The Last Waltz Read online

  For that first visit to Pest, he composed ‘Emlek Pestre – Erinnerung an Pesth’ (‘Memory of Pest’), and for Berlin ‘Erinnerung an Berlin’ (‘Memory of Berlin’). By the time he returned to Vienna at the end of 1835 he had composed more than eighty pieces; more than eighty opus numbers to his name. Vienna had not seen anything like it. Johann Strauss, barely turned thirty years of age, was a phenomenon.

  But his new-found fame was coming at a price. On his return from Pest – and that was before Berlin and the other towns and cities – Strauss wrote to his doctor, ‘My left arm is very strained, which I attribute to my playing the violin, which hurts me.’ Not a good omen for the future. There was another problem too, and one he could do nothing about. Despite the extraordinary reviews and seemingly ubiquitous adulation, Strauss’s music was not meeting with universal approval. In certain sectors of Protestant northern Germany there was open hostility towards the waltz, which was, in the eyes of these strict moralists, an infestation from the Catholic south.

  The dance was condemned as ‘an incitement to sinful passion’, and decried as ‘demoralising and lewd’. Protestant zealots recruited the medical profession to their side and published a treatise entitled Proof That the Waltz is a Main Cause of the Weakness of Body and Mind of Our Generation.12 They could point to actual harm caused by the waltz. Some dancers had fainted due to over-exertion and there had even been reports of deaths. These sad occurrences had affected men more than women, a sure sign – as the opposition were careful to avoid saying – of enjoyment and indulgence taken to extreme.

  These were not just a small number of disaffected Protestants preaching to deaf ears. In some towns they succeeded in having their opposition to the waltz enshrined in law on the grounds that it was inimical to health. In others, including cities as important as Magdeburg and Frankfurt, police edicts were issued against the ‘improper and horrible turning of women by men’, particularly if done in such a manner as ‘to make skirts fly up and reveal too much’.

  Disaffection with the waltz, though, could not last. It was impossible to withstand the avalanche of popularity and enthusiasm that swept not just Austria and Germany but beyond their borders and across Europe. Johann Strauss and his orchestra were growing more popular internationally by the day, and the name of Johann Strauss was fast becoming the best-loved musical name in Europe. What could possibly go wrong? The answer is a lot. Nothing to do with music. It was much nearer home than that, and it was to have a profound effect on the Strausses of the next generation.

  10 Variously Kolschitzky, Koltschitzki, Kulczycki.

  11 On the site today stands a large park called the Türkenschanzpark, ‘Turkish trench park’.

  12 Beweis, dass der Walzer eine Hauptquelle der Schwäche des Körpers und des Geistes unserer Generation sey.

  Life ‘on the road’ held many attractions for Johann Strauss I, not least the perfect justification to absent himself from a naturally disorganised household with five children ranging, at the end of 1835, from ten years of age to twelve months.

  There were also all the temptations open to a young, highly attractive man, spending every night away from home. I have already noted Strauss’s unusual complexion, compared to the typically blond Viennese Joseph Lanner. Strauss’s paternal grandparents were both Jewish, and he had inherited their dark complexion.13 He had lustrous black wavy hair and there are numerous descriptions of his sparkling eyes, dazzling good looks and magnetic personality.

  There was no shortage of female admirers at his concerts, and Strauss was not reluctant to benefit from what was on offer. There is no doubt word got back to Anna in Vienna, and she seems to have accepted his transgressions as a price to be paid for a successful and lucrative career, which had allowed the family to move into a spacious and elegant house in a smart area of the city. That changed, though, when Anna received information that suggested that one liaison had become rather more permanent than the others, that Johann in fact had a mistress, not in some distant town, but in Vienna itself.

  Emilie Sophia Anna Trampusch14 was, by all accounts, an attractive and charming young woman who worked as a milliner. Ten years younger than Strauss, she lived in a small apartment in Kumpfgasse, close to St Stephen’s Cathedral in the centre of the city. The Strausses’ house was across the Danube canal in Taborstrasse, which ran alongside the leafy and green Augarten park, a carriage ride of not more than ten or fifteen minutes from St Stephen’s.

