The Last Waltz

by John Suchet

  “As a composer of operetta Johann Strauss had had one extraordinary success, two moderate successes, and a succession of failures.”

  Two weeks of festivities followed, during which Johann was lauded as Vienna’s most famous musical son. There was no time to brood on a failure. Actually, once again Jabuka, like its immediate predecessors, was not exactly a failure. The Neue Freie Presse described the opening night as ‘electrifying, especially the second and third acts [which] caused a sensation’. Hans Jörgel, which seemed to have it in for Johann, reported that the second-night audience responded ‘much more coolly’.

  Jabuka achieved fifty-seven performances in its first year, which might not be a staggering success but is far from being a failure. But then it dropped entirely out of the repertoire, and Johann chalked it up as another failure.

  But he still wasn’t giving up. Another two operettas followed in the next three years. They found perhaps their greatest advocate in Johann’s good friend Johannes Brahms. The great composer was in failing health, but he championed the first, Waldmeister (‘Woodruff’), and despite being largely bedridden attended the premiere of the second, Die Göttin der Vernunft (‘The Goddess of Reason’). Brahms died just three weeks later, never to know that neither of the two operettas would remain in the repertoire.

  Brahms did better than his friend. Johann was too ill to attend the premiere of Die Göttin der Vernunft. He had another attack of bronchial catarrh – why does this not come as a complete surprise? – but arranged to have news of how the audience was reacting telephoned through to his home at the end of each act.

  He will have known, therefore, that the audience did not exactly leap to their feet. A kindly critic, writing for Fremdenblatt, put this down to their disappointment on learning that Johann was too ill to attend, which dampened their mood. A less kindly, and more realistic, critic in the Neue Freie Presse asked how you could possibly expect a burlesque comedy set amid the turmoil and cruelty of the French Revolution to succeed. ‘Can you disguise a blood-red guillotine with flowers?’ his review asked.

  Johann, finally, was finished with operetta. As a composer of opera, he had failed. As composer of operetta he had had one extraordinary success, two moderate successes, and a succession of failures. It was time now for one more attempt to prove he could do more than write waltzes and polkas, one more attempt to prove himself a ‘serious’ composer.

  So what did he do? He turned his hand to ballet.

  You really cannot avoid the feeling that Johann was rather pushed into composing a ballet. It seems the idea came from the highly influential music critic Eduard Hanslick, known as Vienna’s ‘music pope’.72

  Hanslick organised a competition inviting writers and librettists to submit a text, which Johann Strauss would then set to music to produce a ballet. The entries would be judged by a distinguished panel of musicians, including – naturally – himself, as well as the man whose inclusion probably persuaded Johann Strauss to take part, a man he greatly admired, the artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera, Gustav Mahler.

  Hanslick and his fellow judges were totally taken aback by the response. By May 1898 no fewer than 700 entries had been received. The winner was adjudged to be one A. Kollmann from Salzburg, who submitted a modern version of the Cinderella story.73

  Johann Strauss then set to work and a familiar pattern unfolded. At first he threw himself into the project, but it was not long before tedium, coupled with his natural pessimism, overtook him. He wrote to brother Eduard:

  I have my hands full with the ballet. I am writing my fingers to the bone, and still make no headway. I am on the 40th sheet (full score) and have only managed 2 scenes.

  By late autumn Johann had completed the first draft of the ballet, which was called Aschenbrödel (‘Cinderella’). He interrupted work on it to conduct just the overture at a special matinee performance of Die Fledermaus at the Vienna Court Opera House on 22 May 1899, to mark the traditional springtime holiday.

  Why only the overture, as opposed to the whole work? All his life Johann had been ambivalent towards conducting. First Josef, then Eduard, had taken on the conducting while he got on with composition – to him a much more worthwhile pursuit.

