Johann Strauss II

“ We now come to Johann Strauss, the oldest of the brothers, born Oct. 25, 1825, and still living. It is not often that a man of genius has a son who attains even greater eminence than himself, but in this case the palm must be awarded to Johann Strauss, Jr., whose creative power was not only greater than that of his brothers, but soared into regions of which even his father never dreamed.
His talent for music was manifested at a very early age, but his father did not encourage it—forgetting how much he himself had suffered in his childhood from parental opposition to his natural inclinations. ”

“ He was an extremely talented young man not only in music but even as architect and inventor. Of more serious and sober disposition than either of his two brothers, he long regarded café-house music condescendingly, his musical preference being for the classics. His famous brother, Johann Strauss II, needing someone to help him direct his orchestra, finally prevailed on Josef to turn to café-house music. Josef made his debut as café-house conductor and composer simultaneously on July 23, 1853, his first waltz being Die Ersten. ”

“ Herr Johann Strauss, with whose dreamy waltzes most of us are familiar, for his part says that he is far too modest to designate any composition as his best. When he finishes one he forgets it completely for a time in the interest caused by his next work. Method he has none—only inspiration, genius—for in his opinion composers can never be made. "One may compose," he says, "very easily, or—not at all." The divine art must be innate, and a composer—like his brother genius, the poet—must be born, and can never be made. The music is taken from one of his well-known waltzes. ”

“ The men seized them tightly and they whirled to the inexorable music when it was a waltz, whirled and whirled, until one thought of the Viennese and how they become as dervishes and Japanese mice when one plays Johann Strauss. ”

“ His mind was always an arena in which dim, vast dreams of music of his own struggled with impressions from other men's music that incessantly thronged his brain as they must that of every busy conductor, and with more or less vague, poetic, philosophical and humanitarian visions. He never quite succeeded in making for himself an idiom unmistakably and exclusively his own; all sorts of composers, from Beethoven and Bruckner to Johann Strauss, seem to nod to each other across his pages. ”

“ Music is part of the life of the Austrian, and the opera house is a national concern, as are also the chief theatres. The names of Austrian composers are legion, for the national genius seems to take this direction more easily than that of literature. Among them is that of Johann Strauss, composer of waltzes, blessed in many countries, many climes; from torrid to Arctic zones his lilting music moves the feet and no less the hearts of those in youth’s spring-time.101 He was born at Vienna in 1804, and is not the only one of his name to win fame with his music. ”

“ STRAUSS, Johann, composer of dance-music of world-wide celebrity, born in Vienna, March 14, 1804. As a child he showed talent for music, and a love for the violin, but his parents, small innkeepers, apprenticed him to a bookbinder, from whom he ran away. A friend met him, took him back, and persuaded the parents to entrust him with the boy's education as a musician. With the son of this benefactor the little Strauss learnt the violin from Polyschansky, afterwards studying harmony and instrumentation with Seyfried. ”

“ He delighted in the music of Strauss' band, which was engaged to play daily at Baden-Baden through some weeks of the season. It was then conducted by the great Johann Strauss, Brahms' particular friend, and he used to walk over every evening to hear it. 'Are you so engrossed?' said a voice behind me one evening as I was standing in the Lichtenthal village street with a friend, looking at the performances of a dancing bear. ”

“ It is only the plain truth to say that Sousa's marches have founded a school; that he has indeed revolutionized march-music. His career resembles that of Johann Strauss in many ways. A certain body of old fogies has always presumed to deride the rapturous waltzes of Strauss, though they have won enthusiastic praise from even the esoteric Brahms, and gained from Wagner such words as these: "One Strauss waltz overshadows, in respect to animation, finesse, and real musical worth, most of the mechanical, bor115rowed, factory-made products of the present time." ”

