by John Suchet
What I find particularly striking is the extent to which the character of Johann Strauss instantly became identified with his music, and has continued to be so. He is universally portrayed, in image and words, as kindly, carefree and happy – just like his music. I wonder what Adèle, and those collaborators who felt the sharp edge of his tongue, would have to say to that.
Perhaps the most fulsome tribute to the Waltz King came three years before his death, from one Oskar Blumenthal, director of Berlin’s Lessing-Theater. It is a perfect example of the character of the composer being subsumed in his music. Clearly, as I have shown, Johann Strauss was not the carefree soul that his music would suggest. Yet so strong is the legend that I still find it hard to argue with any aspect of this assessment:
For fifty years Johann Strauss has, although unseen, been present at almost every joyous function of the civilised world. Wherever parties of happy people have gathered for carefree pleasure, Johann Strauss’s spirit has pervaded. If we could estimate the amount of happiness and enjoyment contributed to the world by his creations, Johann Strauss would be regarded as one of the greatest benefactors of the century.
Some years ago I interviewed the president and first violinist of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Dr Clemens Hellsberg, for a radio programme I was making entitled Vienna, City of Music.
We stood in the aisle of the Golden Hall of the Musikverein, gilded statues looking down on us. Dr Hellsberg pointed to the spot above the stage on the left where Johannes Brahms sat and heard a performance of his Fourth Symphony, just a month before he died.
We spoke of Bruckner and Wagner, Mahler and Richard Strauss. Finally I asked him a question I was determined to ask, but hesitated to do so in case he dismissed it with a wave of the hand, as if to say, ‘We are talking of serious music here.’
I asked, ‘Here we are in Vienna, in the famous concert hall where the New Year’s Day concert takes place every year, and where the “Blue Danube Waltz” is heard each time. What is it about the music of Johann Strauss, do you think, that makes it so enduring and so universally loved?’
A smile instantly settled on his face, much to my relief. He thought for just a brief moment, and then said, ‘Strauss makes you happy.’
There was one notable absentee from Johann Strauss’s funeral: his brother Eduard. Life had not been kind to the youngest of the Strauss brothers. He was now sixty-four and a man with problems.
He was also a man with a plan. It was an extraordinary plan, to us an inexplicable one. He would soon commit the single worst act of vandalism in the history of music.
74 Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and Journalisten- und Schriftstellerverein ‘Concordia’
As we have seen, Eduard and his elder brother had never really got on. In the way that siblings often do, they agreed about little and there was coolness – even animosity – between them. It was long-lasting. As late as 1892, when Johann was sixty-six and Eduard fifty-seven, Johann wrote to his publisher, ‘Brother Eduard is not the sort who is inclined to want to say something that pleases me.’
It is difficult to assess now who was more to blame. There are contradictory comments about each man’s behaviour. Eduard’s eldest son Johann certainly followed his uncle Josef in initially putting his natural musical talent to one side and pursuing an entirely different career. In his case it was to study law at the University of Vienna, and then take up a post as an accounts official in the Ministry of Education and Instruction.
But, as he himself said, paying tribute to his other famous uncle:
I had music in my blood, and I longed to get away from the tedium of the public functionary. It was my paternal uncle, Johann, who especially understood that I had a talent for music. He supervised my efforts as a composer, he even allowed me to transcribe his own orchestral compositions for piano, and he encouraged my musical studies in every way.
Eduard, his father, was having none of this. He said, ‘My brother never bothered about the upbringing or education of my sons.’
Which is the accurate account? We cannot know for sure. What is certain is that Eduard had every reason to be bitter. Remember Johann refusing to adjust his will when he heard that Eduard had encountered financial difficulties? This came about through an appalling set of circumstances that afflicted Eduard, and which must have devastated him utterly.
It is highly arguable that Eduard was the hardest-working member of the Strauss family. His compositions, like those of his father and two brothers, run into the hundreds, even if they are not as memorable or enduring as most of theirs. And when it comes to orchestral touring and management he was in a league of his own.
In the single year of 1890 he made a triumphant tour throughout the United States and Canada, lasting twenty-nine weeks, and performed in sixty-two American towns and cities – that’s an average of one concert every three days for seven months – and over the following nine years he made concert tours to Germany, Russia, the Netherlands and England, as well as performing in his home city of Vienna.
This amassed Eduard a considerable fortune, but in 1897 he was suddenly confronted by the realisation that almost everything he’d earned had been squandered by his wife and two sons. In the three-year period from 1894 to 1897, Eduard’s two sons, apparently with the knowledge and support of their mother, had spent a total of 738,600 kronen.75
Eduard was in despair at this turn of events. On tour in London, he poured his heart out to a friend in a letter dated 21 July 1897, which makes a clear if oblique reference to his elder brother’s refusal to help:
I do not know if you have heard about the limitless distress which I suffer due to the profligacy of the members of my family, and the position and the circumstances force me to stand completely alone! I no longer have a family! Let me not dwell on this unspeakably sad situation any longer.
