By the Beautiful Blue Danube, Tales from the
Vienna Woods, Artist’s Life, The Bat… Almost everyone is familiar
with these titles. Johann Strauss Jr. wrote over 500 musical compositions,
among which we can find waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, marches, gallops, quadrilles,
romances, overtures, operettas, one opera and symphonic poems. He elevated his waltzes to
symphonic form with a very clear structure and an original coda. Towards the
end of his life he wrote Traumbild, a
symphonic poem in two parts; it was neither performed nor published during his
lifetime (apparently, he had no intention of performing it in public), and
shows us a very different Strauss.
He
was strongly advised to start writing operettas by his wife Jetty, who knew
that is was an emerging musical form extremely popular in Paris thanks to
Jacques Offenbach. Having refused it at first (he never felt at ease with
theatre people), he reluctantly accepted, and the new operetta style was born: the
Viennese operetta. Johann’s most popular operettas are The Bat (1874) and The Gypsy Baron
(1885), premiered at the Theatre an der Wien in Vienna with great success. It
must be said, however, that many of his operettas were not that fortunate
because of the weakness of its librettos. His only opera, Ritter Pázmán (now
almost entirely lost, apart from its ballet and czardas) was not very well
received either, which pained Strauss greatly, as he wanted to be considered a
serious opera composer.
It would
be possible to write tomes about Strauss’ relationship with his brothers. Josef
Strauss (1827-1870) worked as an engineer despite his father’s desire that he
become a military man. When he was asked by his family to replace Johann during
his illness in 1853, he was reluctant at first. Later, however, he started to
enjoy the role of the conductor of the Strauss Orchestra and began writing his
own music. A very talented composer, Josef was highly admired by his older
brother Johann. Their relationship, however, was not, apparently, devoid of
professional jealousy from both sides. At the same time, Johann praised his
brother’s talent – ‘Pepi [Josef] is the most talented of us two, I am merely
the most popular one’, he is reported to have said.
Things
were even more complicated between Johann and the youngest brother, Eduard
(1835-1916). A gifted conductor, ‘the handsome Edi’ lacked his brothers’ originality and their knack of writing popular and widely loved
music. In 1907 Eduard burnt Strauss family archives, which included works written
by Johann Sr., Johann Jr., Josef, as well as other composers. That action
greatly complicated the work of numerous musicologists, who were forced to
reunite lost compositions and to orchestrate them again (in many cases only
piano versions survived).
Strauss
spent his last years surrounded by his wife Adele, her daughter Alice, whom he
had adopted, his closest friends, one of whom was Johannes Brahms, and his
horses. In 1884 the fortieth anniversary of Strauss’ premiere at the Dommayer
Casino was celebrated, and the maestro received greetings from prominent
musical, drama and literature figures all over the world. Giuseppe Verdi, for
instance, wished him the following: ‘I honor him as one of my most congenial
colleagues and the best I can wish him on his jubilee is an iron constitution.
Those Viennese are no joke. It is too bad that [Strauss] cannot substitute a
double for those tough days which await him… A double jubilee in Vienna and for
Strauss yet… well, may the Lord have the mercy on him’ (the quote is taken from
the book ‘Johann Strauss. The End of an Era’ by Egon Gartenberg, 1979).
Material used:
Kemp, Peter
(1989), ‘The Strauss Family’, Omnibus Press, London/New York/Sydney/Cologne.
Fantel, Hans
(1971), ‘Johann Strauss. Father and Son and Their Era’, Redwood Press Limited,
Trowbridge and London.
Gartenberg,
Egon (1979), ‘Johann Strauss. The End of an Era’, Da Capo Press, Inc., New
York.
Jacob, H.E. (translated
my Wolff, Marguerite) (2005) ‘Johann Strauss – Father and Son – A Century of
Light Music’, Kessinger Publishing Co.
Мейлих, Е. (1975), ‘Иоганн
Штраус. Из истории венского вальса’, Музыка, Ленинград (Meylich, E., ‘Johann
Strauss. From the History of the Viennese Waltz’, Music, Leningrad).
http://www.johann-strauss.org.uk/
(The Johann Strauss Society of Great Britain), accessed on September 30th,
2013.
