The Last Waltz Read online

  These two highly talented violinists soon attracted attention, not least because they were such opposites. ‘Black Schani’ (Strauss) was olive-skinned with dark wavy hair, described by the Viennese in local dialect as ‘peppery’, ‘vibrant’, even ‘sharp-tongued’. ‘Blond Peppi’ (Lanner) by contrast was ‘mild’, ‘smooth’, ‘silken’.

  That applied to their music too, because what set these two apart from the many other musicians playing in orchestras and bands was that both began to compose. Lanner, as the older and more experienced, was the more productive of the two. Although – in an uncanny prescience of what would happen a generation later to an as yet unborn Johann Strauss the Younger – the strain of rehearsing, conducting, arranging and composing began to take a toll on Lanner’s health.

  Lanner, the driving force in the partnership, had expanded his quartet to a small string orchestra, and when that proved insufficient to handle the ever increasing workload, formed a second orchestra. He appointed his friend and partner, Johann Strauss, as ‘vice-conductor’ of this orchestra.

  It proved to be a mistake – for Lanner. The young Johann Strauss, just turned twenty-one, had found his calling. Suddenly his boundless energy, his hitherto untapped organisational skills, his natural authority, the ability to lead, set him apart. Once Lanner asked him to come up swiftly with a set of waltzes for an event that same evening – he was too unwell to do it himself. Just once and never again. It was a triumph for Strauss.

  There was no holding him. He did more than just compose. He arranged pieces by other composers, hired the musicians, and booked venues. But what impressed the ever growing audiences most of all was that Johann Strauss led the orchestra from the violin. This was not unknown in Vienna, or in taverns along the Danube. But usually the violinist would stand in front of a small handful of musicians, his part no more or less important than theirs. Strauss did more than just play or accompany. He led. No one doubted who was in charge, or who took the bows at the end.

  The young man developed a certain swagger, as his name began to be talked of around town. It was not long before Strauss realised he had the skills, and the public recognition, to forge a career on his own. The friend and colleague who had given him his break was now superfluous, if not actually a hindrance. He went to Lanner and told him he planned a solo career. Lanner knew full well what he was losing and the discussions, which took place over a number of days, became increasingly heated. Matters reached a head at a concert the two men gave together at a large ballroom by the name of Zum Bock (‘At the Ram’).

  In the early hours of the morning, with the concert over and large quantities of alcohol consumed, the two men – so legend has it – came to blows. Instruments were damaged and furniture was smashed. There was no going back. It was a parting of the ways, which Lanner commemorated in his ‘Trennungswalzer’ (‘Separation Waltz’).9

  Johann Strauss was on his own. Well, not entirely. In the first place he took fourteen of Lanner’s best musicians with him, which allowed him to put together a serviceable orchestra from the start. Secondly, and of considerably more importance to musical history, he had met a young woman and fallen in love.

  Anna Streim was the daughter of the landlord of Zum roten Hahn (‘At the Red Rooster’), a tavern in a suburb of Vienna. Johann wooed and won Anna, and on 11 July 1825 the couple were married. Johann was twenty-one, his bride two years older. Less than four months later, on 25 October 1825, Anna gave birth. The baby was a boy, and he was named after his father. This was the Johann Strauss who would go on to eclipse his father as a musician, and become the best-loved, most prolific, internationally lauded composer that the city of Vienna had ever – or would ever – produce.

  1 Perhaps the closest, though ‘Vltava’ is the second of six symphonic poems which make up Smetana’s Ma Vlast (‘My Homeland’).

  2 It happens to this day. On my last visit to Vienna, just a couple of years ago, I stood in a crowd listening to street musicians playing folk music from the Andes.

  3 ‘Glücklich ist wer vergisst, was doch nicht zu ändern ist.’

  4 The 1949 film The Third Man perfectly portrays Vienna, the frontier city.

  5 ‘Of the country’, or ‘rural’.

  6 From the verb ‘walzen’, ‘to turn’.

  7 I would like to believe the story that when the tone of the fiddle was too dry and thin, Johann would pour beer into it to give a more moist, and consequently sentimental, tone.