  This gives the lie to the thousands of images and statuettes we have today of Johann Strauss, violin in one hand, bow raised high in the other, one hip cocked, one knee bent, a trance-like smile of happiness etched on his face as he leads his orchestra. It might be an exaggeration to say he hated directing the orchestra, and more truthful to say he did it because he knew he had to. When, sometime in late middle age, he began to suffer from arthritis and could no longer play the violin, he happily swapped it for the baton. He would just as happily have given that up too.

  A letter he wrote to Eduard made it clear that it was his health, once again, that was dictating his musical career:

  On account of my health I must, as much as possible, keep away from conducting … because at the end of a number I leave the orchestra as if bathed in sweat, and unlike another person I cannot simply change my underclothes. I have to stay in the same attire for 5–6 hours, until the soaked outfit dries out by itself.

  His compromise, in later years, was to agree to conduct the overture alone then hand the baton to a conductor who would take over for the rest of the performance. As far as we know, the last time Johann conducted an entire operetta was the 200th performance of Die Fledermaus at the Theater an der Wien on 15 May 1888.

  Now, eleven years later almost to the day, he agreed to conduct the overture to his most popular and beloved work at the Vienna Court Opera House. It was not only to be the last time he would conduct, but the last time he would appear in public.

  71 Even if this was true, it was a short-term reaction. A trilogy of films on the empress’s life starring Romy Schneider, made in the 1950s, remains popular to this day, and on the centenary of the empress’s death in 1998 several new biographies were published, and Sisi’s portrait adorned hundreds of shop windows in Vienna.

  72 Hanslick’s 1854 publication The Beauty in Music was hugely influential. An early supporter of Wagner, his enthusiasm for him, as well as Liszt, and ‘the music of the future’, cooled. He is believed to have influenced Brahms’s music, and dismissed Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto as putting the audience ‘through hell’ with music which ‘stinks to the ear’.

  73 The name was soon discovered to be a pseudonym, and to this day the writer’s real identity has not been uncovered.

  Those who were there said Johann Strauss conducted the overture to Die Fledermaus with a vigour and intensity they had not seen before, as if somehow he knew it would be the last time.

  They were, of course, speaking with the benefit of hindsight. But I imagine the eyes blazing, sweat already breaking out on his forehead in nervous anticipation, perhaps a last run of the left hand through the hair, before bringing the baton down for the rising notes that begin the orchestral swell.

  A brisk twelve-bar introduction of runs and triplets that come to rest in a single held note. Some soft staccato chords and an oboe soars above. The violins take over, there’s a long crescendo, and then fortissimo the violins rise, syncopated chords, and we are into the first theme taken from the operetta itself, into a second theme, and already the audience is swaying to melodies that are so well known, not just across Vienna and Europe, but the world.

  What is going through Johann’s mind? Is he asking himself why he was never able to repeat the success of this, his best-loved operetta? He has little time to contemplate, as staccato pianissimo notes in violins and cellos lead without a pause straight into the first waltz, which with its turning phrase and firm end notes seems to distil the essence of Vienna, a tune beloved of whistling fiacre drivers, as they gently gird their decorated horses into a trot.

  The waltz repeats itself, this time forte for good measure, before leading straight into a second waltz, which springs high to the top of the E string for the first violins. And yet a third wal
tz, to which the audience hums along, smiling at the familiarity.

  A march then, to which the characters will soon be stomping across the stage. We are already at Prince Orlofsky’s ball, where all the masked chicanery will take place. But this is the overture. It must offer contrast, and so Strauss pulls it back, to a piano repeat of the opening. Mustn’t give too much of the plot away yet.

  And back comes the great opening waltz, again that stroke of genius to have it played pianissimo, make the audience strain forward to be sure they can catch it. Then give it to them full, forte.

  The second waltz returns, now fortissimo, with high leaps once again in the first violins. Back comes the march, piano, then strings and wind in unison as the pace quickens. Notes fly off into the air, fortissimo now, and a sequence of unison chords tells us the overture is about to reach its climax – and end.

  Eight chords – chord, pause, chord, pause, chord, pause … – the audience cannot help but hold its breath. The final three chords sound – two swift chords and an end chord. Syncopated. Unexpected. And the applause and cheers break out.

