The Last Waltz

by John Suchet

  68 The house Brahms rented is still there. On the site where Strauss’s villa stood there is now an unprepossessing modern apartment block.

  69 See chapter 21, page 241.

  70 See chapter 12, page 125.

  In one of those quirks of history, two men whose names were previously unknown would soon enter the story of the Habsburg empire. The second of these, whom I will address later, would fire a volley of shots that would kill two people, and lead to the deaths of millions. The first would wield a stiletto knife, kill a single person, and bring a man already tortured with pain and regret to unknown despair.

  The name Luigi Luccheni is forgotten to history, but for a brief moment in September 1898 it was emblazoned across the newspapers of the world. Born in Paris to Italian parents, he grew up as an orphan, working later as labourer and bricklayer, then as a cavalry officer’s servant. At some stage in young adulthood he became an anarchist, joined the extremist ‘Regicide Squad’, and set himself the task, or was assigned the task by colleagues, of assassinating a member of European royalty, a ‘great deed’ from which the monarchies of Europe would not recover. The chosen target was Prince Henri of Orléans, pretender to the throne of France. The prince was known to be intending to visit Geneva, and so Luccheni based himself there.

  Several hundred miles north of Geneva, in central Germany, the Empress of Austria was in the spa town of Bad Nauheim enjoying a rest and buying presents for her grandchildren. Actually, ‘enjoying’ is not entirely the right word. Her daughter Archduchess Marie Valerie, who had been with her for two weeks in Bad Ischl, described her as being ‘in low spirits, as always’. Bad Ischl had that effect on her.

  Valerie sided with her mother and largely blamed the emperor for ‘the melancholic effect of court life, this exclusion from all natural situations … What sort of life must Papa lead if he finds life here comfortable and enjoyable?’

  Sisi then left for Switzerland, travelling incognito and accompanied only by a close friend and lady-in-waiting Countess Sztáray. Under the pseudonym of Countess von Hohenembs, she and her friend checked into the Hotel Beau Rivage on the shores of Lake Geneva.

  The hotel manager, though, knew perfectly well who she was, and boasted to the local newspaper of his distinguished guest. The following morning the paper carried an item saying that the Empress of Austria was staying at the Beau Rivage in Geneva.

  Luccheni the anarchist was in some despair. At the last minute Prince Henri had cancelled his trip to Geneva. What was he to do now? Would there be no ‘great deed’? In despair he picked up a copy of the local newspaper, and the empress’s fate was sealed.

  Sisi had recently developed a fondness for Switzerland (no royal family, therefore no formalities or protocol), and her mood improved markedly. On Saturday, 10 September, she and her friend sat down to an early lunch in the hotel, enjoying first tea and patisseries and then a three-course lunch, which included a half-bottle of Médoc. The hotel bill, which includes the lunch (and, it appears rather extraordinarily, lunch the following day for six people), is quite clearly made out in the name of ‘Madame la Comtesse de Hohenembs’.

  Afterwards they walked the short distance to the landing stage on the banks of Lake Geneva to take the 1.40 p.m. lake steamer to Montreux. Sisi was dressed entirely in black, wearing a full-length dress with long embroidered sleeves and high-ruffed collar, cinched tightly at the waist. She carried a parasol in one hand and fan in the other.

  Luccheni had hidden in his right sleeve a long thin file which he had ground to a sharp edge, set into a large round wooden handle with a strap so that he could hold it securely.

  As the two women approached the landing stage Luccheni ran up to them, ducked under Sisi’s parasol, paused to make sure he could locate her left breast (a book of anatomical drawings in his room had shown him exactly where the heart was found), and then plunged the file into her chest. He withdrew it quickly and hurried off.

  Sisi temporarily lost her balance, but quickly recovered and said to her friend, ‘What did that man want? Maybe he wanted to take my watch.’ She assured her friend that she was all right, and the two women covered the short distance to the stage to board the steamer.

  They stood on deck as the steamer departed. Suddenly Sisi let out a small sigh and collapsed to the floor. The countess thought she had fainted and began to unbutton the bodice of the dress. Only then did she notice a small tear in the dress and a brownish stain on the camisole underneath it.