  “There was no shortage of female admirers at his concerts, and Strauss was not reluctant to benefit from what was on offer.”

  It is probable the liaison began before Strauss left on that first tour. But what Anna was totally unprepared for was the news that reached her just two months after her youngest child, Eduard, was born. Emilie had borne Strauss an illegitimate daughter, and he was openly and brazenly admitting he was the father.

  Far from being repentant, he continued the relationship, and exactly one year and ten days later Emilie gave birth again, this time to a son. He was christened Johann Wilhelm. Anna now had to contend not only with the fact that her husband had a second family, but that the eldest son was named Johann, just as her eldest son was.

  It did not end there. Over the following ten years Emilie gave birth six more times. Only three of the eight children survived into adulthood and they were the three eldest, two daughters and a son. All three kept their mother’s name, so that there was one Johann Strauss senior and two half-brothers, Johann Strauss junior and Johann Trampusch. None of the three illegitimate Strauss children has earned even a footnote in history. I find it surprising, given that their father was an extraordinarily gifted musician and their mother later became an actress – artistic talent therefore to some extent on both sides – that none of the three possessed any aptitude in music or any other of the arts.15 It is perhaps even more surprising that his three legitimate sons all became prolific composers, one of undoubted genius.

  Johann Strauss senior had fathered fourteen children with two women in twenty-one years. He had two families and ran two households, which was an open secret among musical circles in Vienna. During roughly the same period he had composed the best part of a hundred pieces, and his name was becoming known across Europe, which quite simply had never seen a musician like Johann Strauss. He composed most of the pieces he performed. Broadly they were a mixture of gallops, waltzes and polkas, all designed for dance and amusement. They were not just trifles. It did not take the musically sophisticated Viennese long to realise these were substantial pieces, perfectly calculated to entertain an audience.

  There was also his infectious personality. He did more than simply lead from the violin; the music seemed to inhabit his body. Swaying with the violin under his chin one moment, waving it – and the bow – in the air the next, turning to the audience while playing, smiling all the time. And his were not audiences sitting in serried rows of seats, formally attired, speaking only in the quietest of whispers, taking care not to cough. These were dance-hall audiences, eating, drinking, laughing, conversing and, most importantly of all, dancing.

  “He did more than simply lead from the violin; the music seemed to inhabit his body.”

  Given his growing reputation it was hardly surprising when an invitation came to travel to the most sophisticated city, artistically speaking, in mainland Europe, where audiences were notoriously critical, even cruel. It would be a challenge, a risk. The Strauss sounds and rhythms might be much loved in central Europe, but how would they go down nearly eight hundred miles to the west, in Paris?

  In the late afternoon of 4 October 1837 Johann Strauss and an orchestra of twenty-eight musicians boarded coaches for the overland journey to the French capital. There were several stop-offs on the way for concerts in southern Germany, and then in Strasbourg. They arrived in Paris on 27 October, no doubt exhausted from an arduous journey with performances along the way. The first concert was scheduled for 1 November, giving them just four days to recover, settle in and rehe
arse.

  To add to his anxiety Strauss learned that tickets had been sold at inflated prices, and his nerves were hardly calmed when he was informed that the cream of Parisian musical society would be in the audience. The most recognisable, with his mop of carrot-coloured hair, was also the most revered, Hector Berlioz. Other respected names, if not at this first concert then at subsequent performances, were Meyerbeer, Cherubini, Auber and Adolphe Adam (whose most famous ballet Giselle was still four years off).

  It was with understandable trepidation therefore that Johann Strauss mounted the podium in front of his orchestra in the Salle des Gymnases. He need not have worried. Using flattery once again as a potent weapon – ‘Der Carneval in Paris’ and the ‘Paris Walzer’ (which contained a quotation from La Marseillaise in waltz-time!) had been specially composed – even this sophisticated Parisian audience could not resist the infectious sounds and rhythms of the Strauss orchestra.

