by John Suchet
Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels lost no time in appropriating Strauss to the Nazi cause. But there were two inconveniences, one minor and one very major indeed.
The minor one was that Strauss was not actually German; he was Austrian.80 This was solved in March 1938 when German troops marched into Vienna and Austria was annexed into the Third Reich, an event known as the Anschluss. Almost forty years after his death, Johann Strauss was now as German as someone born in Berlin.
The major problem for the man who in 1938 published ‘Ten Principles of German Music Creativity’, in which he explicitly called for all good Germans to fight against the infiltration of Jewish music in German culture, was that Johann Strauss had Jewish blood. Not very much – actually not quite enough to make him Jewish under the strict laws brought in by the Nazis themselves – but even a single drop was a drop too many.
It was there in writing for anyone to see. The register of St Stephen’s Cathedral recorded the marriage of Johann’s great-grandfather on 11 February 1762 thus:
Johann Michael Strauss, a respectable man, servant … a baptised Jew, single, born in Ofen, legitimate son of Wolf Strauss and his wife Theresia, both Jewish …
According to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, to be classified as German all four grandparents had to be Aryan. One or two grandparents only led to the classification of Mischling (‘Half-caste’). Three grandparents who were Jewish, or a single parent (of either sex), meant you were Jewish.
Johann Strauss senior was therefore a Mischling, while his off-spring were second-class Mischlings. This was not ‘full-blooded’ Jewishness by Nazi rules, and could even be upgraded to ‘honorary Aryan’ under certain circumstances, and with Hitler’s personal approval.
But Goebbels did not want to go down that route. It was essential Johann Strauss the Younger was absolved of any Jewish connection. Goebbels recorded in his diary that Johann was one-eighth Jewish – in fact he was one-sixteenth – but that was one-eighth too much. He thus set in train one of the most bizarre acts of forgery perpetrated by the Third Reich.
“Much of the inner city was destroyed, including the house in the Igelgasse where Johann so often sought sanctuary.”
The original register of St Stephen’s Cathedral, recording great-grandfather Strauss’s marriage, and his background, was removed and sent to the Department of Nationality and Race in Berlin, with orders from Goebbels that the offending entry should be carefully taken out, and then returned to Vienna.
One wonders how Goebbels or anyone found time to devote so much energy to the question of the Strauss family’s Jewishness, given that they had a war to run, but devote it they did.
In Berlin the entire register was recorded page by page on microfilm, and a copy then produced on vellum, which was then bound in four volumes. Anyone examining the copy and looking for Johann Michael Strauss would find that he was missing. The next entry had been moved up to fill the gap. He had also been deleted from the index, so that the records no longer contained any evidence that the marriage had taken place.
The original, and copies, were returned to Vienna. The first page of volume one of the copies bore an official stamp of the Department of Nationality and Race, and the swastika seal of the Third Reich, certifying that it was an exact copy of the original. It was dated 20 February 1941.
That original, containing the entry for Johann Michael Strauss the Jew, was carefully hidden in the State Archive, well removed from St Stephen’s Cathedral. The copies were replaced in the Cathedral.
There is a legend, impossible to verify, that in the spring of 1945, as the Nazis set about destroying Vienna as a farewell gesture, a man ran through the streets of the city clutching the original register. Determined to keep it safe, he secreted it in a deep vault beneath St Stephen’s Cathedral. How he obtained it or who he was is unknown.
What is certain is that the original was found intact in that vault in the cathedral – not in the State Archive – after the war. It had survived the destruction of the city.
It was not until several years after the war that the whole bizarre episode came to light. On 8 June 1951 the Viennese newspaper Arbeiter -Zeitung published the story of the falsified document, explaining how the copies had been made and the entry for Johann Michael Strauss expunged.
“Defeat brought financial hardship and ruin to the aristocratic classes and nobility.”
If it is a blessing that the register survived, sadly not much else associated with Johann Strauss was so fortunate. Much of the inner city was destroyed in the Battle of Vienna, including the house in the Igelgasse, which Johann loved and where he so often sought sanctuary from the pressures on him.
