1825–1899 · Austria · Romantic
Johann Strauss the Younger (1825–1899) was an Austrian composer, conductor and violinist who was called the "Waltz King". He created 496 works: waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, marches and fifteen operettas, among them Die Fledermaus and The Gypsy Baron. The site offers "Thunder and Lightning" (Op. 324) and an aria from Die Fledermaus.
Johann was born into the family of the well-known Austrian composer Johann Strauss the Elder. Two of his four brothers, Josef and Eduard, also became well-known composers. His father saw a future banker in him and could not bear the sight of a violin in his hands, so the boy studied in secret, with his mother's help.
His father enrolled him at the Higher School of Business and made him spend his evenings on bookkeeping. By 1844 Johann had completed his musical training: his teachers, Franz Amon among them, gave him excellent recommendations, which he needed to obtain a licence for the profession.
When Johann applied to the magistrate for a licence to conduct an orchestra, his mother filed for divorce, fearing that Strauss the Elder would block the licence. In response his father cut the children of that marriage out of his inheritance. After his parents' divorce, with his mother's support, the son was able to devote himself fully to a career as a composer.
Soon Strauss managed to gather a small orchestra of his own and performed successfully at Dommayer's casino in Vienna. Most of the repertoire consisted of his own compositions. At first his father's jealousy got in the way: he blacklisted the venues where his son played and kept him away from the court balls. Thanks to the admirers of the younger Johann's talent, however, he was appointed bandmaster of the military band of the second regiment of the civic militia, while his father led the band of the first regiment.
The revolution of 1848 deepened the conflict between father and son still further. Strauss the Elder backed the monarchy and wrote the Radetzky March. During the revolution Strauss the Younger played the Marseillaise and himself composed a number of revolutionary marches and waltzes. After the revolution was put down he was brought to trial but in the end acquitted.
In 1849 Strauss the Elder died of scarlet fever. At his father's grave Johann played Mozart's Requiem, dedicated the waltz Aeolian Harp to his memory and published his father's complete works at his own expense. His father's orchestra decided to join the musicians of the son, and the combined orchestra toured Austria, Poland and Germany, with huge success everywhere.
To mend relations with the new emperor Franz Joseph I, Strauss dedicated two marches to him. In 1852 he was given all his father's duties at court balls and concerts. There were so many invitations that he often sent one of his brothers in his place. He envied no one and joked that his brothers were more talented, he was simply more popular.
Strauss's first tour of Russia took place in 1856. He was given the post of regular conductor of the summer concerts at the Pavlovsk station; the salary was 22 thousand roubles per season. During five years of performing in Pavlovsk he fell seriously for a Russian girl, Olga Smirnitskaya, but her parents did not allow the marriage to take place.
In 1862 Strauss married the opera singer Jetty Chalupetzky, who performed under the name Treffz. The family was a happy one: Henrietta was both his wife and his impresario. Only six weeks after she was gone, in 1878, Strauss married a young German singer, Angelika Dittrich, but the union soon fell apart.
The third marriage, in 1882, turned out to be the last: Johann's wife became Adele Deutsch. She was Jewish and did not intend to convert to Christianity, and the Catholic Church would have refused to marry the couple. To arrange the new marriage Strauss converted to Protestantism and obtained German citizenship. In 1887 the marriage with Adele was finally formalised, and their life together went well. Strauss had no children, although he was married three times.
Strauss's talent flowered around the turn of the 1860s and 1870s. That was when his best waltzes appeared, among them The Blue Danube and Tales from the Vienna Woods, along with his best operettas. In 1870 he gave up his court duties, which passed to his brother Eduard, and devoted himself to operetta. In the same year his brother Josef unexpectedly died, aged 43.
In the 1870s Strauss's orchestra toured Britain, France and the USA. At the music festival in Boston he conducted an orchestra of more than a thousand musicians, which was a world record. In 1871, on Offenbach's advice, Strauss wrote his first operetta, Indigo and the Forty Robbers, which the public received well. In all he wrote fifteen operettas.
The operetta Die Fledermaus (1874) at first had no great success with the public, yet it stayed in the repertoire of Viennese theatres for many years. The real triumph came only twenty years later, after a new version by Gustav Mahler in Hamburg. In 1885 Strauss composed The Gypsy Baron, based on Mór Jókai's story Saffi. The music has a distinctly Hungarian colour, and among Strauss's operettas this is the most "operatic".
In 1880 Strauss travelled to Paris to see Offenbach off on his last journey.
The whole of Europe held celebrations for the composer's seventieth birthday in 1895. In his last years he rarely gave concerts and seldom left his house. For the 25th anniversary of Die Fledermaus he was nevertheless persuaded to take the podium and conduct the overture. Strauss grew so heated that he caught a bad cold on the way back.
The composer died on 3 June 1899 in Vienna; he was 73, and the cause of death was pneumonia. The ballet Cinderella was left unfinished: Josef Bayer completed it the following year. Strauss was buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery.
Strauss left his fortune to a musical society, and Adele received only an annuity. She outlived him by 31 years and devoted herself entirely to the Strauss museum and the publication of his works.
After Strauss's death several operettas assembled from various works of his were staged. The first was Wiener Blut, whose leitmotif is his waltz of the same name. The composer had given permission for it shortly before his death, but it had no success on the stage.
In his lifetime Johann Strauss created 496 works: 168 waltzes, 117 polkas, 73 quadrilles, 43 marches, 31 mazurkas, 15 operettas, a comic opera and a ballet. He raised dance music to symphonic heights, just as Gershwin later did with jazz. His works were admired by composers as different as Offenbach and Wagner, Lehár and Tchaikovsky.
Among his best-known waltzes are Liebeslieder (op. 114), Abschied von St Petersburg (op. 210), An der schönen blauen Donau (op. 314), Künstlerleben (op. 316), Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald (op. 325), Wein, Weib und Gesang (op. 333), Frühlingsstimmen (op. 410) and Kaiser-Walzer (op. 437).
For the theatre Strauss wrote operettas: Indigo and the Forty Robbers, Eine Nacht in Venedig, Die Fledermaus and The Gypsy Baron. He also wrote an opera, Ritter Pásmán. His only ballet, Cinderella, reached the stage only after the composer's death.
Strauss's other operettas include Der Karneval in Rom (1873), Cagliostro in Wien (1875), Das Spitzentuch der Königin (1880), Fürstin Ninetta (1893) and Die Göttin der Vernunft (1897). After the composer's death one more, Wiener Blut (1899), was put together from his music.
Strauss's music is heard in films too. Director Stanley Kubrick used Karajan's recording of the waltz The Blue Danube in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The waltz Wiener Blut is heard in the "Mouse Johann" episode of the cartoon Tom and Jerry and in Guy Ritchie's film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, in an arrangement by Hans Zimmer.
The site has two of his pieces at the advanced level: "Thunder and Lightning" (Op. 324) for solo piano and the aria "Ich lade gern mir Gäste ein" from the operetta Die Fledermaus for voice and piano.