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THE WALTZ AND THE STRAUSSES
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The waltz became a cottage industry for the Strausses -- although the father initially wanted his son, Johann Jr. to pursue a career in banking. Fortunately, the son ignored that career advice and became the principal perpetuator of the family legacy, becoming known throughout the world as the Waltz King. His orchestrations sparkled, he played violin with carefully controlled brilliance, and he possessed a melodic inventiveness that kept the genre up to date and fresh.
Strauss' other sons, Eduard and Josef, also went into the business, and the various members of the family helped popularize the waltz by publishing, composing, playing, and touring indefatigably, year after year after year. The famed Strauss Orchestra finally disbanded in 1901, after a grueling tour of the United States, in which the musicians would sometimes hit two towns in one day.
The mid-19th century, before Josef retired and Johann Jr. took up a second career as a composer of operettas, were the halcyon days of the Viennese waltz, and it is principally from that time that we have inherited our images of twirling dukes and gliding baronesses. Yet Vienna was the center of an autocratic state, and the Strauss' relationship to officialdom, and therefore to respectability, was actually quite complicated. The elder Strauss had prudently supported the regime during the uprising of 1848. The younger Johann sided with the students -- though only until their rebellion was quashed, at which point he became an ardent, even fawning admirer of the Emperor Franz Josef I, to whom he dedicated a couple of his marches.
It took Johann Jr. about 15 years to expunge his political indiscretion, but in 1863 he was finally appointed to his late father's post of Court Ball Music Director (k.k. Hofballmusikdirektor). The ultimate laurel, however, was his spectacularly successful debut on the podium of the Vienna Philharmonic in 1873. That the court opera orchestra should spend an evening playing dance hall tunes represents a fusion of the refined and the popular that has rarely, if ever, been so thoroughly achieved again.
If Vienna, its Philharmonic, and its Waltz King are firmly and justifiably fused in the popular imagination, the New Year's Day concert has a more equivocal legacy. The first one took place in 1939, four decades after Johann Jr.'s death, and months after Austria had been absorbed into Hitler's Germany. The Vienna Philharmonic's Web site interprets that event as a cautiously subversive act: "In performing a concert consisting entirely of works of the Strauss dynasty, the orchestra subtly underscored Austrian nationality at a time when the country had disappeared from the world map," the orchestra's official history explains.
That account, however, omits several germane facts: that the elder Strauss' grandfather, also named Johann, had been born a Jew and converted to Catholicism; that Johann Jr.'s third wife, Adèle, was also Jewish; and that in order to obtain a divorce and marry her, the Waltz King had had to renounce his Austrian citizenship. (Here, the ironies multiply, since Adèle's maiden name, Deutsch, means German and in the 18th century, the word "deutsch" was used as a synonym for waltz.) By 1939, Germany had not only annexed Austria, but its cultural heritage, too, and the Gestapo had gone so far as to obliterate all records of the Strauss family's Jewish past in order to justify Hitler's personal fondness for their waltzes.
Though Strauss waltzes kept popping up, Zelig-like, at some of Europe's most high-tension moments, the music preserved its sepia-toned innocence, gaining new layers of nostalgia even as its popularity waned. Insouciant, merry, and sentimental all at the same time, the concert waltz as the Strausses refined it came to be thought of as the soundtrack of society the way it was before the war -- though which war, precisely, kept changing. The waltz is the music of memory, but it also evokes the giddiness that uncertainty can bring, which makes it the perfect celebratory accompaniment for each turning of the year.
Top banner photos: Host Walter Cronkite; Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic (photo courtesy of ORF); the caryatids in the Musikverein's main hall (photo: ©2001 Robert Zival, Musikverein). |
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The first piece that the orchestra ever performed by Johann Strauss, Jr. was his waltz "Wiener Blut." |
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A musician can apply to become a member of the Philharmonic only after playing with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra for three years. |
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The DVD and CD are available from Amazon.com. |
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