It seems difficult, if not impossible, for us today to know exactly how or why the money was squandered. I have been unable to unearth any details; it is quite possible Eduard never revealed what was behind it, or even destroyed the evidence. All we know is that after he discovered the loss, Eduard went to his elder brother for financial help, and was refused.
The affair ended Eduard’s marriage. He separated from his wife Maria, and became largely estranged from his two sons.
All of which meant that if Eduard was dreaming of a comfortable retirement, he needed to think again. In the autumn of 1899, at the age of sixty-four, and just months after the death of Johann (by which time we can assume he knew from Johann’s will that he was to receive nothing), he signed a contract for yet another intensive tour.
He was off to North America again, almost a decade after the last tour. In a period of just under four months, spanning the turn of the century, he gave daily concerts and matinées twice a week, a total of 106 concerts, in seventy-three different places.
Now in his mid-sixties, Eduard paid the price for his exacting itinerary. In New Orleans, Chicago and San Francisco he had to be treated for malaria, while in Montreal it was problems of a different nature. The large French-speaking community was angry that advertisements for the concerts were placed only in the English-language newspapers, and so boycotted the concerts.
Troubles for Eduard and his orchestra did not end there. In the early morning of 7 February 1901, with just five engagements left, the train they were travelling on was involved in a collision as it pulled into Pittsburgh. Eduard dislocated his right shoulder.
For the remaining concerts, which culminated in a benefit ball in New York, Eduard was forced to conduct with his left arm, no doubt in considerable pain from the dislocation. At the end of the ball he knew he was laying down his baton for the last time. Did it make him sorrowful, or even nostalgic as he remembered the high points of an illustrious career? Not a bit of it. A letter he wrote made it clear he had firmly disliked every moment:
As I laid down my baton at the ball … I knew that I had now conducted for the last time, and I cannot describe what feelings
came over me in this moment when, after thirty-nine years’ work with all its unpleasantness, rancour, troubles, sorrows, deprivations and exertions … I had now reached my goal.
Here was a man as far removed from the traditional image of the swaying Strauss, composer and performer of lovely melodies, as it is possible to be. If his elder brother did not conform to that traditional image, how much further removed from it was his younger brother!
If we take Eduard at his word (and all his writings and utterings seem to confirm it) he had not only been a reluctant musician, but he had not enjoyed any of it. It is possible to argue that to some extent he was responsible for this – he was a difficult man who resented living in his elder brother’s shadow, and it was on his shoulders that the rigours, even tedium, of touring fell – but that does not alter the fact that he was not happy in his job.
It is not difficult, then, to envisage the pleasure with which he laid down his baton in New York, and the joy with which he summoned the forty-two players in the Johann Strauss Orchestra the following morning. They must have known what was coming.
At eleven o’clock on the morning of 13 February 1901 Eduard disbanded the Johann Strauss Orchestra, almost seventy-six years after his father founded it. He himself had managed it, and conducted it on tour, for the previous thirty years.
Did he do this with any sense of nostalgia, gratitude even for the players who had worked so hard for him? Was he grateful for their loyalty? Not exactly. These are the words he wrote: ‘I was overjoyed to have nothing more to do with this category of men.’ They must have wondered how they had come to upset him so much.
“As I laid down my baton at the ball … I knew that I had now conducted for the last time.”
Eduard Strauss
When Eduard returned to Vienna, he had earned enough from the tours to be able to retire, giving up all his public duties. He was sixty-five. In November he was awarded a medal for services to music. The invitation to the prestigious event named the recipient of the honour as Johann Strauss. You can just imagine Eduard’s fury – or maybe by this stage in his life it was a resigned shrug of the shoulders.
I mentioned Eduard had problems at home, of which his musicians must have had more than an inkling. It was public knowledge that Eduard separated from his wife after the scandal of the squandered money. They are certain to have known too that his son Johann had been investigated for possible bankruptcy. This happened again in 1901, and will have alienated father and son still further.
Johann’s money problems might have been due to the fact that he had formed his own orchestra, with which he gave his first concert on 3 November 1900, possibly deliberately timed to take place while his father was in the United States.
For a time he seemed to inherit the Strauss mantle by directing the music at the balls of the Imperial Court, still presided over by the old Emperor Franz Josef. But the coveted title of Court Ball Music Director, held both by his uncle and his father, eluded him, almost certainly because of his brushes with the law.
Financial problems continued for Johann, and matters came to a head when, on 5 October 1904, he stood in the dock accused of bankruptcy incurred through negligence, and defrauding his creditors. After painfully lengthy proceedings he was convicted, ordered to pay a large fine, and sentenced to a week’s imprisonment.
Johann Strauss, bearer of such a famous name, nephew of the most famous musician the city of Vienna had produced, serving time in jail! It was an unthinkable path for a member of this most illustrious of musical families to have gone down.
If Eduard was estranged from his son before, this was the final straw. Unimaginable shame had been brought on the family. He wanted nothing more to do with either of his sons.
It was in this frame of mind, fully retired from the world of music, bitter, angry, resentful, that Eduard Strauss put into action an unthinkable act of vandalism. Is it too much to call it the ultimate act of revenge? You must judge for yourself, but I do not believe so.
