The Last Waltz Page 4

  Small wonder the itinerary would end in total physical breakdown for Strauss, with London’s leading musical journal, The Musical World, reporting (with a touch of malice): ‘Strauss, who is on his hotel bed, finds himself successful, much applauded, very rich – and dying.’

  It began badly. After a difficult overnight Channel crossing, Strauss found that the hotel he had booked in London’s Leicester Square not only could not accommodate the entire party, causing some of the men to stay elsewhere, but it was also not clean, did not have a dining room, and the food was poor. To exacerbate matters Strauss discovered soon after checking in that a large sum of money, almost £100, had been stolen from his room.

  There was nothing he could do immediately, since the first concert was scheduled in less than a week at the Queen’s Concert Rooms in Hanover Square. His priority was arranging the programme and rehearsing. Strauss’s mood was hardly improved when he learned that tickets were not selling well – poor weather, lack of advertising, a hit on at Covent Garden, and ridiculously expensive tickets at 10/6d.16

  It is not hard to imagine the weariness with which Strauss must have mounted the podium, and the feeling of ‘here we go again’ among the players. That might account for the review in the following morning’s Times, which accused Strauss of so drilling conformity and precision into his orchestra, that ‘an effect is produced like that of an accurately constructed machine’.

  Soon afterwards Strauss, known for his fi eriness and quick temper, exploded. Things had got on top of him and the tour had barely started. He ordered his men to leave the awful hotel immediately, without giving due notice. The hotel proprietor, a certain George Street, took Strauss to court, and so Europe’s most famous travelling composer and orchestral leader found himself up before a bewigged judge in London, in a scene that might well have inspired a young London author by the name of Charles Dickens.

  Strauss was fortunate to escape with a fi ne of just £27 16s, but was ordered to pay court costs of £140, money that he did not have. Under Britain’s notorious bankruptcy laws debtor prison beckoned for the whole entourage, which would have brought the nascent tour to an embarrassing and undignifi ed end. The perilous situation was saved by a London music publisher named Robert Cocks, who offered to put the money up in return for the rights to publish Strauss’s waltzes in Britain. Strauss knew this would cause problems with his Austrian publisher Tobias Haslinger, but reasoned that he had more chance of squaring things back in Vienna than in a strange city whose customs and laws were alien to him, whose people he did not know, and whose language he did not speak.

  He therefore accepted Mr Cocks’ offer, something for which the London publisher had reason to be grateful many times over in the coming years. The court case was resolved and the tour was back on.

  Between that first concert on 17 April and the end of July, Strauss and his orchestra gave a total of seventy-nine performances in London alone, and the list of hosts for whom he performed reads like a Who’s Who of English aristocracy: the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of Devonshire, the Duke of Cambridge, the Duke of Buccleuch and Sutherland, the Countess of Cadogan and Mrs Lionel de Rothschild, as well as the ambassadors of Austria and France. There were also two public balls, two charity concerts, thirty-nine public concerts, and three large-scale concerts shared with other high-profile artists.17

  The ultimate accolade, though, came with the invitation to perform in the presence of the young Princess Victoria in Buckingham House, the building she was about to make her official royal palace. This took place on 10 May, and Strauss followed his usual practice of performing a piece specially composed for the occasion. This was the waltz ‘Hommage à la Reine d’Angleterre’,18 which tactfully quoted from ‘Rule, Britannia’ in its introduction and ‘God Save the Queen’ in waltz tempo in its coda. The Times reported that Strauss’s new waltz was much admired by the future queen, and thereafter Strauss made sure he included it in future performances following the coronation, both at the Palace and elsewhere on tour.

  And what a tour he now embarked on. Even while resident in London, Strauss and the orchestra made a five-day visit to Cheltenham and Bath, and on leaving London at the end of July they began a six-week tour of England, Scotland and Ireland. In all they would perform in thirty-one different towns and cities, making return visits by popular demand to several of them.

  On many days they gave three performances in three different venues: matinee, late afternoon, and evening. It was reported Strauss could now command fees of £200 or more for a performance – a substantial amount at that time. The constant travel was made easier by advances in modes of transport. Strauss himself wrote of the tour:

  I found myself in a different town almost daily, as one may travel here exceedingly quickly by virtue of the good horses and excellent roads … Of great advantage to the traveller are the railways, which I have used extensively, in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, etc. …

  But there was one feature of life in the United Kingdom over which Strauss could have no control: the weather. October in Scotland was cold and wet. There was a week of ceaseless rain, coaches had trouble making headway through the mud, and several members of the orchestra came down with colds or worse. A local doctor prescribed a concoction of claret, nutmeg and ginger, ‘hot enough to wake the dead’. Still they performed. It was thus a group of musicians of depleted strength that made the crossing to Ireland, and all the more so on their return.

  It was inevitable that sooner or later a work schedule of this intensity would catch up with Strauss and his men. It did so in the north of England. In November Strauss was reported to be suffering from ‘illness of a serious character’. He had severe shivering fits, a hacking cough and chest pains. Concerts in Derby and Leicester were postponed. A doctor in Derby did little to improve things, by prescribing Strauss a dangerously strong dose of opium that almost killed him.