  8 It’s possible he actually played viola in the orchestra, which would be even more impressive.

  9 There is no documentary evidence of the fracas, but why should there be? Certainly it was the talk of Vienna within a very short time, and even if an element of exaggeration has crept in, there is no doubt the two young men parted acrimoniously.

  If Vienna was Europe’s capital city of music, it was also – and still is – the European capital of the café. It is possible there was a café in Oxford, or Venice, earlier than in Vienna, but it was in the Habsburg capital that the café or coffee house firmly took root and became a way of life. The reason for this is not hard to find. The Habsburg empire traded closely with the Ottoman empire, and the coffee bean so prevalent in Istanbul quickly made its way to Vienna, where it was in abundant supply. Cafés soon proliferated in the city and became the favoured places to meet, gossip and listen to local bands.

  But there is a much more interesting and engaging explanation of how Vienna came to be the café capital of Europe, and it is one known to the Viennese today, and certainly to most Viennese of earlier centuries, in particular to musicians for whom the café, and later the dance hall, were to provide so many new venues for their work. It is, of course, a legend, and as such has become embroidered over the passage of time, but a legend becomes so only because it is based on truth, and this one has more than a ring of truth about it.

  Every legend has a hero, and the name of this one is Georg Franz Kolschitzky.10 A Polish street trader, Kolschitzky had spent some years travelling and trading in Turkey and so became fluent in Turkish and familiar with Turkish customs and traditions. At one time he had served as translator in the Turkish army. He was therefore the right man in the right place when the Turks, for the second time in a century and a half, sent a huge army west with the aim of conquering Europe and destroying Christendom. The Crusades in reverse, as it were. After the first failed attempt under Suleiman the Magnificent, when the siege was broken by the Viennese, a massive defensive wall – the Bastei – had been built around the city with the explicit aim of keeping out any later attempt.

  Now, in 1683, that wall threatened to prove more of a hindrance than a help. An army of 300,000 Turks simply set up camp outside it, prevented any movement of supplies through its ten gates, and waited for the Viennese, holed up inside, to surrender before they starved. The Glacis, the expanse of green that lay beyond the wall, bristled with tents, and the air was filled with smoke and the exotic aromas of Levantine spices.

  The commander of the meagre forces inside the city wall, Count Starhemberg, was aware that help, of a kind, was at hand. The Duke of Lorraine was camped on the other side of the Danube with a force of just 33,000 men – no match for the Turks. But King Jan Sobieski of Poland had left Warsaw and was gathering forces as he marched south-west to Vienna. If and when Sobieski and Lorraine could join forces, there was the faint hope that the Turks could be defeated and the siege lifted.

  The situation inside the city wall was becoming desperate. Star-hemberg knew time was short and it was imperative to get word out to Lorraine of just how serious things were, and how quickly help was needed. Several times he dispatched envoys with orders to get through enemy lines, only to see their bodies hanging outside the city wall days later as a warning and deterrent.

  Enter the man who could speak fluent Turkish, understood Turkish ways, and could – with a measure of good fortune – pass himself off as one of the enemy. Could Kolschitzky succeed where others had failed?

  On 13
August he left the city and walked through the Turkish encampment, passing himself off as a trader from Belgrade. So successful was he that at one point he was captured by locals in the little village of Kahlenberg and only managed to persuade them he was not one of the enemy by speaking to them in a Viennese dialect no one who was not Viennese could possibly know.

  Kolschitzky reached Lorraine safely. A rocket was fired off to signify this, and a rocket was fired from the roof of St Stephen’s Cathedral in the city in acknowledgement. Kolschitzky apprised Lorraine of the dire situation inside the city wall and the desperate need for action. Lorraine dispatched couriers to Sobieski and other European leaders, urging them to send forces to Vienna at maximum speed, warning that otherwise Vienna would be lost, leaving Europe at the mercy of the Muslim horde.

