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Johann Strauss II
1825 – 1899
Johann Strauss the younger, the 'Waltz King', was the greatest of all Viennese dance music composers.
Life and Music
- The young Strauss had started composing and directing his own ensemble of local musicians by the time that he was 20. His father disapproved, knowing well the insecurity of the profession.
- Strauss senior died in 1849, and has since been celebrated mainly for his Radetzky March. He actually published a total of 251 works, including 152 waltzes, had his own highly successful dance orchestra, and directed Vienna's famous court balls for his last three years.
- Strauss' genius lay in the way he took the waltz form his father and Josef Lanner had developed, and gave it a symphonic coherence and Romantic style, elevating waltzes from their relatively humble beginnings into mini masterpieces worthy of the concert hall.
- Johann Strauss II soon merged his father's orchestra with his own, and over the following decades went on to delight audiences in Austria, Germany, Poland and Russia.
- In England in 1867, The Times noted how similar Johann II was to Strauss senior: "He conducts the orchestra like his father, fiddle in hand, and joins in the passages of most importance." Conducting Strauss-style - from the violin - has been kept alive in recent years by Lorin Maazel and André Rieu.
- After relinquishing Vienna court ball duties, Johann moved on and up, accepting an invitation to conduct a series of huge-scale concerts in Boston in 1872 to celebrate the World's Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival.
- For one memorable performance Strauss directed an orchestra of 2,000 and a choir of 20,000, with the help of 100 sub-conductors who valiantly attempted to keep the whole thing under control - Strauss observed that there arose "a fearful racket, that I shall never forget as long as I live". However, the 100,000-strong audience lapped it up.
- During this period Strauss was tempted (particularly by his first wife, the noted mezzo-soprano Jetty Treffz) to try his hand at operetta in the style of Offenbach and the Austrian composer Suppé. After two unremarkable attempts, Strauss hit the jackpot with Die Fledermaus in 1874.
- Jetty died in 1878 and within weeks the composer was married again - this time to the actress 'Lili' Dittrich. The marriage survived only four years. Strauss, by then 53, quickly took up with a young admirer, Adele Strauss (no relation). Adele remained faithful to him to the end.
- Meanwhile, the hits rolled on, and despite a breathtaking output - 600 pieces in total - and nagging ill-health, Strauss retained his youthfulness and fertility of invention.
- In 1894, five years before his death, Vienna honoured the 50th anniversary of the composer's debut with days of celebrations, when congratulations poured in from across the world.
- The Goddess of Reason, his final operetta, was premiered in March 1897, but Strauss was too ill to attend. Brahms, terminally ill himself, struggled along to see it, but three weeks later he was dead. Strauss survived another two years.
Did you know?
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the man who had set the whole world dancing was that he himself was a terrible dancer. He once confided to a friend: "[That's why I] have to give a firm 'no' to the many tempting and alluring 'invitations to the dance'".
