This month we celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Johann Baptist Strauss.  The son of Johann Strauss I (1804 -1849) and Maria Anna Streim, he became the most prominent and successful of the Strauss family as a violinist, conductor and composer.  ‘The master of melody’, his huge output included over 500 Waltzes, 14 operettas and a grand opera, a ballet and other works. His music is suffused with the spirit of sheer enjoyment of life.

The composer of “An der schönen blauen Donau” indeed gained, if only by this one piece, an absolutely universal celebrity.

[The above quote and all indented text is from the Daily News, 5 June 1899 (from their own correspondent in Vienna).]

It was the elder Johann Strauss (whose “Victoria Walzer” was as popular in the last generation as his son’s “Blue Danube” has been in this) who first began to give special names to waltzes.

Although regarded primarily as a composer of dance music who did not engage with the serious classical forms of the symphony or concerto, Johann Strauss II won the admiration of the major composers of the day.  They included Brahms, Verdi, Anton Rubinstein, Hans Von Bulow, Leoncavallo, Richard Strauss and Wagner.

He enjoyed a long friendship with Brahms who acknowledged his mastery of orchestration and remarked to Hanslick at the premiere of the operetta Waldmeister in 1895 that Strauss orchestration reminded him of Mozart.

The story goes that the late Johannes Brahms, being entreated by some importunate though comely young damsel to write in her album the name of the composer whose music he liked best to hear, at once took a pen and indited the name of Johann Strauss.  The confession surprised the lady, as it did a good many Viennese musicians of the more serious school.  There is, however, nothing inherently improbable in the story.  Whether or not the waltz was of Viennese origin….

The family orchestra, founded by his father in 1828, was to hold a supreme position in Vienna for the rest of the 19^th Century.

It was Johann Strauss the elder and his dance orchestra which had the pick of the concert and private party engagements at the innumerable balls and fêtes given in honour of the Queen [Victoria’s] Coronation in 1838; .

Strauss I’s first published composition was a waltz, and he is credited, along with Joseph Lanner (1801-1843) with the transformation of the waltz from its origins as a simple peasant dance into the Viennese waltz fit for the highest of society as both an accompaniment for dancing and as a purely musical entertainment.

The true waltz form, as we now know it, that is to say, with a slow introduction, followed by two or more themes and a coda, we owe to Johann Strauss the elder, Lanner, and Labitzky; and later on to Gungl (who was over here at the Covent Garden promenade concerts about 25 years ago) and Johann Strauss the younger.

Strauss II had formed his own orchestra when he was just 19 years old.

Long before he was of age he quarrelled with his father, and resolved to adopt music as a profession.  Accordingly, on October 15, 1844, he appeared, for the first time, as a conductor in the beer garden of Dommayer, at Hietzing, playing his father’s “Loreley walzer,” and one or two now forgotten pieces of his own.

When his father died in 1849 Johann united the two orchestras and with them, together with his equally talented brother Josef (1827 -70) (who became interim conductor in 1853 when Johann was ill for several months) he toured Austria, Germany, France, Poland, England, Russia and the USA which established his enduring international reputation.

From 1855-65 he was engaged by the Russian Emperors to conduct concerts at the Petropaulowski Park in St Petersburg and in 1863 was eventually appointed conductor of the Court Ballet in Vienna succeeding his father after a fifteen-year delay on account of his involvement in ‘the great movement of 1848’, a revolutionary uprising lead by university students which gained such momentum it threatened the power and control of the Habsburg Empire. The golden age of Strauss waltzes when Johann and Josef ‘held sway’ was from 1850 -1870 (the year of Josef’s death). Their younger brother Eduard succeeded Johann at St Petersburg from 1865 and at the Court Balls in Vienna from 1870. The family orchestra continued until 1901 under direction of Eduard Strauss (1835-1916). One of his sons, Johann Strauss III, a conductor, led the Strauss revival into the 20^th century.

After his appearance in Paris in 1867 at the Austrian Embassy Ball which helped popularise the Blue Danube waltz outside Vienna, he went on to London where he conducted at all 63 promenade concerts at Covent Garden.  These included a performance of the Blue Danube waltz in its choral version and the Erinnerung Waltz.

Johann then turned his attention to writing operettas. The first was Indigo in 1871 and the most successful was Die Fledermaus in 1874.  He also wrote the comic opera Ritter Pázmán in three acts in 1892 which was performed at the Imperial Opera, Vienna.

Johann Strauss’s compositional technique had great clarity; like Mendelssohn, everything had a definite purpose and clear melodic direction enhanced by his masterly, uncluttered but colourful orchestration. He had begun composing at an early age.

He was only six or seven when he wrote his first waltz, a composition which, without being much touched up, was revived in Vienna in 1875, on his fiftieth birthday, under the title of “Erster Gedanke”.

The family was surrounded by music at home where his father’s orchestra regularly rehearsed a wide range of repertoire, including overtures and concert pieces. Johann and Josef first became excellent ‘social pianists’. Johann wrote:

“We boys paid close attention to every note, we familiarized ourselves with his style, then played what we had heard straight off, exactly in his spirited manner. He was our ideal. We often received invitations to visit families… and would play from memory, and to great applause, our father’s compositions.”
(From Grove online, 2001)

However, Strauss I wanted his sons to have respectable middle class careers. Perhaps it was his early experience of financial insecurity which prompted him to strongly discourage his sons from pursuing careers as professional musicians.

His father insisted, indeed, that he should become a bank clerk, and after a due course of study at the Gymnasium and Polytechnic he was placed at a savings bank.

Both were far too naturally talented as musicians to comply, as was their younger brother Eduard who followed them in later years. Their mother secretly sent them to study the violin, Johann with the leader of his father’s orchestra, Franz Amon, and harmony and counterpoint with Joachim Hoffmann, later with Joseph Drechsler (1782-1852) to study composition. Drechsler was an organist and Kappellmeister at several Viennese churches as well as a composer and conductor at Leopoldstadt Theatre. Significantly he composed operas, as well as Masses including a Requiem and a treatise on harmony. All this laid the ground for Johann Strauss’s future career.

Not to detract from his purely musical achievements, Johann’s enormous commercial success can partly be attributed his astute practice of commemorating every significant social, cultural or political event in Vienna with a musical occasion that would ensure continual publicity. It kept him in the spotlight throughout his career. Both he and Josef were regularly engaged to compose dedications for the corporate balls and faculties of Vienna university.

On his death on 3 June 1899 –

A very pretty demonstration took place in the Vienna Volksgarten ….  A concert was being given there conducted by Herr Kremser and in a few touching words informed the public that Johann Strauss had just breathed his last.  Everybody rose.  Then Kremser lifted his baton and spoke one word and there rose from the orchestra, very softly and sweetly, the strains of “An der schönen blauen Donau.”

All the title pages illustrated are of music transcribed for the pianoforte.

Nicholas Lane, 2025.