  It is possible, even probable, that Strauss did not receive much sympathy from his men. This time they really had had enough. They had been away from home now for over a year, and they wanted to return to Vienna. A small but militant clique warned Strauss that if he did not promise that they would leave for home soon, they would refuse to play on.

  There was another factor at work here, hidden not so far beneath the surface. The members of the orchestra were well aware of Johann Strauss’s domestic arrangements back home in Vienna. He had a wife and children in the family home on the edge of the Augarten. He also had a mistress and illegitimate children in the apartment he had set up for them near St Stephen’s Cathedral in the centre of the city.

  Life for Strauss in Vienna was complicated. Life on tour, on the road, was an escape from all that. What if it was his plan, they conjectured, never to return? To stay away on tour for year after year. And how could he achieve that? Simple. By putting into action a plan he had mentioned more than once: the ultimate ambition. Board a ship for the United States. Succeed there, and there would be no need ever to return to Vienna and all the complications it held for him. Had he not implied as much when they were on tour in Ireland? Look west, he had told them, there is nothing between here and America. That is where we must go.

  Strauss knew about the mutterings. He had a few faithful members of the orchestra who reported to him every nuance of what was being said. He also knew that, however much not returning to Vienna would solve domestic issues for him, he had no choice but to go back. He could not abrogate his responsibilities totally.

  There was also the question of his health. He needed to consult with doctors who knew him and with whom he could at least converse in his own language. This latest bout of ill health had scared him. When the postponed concerts in Derby and Leicester had eventually taken place, he only had the strength to conduct the first half. That had not happened before. Something had to give.

  “The last thing that the Paris doctors wanted was to preside over the demise of the most famous musician in Europe.”

  It was therefore
a relieved orchestra that was told by Strauss that the tour was over and they would cross to Calais on the first leg of the return journey to Vienna. This they did on 2 December, almost eight months after arriving in England and fourteen months after leaving Vienna.

  Strauss was not finished yet, though. It must have taken some persuasion on his part, and probably promises of increased remuneration, but he somehow managed to secure his orchestra’s agreement to give a farewell concert in the rooms of the Philharmonic Society in Calais.

  It did not go according to plan. In the third item on the programme he collapsed and fell from the podium. There was no swift recovery this time. He was taken to Paris where doctors warned him he needed substantial rest before making another move. He retorted that he was suffering from nothing more than exhaustion, and that after a few weeks of rest and recuperation he would be well enough to resume concerts – right there in Paris.

  Reality dawned when he was informed that his orchestra was miles away, well advanced on their return to Vienna. This time, for the first time, he was no longer in control. Nor was his health improving. He lapsed into delirium several more times but was able to make it clear that he wished to return to Vienna to see his own doctors. There was agreement over this, not least because the last thing that the Paris doctors wanted was to preside over the demise of possibly the most famous musician in Europe.

  A coach was fitted out with a bed and Strauss began the long journey home. The icy cold December air did nothing to improve his condition and, despite being piled high with blankets, he suffered a relapse in Strasbourg. Eventually the journey continued slowly, passing through Stuttgart, Ulm, Munich, and across the border into Austria. The one orchestral member who had stayed behind to accompany him reported an immediate improvement in his condition when he heard the Austrian accents in the town of Linz on the Danube. He arrived in Vienna three days before Christmas 1838, almost fifteen months since his departure. The Theaterzeitung reported, ‘Strauss has at last arrived in Vienna, but suffering so much that it will be a considerable time before he is fully recovered.’

  With typical bravado, even foolhardiness, Johann Strauss was back on the podium two weeks later, on 13 January 1839, at a ball in the Sperl, the dance hall he knew so well. For the occasion – again deploying the tactic at which he was so adept – he performed a piece he had composed specially for the occasion, ‘Freuden-Grüsse (Motto: Überall gut – in der Heimath am besten)’, ‘Joyful Greetings (Motto: Everywhere is good – at home is best)’.

  Johann Strauss was welcomed back rapturously by his many admirers, his most loyal fans. To them he was a returning hero. Word had regularly come back to Vienna of how the English, considered snobbish, inimical to foreign influences, had taken him to their hearts. And had their own Johann not performed for the young Queen Victoria? Who could match that, not just from Vienna, but from any other country in Europe? Strauss, the most famous musician in Europe, and he was theirs.

  Strauss must have wished it were that simple. He had, of course, come home to his messy and complicated domestic arrangements. Meanwhile much had changed during the fifteen months of his absence. The Vienna he returned to was a different city to the one he had left all those months ago. The change was not overt, but it was there.

  The chancellor, Klemens von Metternich, had tightened his grip on the city. He needed to. His network of spies had never been so busy. There was a dangerous mood, an undercurrent, that was gaining strength. Students, writers, poets and playwrights were writing material they knew to be seditious, dangerous, liable to lead to their arrest.

