  In a single night the history of the Habsburg empire had changed.62

  It was that interval of several hours that was the most problematic fact of all. This could not be passed off as a sudden act of folly, or desperation, the result of some traumatic quarrel. This was calculated, premeditated. Rudolf must have looked at the body of his mistress, the blood flowing from the head wound, slowly congealing, for several hours before himself committing suicide.

  Not that that stopped the news being officially announced with every possible explanation except the true one. On one ‘fact’ every report agreed: there was only one body, that of Archduke Rudolf. To admit to two would cause all kinds of unseemly speculation.

  The first report was that the Archduke had been poisoned by a jealous woman. When this was considered so unlikely as to be implausible, it was announced that Rudolf had died of a stroke. Another report said a heart attack was more likely in a man of thirty.

  But it was impossible to suppress the truth. Almost. On 1 February the evening edition of the Wiener Tagblatt carried a black-framed monumental headline: THE MOST HORRIBLE TRUTH. It reported that Archduke Rudolf had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. He had, it said, been alone at the time.

  Extraordinary measures were put in place to conceal the fact that Rudolf had not been alone, that a woman – never mind that it was his mistress – was with him, and had been shot by him in a suicide pact.

  In scenes that are almost too macabre to be believed, two of Mary’s uncles travelled in an unmarked carriage to Mayerling. They first identified their niece’s body, then proceeded to wash caked blood from the body, after which they dressed it in coat and hat, boa, veil and shoes.

  They stood Mary’s corpse up, took an arm each, and walked her out under cover of darkness to the carriage. To use a hearse would have been out of the question. They lifted her into the carriage, forced her into a sitting position between them, with a broomstick pushed between her dress and her spine to keep her erect.63

  Mary was buried quietly and secretly in the cemetery of a Cistercian monastery, the abbot allowing himself to be persuaded – no doubt with a substantial ‘gift’ to the monastery – that although suicide prevented a Christian burial, this case was different since the young woman concerned had suffered a ‘temporary loss of her senses’.

  Archduke Rudolf, by contrast, received the full panoply of Habsburg court mourning. He was laid out in state in his apartment at the Hofburg Palace, his body strewn with flowers, moustache elaborately waxed and combed, a large bandage covering his forehead and the entire upper part of his head.

  Empress Elisabeth visited her son and kissed his lips. Her younger daughter, Archduchess Marie Valerie (known as Valerie), who accompanied her, gave an account of the scene, at the same time leaving us a witheringly accurate description of her brother’s character:

  He was so handsome and lay there so peacefully, the white sheet pulled up to his chest and flowers strewn all around. The narrow [sic] bandage on his head did not disfigure him – his cheeks and ears were still rosy with the healthy glow of youth – the restless, often bitter, scornful expression that was often characteristic of him in life had given way to a perfect smile. He never seemed so beautiful to me before – he seemed to be asleep and calm, happy.

  Hardly surprisingly the sudden death – and its manner – of the heir to the throne, and of a son who rarely saw his mother and did not get on with his father, did nothing to bring his parents any closer together.

  It was Empress Elisabeth who was told the news first, initially complaining that she had given instructions that her daily Greek lesson should never be interrupted. She then told her husband. Significantly she did not attend Rudolf’s funeral, preferring to remain in prayer in a private chapel.

  Also unsurprising, given what we know of their characters, is the different way in which each parent reacted to Rudolf’s death. As a father Franz Josef grieved for his son, but the military bearing and discipline never wavered, at least in public. ‘I bore up well,’ he said after the funeral. ‘It was only in the crypt that I could endure it no longer.’

  There is no question that uppermost in his mind was the fact the heir to the Habsburg throne was now dead. What would that mean for the empire? Would it in any way weaken it? Would its enemies try to capitalise on the grave situation?

  As for Elisabeth, she was riven with guilt. Not, it seems, for the fact she more or less deserted her son and had taken little interest in his upbringing or welfare, but for fear that she had passed on her family’s mental instability – madness, not to put too fine a point on it – to her son.

  If she believed what the Roman Catholic Church said, she had good reason to feel guilty. Like the Cistercian abbot, the pope himself had proved remarkably susceptible to inducements of one kind or another, finally allowing himself to be persuaded that Rudolf’s suicide was not your normal suicide, but the consequence of ‘a state of mental derangement’, thus allowing Rudolf complete burial rites.

  Rudolf thus suffered officially from mental derangement, and why might that be? His mother believed for the rest of her life that she at least bore some responsibility for that dreadful act on the night of 30 January 1889.

  Rudolf’s coffin took its place in the Imperial Crypt in the Augustinerkirche in the Neuer Markt in the centre of Vienna, where it would later be joined by those of his parents. They lie alongside each other to this day, closer in death than they ever were in life.

  Vienna was in a state of shock. No living Viennese had known of such a portentous act. The nineteenth century had certainly been one of upheavals, and you only had to be in late middle age to have witnessed the street revolution of 1848 and the ignominious middle-of-the-night departure of the politician who had ruled with an iron fist, Klemens von Metternich.