What the Nazis did not destroy, the Soviet Red Army made short work of. Most of Johann’s personal belongings, kept in various archives and museums, simply disappeared. Even his violin was gone.
For the Nazis, then, Johann Strauss was conveniently not Jewish, but two people he was extremely closely associated with most certainly were. His third wife Adèle was Jewish, a fact that had never been hidden, despite her conversion to Roman Catholicism in order to marry Strauss. This meant that her daughter Alice – Johann Strauss’s stepdaughter – was Jewish too.
Adèle died in 1930 but Alice was in her early sixties at the outbreak of the Second World War. Johann, as I have related earlier, adored Adèle and doted on her young daughter. After his death a valuable part of his estate went to his widow, and from her to Alice.
The Nazi propaganda sheet Der Stürmer was having none of this. Johann’s marriage to Adèle was an aberration, it claimed. He had been old and weak when he had met her,81 and she had clearly taken advantage of him for her own gain.
It went further. With extraordinary perspicacity, not to say clairvoyance, it predicted exactly how Johann would have behaved had he lived half a century later under National Socialism, in a rant typical of Nazi propaganda:
If Johann Strauss were alive today, then he would be an anti-Semite. In his music lies true empathy for the Volk. Through his music a true German [sic] speaks to us. And precisely because we know this, we are therefore under an obligation not to let this great legacy be Jewified (bejudeln lassen) through Jewish eyes.
It was a small and easy step to go from this to stating unequivocally that Alice had no right to inherit anything from her stepfather. Not only was Alice a Jew, the paper ranted, but she was falsifying information so that she could claim she was entitled to keep Strauss artefacts.
And even if she were entitled, what would she do then? Sell them to the highest bidder. Strauss himself had been aware of this danger, Der Stürmer reasoned in a wilful distortion of the facts, which was why he had donated his entire estate to Vienna’s most prestigious and elite musical organisation, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. It was nothing short of thievery that Alice was holding on to a large portion of it. She should donate it to the city of Vienna, the paper demanded.
Alice was worn down by a series of abusive articles in Der Stürmer. Now ageing and with no stomach for a fight, she saw herself robbed not only of the possessions and keepsakes her stepfather had given her, but of her dignity too.
Alice survived the Second World War and went to live in Switzerland. None of the possessions taken from her were ever returned, and she received no compensation. She died in 1945. It was not until the 1990s that it became known how the Nazis had treated her.
And what of the woman who all those years before had served Johann Strauss his favourite dish of crayfish and goose-liver pâté, washed down with dry champagne, and who had earned a place on the sideline of history as the emperor’s closest companion for more than thirty years?
Katharina Schratt’s world ended on 21 November 1916 when the Lord High Chamberlain telephoned her from Schönbrunn Palace to say that emperor was dead. Such was the life of a mistress.
Yet in an extraordinary acknowledgement of just how important she had been to the old man, and the esteem in which his family held her, courtiers
at the palace had been given orders to admit her immediately into the private apartments, and then into the simple and austere bedroom where the emperor lay on the plain iron bed on which he had died.
The emperor’s daughter, Archduchess Valerie, who had remained close to her father after Empress Sisi’s tragic death, embraced her like a mother. Kathi walked to the bed, placed two white roses in the emperor’s hands and bent over him, her eyes closed in prayer.
Franz Josef was buried with all the pomp of a great state funeral, sovereigns and princes of the empire converging on Vienna. But Kathi Schratt stayed away. She knew it was not her place to be there.
I expect that Kathi was in some ways grateful that the emperor did not live to see the end of the First World War, the defeat of Germany and Austria, and with it the abolition of the empire he had strived so hard to keep together.
Defeat brought financial hardship and ruin to the aristocratic classes and nobility. Money became worthless almost overnight, banks collapsed, the stock exchange crashed. Kathi was more fortunate than most, in that her assets were mainly in the form of gifts from the emperor and valuable artefacts she had collected over the years.