  I have seen composers turn to the audience, having conducted one of their own works. They are not of this planet, not of our world. Johann Strauss at this moment must have resembled the Lehnbach portrait, eyes blazing, staring before him and seeing nothing. His forehead will have been glistening with sweat, his clothes damp.

  Is it too much to surmise that the audience rose to its feet, refused to let him head straight for the exit, shaking his hand, clapping him on the shoulders as he struggled to leave, the curtain already back, Rosalinde on stage, her admirer Alfred off stage and waiting for the cue to begin his opening number?

  He should, of course, have retired to his personal box, reclined in a comfortable easy chair, and enjoyed the performance of his masterpiece. Instead he had ordered a carriage to be ready to take him back to his house on the Igelgasse, and Adèle.

  He emerged into the light of a spring afternoon. The air tasted good, permeated with the scent of lilac and acacia. Horse-chestnut trees in full white blossom lined the streets. But there was still a hint of a lingering late-winter chill, and so Johann turned the collar of his coat up, wincing slightly at the touch of cold sweat on his skin.

  He needed to walk, breathe freely. He dismissed the carriage with a wave of the hand and began the walk back to his house. It was by no means a short stroll. Johann knew it would take a half-hour or more, along the Ringstrasse and then south into the district of Wieden.

  Did he regret the decision after ten or fifteen minutes, as his body warmed from the exertion, but the sweat stayed clammy on his forehead and neck? Did he stop and sit on a bench and dab his face with a handkerchief ? We know that by the time he entered his own front door his face had lost its colour, his skin was cold and clammy, and he was finding it an effort to breathe normally.

  Adèle ordered him straight to bed to rest. But he was soon back at his stand-up desk working on Aschenbrödel. The fever, though, would not pass, and Adèle made him wear warmer and warmer clothes. She summoned the family doctor, Dr Lederer, who examined Johann and told Adèle he needed to call in a specialist.

  Professor Dr Hermann Nothnagel of the University of Vienna was summoned. He placed a stethoscope against Johann’s back and asked him to cough.

  Johann did as he was told, then asked, ‘Is that all I can do for medical science?’

  Five days after conducting the overture to Die Fledermaus, on Sat-urday, 27 May, he began to suffer severe shivering fits and vomiting. He had a high fever. Dr Nothnagel, aware of Johann’s phobia of anything to do with illness or death, told him he had a severe cold. He told Adèle her husband had double pneumonia.

  Johann was confined to his bed. On 1 June he began to lose consciousness and he became delirious. Adèle recalled later that in one of his lucid moments Johann, smiling weakly, sang a song in a feeble voice. It was a Viennese classic, which she said even her young daughter knew. She also knew that it was written by the composer Joseph Drechsler, who had taught Johann as a young man, but she had never heard him sing it before. It had a gently turning melody and the words were particularly apt:

  Brüderlein fein, Brüderlein fein

  Musst mir ja nicht böse sein,

  Scheint die Sonne noch so schön

  Einmal muss sie untergehn.

  (Little brother, little brother so fine,

  Don’t be cross, you’ll forever be mine.

  Yet no matter how beautiful the sun does get

  Sooner or later it has to set.)

  On the morning of Saturday, 3 June, Dr Nothnagel issued a bulletin:

  The inflammation has reached its peak, and has attacked both lobes of the lungs in their entirety. The fever is very high; the patient is unconscious.

  Later that morning Johann reached for his wife’s hand and kissed it twice without words.

  ‘It was his last caress,’ Adèle reported, ‘at a quarter past four he died in my arms.’

  Johann Strauss the Younger, the best-loved composer the city of Vienna had ever produced, died at the age of seventy-three, six months short of a new year and a new century.

  On the same afternoon a concert was taking place in the Vienna Volksgarten in aid of the memorial fund set up to remember Johann Strauss senior and his one-time colleague, then rival, Joseph Lanner. The conductor was the well-known composer, arranger, and collector of traditional Viennese songs, Eduard Kremser.