  There had already been one death in the imperial royal family. The emperor’s brother, Archduke Maximilian, who had been installed on the throne of faraway Mexico, had been executed by firing squad in June 1867.64

  There had been wars, both victories and defeats, even an economic crash. But of one thing it was possible to be absolutely sure: the Habsburg dynasty, secure for six hundred years, was immutable. An emperor died or abdicated, and his legitimate and rightful heir would succeed. This progression had come to a sudden and unnatural stop.

  What no one could know, not the emperor himself nor his wife, was that the killing was not yet over. Another single and unnatural death would haunt Vienna, and the empire, within a few short years. And that in turn would be followed by more killing, on a hitherto unimaginable scale. It would run into millions.

  But that lay ahead. For now, the people
of Vienna who had celebrated the emperor’s fortieth anniversary with such élan, found themselves thrown into the deepest mourning. And who, once again, did they turn to when in need of gaiety and laughter?

  Why, the Waltz King, of course.

  58 Known as ‘tight-lacing’.

  59 In fact she had not been intended as the emperor’s bride. His mother had chosen Elisabeth’s elder sister, but Josef fell in love with Elisabeth and proposed to her.

  60 Today it is a museum to Empress Elisabeth owned by the Greek nation.

  61 Katharina Schratt outlived the emperor by nearly twenty-four years, dying in 1940 at the age of eighty-six.

  62 It is not an exaggeration to say that the history of the world changed that night. The death of Rudolf made Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the emperor’s nephew, heir to the Habsburg throne. It was his assassination in Sarajevo that was the catalyst for the outbreak of the First World War.

  63 One report says, rigor mortis having set in, they needed to break one of Mary’s legs in order to close the carriage door.

  64 He had done his duty, said the emperor, ever the military man.

  There are numerous photographs of Emperor Franz Josef, at least from middle age onwards, and dozens of painted portraits, facsimiles of which still hang in many a government office or hotel reception room today. They show the kindly visage, worn down by tragedy and the relentless unpredictability of events – ‘Gentlemen, my hand is unlucky,’ he once said to city officials, and that was before the final tragedy – but if you want a true character study of this longest serving of monarchs, Der alte Herr (‘the Old Gentleman’) to the people of his day and a century of succeeding generations, you need look no further than Johann Strauss the Younger.

  In the autumn of 1889, the year following the fortieth jubilee of the emperor’s reign, Strauss composed a new waltz entitled ‘Hand in Hand’. It was one of the pieces he intended performing in Berlin at a week of concerts, and the title was meant to echo a recent toast of friendship that Franz Josef had made to the German kaiser.

  However, Strauss’s Berlin publisher, Fritz Simrock65 had the rather good idea that the piece should be renamed ‘Kaiser-Walzer’ (‘Emperor Waltz’), a title that could refer to either monarch, and thus be suitably flattering to both. He went ahead with his plan, published the piece under the new title, and thereby gave the world a single piece of music that many consider to be the finest, and at the same time most poignant, that Strauss ever composed.

  The Swiss music critic William Ritter described the ‘Emperor Waltz’ as symphonic, more tone-poem than dance, and ‘the most beautiful flower the fantastic tree of Strauss’s music has borne’.

  The German dramatist and novelist Paul Lindau wrote to Strauss:

  It is no exaggeration when I say that, in my musical view, nothing has been written since the days of Franz Schubert which, for pure melody and unspoiled beauty, can be compared with the first part of your ‘Kaiser-Walzer’. In those [opening] bars there is more music, genuine, unadulterated music, than in many operas that last a whole evening but which leave the heart empty.

  There certainly is. The opening is in fact a slow march. What is a march? Something boisterous, loud, noisy, to stamp booted feet to. Strauss’s first stroke of genius is to mark the opening bars pianissimo, as quiet as possible. The effect is to make you lean forward, strain your ears, to catch what is being played.

  These opening bars capture instantly the character of Emperor Franz Josef. He is a military man, but a quiet one. Not a soldier to stamp and shout, but one who quietly gives orders and is prepared to obey them with total discipline when required.

  “Strauss possibly wrote nothing more beautiful – and nothing less like the Strauss as Vienna’s dance enthusiasts conceived him.”

  Heinrich Eduard Jacob

  The German-born journalist and writer Heinrich Eduard Jacob, author of Johann Strauss: A Century of Light Music, described this opening passage as ‘very discreet, which is not typical of Strauss’, and adds:

  Strauss possibly wrote nothing more beautiful – and nothing less like the Strauss as Vienna’s dance enthusiasts conceived him – than this march, which excites by its very tranquillity.

  Strauss then lifts the volume slightly to piano, gives a foretaste of the beautiful waltz to come, then increases the volume more and more to a forte, bringing the entire orchestra in for a full-blown march.

