by John Suchet
Eduard Strauss suffered a fatal heart attack on the night of 28 December 1916, and died in the presence of his housekeeper. He was eighty-one years of age. His death brought to an end a golden epoch of Viennese music-making, and closed two generations in the most prolific and popular musical family, not just in Vienna but in musical history.
75 Around £1 million in today’s money.
76 In Heinrich Eduard Jacob, Johann Strauss: Father and Son – A Century of Light Music (The Greystone Press, 1940).
In some ways it is just as well that Johann Strauss died in the final year of the nineteenth century. He was every inch a man of that century. He was born just four years after Napoleon died, two years before Beethoven died, into a country that was still predominantly agricultural and a city that had not yet felt the effects of the industrial revolution that was to transform Europe. The Vienna in which he died seventy-three years later was a bustling city echoing to the new sounds of the motor and mechanisation. One can almost imagine him covering his ears in horror as the first electrical tramline began to clatter over the cobbles in 1897.
He had witnessed the city of his birth transform itself from a small inner city hemmed in – literally – by a massive ring of fortifications, with a mere quarter of a million souls living both inside the wall and in the villages close by outside it, into a modern metropolis of nearly one and a half million people jostling for living space.
By the end of the century much had changed, but in another sense it had stayed the same. The immigrants who had thronged the streets of the inner city dressed in colourful traditional clothes were now the underclass of the suburbs, engaged in menial tasks and dressed shabbily. But they were still there, guarding their nationalist traditions. Vienna was still the crossroads of Europe, and therefore still the musical capital of Europe.
Small wonder the music of the Strauss family found a ready audience. Native Viennese recognised its essentially Germanic – and therefore Austrian – quality. The waltz, after all, had its beginnings in the stomping Ländler of the Black Forest. The two countries shared a language, and much else, and great German musical names such as Brahms and Schumann (to name but two) found as ready an audience in Vienna as in their home towns.
Those of other ethnic origins were naturally drawn to the music of the Strausses as they assimilated, along with their own traditions, the traditions of the country to which their parents, or grandparents, had emigrated.
“It will be the end of Austria when the Old Gentleman closes his eyes.”
Austrian saying about Emperor Franz Josef
Throughout the century other composers, other musicians, had come and gone, but Vienna’s Johann Strauss had stayed in his home city. ‘One of us,’ his admiring fellow Viennese would say.
Fitting, then, that in the final decade and a half, or slightly more, of the century, of the many great musical names to take their final bow, Johann Strauss was the only Viennese and also the last to leave. Wagner had died in 1883, Liszt three years later. Tchaikovsky, who visited Vienna many times and described it as the city he ‘liked almost more than any city in the world’, died in 1893. Anton Rubinstein and Hans von Bülow died in 1894, Franz von Suppé in 1895, and Anton Bruckner one year later. Strauss was profoundly affected when his old friend Johannes Brahms passed away in 1897, preceding him by two years.
The four-year period between von Suppé dying in 1895 and Johann Strauss four years later, the Viennese referred to as das grosses Sterben (‘the great dying’). What has come to be known as ‘The Golden Age’ was over, and it ended definitively with the death of Strauss.
The one important musical name to carry the torch into the new century was Gustav Mahler, resident of Vienna but again not Viennese. Mahler was a friend of the artist Gustav Klimt and found himself closely involved in what came to be known as the Viennese Secession, a movement across the arts determined to break away from the old traditions. It took hold as the old century gave way to the new. If the primary aim of those involved was to shock, the results were none the worse for that. Works of art – paintings, sculptures, architecture, music, literature – were created that today are considered to be masterpieces.
The close links between music and the Secession are exemplified in the Secessionist Building, an exhibition hall topped by its famous ‘golden cabbage’ cupola, which contains Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze. This extraordinary work of art extends 110 feet across four walls.77 Both building and frieze stand today as testament to the creativity of the Viennese Secession.
If the fin de siècle was a time of dying in Vienna, it was also a period of rebirth – more début de siècle than fin in some ways. Artists of all kinds were taking their art in entirely new directions. In 1897 Gustav Klimt caused a sensation in Vienna when he led a band of nineteen like-minded artists out of the Imperial Academy to form their own modernistic movement.
Egon Schiele was later to cause a sensation of a different kind with nude paintings of such graphic detail – including paintings of his sister – that he landed himself in prison for exhibiting erotic drawings where they could be seen by children.
Sigmund Freud published his ground-breaking work The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, introducing an entirely new way of approaching mental problems – psychoanalysis – to an unsuspecting world.
In literature Arthur Schnitzler, a qualified doctor, confronted the anti-Semitism rabid in Viennese society head on, in a way that no one had dared to do before. That was not the only way in which he shocked. One of his plays depicted a circular chain of ten pairs of characters before and after having sex, beginning and ending with the same prostitute. Vienna had literally never seen anything like it. Schnitzler was dismissed in refined quarters as a pornographer.
In architecture too there was a wilful break with the past, led by Adolf Loos (even if he attacked the Secessionists rather than joined them). He considered any kind of ornamentation to be superfluous, and designed stripped-down buildings – an early precursor of the minimalist movement.