  His task complete, Kolschitzky made the dangerous return journey to the besieged city. He came even closer to having his cover blown on this return trip, he later said, and had to call on every ounce of skill and deception that he possessed. Against all the odds he arrived safely back in Vienna on 17 August.

  Less than a month later a large relief force made up of Poles, Germans, Austrians and several other European nationalities gathered on the summit of Mount Kahlenberg, at the extreme eastern end of the Vienna woods, overlooking the city. At midnight on 11 September the troops were blessed in an outdoor mass, and at dawn on the 12th, led by the Polish king, they charged down the hillside straight into the Turkish camp.

  A defensive line of Turkish trenches to the north-west of the city was quickly overwhelmed,11 and after a fierce but one-sided battle the Turks were routed. They fled in disarray, unable even to dismantle their tents or pack up goods and equipment. It was the last attempt by a Turkish army to invade Europe.

  King Jan Sobieski of Poland became an instant hero across Eu-rope, to this day revered by Poles who will tell you that their king saved Christendom and that had it not been for him Europe would now be Muslim. Kolschitzky became an instant hero in Vienna and a grateful Emperor Leopold asked him to choose a reward from the bounty the Turks had left behind.

  And what exactly had the Turks left behind? The inventory included 25,000 tents, 10,000 oxen, 5,000 camels, 100,000 bushels of grain, a huge quantity of gold, and hundreds of sacks filled with green beans that no one in Vienna had seen before or knew what use to make of them. No one except Kolschitzky, who from his time in Istanbul knew instantly that they were coffee beans. He asked the emperor for the sacks and their contents, and permission to open an establishment serving the drink he would make from the beans, known as coffee. The emperor was only too pleased to oblige.

  Thus Vienna acquired its first coffee house, or café, and the Viennese first fell in love with the drink that would come to epitomise them. Well, not quite that easily. For, as the legend goes, the drink that Kolschitzky first brewed was much too bitter for Viennese tastes and it failed to catch on.

  Then someone suggested to Kolschitzky that he should add milk. This improved matters considerably, but still he failed to make a success of the venture. Another suggestion: why don’t you use cream instead of milk, and whip it?

  The rest, as they say, is history. Now it might well be that these last few details have accrued something in the telling, but the fact remains that to this day there is a street in Vienna named after Georg Franz Kolschitzky, the Kolschitzkygasse, and on the corner of it, on the first floor, is a statue of Kolschitzky in Turkish garb, holding a tray with coffee cups, erected by a grateful Coffee Makers Guild of Vienna.

  To say that Kolschitzky started something is an understatement. Cafés proliferated across the city. By the 1830s there were eighty coffee houses in the city centre, and at least fifty more in the suburbs. This coincided with an equally extensive proliferation of dance halls in Vienna. As a new century dawned there were the beginnings of mechanical industry that within a few decades would revolutionise people’s lives. There was more wealth than ever before, and with it the Viennese demanded more entertainment, more opportunity for relaxation.

  That meant music, and music meant dancing. Coffee houses became ever more numerous, and dance halls – taking their cue from Paris – became more and more luxurious. Elaborate chandeliers hung from the ceiling, a thousand wax candles glittering in them. In the centre of one hall, the Apollo Palace, sat an immense rock from which springs flowed out in tumbling cascades, down into large tanks filled with live fish.

  But the most sensational import from the French capital was wooden parquet flooring, never before seen in Vienna. What could be better for the new dance that was swiftly becoming a craze? The waltz was taking hold in Vienna at just the time the young Johann Strauss I was weighing up the possibilities of a solo career. The style and rhythms of the music came naturally to him. He played it and he wrote it, and the Viennese delighted in it.

  In a remarkable confluence of increased sophistication, public taste, a desire for change, and the move into a new century, the waltz took hold in Vienna, never to leave it. It could not have been a better moment for a certain young musician to strike out on his own, form his own orchestra, experiment with his own compositions, see if he could make a name for himself.

  Johann Strauss the Elder was on his way.