  But this does not last. It is as if the emperor himself is saying, ‘No no, this is too public, too indiscreet, we must maintain our royal dignity.’ A lone cello comes in, high in the upper register, with a theme so plaintive the emperor himself could be shedding tears.

  With just solo cello sounding, the time changes to three-four, Strauss writes Tempo di Valse at the top of the score, and gives us the most heartrendingly beautiful waltz, with plunging intervals of an octave, a seventh, even a ninth. It is the sound, almost, of a sob, but as with everything about his subject, a controlled sob.

  But why just one waltz, when two will do? And what a contrast the second waltz is. High violins and flute take the theme, with horns and oboe in counterpoint. This is the emperor remembering better days, when he was young and taking as his bride the most beautiful young duchess in Europe.

  Memories, though, are painful for Franz Josef. A waltz like this cannot endure, and again it is high violins and flute that drift down, a melancholy phrase that does not so much end as peter out, as the first waltz comes back in, and we are once again in the emperor’s private world, and once again pianissimo.

  Back comes the second waltz, but still pianissimo, as though, try as he might, there can be no relief from the melancholia that sits on Franz Josef’s shoulders. A brief passage played fortissimo, allowing him temporary respite, gives way to a new waltz, a descending phrase once more filled with sadness. At intervals musical laughter breaks out, but each time it is quickly stifled.

  A third waltz now, and it is joyous. No matter what befalls him, Franz Josef refuses to surrender totally to despair. And back comes the march. The emperor on parade, inspecting his troops, relishing their respectful and admiring gaze.

  And we are into yet a fourth waltz, pointed and even piquant, as Franz Josef enjoys a little humour with staff officers. But once again it is not allowed to last, as the very first waltz returns in an inverted version. Instead of the theme plunging huge intervals, it rises. But Strauss keeps hold of the reins, not allowing the sound to rise above mezzo forte.

  Soon we are back into melancholia, and the first waltz with those plunging intervals, the controlled sobs once more, with the sound not rising above piano. Is the emperor wiping away tears as news reaches him of the tragedy at Mayerling?

  Life must go on. A soldier’s discipline will ensure he does not surrender. The march returns, as Franz Josef gratefully receives the enhanced love of his people, who want to share his pain at the loss of his son, their future emperor, in order to alleviate it if they possibly can.

  Through the sadness of the first waltz, the emperor is determined to show his people that they have helped him come through the worst of times. Trombones and trumpets sound the martial notes that allow him to bestride the parade ground, his palace, the duties of state.

  But he knows, they know, that in the end he will be overwhelmed by fate, by forces he cannot control. The march is abruptly cut off, and the lone voice of the cello returns, like a Cassandra with nothing to impart but prophecies of more tragedy to come.

  And in the face of such predictions, the emperor behaves like any soldier – with defiance and dignity, a refusal to be cowed. So the music builds finally to a fortissimo finish. Nothing will break this man.

  If I have taken a certain artistic licence in my descriptive analysis of the ‘Emperor Waltz’, one factor in Johann Strauss’s life most certainly supports it. He knew the emperor well, and even if his intention had not been to create a portrait in music of the man, he must have realised how apt it was. Why else would he have agreed to the title
being changed?

  His role as Court Ball Director of Music brought him into frequent contact with the emperor and empress, even though they were hardly great concertgoers or aficionados of music. He was required to compose new pieces for special state occasions. For the emperor’s diamond jubilee he composed the ‘Kaiser-Jubiläum Jubelwalzer’ (‘Jubilee Waltz for the Emperor’s Jubilee’), which became instantly popular, even if it was to be rather eclipsed by the ‘Emperor Waltz’, which followed a year later.66

  It seems Johann Strauss knew the emperor on another level as well. The emperor’s mistress, Katharina Schratt – Kathi to those close to her – was now fully accepted as part of his life. Should there be any doubt, the empress herself made a point of being seen both at court and in public together with her husband and Kathi, an overt declaration of her approval for what amounted to a ménage à trois.

  For Kathi actually to take up residence in either the Hofburg or Schönbrunn Palace, though, would be considered a step too far, and so the emperor bought a villa for her in the Gloriettegasse, a secluded tree-lined street just outside the garden walls of Schönbrunn in Hietzing. Kathi was therefore on hand whenever the emperor was able to escape from his official residence in the centre of Vienna to the beautiful summer palace in Hietzing.

  The wealthy suburb of Hietzing had both good, and not so good, memories for Strauss. It was where Dommayer’s Casino stood, the venue that had seen his debut as conductor and composer nearly half a century earlier. It was also where he had lived contentedly with the wife he adored, Jetty, and where she had died.

  We do not know under exactly what circumstances, but residents of Hietzing, well into the next century, spoke excitedly of the famous personages who frequented their district. It was said that the emperor himself would walk out of Schönbrunn Palace early of a summer’s morning, stroll across to Kathi’s villa, let himself in through the garden gate, and join his mistress for breakfast.