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Vienna Icons;
Johann Strauss
The most famous son of Vienna, Johann Strauss was a
prodigious composer of over 500 works. Unlike his
German, Italian and French contemporaries, Strauss was a
hugely populist composer, with his work loved by his
native Viennese. Strauss was a dance composer,
specialising in waltzes, polkas, marches and gallops.
Known during his life as “The Waltz King” he is of course
best known for the sublime waltz, The Blue Danube, one
of the most instantly recognisable pieces in music.
Strauss was born into a musical dynasty, in the most
intensely musical city in the world. Like Salzburg 150
years before, the 19th century was a renaissance for
Viennese musical excellence. The son of Johann Strauss
the first, Strauss the second was encouraged by his
composer father to go into banking and not composing,
but Strauss studied the violin in secret under the first
violinist of his fathers orchestra, Franz Amon. On the
discovery of his sons disobedience, his father was livid and
it wasn’t until he left Strauss’ mother shortly before his
17th birthday for a mistress, that Straus was able to study
music publicly.
The position of Strauss the elder in Viennese musical
society, made many establishments wary of employing the
young Strauss despite his obvious talents, but the brave owners of Dommayers
casino in Heitzing, employed his orchestra, and thus began a rivalry played out in the
local press.
Strauss won over his audiences with his incredibly popular music but courted
controversy once again, when, following the revolution of 1848, Strauss the younger
sided with the revolutionaries and against the monarchy, with whom his fathers
career and patronage lay. This decision to support the revolutionaries proved career
suicide for a decade, when Strauss was twice denied the much coveted “KK
Hofballmusikdrektor” position, which would have been his but for his political
alliegiences.
Strauss senior died shortly after in 1849 of scarlet fever and upon his death, Strauss
junior merged the two orchestras and composed a number of patriotic marches,
aimed at restoring his position with the new monarch Franz Josef 1, who came to the
throne as a result of the bourgeois revolution.
Thus began the greatest composing period of Strauss’ life, as he toured Europe and
Russia with his, by now world famous orchestra. After his marriage to Jetty Treffz in
1862, Strass was awarded the “KK Hofballmusikdrektor” Music Director of the Royal
Court Balls, a position that brought him firmly back into favour not just with the
Hapsburgs, but with Royal families across Europe. At this time, he was involved in a
terrible divorce scandal which caused Strauss to leave the Catholic church and
Vienna, and become a citizen of Saxe Coburg Goethe in January 1887.
Strauss was admired by the cream of Europe’s musical elite, and was publicly
congratulated by Franz Lehar, and Jacques Offenbach for
the majesty of his operettas, but it was not in this field that
Strauss would be remembered; it was of course for his
mastery of the waltz, a legacy that sees him still one of the
most listened to composers in history.