His most famous, i.e. notorious, building was commissioned in 1909 and constructed directly opposite the Hofburg Palace on the Michaelerplatz. The six-storey building has pillars on the front, with four floors above. Most of the windows have windowboxes below them, but none has any ornamentation above it. The Viennese called it ‘the building without eyebrows’.
Emperor Franz Josef could clearly see the building from his palace, and utterly loathed it. After it was built he never again used the palace exit on to the Michaelerplatz, so he did not have to set eyes on it. He even had the windows that gave out on to the Michaelerplatz nailed shut, so he would not inadvertently catch a glimpse of it.78
If so much had changed, then, there was one constant in Vienna, in Austria, in the Austro-Hungarian empire, that had not changed one jot, and showed no sign of doing so. It was an old man who wished he could die.
At the turn of the century Emperor Franz Josef was seventy years of age. He was already one of the longest-reigning monarchs in European history,79 and if his accession to the throne was – literally – a lifetime ago, it must also have seemed to belong to another world.
Like Johann Strauss, Franz Josef was moulded by the nineteenth century. Here was a man who had suffered untold personal tragedy, seeing the world slip away from him into a new era. He must have longed to retire, to live peacefully in Bad Ischl with Kathi Schratt.
Instead he ruled over a fractious and diverse empire, extending from Innsbrück in the west to beyond the Carpathians towards the Black Sea in the east, a vast area of central Europe containing no fewer than ten independent states, one of which – Serbia – was shortly to play a tragic role in world history.
Franz Josef truly was now ‘der alte Herr’, the ‘Old Gentleman’ beloved of his people. He knew his time was past, and his people knew it too. As the first decade of the new century progressed, a saying took hold in Vienna: ‘It will be the end of Austria when the Old Gentleman closes his eyes.’ It was said always
with affection and respect, though those who uttered it can have had no inkling of how appallingly prophetic the words were.
Nor can they have understood just what was occupying the emperor’s mind. Only those truly close to him could have had any inkling. He lived in fear of becoming senile, incapacitated mentally and unable to rule. He had long since given up any hope of an easy natural death around his three score years and ten. It seemed he was destined – condemned – to live on and on. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all those that a?icted him was that he simply could not die, and therefore was unable to find peace and release.
Franz Josef had always done his duty but he was finding it harder and harder to master any political brief, to the frustration of his ministers and generals. Increasingly they bypassed him, albeit subtly, making decisions, and at the same time positioning themselves to take full advantage of the power struggles that would follow the inevitable.
As the awful and portentous year of 1914 approached, an exhausted old man sat on the imperial throne in the Hofburg Palace, struggling to keep in touch with fast-moving political events.
Those events were about to spiral out of control and Franz Josef, in responding to them, would unwittingly take a course of action for which the description ‘catastrophic’ would prove to be absurdly weak.
After Crown Prince Rudolf’s suicide at Mayerling back in 1889, the heir to the Habsburg throne was the emperor’s nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a pompous and difficult man for whom Franz Josef had little affection. His personal servant wrote in his memoirs that when the emperor and Franz Ferdinand were in the room together, ‘thunder and lightning always raged as they had their discussions’.
In a grim and infinitely more portentous echo of the assassination of Empress Sisi more than a decade earlier, in June 1914 a group of Serb nationalists slipped into Sarajevo with orders to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The ultimate aim of the conspiracy was to break off parts of Serbia from the Austro-Hungarian empire, as part of a wider ambition to restore Serbia to the broader frontiers and greater power it enjoyed in centuries past.
A bizarre, almost unbelievably absurd sequence of events led to a successful assassination. At first they botched it. A bomb thrown at the archduke’s car bounced off the hood, exploded under the next car and wounded two officers. But Franz Ferdinand was unharmed and, accompanied by his wife, continued to a morning engagement at the Town Hall.
With typical brashness he interrupted the mayor’s speech of welcome with the words: ‘Mr Mayor, I came here on a visit and I get bombs thrown at me. It is outrageous.’ Only after his wife calmed him down did he allow the mayor to continue with his speech.
The engagement over, the archduke instructed his driver to take him and his wife to the local hospital to visit those who had been injured in the bomb attack. In a single innocent error, which would echo down the years, the driver took a wrong turning and found himself back in the street where the bomb had been thrown, ironically named Franz Josef Strasse.
As it happened, one of the would-be assassins, the Bosnian-Serb Gavrilo Princip, was standing outside a café in the same street, no doubt bemoaning the failure of the mission. He instantly spotted the archduke’s limousine, and must have watched bemused as the driver, realising his mistake, put his foot on the brake, slammed the gear lever into reverse, and tried to back out.
But the gears locked and the engine of the car stalled. It gave Princip exactly the opportunity he needed to carry out the task that had brought him to Sarajevo. He calmly walked towards the stationary car and fired two shots at his – literally – sitting targets.
The archduke’s wife Sophie, hit in the abdomen, instinctively covered her husband’s body with her own. Franz Ferdinand, bleeding from a wound in the neck, cried out to his wife, ‘Sophie darling! Sophie darling! Don’t die! Stay alive for our children!’ (‘Sopherl! Sopherl! Sterbe nicht! Bleibe am Leben für unsere Kinder!’)