  Every seat was taken, and concertgoers lined the perimeter of the park, enjoying family outings, drinks and picnics, swaying to the traditional sounds of their city and the Austrian countryside.

  As one piece ended, someone went up to the podium, tapped Kremser on the shoulder, and whispered in his ear. For a moment Kremser stood quite still. Then he leant towards the orchestra leader and said something to him. The first violinist passed the word to the desk behind, and it spread in whispers through the orchestra.

  On every music stand a piece of sheet music was pulled out from behind and placed in the front. The string players put mutes on their instruments. Kremser raised his arms. The left arm was outstretched, palm down to indicate pianissimo. The right arm gave the most gentle of downbeats.

  First and second violins sounded the shimmering opening chord, and in the next bar a solo French horn sounded the three rising quavers to a sustained note, woodwind responding with light quavers. The beautiful melodies of ‘By the Beautiful Blue Danube’ wafted on the summer air across the Volksgarten.

  Thus Vienna learned of the death of its Waltz King.

  Into the 1970s and 1980s those Viennese who remembered it as children still spoke of Johann Strauss’s funeral as eine schöne Leich (a good funeral). Three days after his death, on the afternoon of 6 June, eight black horses drew a hearse bearing Johann’s coffin, driven by men dressed in Renaissance Spanish costume, away from the house on the Igelgasse.

  Six pallbearers drawn from the Society of the Friends of Music and the Vienna Authors’ and Journalists’ Association ‘Concordia’ walked alongside, each bearing a red satin cushion.74 On one was Johann Strauss’s baton, on another a lyre, three bore his many medals, and on the sixth lay his violin with its strings sprung to signify that it would never be played again.

  More dignitaries walked behind carrying flags and torches. A succession of carriages followed, overflowing with flowers and wreaths, and containing Adèle and close friends, Conservatory professors, artists, more than forty representatives of parliament and the city council, Vienna’s mayor, Karl Lueger, and Gustav Mahler.

  The cortège made its way past the Theater an der Wien to the Protestant Church in the Dorotheergasse, in recognition of Johann’s ‘conversion’ to Lutheran Protestantism, part of the process that had enabled him to marry Adèle.

  After the consecration service, the procession made its way past the Vienna Court Opera building and elaborate Musikverein concert hall, and then began the lengthy journey south-east towards the city boundary and the m
ain cemetery, the Zentralfriedhof. Crowds lined the route, with many following on foot for the whole distance.

  At the cemetery funeral orations were delivered by the Mayor of Vienna and representatives from the Vienna Musicians’ and ‘Concordia’ Associations. Johann Strauss was buried in the Musicians’ Quarter of the Zentralfriedhof, alongside his friend Johannes Brahms, and only yards from Beethoven and Schubert.

  In the days that followed, eulogy after eulogy was printed, and the single factor that united them all was the recognition that the music of Johann Strauss was Vienna.

  Guido Adler, Austrian composer and musicologist, devoted an entire music history lecture at the University of Vienna to Johann Strauss, saying:

  Strauss’s melodies strengthen the feeling of home for Viennese, for Austrians. One could say, ‘Vienna lives in his sounds.’ They are the musical reflection of the Viennese soul.

  “The name Johann Strauss was like our flag. We bury more than a composer. A proud piece of our fatherland is laid to rest.”

  The Fremdenblatt

  The Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt reported:

  Now that he is dead, this great, kind Viennese master, it is as if one of the old, world-famous landmarks of Alt Wien has disappeared from the face of the city, demolished by death. Johann Strauss belongs to Vienna like the Prater or St Stephen’s.

  And in the Fremdenblatt, these words:

  In all parts of the world, on all seas, the name Johann Strauss was like our flag … We bury more than a composer. A proud piece of our fatherland is laid to rest.

  For days and weeks afterwards, hundreds then thousands of picture postcards featuring a variety of portraits of Johann Strauss went on sale, and remain so to this day.