  Berlioz himself, considered by many (including himself) to be the natural successor of Beethoven, no less, wrote in the Journal des Débats:

  We knew the name of Strauss, but that was all. Of the fire, the intelligence, and the rhythmic feeling which his orchestra displays, we had no notion … Their waltzes are difficult to play, but how easily the Viennese accomplish it, how they charm us with their piquant rhythmic coquetry!

  Where Berlioz led others followed, and it can have come as no surprise to Strauss that he soon received a formal invitation to perform at the very top – at the Tuileries Palace in the presence of King Louis-Philippe of France.

  This was a very different monarchy from the one that had been brutally terminated less than a half-century earlier. Louis-Philippe was a distant relative of the ill-fated Louis XVI and enjoyed a fully aristocratic upbringing, but had some sympathy with the revolutionaries’ aims, if not methods, and was keen to portray himself as a man of the people. So successful was he, at least in the early years of his reign, that he earned the sobriquet ‘The Bourgeois King’.

  Strauss and his men walked along the same corridors that had been stormed and in which the blood of the Swiss Guard was spilled during the revolution, to be greeted personally by the king, which no doubt surprised Strauss who was more accustomed to the rigid etiquette and formality of Vienna. He was flattered to hear the king say, ‘Your waltzes have been familiar to me for a long time, my dear Herr Strauss. It gives me all the more pleasure that you have done me the honour of appearing here personally.’

  The success of the performance was a foregone conclusion. Afterwards Louis-Philippe made an impromptu speech of congratulations and thanks to the Viennese musicians, all enjoyed champagne, and the king took both of Strauss’s hands in his – all in all, a scenario that would have been unthinkable in the presence of a French monarch not many years before.

  If the king represented the highest personage Strauss and his musicians were to meet during their stay in Paris, then unquestionably the single musical figure they were most honoured to meet was an Italian violinist whose name was known across Europe. Now in the autumn of his years, suffering from the syphilis he had contracted many years before and a recent bout of pneumonia, Niccolò Paganini attended one of Strauss’s concerts incognito, slipping into the back row unseen.

  But the disguise was instantly spotted and he was ushered to the front of the hall and into a place of honour. Strauss came onto the podium, had his attention directed to the famous musician, instantly left the podium and the two men embraced. In a faltering voice, but clear enough for the audience to hear, Paganini said, ‘I am glad to meet a man who has brought so much joy to the world.’

  Everywhere the orchestra went they were lauded and applauded. Strauss’s musicians were aware that they belonged to the most in-demand orchestra in Europe, that they were travelling to towns and cities they could not otherwise have expected to see in a normal lifetime, meeting royalty, aristocrats, composers, fellow musicians. Yet for the first time since Strauss formed his orchestra, there were the beginnings of an undercurrent of malaise. Not too strong, at least not to begin with, but a matter he would sooner or later have to confront.

  “I am glad to meet a man who has brought so much joy to the world.”

  Paganini upon meeting Strauss in Paris

  By February 1838 the musicians had been away from home and family for the best part of five months, including over Christmas. Several of them had written home bemoaning the fact that the French did not take much notice of Christmas – no Christmas trees! – and when they did it was without a proper sense of its religious significance: dancing in the streets when they should have been attending midnight Mass.

  There was a growing feeling among the players that it was time to return to Vienna. Strauss was aware of the demands he was making on them, the exhausting journeys by horse-drawn carriage, the busy schedule of concerts – often arranged at the last minute. One player wrote home that they were all enjoying a midday meal nine days before Christmas, when Strauss rushed in and told them to hurry up because they needed to leave for Rouen where they had just been booked to play at a masked ball and give three more concerts.