  She called out to the captain to come quickly, informed him who her mistress was, and asked him to return to shore as swiftly as he could. Once the boat docked Sisi was laid on an improvised stretcher made up of oars and velvet chairs, and carried as quickly as possible back to the hotel.

  A doctor was summoned, and although Sisi was still breathing faintly he was able to ascertain that she had moments only to live. He explained to the countess that Sisi had survived as long as she had only because the weapon used was so narrow and the wound so small that the heart continued to beat and only gradually slowed as the flow of blood increased.

  The dress she was wearing has been preserved, I have seen it. The tear above the heart is so small it is not at all surprising that she was not immediately aware of what had happened.

  Empress Elisabeth was sixty years and nine months when she died, and those closest to her found consolation in the knowledge that death had come to her as she had wanted – swiftly and without warning.

  Her daughter Valerie remembered that her mother had said, ‘Let death take me unawares. And when it is time for me to die, lay me down at the ocean’s shore,’ and after she received news of her mother’s death, she wrote, ‘Now it has happened as she always wished it to happen, quickly, painlessly, without medical treatment, without long, fearful days of worry for her dear ones.’

  In the Hofburg Palace in Vienna the emperor had written a letter that morning to Kathi saying, ‘The empress is enjoying the pure, invigorating mountain air of Switzerland.’ At half past four in the afternoon an adjutant came in clutching a telegram. He said there was bad news from Geneva, the empress had been ‘injured’.

  The emperor, who without doubt had always loved his wife, even if he had been at a loss to understand her erratic behaviour, was endlessly concerned about her fragile health. He barely had time to wonder at the use of the word ‘injured’, before a second telegram arrived minutes later with the news of her murder.

  Franz Josef, who had already lost his brother to a firing squad and his eldest son to suicide, had now lost the woman he fell so completely in love with all those years ago to an assassin. The adjutant reported that the emperor turned away and muttered almost under his breath, ‘So I am to be spared nothing in this world.’ (‘Mir bleibt doch gar nichts erspart auf dieser Welt.’) And then, even more quietly, ‘Nobody will ever know how much we loved each other.’ (‘Niemand weiss, wie sehr wir uns geliebt haben.’)

  As for the assassin, he had what he wanted – his moment in the spotlight. He was chased and wrestled to the ground by hotel staff who were carrying the two women’s bags. A photograph was taken of him being led away by two gendarmes. He strides along, arms swinging, a smile of satisfaction on his face, a gondolier’s hat set at a jaunty angle on his head. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Eleven years later, in 1910, he hanged himself in his cell.

  Luccheni had indeed murdered a royal personage, but in his prime objective he had failed totally. The emperor and his people were in mourning, but Sisi’s death did not affect the constitutional affairs of the Habsburg empire one jot. It might even be something of an exaggeration to say that the people were in mourning. A confidant of the emperor, who was also Governor of Lower Austria, said, ‘Not many tears were shed for her.’71

  If the final decade of the nineteenth century seemed to offer nothing but heartache for Emperor Franz Josef, the same was true – surprising though it may seem – on a professional level for Austria’s best-loved and most famous
composer.

  We know Johann Strauss the younger today as the composer of the waltz sans pareil. He was the undisputed master of the form. The names of his greatest waltz pieces echo down the years and will continue down the centuries: ‘The Emperor Waltz’, ‘By the Beautiful Blue Danube’, ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’, ‘Wine, Woman and Song’, ‘Voices of Spring’, ‘Vienna Blood’, ‘Roses from the South’.

  But the urge to be a great composer of opera never left him. Failing that, well, to be known first and foremost as a composer of operetta would do nicely. Putting this desire into the context of its time, it is perhaps not too difficult to understand the ambition.

  This was the era of Wagner and Verdi. The operas of both composers were sweeping across Europe. Wagner had his detractors, but few doubted he was rewriting the musical rule book. No one had written operas like his; no one had created harmonies such as his.