“ A Wagner music-drama, a Richard Strauss tone poem, seem elaborate and complicated affairs compared with a Beethoven sonata or symphony. Yet even the most advanced work of a Wagner or Strauss is neither as complicated nor as elaborate as a fugue by that past master of his art, Johann Sebastian Bach, who, although he was born in 1685 and did not live beyond the middle of the following century, was so far ahead of his age that not even to this day has he fully come into his own. ”

“ The world requires that music shall suit its varying moods. Some of Johann Strauss' waltzes are quite as genuine music as are Beethoven's symphonies, and each in its own way contributes to the pleasure and benefit of mankind. ”

“ Such an one was Beethoven. On the other hand, a musician may be as limited in the sphere of his activity as any average man of science. Such an one was Johann Strauss, who, in spite of his beautiful melodies, cannot be regarded as a genius if only because of the absence of constructive faculty in him. To come back to the main point; there are many kinds of talent, but only one kind of genius, and that is able to choose any kind of talent and master it. There is something in genius common to all those who possess it ”

“ It was Horace who remarked, almost two thousand years ago, that no man is quite satisfied with his occupation, and everyone fancies he would have been happier had he chosen some other career. This may have been the reason why the elder Strauss, in the midst of his honors and remarkable popularity, decided that none of his sons should become musicians. Johann was to be a merchant, Josef an engineer, and for Eduard, too, some non-musical employment would have been selected had not his father died before he was fourteen. ”

“ I saw and heard the great Johann Strauss—this was the grandfather—and in after years his son, and the schöne Edie his grandson. Everywhere one heard music, and the Prater was a gay and festive paradise indeed. There was no business; the town lived on the Austrian, Hungarian, Bohemian, Russian, and other nobility, who in those days were extravagant and ostentatious to a degree now undreamed of, and on strangers. As for free and easy licentiousness, Paris was a trifle to it, and the police had strict orders to encourage everything of the kind ”

“ In Bitter Sweet, Noel Coward made a conscious effort at writing a romantic, sentimental, nostalgic operetta in the style so long favored in Vienna; indeed it was a hearing of a recording of Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus that proved to be the immediate stimulus in the writing of his text. The setting is for the 65 most part Vienna, and the time the 1880’s. Sari, an English girl, is about to marry an English man of means when she suddenly decides to elope with Carl, a music teacher. They go to live in Vienna. ”

“ They have life on easier terms, are less intellectual, are more sensuous, emotional, more fanciful, fonder of artistic enjoyment, more sensitive to color and to those effects called "color," by contrast to form, in other arts than that of painting. The art of music is most germane to the Austrian spirit; and we have a ready key to the peculiarities of the Austrian disposition in the difference between Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Johann Strauss, on the one hand, and Händel, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner on the other. ”

“ In Vienna Johann Strauss with his waltzes, and the most perfect comic opera of its kind, Die Fledermaus (The Bat) still sparkling and delightful, Zigeuner-Baron (Gypsy-Baron) , all owe their start in life to Offenbach’s genius. We too, in America, have had the gifted Victor Herbert with his Mlle. Modiste, The Serenade, The Red Mill and many other lovely operettas and Reginald De Koven with Robin Hood. The inimitable pair in England, Sir Arthur Sullivan and his librettist W. S. Gilbert, wrote comic operas that have become classics. ”

“ Composers of individual merit, though their music is of light calibre, are perhaps entitled to recognition no less than their confrères in more ambitious fields. We refer to such delightful writers of comic opera as Johann Strauss, Millöcker, Suppé, etc., and the admirable English school of musical comedy headed by Sir Arthur Sullivan. Without denying the intrinsic value of their work, it must be admitted that they have contributed nothing essentially new or fundamental to the development of the art and are therefore of slight historical significance. ”

“ There are compositions by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and others which can be performed by players of very moderate ability, and there are easy and attractive compositions by less ambitious composers, even such as Johann Strauss, which have much more merit than the brilliant runs and arpeggios of Sidney Smith, H. A. Wollenhaupt, and that class.
There are several ways in which you can make a programme so as to give it a special interest beyond that of the music alone, and I should advise you to adopt some one of these plans. ”