  As a new decade dawned, so did a new feeling that the repression of the last twenty or more years could not endure. Whispers became voices. The cosy domesticity of the Biedermeier era contained within itself the inevitable seeds of change. We know now, with the benefit of hindsight, that it would be just a few more years before change would come, and that when it did it would explode with a force that would change Europe for ever.

  What Johann Strauss could not in his most fantastical dreams have imagined was that when change did come, it would not only sweep away the established order, it would take him along with it.

  16 A comparison with today’s prices is difficult, but a rough equivalent would be between £80 and £100.

  17 At the ball given by the Duke of Sutherland, Strauss was also a guest, invited to join the Duke’s table after the performance, a practice not uncommon in Paris or Vienna, but practically unheard of in the class-conscious milieu of Britain.

  18 Although the coronation of Queen Victoria was still six weeks away.

  It was not just a different Vienna that Johann Strauss returned to, but a subtly altered set – or sets – of domestic circumstances. It appears Strauss did not just prefer the company of his mistress and illegitimate family, but had developed an intense disregard for his wife and legitimate children.

  While he was abroad on tour he had used an intermediary to send large amounts of money – secretly – to Emilie Trampusch. On his return he moved back into the large family house, the Hirschenhaus, but lived in a separate apartment within it. Whether he insisted on this arrangement, or Anna banished him to his own quarters, is not known. Quite probably it was Johann’s doing, since the apartment gave him room to live and work: he could compose there, he had an office from which to run the orchestra’s complicated schedule, and in the large main room there was space actually to rehearse with his players. Anna would also have been forced to rely on him for housekeeping money. He held the purse strings, literally.

  His wife’s public humiliation was made complete by the fact that in the seven years after his return to Vienna he fathered a further five children with Emilie. He might have lived in the family house but he clearly spent a lot of time in the Kumpfgasse. The atmosphere in the Hirschenhaus, at least when Strauss was there, must have been tense, to say the least. He was not happy in the company of his family, and the clear dislike he had for his wife was something he also exhibited towards his children.

  The two elder boys were developing a talent for playing the piano, and Johann II would recall in later years how he and Josef would watch their father conduct orchestral rehearsals in the house, ‘paying close attention to every note, so that we familiarised ourselves with his style and then played what we heard straight off, in exactly the same spirited manner as he had. He was our ideal.’

  The admiration was not reciprocated. Johann said his father had no idea his two sons were talented pianists and that when they finally demonstrated their skills to him, he accused them of ‘tinkling at the keys in an amateurish fashion’.

  Their father went further. There was to be no thought on either of their parts of a career in music. He would not allow it. Instead they were to continue with normal school studies. And so in 1841, when Johann was fifteen and Josef thirteen, they were enrolled as students in the Commercial Studies Department of the Polytechnic Institute of Vienna. Strauss planned a career in banking for his eldest son, and engineering for the younger.

  Johann II, at least, had other plans, and he confided in his closest ally, his mother. He was in no doubt that he wanted his future to be in music. Furthermore he had no intention of becoming a banker, nor did he intend remaining at the Polytechnic Institute. His mother, it appears, sided entirely with him, and it is not difficult to understand why. In the first place Johann’s musical talent was blindingly obvious, and his father’s refusal to see it must have been deliberate obstinacy. The boy had actually composed his first waltz at the age of six and given the manuscript page with a mere twenty-one bars of a simple melody in three-four time to an impressed mother.

  Now, at the same time as attending the Polytechnic Institute and with money in the household in short supply, he was giving music lessons to children of friends. He was himself just fifteen years of age, and he was already bringing in funds with his natural talent at the piano.

  Probably too there was the feeling at the back of Anna’s mind that to do so
mething surreptitious, that her husband was unaware of, would be somehow getting back at him for the hurt he had caused her. And what if her eldest son proved to have real musical talent? Wouldn’t that be a delicious irony? What better way for her and her family to avenge themselves than by outstripping her husband in the very area in which he excelled?

  So when Johann came to his mother and said he wanted to give up his studies and devote himself to music, he found a willing and accommodating pair of ears. There was more to Johann’s plan. He did not want simply to become a musician so that he could perform at the piano, or earn a living giving piano lessons. Oh no, his mind was set on greater things. He had observed his father and learned from him. He admired what his father was doing in music. He might not have enjoyed anything approaching a close father–son relationship, but his father – unwittingly – was providing him with knowledge and inspiration, and his son, even at the tender age of fifteen, knew exactly what use he intended to make of this.

  He turned to his mother. He wanted to learn the violin. He knew his father would never agree to this. He wanted to reach a level of proficiency where he could form his own orchestra and give concerts of his own compositions. In other words, to follow exactly in his father’s musical footsteps. He assured his mother that he could pay for lessons with the money his own teaching was bringing in. Anna willingly entered the conspiracy and went straight into the enemy camp, as it were, by approaching one Franz Amon, first violinist in her husband’s own orchestra, who deputised for him on occasion as conductor with a second group when Strauss himself was on tour.