Soon a steady trickle of these made their way to the auction houses of Vienna, to keep Kathi afloat financially. On one occasion she asked her godson, who was attached to the Austrian Legation in London, to negotiate the sale of some valuable snuffboxes in the hope that Queen Mary might be interested. Apparently word came back from Buckingham Palace that the price was too high.
Those who might have expected Kathi to retire from public life, now that her usefulness at court was at an end, were to be disappointed. She reacquainted herself with her former world of the theatre, and many a young and impecunious actor found himself entertained at her table.
Sunday luncheons at her small house in Hietzing became famous in theatrical circles, with trays and confectionery sent round from Demel, the confectioner in the Kohlmarkt that was the city’s best known.82 There was a cacophony of sound, as boisterous conversation competed with the many stray dogs Kathi had collected and given sanctuary to.
Life in Vienna, once the most sophisticated city in Continental Europe, had changed for ever. Gone was the sumptuousness and grandeur of a capital city of empire, to be replaced by austerity and the shame of a defeated country.
None of this caused Kathi to retreat into obscurity. In her seventies she was still to be seen regularly at the Salzburg Festival, or taking a cure at the spa town of Karlsbad. In 1929, at the age of seventy-six, she boarded an aeroplane for the flight from Zurich to Vienna.
One thing Kathi Schratt did not do, though, which perhaps earns our admiration and frustration in equal measure. In the 1930s journalists beat a path to her door, offering large sums of money in foreign currencies for her memoirs – what we could call today a ‘kiss-and-tell’.
All offers were politely but firmly refused, one such refusal reported and much admired. ‘I was never a Pompadour, still less a Maintenon,’ she said, in a witty and apt acknowledgement of her role.
Every now and then a sensational article would appear in a magazine, in which she was referred to as ‘the emperor’s sweetheart’, or ‘the gnädige Frau of Schönbrunn’. She told her friends she never read a word of any of them.
Only once did she react with anger at anything that was printed about her. She was furious when she was told one article said she had accepted a pension from Herr Hitler. She angrily denied it, and when later, in the spring of 1938, Hitler drove in triumph through Vienna after the Anschluss, she pulled down the blinds of her windows.
Kathi Schratt died on an April day in 1940. Like the man to whom she had devoted so much of her life, she was eighty-six years of age. Like him too, she died in the middle of a world war and did not live to see Austria defeated.
As for the innermost secrets of an emperor who had ruled for nearly seventy years, whose empire was no more, who had lost his brother, wife, son and nephew to assassination and suicide, whose shoulders bent – literally – under the intolerable weight of matters of state and personal tragedy, Kathi Schratt took them to her grave.
80 It seems either the Nazis did not know of his change of nationality to clear the path to his marriage, or discounted it.
81 He was in his mid-fifties.
82 It still is.
There was to be one more musical Strauss. Johann III’s younger brother Josef, although a talented pianist, chose to become a garage proprietor, but Josef’s youngest son Eduard – grandnephew of the Waltz King – decided on a musical career from the age of twelve.83 He studied piano, horn and violin, took singing lessons, and made his conducting debut in 1949 – the centenary of the death of Johann Strauss the Elder, and fiftieth anniversary of the death of Johann Strauss the Younger.
Eduard II, as he was known, established a fine reputation as a conductor and was soon touring the world. In an extraordinary echo of his grandfather’s limitless energy, in 1955 he conducted in Germany and Switzerland, and in the following twelve years he performed in Manila, Seoul, Moscow, Cairo, Paris, London, Ath-ens, Gothenburg and Warsaw. During the same period he led six major tours of Japan, conducting no fewer than 137 concerts in 36 Japanese cities. It was an even more demanding schedule than his grandfather’s, since he was also frequently in the recording studio.
In one respect only did he not inherit the Strauss genius. He was not a composer. He certainly tried, but told a friend, ‘I knew my ideas were not of any value, so I threw them away.’