We have two people’s word only for what I am about to describe. The first is Eduard’s, and refers to the reason behind the act. The second is the factory owner who carried it out under Eduard’s orders.
In September 1907 Eduard made enquiries of oven manufacturers and incinerator plants in Vienna. He wanted to know if they would incinerate several hundred kilos of waste paper, which he had accumulated and wanted to get rid of.
He finally settled on one in the Mariahilf district of the city and agreed on a price of two kronen per hundred kilos. On 22 October 1907 a furniture van crammed full of tied bundles of waste paper arrived at the plant.
A small team of men unloaded the van and began to untie the bundles. The factory owner gave the paper a cursory glance, then looked more closely and realised that it was manuscript paper, covered in staves and musical notes. He knew he was looking at compositions by the famous Strauss family.
He had all the bundles untied, until the floor was deep in manuscript paper: hundreds, possibly thousands, of pages, all covered in notes. He decided to wait until Eduard Strauss himself arrived, which he was due to do at around two o’clock.
When Eduard arrived the factory owner tried to make light of the matter, suggesting to Eduard that there was possibly some mistake, since this was obviously not waste paper but something altogether more worthwhile and valuable.
To his surprise Eduard assured him that this was indeed the waste paper he wanted incinerated. The factory owner tried to dissuade Eduard, telling him his men would happily bundle it all up again and deliver it back to his address.
Eduard was adamant. He repeated he wanted to see every sheet go up in flames. The factory owner gave the order. Eduard Strauss sat in an armchair in front of two large kilns for firing pottery, and watched as the men fed the sheets of paper into the flames.
Occasionally, the proprietor recalled, Eduard was visibly moved when he saw particular sheets of music that held special memories. Every so often he would look away, or stand up, or walk into the office to gather himself. But not once did he ask for a sheet of music to be spared from the flames.
Eduard stayed until the very end, until the last sheet of paper had been burned – all the more remarkable, the factory owner reported, since there was so much paper it took fully five hours for it all to be fed to the flames, the final sheet not being consumed until seven o’clock in the evening. Only then did Eduard, satisfied, leave the premises.
Later it was learned that as if this was not enough, Eduard took two further vehicle-loads full of completed manuscript paper to another factory in the Porzellangasse, and had them all destroyed too.
What had occasioned this extraordinary act? We have only Eduard’s word for it, as he described it in the memoirs he wrote in retirement, and even then he makes only passing reference to it.
He recounts that way back in 1869 he entered into a ‘social contract’ with his brother Josef, who was already suffering from the headaches and occasional fainting fits that would kill him a year later.
Josef feared that his life was in danger and, according to Eduard, agreed to make over all performing rights in his music to Eduard, in return for which Eduard would make financial provision for Josef’s widow and daughter.
More than that, again according to Eduard, the brothers agreed that if Josef should die and Eduard was subsequently to give up his musical activities, then Eduard should destroy all Josef’s papers, as well as providing in his will for the destruction of his own papers.
The motive, Eduard explained, was to prevent valuable material penned by a Strauss from falling into the hands of unscrupulous persons who might pass off the works as their own.
Can we believe Eduard’s account? The most that can be said is that it is the only explanation we have of this extraordinary act. It is a fact that in the year before he died Josef himself said he was turning to other kinds of composition. The Morgenpost, in its obituary of him, said he died before he could realise ‘the most precious ambition of
his life – the composition of a grand opera’.
Josef’s widow and daughter both claimed in writing that Josef was working on an operetta. If either the Morgenpost or his wife and daughter – possibly both – were correct, then all we know for sure is that such a work disappeared, never to be found.
“Who knows what great compositions might have been lost in those few dire days of 1907?”
Is it unreasonable to suggest that Eduard, to avoid unfavourable comparisons with his brother, found the work and destroyed it after Josef’s death? In light of what was to happen more than thirty years later, perhaps not.
On that grim day at the incinerator plant, and the other even more destructive day at the second plant, we can assume that several hundred, quite possibly several thousand, compositions went up in smoke. We have an eyewitness account of bundles of paper being shovelled into the two kilns at the first plant, and that it took a full five hours. Add to that two vehicle-loads at another plant.
That is a lot of material, and it has to be more than Josef alone could have produced. Another account76 has Eduard’s chin quivering with emotion as he recognised his father’s or Josef’s writing on some of the sheets of paper. This suggests letters, articles, quite possibly librettos as well as compositions – all went up in smoke.
I would go further to speculate that such an enormous amount of paper must have included compositions, as well as letters and other documents, by Johann Strauss himself. If true this would mean that Eduard was responsible for destroying material by his father and his two brothers as well. Who knows what great compositions, as well as valuable material relating to this most prodigious of musical families, might have been lost in those few dire days of 1907?
Eduard Strauss lived on, alone, for nine more years, in increasingly declining health. He saw the music of the Strauss family slowly fall out of favour, as names such as Franz Lehár, Oskar Straus and John Philip Sousa competed for public attention.