  Verdi was entirely different. Instantly memorable tunes, so much so that in the case of one of them – ‘La donna è mobile’ – he forbade his performers to whistle it in the street ahead of opening night, for fear of it becoming known too soon.

  Certainly there were composers of the nineteenth century who had established themselves firmly in musical history without ever having written an opera, or in the case of Beethoven just one. As well as Beethoven, there were names such as Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Bruckner, Brahms, Mahler – symphonists, first and foremost, all of them.

  To attend a concert was an activity that belonged largely to the cultured classes. While the same might be true of Wagner, it was very different in the case of Verdi in Italy, Offenbach in France, or Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain. The theatre was entertainment in a way that a purely musical performance could not be. And the theatre belonged to everyone.

  The music that Johann Strauss wrote fell, to some extent, between the two genres. It could most certainly be played at a concert, but it was better in a dance hall or even in a café. It was music that needed to be moved to. Although performers could dress in traditional costume and dance on stage in front of an audience, it was not by any stretch of the imagination opera.

  And so, while he was producing immortal waltzes, polkas, even marches and quadrilles, he still longed for recognition as a composer of stage works. Proof of this is that in a thirty-one-year period, from 1868 to his death in 1899, Strauss composed no fewer than seventeen stage works – sixteen operettas and one opera. The number is nineteen, if you include the two false starts. That might be fewer than Verdi, but it is more than Wagner.

  Of that number only one, Die Fledermaus, remains firmly in the repertoire to this day, with occasional outings for Eine Nacht in Venedig and Der Zigeunerbaron. That means sixteen failures or near failures, which Strauss found very hard to deal with. He went on trying to recreate the success of Die Fledermaus right up until his death.

  By the beginning of the 1890s, the final decade not just of the century but of Johann Strauss’s life, he had composed twelve operettas. In the nine years left to him, one opera and four more operettas would follow.

  They would prove a succession of failures to some degree or other, and it is not an exaggeration to say that, given his nervous disposition, ailments real and imaginary, they would exacerbate his health problems and even hasten his death.

  The first of these was his only opera, and he knew even before he had written a single note that it was destined for failure, despite encouragement from his good friend Johannes Brahms.

  “The music that Johann Strauss wrote could most certainly be played at a concert, but it was better in a dance hall.”

  Ritter Pásmán was a convoluted medieval tale about an unchivalrous kiss, adapted from a Hungarian poem by a lawyer, diplomat and journalist who was also a playwright. Johann had begun work on it in early 1888, but soon got bogged down.

  As always when work was difficult, his health suffered, and he took himself off to the spa town of Franzensbad to take the waters, as well as mud-bath treatments for gout and neuralgia.

  By August 1891 he was thoroughly dispirited. He was in dispute with his publisher, whom he accused of making unreasonable demands and deliberately withholding a contract, and the constant need for rewriting and revision was wearing him down. He wrote to a friend:

  Nothing comes of writing operas … So much torment, so many false temptations in the inventing of melodies … By the time I have finished trips to the spa, two full months will have passed without a note being written … I cannot but confess that my heroic decision to write an opera not infrequently fills me with despair.

  After the final rehearsal, Johann was heard to say, ‘I have heard it just as I had imagined it. The public can make of it what they will.’

  And they did. The critics for the most part were unkind, and although there were initially full houses, Ritter Pásmán disappeared from the repertoire of the Court Opera after just nine performances. It fared little better in Prague, Dresden or Munich.

  Johann was a composer of dance music, whether he liked it or not, and he knew it. The following April, when it was clear the opera would not be revived, he confessed with some bitterness to his brother Eduard, ‘I only wrote it to prove that I can do more than write dance music.’ And he added cynically that given the amount of corruption in society, maybe the opera would have done better if instead of just a misplaced kiss, the king had gone the whole hog and bedded the knight’s wretched lady.

  Ritter Pásmán was Johann’s first and last attempt at opera. But he had not given up on operetta.