By the time the limousine arrived at the hospital, both the archduke and his wife were dead, and the history of the world was about to change.
Back in Vienna the old emperor, eighty-three years of age, was once again brought news of the sudden and violent death of a member of his family. Old and frail in mind and body maybe, but he immediately realised the import of what had happened.
First and foremost the heir to the Habsburg throne was dead, the second to die suddenly. What would this mean for the dynasty? On a broader front it was almost inevitable that once Austria issued any kind of ultimatum against Serbia in response, Russia would come to the support of the Serbs, threatening the empire. This meant that Austria had to mobilise, to protect itself. At least that was what the emperor’s ministers persuaded him was beyond question.
But wait, he said, further advice was needed, and he sought it from a ruler who was younger, more in tune with events, with a larger and more efficient army, than him. Kaiser Wilhelm, Emperor of Germany.
The kaiser’s response was instant and reassuring. In the event of war with Russia, Germany would enter hostilities on the side of Austria. It was exactly the reassurance Franz Josef sought, but he was under no illusions.
‘Now we can no longer turn back. It will be a terrible war,’ he said. That judgement was wrong only in the sense of it proving to be a gross understatement.
And what were the people of Vienna doing in the years leading up to these momentous events? They were doing what they had been doing for decades, doing what came naturally and enjoying the gaiety and laughter that ran in their blood. This was the city that had invented Gemütlichkeit.
It is the ability to understand that the key to happiness is the acceptance of what one cannot change. It is the message of Die Fledermaus, the single masterwork by Johann Strauss that so perfectly captured the mood of the Viennese and encapsulated it in music.
And so the Viennese were continuing to waltz, to escape into the essentially Viennese world of operetta. Johann Strauss was with them no more, they had lost their Waltz King, but there was another name now receiving their praise and adulation.
This time it was a composer born many miles from Vienna, and even in another country, who settled in Vienna, composed his music there, and became in all but name a Viennese. Franz Lehár might never have earned the sobriquet ‘The Waltz King’, and his world was more that of operetta than the pure waltz, but he could turn out a composition to stand comparison with those of any of the Strausses.
In 1902 the Viennese thrilled to his ‘Gold and Silver Waltz’, composed for the Gold and Silver Ball of a member of the aristocracy, and only three years later he produced an operetta whose success came closer to that of Die Fledermaus than anything else either he or Johann Strauss wrote: Die Lustige Witwe, ‘The Merry Widow’.
The era of Johann Strauss was ended; but there were new names and new forms of entertainment on offer. The dance hall had given way to the café, the waltz had yielded to the operetta.
A new generation of Viennese was enjoying life just as their parents and grandparents had before them. They had the same emperor but in other ways they had broken with the past. It was a new century in a multitude of different ways.
Music, though, was still in their blood. It coursed through their veins as it had done for centuries past. The Viennese would still sing and dance, but now it would be to the music of a new generation of composers. And they would, of course, drink champagne for years and years to come. There was, surely, nothing that could take these pleasures away.
And then Gavrilo Princip fired those shots.
77 A musicians’ ‘Walk of Fame’, or ‘Music Mile’, runs past the Secessionist Building and Opera House on its way from the Theater an der Wien to St Stephen’s Cathedral – paving stones bearing the names of great musicians associated with Vienna (in overt imitation of the Hollywood Walk of Fame).
78 The Looshaus, as it is now known, was damaged by bombs in 1944 and put under protection in 1947. It was elaborately renovated in 1987 and looks today very much as
it did when it so offended the emperor’s eyes.
79 France’s Louis XIV reigned for longer, and although Queen Victoria had been on the throne longer at the turn of the century, she would die the following year.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the Habsburg empire consigned to history, Franz Josef long dead, having finally been granted his wish at the age of eighty-six, the defeated German kaiser dethroned and in exile in the Netherlands, Europe continued to reverberate to the music of Johann Strauss.
Johann III recovered from his financial woes, put his brief prison sentence behind him, and began to benefit from new technology to make the first wax-cylinder recordings of his uncle’s music with his ‘Johann Strauss’s Vienna Orchestra’.
He toured too. In 1931, taking full advantage of sharing the name of the great composer, he subtly renamed the orchestra and performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London as ‘Johann Strauss and his own Viennese orchestra’.
Johann Strauss III produced around thirty compositions, none of them coming close to anything his uncles or father had created. He died suddenly on 9 January 1939 at the age of seventy-two.
Perhaps he was fortunate to die just before the outbreak of the Second World War, for what would happen to the reputation of his family under the Nazis would surely have left him stunned and angry.
For the Nazis, keen to claim great German artists as the Aryan ideal – Richard Wagner being the prime example – Johann Strauss the Younger was an obvious candidate. His music was universally popular.
In June 1939 the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer carried this description of him:
The whole world knows Johann Strauss, the Waltz King, with his incomparable melodies. There is hardly any other type of music which is so German and so close to the people as that of the great Waltz King. Johann Strauss is long since dead. He has become immortal.