Eduard had firm ideas about how the music of his illustrious family should be played. The melodies, he said, should be allowed to unfold ‘like a flower’. He was also adamant that the waltz should not be played too quickly: ‘Always remember, people must be able to dance to it smoothly.’
Sadly Eduard died before reaching his sixtieth birthday (exhaustion, perhaps?), and with him the Strauss musical dynasty came to an end – four generations, six musicians, thousands of compositions, and a name synonymous with Vienna and the waltz.
Where, then, does the Strauss family stand in the lexicon of great musical names, and what is its legacy? I know what some might say. Strauss, the waltz, fluffy, light, easy on the ear, no depth, rather basic.
Well, think again. The catalogue of composers who admired Johann Strauss the Younger is long and illustrious, and these are not names anyone would regard as lightweight.
Hector Berlioz, who saw himself as the natural successor to Beethoven, said (as I noted earlier), ‘Vienna without Strauss is like Austria without the Danube.’
I have already catalogued the friendship between Johann Strauss and Johannes Brahms, and the mutual respect that existed between them as composers. Remember, Brahms would have liked to have composed ‘By the Beautiful Blue Danube’, and recorded his wish in writing.
Tchaikovsky was an admirer, and expressed delight when he heard that one of his works, his Characteristic Dances, had been given its first public performance, conducted by Johann Strauss at one of his concerts in Pavlovsk.
Perhaps Johann Strauss’s most ardent supporter – though I am not aware they ever met – is also the most unexpected. Second to none in his admiration for the Waltz King was a composer who never penned a frivolous note and to my knowledge never wrote a dance number, one Richard Wagner.
As a young man of nineteen, with no completed opera yet under his belt, Wagner came to Vienna and first heard Johann Strauss the Elder, later writing that vivid description of the concert that I have already quoted.
Wagner transferred his boundless admiration seamlessly from father to son. Thirty years later he called Johann Strauss the Younger ‘the most musical brain of the age’, and in a typically barbed comparison with other non-Germanic composers he could not have paid Johann a higher compliment:
A single Strauss waltz, as far as gracefulness, refinement and musical content is concerned, towers above the majority of the often laboriously procured foreign-produced creations.
The admiratio
n was entirely mutual. Johann Strauss frequently included orchestral passages from Wagner in his concerts and was incensed when, in 1861, the authorities at the Vienna Opera dropped plans to perform Tristan und Isolde because they considered it unplayable.
Johann wrote to Wagner asking for permission to play orchestral excerpts from the score. Wagner not only agreed but provided an orchestral version of the great Love Duet from Act II, and of Isolde’s impassioned Liebestod.
In 1876, on his sixty-third birthday, after the most successful summer of his life, which had seen his custom-built theatre in Bay-reuth finally open its doors, Wagner commanded – as was his wont – an orchestra to play for him under a popular local conductor.
His choice of music? The waltzes of Johann Strauss II. Relaxing in the front row of chairs alongside his wife Cosima, relishing the ebb and flow of the music and its universally popular themes, suddenly he leapt up, seized the baton from the conductor’s hands, and led the orchestra into the opening bars of ‘Wein, Weib und Gesang’.
Now there is a beguiling image. Richard Wagner, composer of the mightiest operas ever written, conducting a Strauss waltz!
I have already recounted how Gustav Mahler who, like Wagner, falls into the über-serious category, introduced Die Fledermaus to the Vienna Court Opera during Johann Strauss’s jubilee celebrations. It has never left it, as the annual performance on New Year’s Eve to this day testifies.
Yet another composer holds, as far as I know, the unique distinction of having taken a Strauss waltz and used it, deliberately not well disguised, in an opera of his own. He shared more than just the love of a waltz with the Strauss family; he shared a name too.
Richard Strauss was no relation to the Strauss dynasty. He was not even of the same nationality – German, rather than Austrian. But of his unbounded admiration for his namesake there can be no doubt.