  A year later his new operetta premiered, and if this too ultimately failed, the blame can at least to some extent be laid at the feet of Johann himself. He blamed everybody except himself, and it was almost as if he willed the operetta to fail. Fürstin Ninetta (‘Princess Ninetta’) was a comedy, written by a well-established team of comedy writers.

  Johann was not impressed:

  [This is] the most miserable libretto ever perpetrated … I write at this piece of work without inspiration – it will be a real piece of rubbish.

  And it is clear where his real ambition still lay:

  I shall still succeed in getting people to say, ‘He ought to write operas.’ That would be a triumph!

  Later he complained that he had not been given the whole libretto, including dialogue, so had had to work from lyrics alone. This caused an outburst of vitriol and cynicism which says a lot about Johann’s state of mind:

  The music is completely unsuited to this senseless, inartistic stuff … It is a piece of fancy footwork around the author’s jokes! … I would be even happier if the entire thing were soon committed to a geriatrics’ home. They can steal it from me, I shall not shed a tear over it.

  This is Johann Strauss the angry man, bitter, dissatisfied with being lauded the world over for his waltzes, wanting above all to be admired on the same level as a Verdi or a Wagner. It is also a man who, at sixty-seven years of age, is in declining health, imagining himself to be in worse health than he actually is, which increases his depression, even – extraordinarily – his lack of self-esteem as a composer.

  Fürstin Ninetta was in fact a success at its premiere on 10 January 1893, and no one was more surprised than the composer himself. The critics, though, were once again unkind. One in particular, in the periodical Hans Jörgel, cut Johann to the quick:

  Sadly, Maestro Strauss has grown old. The dazzling giant reflector of his rich musical inventiveness is no longer functioning. His newest work reminds one of so-called ‘official city illuminations’. Everything thoroughly neat and very tidy, but without inner vitality, without breathtaking melodies.

  It might just as well have added: ‘Stick to what you know best, Herr Strauss. Stick to waltzes.’

  It is small wonder that Johann continued to lambast the piece as a ‘scatterbrained, bombastic tale’. Small wonder too, that if the composer himself would not get behind it – and a composer as highly respected as Strauss – there was no hope for it. In fa
ct Fürstin Ninetta ran for a very respectable seventy-six performances at the Theater an der Wien, before joining its predecessors in relative obscurity.

  “When he began to suffer from arthritis and could no longer play the violin, he happily swapped it for the baton.”

  Three more operettas followed in the next three years, and as before, Johann was jinxed with poor librettos, ill health and his own seemingly fathomless pessimism.

  The timing of the next one could not have been more critical. Johann chose a Slavonic subject set in Serbian south Hungary during the annual Apple Festival, when young men gathered to choose their bride. The operetta was to be called Jabuka (‘The Apple Festival’). Johann was in buoyant mood. He began work on the piece in early May 1893 and predicted he would complete it by the end of the year.

  But once again his demons intervened. It was almost as though once again he wanted it to fail. No sooner did he begin work than he began to suffer agonising attacks of ‘head neuralgia’ and bronchial catarrh. He told his brother Eduard that such debilitating illnesses were preventing him ‘conquering this giant work’.

  He also complained – again – about the librettists, two this time, which made the whole process doubly difficult. ‘Each one wants to correct the other, with the upshot that there is no improvement.’

  Inevitably he fell behind, causing anxiety to the theatre, not to mention the singers who had been engaged. It became clear that the opening night would have to be postponed. Just how depressed Johann had become with the whole project shows clearly in a note he sent to the theatre agent and publisher who had acquired the rights to the operetta. This is literally gallows humour with, I suspect, more than an underlying layer of truth:

  Save yourself the weeping and wailing for later … If [ Jabuka] does not succeed, we can hang ourselves next to one another … just as long as I can see you swinging before I pull the rope around my own neck.

  I said timing was critical. Who knows, perhaps if the premiere had not taken place when it did, that gallows humour might have become a reality. Jabuka opened at the Theater an der Wien on 12 October 1894, just one day before Johann was guest of honour at the Vienna Court Opera at the start of celebrations for his golden jubilee.