  To head off any complaints about conditions, Strauss had made it a policy to spare no expense when it came to comfort. For the four months of the stay in Paris he took over an entire hotel, and in the particularly harsh Paris winter of 1836–7 he ordered every room to be individually heated. Meals were frequent and abundant, consisting of several courses. All players were paid promptly, and one wrote that several of the men, himself included, had received salary in advance when required. ‘Strauss cares for his men just as a fond father cares for his children,’ he put it.

  But still there were rumblings of discontent, and Strauss knew what no one else in the party knew. There had been a development that was bound to bring matters to a head.

  Across the Channel the people of Britain were preparing for what they knew to be imminent: the death of the old king and the accession to the throne of a young princess by the name of Victoria. The coronation would unleash festivities such as the country had not seen for a long time, and the invitation had come to Johann Strauss for his orchestra to be part of it. Not only had he a pocketful of invitations to perform for members of the aristocracy, but he could also expect to play in the presence of the princess, soon to be queen, in Buckingham Palace. This would be the pinnacle for the young Viennese musician and his orchestra. Turning it down was simply not an option.

  Strauss’s reputation had travelled ahead of him and already there was excitement that this new dance, the waltz, might soon be coming to British shores, with all the opportunities it offered for romance, illicit liaisons and sexual intrigue – none of these pursuits entirely unknown in British aristocratic circles. Sophisticated appetites had been whetted by no less a figure than the poet Lord Byron, who had written:

  Gods! how the glorious theme my strain exalts

  And rhyme finds partner rhyme in praise of ‘Waltz’ …

  Round all the confines of the yielded waist

  The strangest hand may wander undisplaced;

  The lady’s in return may grasp as much

  As princely paunches may offer to her touch …

  Thus front to front the partners move or stand,

  The foot may rest, but none withdraw the hand …

  The breast thus publicly resign’d to man,

  In private may resist him – if it can.

  Strauss delayed announcing to his orchestra until towards the end of the stay in Paris that they were soon to leave for London. His logic was that he wanted nothing to upset the remaining concerts. On the other hand, as the final concert approached there was a palpable feeling of release among the men; soon they would be returning home to Vienna. Predictably the simmering tension broke through to the surface when Strauss made his plans known. One particularly troublesome member of the orchestra, who led a small breakaway faction, convinced his supporters that if they once set foot on board a ship they would be parted fro
m Europe for ever. He, and they, refused point-blank to follow Strauss.

  Strauss took a two-pronged approach to the revolt. First he used attack as a means of defence, reminding the men they had all signed contracts, which he could hold them to. Secondly he stressed how he appreciated all the hard work they had done, how he admired their obvious devotion to him, and how he could guarantee them a pay increase based on the firm offers of work in England. Finally he said that after a lot of thought if any of them absolutely refused to travel further, he would release them from their contract and allow them to return home.

  Four members of the orchestra left. It was thus a barely depleted party of musicians, Johann Strauss at their head, who boarded the appropriately named steamship Princess Victoria in the Dutch port of Flushing on the night of 11 April 1838 for the crossing to England, and the orchestra’s biggest adventure yet.

  13 This led to one of the most bizarre acts of documentary falsification of the Third Reich, as it tried to obliterate any trace of Jewish ancestry in a family that it held up as a perfect example of Aryanism. See chapter 22.

  14 Variously Trampusch, Trambusch, Tramposch. The name, in whichever form, is inelegant to Austrian ears and will have been mocked by her detractors.

  15 There is some evidence the eldest, Emilie, followed her mother onto the stage, but it is not known with what success.

  I have used the word ‘gruelling’ to describe the schedule for Johann Strauss I and his orchestra in previous months. Now they were about to learn what that word really meant. Over the following nine months they would perform well over a hundred times, averaging around four concerts a week, constantly journeying throughout England north and south, as well as making trips to Scotland and Ireland. Strauss continued to compose, as well as directing the orchestra, responding to invitations, arranging travel, booking accommodation, and generally managing the lives – all the tensions, rivalries, minor disputes, unscheduled absences, occasional over-indulgence in alcohol, homesickness – of an orchestra on the road.