  But things were not easy. Johann Strauss had a growing family, mouths to feed. A second son, Josef, was born less than two years after Johann junior, followed by two girls, Anna and Therese, again at two-yearly intervals. A fifth child lived only ten months, and in March 1835 the couple’s sixth and last child, Eduard, was born. A growing family necessitated more living space and they moved house four times in under ten years, each time to more expensive accommodation.

  It meant Johann senior had to work hard, and this he certainly did. Compositions poured from him. By the time of his first real success, the ‘Sperls Fest-Walzer’, a piece he composed to celebrate his debut at Vienna’s newest and most prestigious dance hall, the Sperl, he had already composed nearly thirty pieces, not just waltzes but gallops as well.

  As his fame grew, musicians clamoured to work with him, and he was impressing some rather big names in the world of music. Writing with characteristic hyperbole, a certain Richard Wagner, who visited Vienna in the summer of 1832, said:

  I shall never forget the extraordinary playing of Johann Strauss, who … made the audience almost frantic with delight. At the beginning of a new waltz this demon of the Viennese musical spirit shook like a Pythian princess on the tripod, and veritable groans of ecstasy which, without doubt, were more due to his music than to the drinks in which the audience had indulged, raised their worship for the magic violinist to almost bewildering heights of frenzy.

  Strauss had learned well from the flamboyance of Michael Pamer. Frédéric Chopin too, then only twenty-one, noted a year earlier that ‘Lanner, Strauss and their waltzes obscure everything’.

  But Johann Strauss was soon to leave Lanner far behind, as word of the magic that this remarkable young musician seemed to instil in audiences, and the flamboyance with which he led his orchestra from the violin – ‘His own limbs no longer belong to him when the desert storm of his waltz is let loose, his fiddle bow dances with his arms, the melody waves champagne glasses in his face,’ wrote one reveller after an evening at the Sperl – spread beyond his home city of Vienna.

  It was not long before Johann Strauss and his orchestra took to the road. A short trip down the Danube led to a sparkling performance in Pest – ‘Herr Strauss triumphed … with the first stroke of his bow’ – and after several more months of concerts and balls in Vienna, Strauss received an extraordinary invitation to travel with his orchestra to Berlin.

  Berlin, capital of Prussia, formal, correct, proper, militaristic, as far removed from the easy-going culture of Vienna several hundred miles to the south as it was possible to be. But this was no ordinary invitation. Strauss found himself performing before the King of Prussia at his court, and his highly distinguished guests the Tsar and Empress of Russia.

  �
��Everywhere they played the audience seemed to relish a feeling of liberation, as if they were at last given permission to get up and dance.”

  So enthralled were the royal personages that the king rewarded Strauss handsomely with a fee so large it was packed in a satchel, and the tsar presented him with a golden snuffbox. A normally sober-minded and restrained Berlin newspaper critic wrote, ‘Look at little Strauss. He has turned all our good citizens into Viennese.’ Another was so overwhelmed that he seemed to lose control of his critical faculties:

  I am so happy, so joyful, so glad that I want to kiss the heavens with their stars; so recklessly, deliriously happy that I want to embrace the whole world and press it to my heart! And why? Because I have heard him! I have heard Johann Strauss!

  On the return journey to Vienna, Strauss and his orchestra performed in Leipzig, Dresden and Prague. Months later they left on another tour – a three-month trip through southern Germany, performing forty concerts in nineteen different towns. The following year saw their most extensive and ambitious tour to date. It lasted almost four months and took them back to Prague and Leipzig, then to Hanover and Hamburg, from there to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Brussels, and finally back to Vienna to arrive the day before New Year’s Eve, 1835.

  Everywhere the orchestra played the audience seemed to relish a feeling of liberation, as if they had at last been given permission to get up and dance, to smile and laugh, sing and shout, drink and dance their troubles away. Johann Strauss had struck a chord, literally.

  As well as the unique sight – certainly outside Vienna – of seeing Strauss leading from the violin, swaying in time to the music, his waving bow a thousand times more expressive than a conductor’s baton, there was something else that set Johann Strauss apart. He would frequently mark a visit to a town or city by composing a new piece in its honour, and performing it before a suitably flattered audience.