“ Alfred Strauss from Munich who was in the concentration camp Dachau as a prisoner under protective custody was killed by 2 pistol shots by SS man Johann Kantschuster who escorted him on a walk prescribed to him by the camp doctor, outside of the fenced part of the camp. ”

“ The reader will pardon the appendage of a few final remarks relating to the progress of lighter German music during the nineteenth century, for otherwise these records would not be complete. By retracing a few of our steps we find that the more important successors of Kreutzer (who was mentioned on page 73 of Chapter IX, and lived from 1780 until 1849) were Lortzing, Nicolai, Flotow, Suppé, and Johann Strauss junior. For charming originality and for naturalness of expression Lortzing (1801) stands head and shoulders above the remaining composers of this list. ”

“ Of the many letters of congratulation received by Allgeyer after the appearance of his 'Life of Feuerbach' in 1894, one of those most highly prized by him came from Brahms.
Brahms paid one visit to the great Exhibition in the company of Groth and other friends, though the noise and bustle of such a scene were by no means to his taste. He was more anxious that his friend should see and hear what was really characteristic of Vienna. 'You must go to the Volksgarten on Friday evening when Johann Strauss will conduct his waltzes. There is a master ”

“ For the first time people came to cafés and dance halls to listen to music for its own sake instead of regarding it merely as an aid to conversation and dancing. Strauss not only had the gift of inventing original themes, he also had the skill to clothe them in a charming orchestral garb. Great composers, like Cherubini, Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, recognized his talent, and Wagner wrote in 1863 that "a single Strauss waltz surpasses in grace, refinement and real musical substance, the majority of the oft-laboriously-collected foreign products." ”

“ But once such a theme exists it begins to act, musically, of itself, and develops such a network of musically interesting relationships that the listener, fascinated, clean forgets the program in his purely æsthetic delight. Strauss, probably, forgets it too. He does for us, in spite of his programs, exactly the kind of thing that Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann do; he creates intrinsically significant and expressive musical forms (melodies) capable of absorbing our attention and transfiguring all they touch—even a rogue like Till Eulenspiegel—with their æsthetic magic. ”

“ But if you have attained the age of discretion you will not ask too much, forget such childish and sinister play, [Pg 156] and enjoy to the full the man's extraordinary gift of music-making.
For Richard Strauss is an extraordinary musician. To begin with, he doesn't look like a disorderly genius with rumpled hair, but is the mildest-mannered man who ever scuttled another's score and smoked Munich cigars or played "skat." And then he loves money! What other composer, besides Handel, Haydn, Mozart—yes, and also Beethoven—Gluck, Meyerbeer, Verdi, Puccini, so doted on the box-office? ”

“ Strauss is at once a man of genius and an irresponsible street urchin. With all his gifts, something that goes to the making of the artist of the very greatest kind is lacking in him. He has a giant span of conception that is rare in music ”

“ For one reason and another, then—temperament, environment, the enervation of the operatic atmosphere with its constant quest of "effect"—the fresh and vital elements in Strauss's art have not entirely escaped contamination by more stale, conventional, and specious ones. Particularly has he failed of his highest achievement when desire for immediate appeal, the bias of an over-active mind, or the fallacies of a one-sided æsthetic have led him too far from the subjective emotion which is truly the soul of music. ”

“ He is tall and slender, with kindly blue eyes, rather informal in manner. He has the air of a happy man even if he has received some of the harshest criticism from friends and foes that any composer has had from earliest times. His wife used to sing his songs in public. He is fond of games, especially the card game “skat” and like the true grandson of a brewer enjoys his glass of beer.
Strauss’s Contribution to Music Among Strauss’ greatest works are his operas Electra, Salome and Der Rosenkavalier and his nine tone poems. ”