Childhood in Leopoldstadt

In the early months of 1804 Ludwig van Beethoven was nearing the completion of one of his most celebrated works, the Eroica symphony, still with the firm intention of dedicating it to Napoleon. He was living in an apartment in the Theater an der Wien, to the south of the city, contemplating his next major work, an opera called Leonore (the first version of Fidelio), to be performed in that theatre. Two miles away, in Leopoldstadt, a suburb to the north of the city, a married couple in their thirties, Franz Borgias Strauss and Barbara Strauss, who ran a busy inn, ‘Zum heiligen Florian’, were expecting their third child. On 14 March a baby boy was born, Johann Baptist Strauss.

Two generations of the Strauss family had lived in Vienna since the middle of the eighteenth century, when Johann Baptist’s grandfather, Johann Michael, had left his native Ofen in Hungary (that is Buda, later part of Budapest). Johann Michael (1720–1800) worked as an upholsterer and in order to marry a Viennese woman, Rosalia Buschin (1729–85), had converted from Judaism to Catholicism. Franz Borgias (1764–1816) was their second child; unlike his father, he never learnt a trade as such, instead working as a barman-cum-waiter before running ‘Zum heligen Florian’. At the age of thirty-three he married Barbara Stollmann (1770–1811), the daughter of a coachman. Their first child, Ernestine, was born in 1798 and lived until 1862 – someone who, as a sister and aunt to four musical members of the Strauss family, lived long enough to witness their unprecedented careers. A second daughter, Anna, had died of consumption at the age of eight months in 1802.Footnote ¹

It is worth pondering why the third child, Johann Baptist, was given those names. It was certainly a common combination – John Baptist – but the choice does not seem to have been prompted by the long-standing Catholic practice of naming children after proximate saint days; the feast of John the Baptist was celebrated on 24 June, over three months after Johann Baptist Strauss was born. However, there was a family tradition, with an uncle as well as a grandfather called Johann; more recently, it had become a Habsburg name for the first time since the Middle Ages, given by Emperor Leopold II (1742-92) to his sixth son, Archduke Johann (1782–1859), brother of Emperor Franz (1768–1835), a young man who was already beginning to figure in public life as a military leader. Alongside the newly fashionable name of Johann, Baptist may have been added as a gentle affirmation of the Christian identity declared by Johann Michael over fifty years earlier.

Very little is known about Johann Strauss’s childhood, with only one anecdote handed down through the generations. Eduard Strauss was to write in his memoirs, published in 1906, that when itinerant fiddlers played in his grandfather’s inn the young Johann would crawl under a table in order to listen to them.Footnote ² It seems to have been a dispiriting childhood, on occasions a tragic one, largely the product of immediate family circumstances. The death of three further siblings – Franz, Josefa and Antonia – before Johann was five years old was followed by the death of his mother when he was seven years old. His father had moved from the ‘Zum heiligen Florian’ to another inn, ‘Zum guten Hirten’, in 1808, only to relinquish the job in 1812. The following year he married for a second time, to one Katharina Theresia Feldberger, originally from Linz, a stepmother to the nine-year-old Johann and his thirteen-year-old sister, Ernestine, though nothing is known about their personal relationship. The father acquired debts, seemed increasingly feckless and, in 1816, when Johann was just twelve years old, fell, drunk, into the Danube and drowned.

For much of Johann’s childhood the wider environment in Vienna was an unsettled and unsettling one, too. When he was born in March 1804, there was a lull in the Napoleonic Wars, but by the summer there was increasing tension between France and Austria, exacerbated by rival declarations of imperial authority: Napoleon had declared himself emperor of France – the event that caused Beethoven to erase Bonaparte’s name from the title page of a manuscript of his third symphony – and, in retaliation, Emperor Franz II, the head of the increasingly meaningless Holy Roman Empire, gave himself a new imperial title, Emperor Franz I of Austria, a much more defined territorial responsibility that went with a new sense of patriotism. In September 1805 France declared war on Austria; two months later French troops occupied the city. A humiliating peace treaty, the Treaty of Pressburg, was signed on St Stephen’s day in December. Over the next few years the same inescapable pattern of peace, increasing tension and declaration of war was repeated, leading to a second invasion of the city in May 1809. Vienna became an occupied city for six months, until the signing of the Treaty of Schönbrunn in October, when Emperor Napoleon and his troops left the city.

In the suburb of Leopoldstadt the five-year-old Johann might not have witnessed any actual fighting, since the invasion had come from the south rather than north, but the consequences of military occupation – billeting, curfews, troops on horseback and in marching formation – must have created an uncertain environment. Across the period of occupation, civilian life gradually returned to normal and, presumably, inns like the ‘Zum guten Hirten’ profited from the presence of French troops. Much worse than the physical presence of the French, however, was the increasingly pernicious financial consequences of the Napoleonic Wars. Inflation had been rising steadily since the beginning of the century, ruthlessly exploited by Napoleon, who distributed fake currency during his march towards Vienna, and further compounded by the Treaty of Schönbrunn, which required Austria to pay war reparations of eighty-five million francs. By 1811 inflation had moved to hyperinflation, making the currency worthless and forcing the government to declare the state bankrupt and to devalue the currency by 80 per cent. Food and rent were affected most directly, though innkeeping in a busy suburb like Leopoldstadt may have been one of the more resilient of business activities.Footnote ³

One of the oldest of the Viennese suburbs, Leopoldstadt was an attractive, bustling area, with a clear sense of identity, one that contrasted with that of the inner city to the extent that it seemed a different place. Located between the Danube River to the north, then a network of tributaries, and the Danube Canal to the south that separated it from the inner city, Leopoldstadt was an extensive, flat area that, for the most part, presented a greater sense of space than the walled inner city. From the single wooden bridge that connected the inner city and the suburb, the Schlagbrücke (today Schwedenbrücke), two main thoroughfares radiated outwards, leading to two former imperial parklands that had become public spaces. The more central of the roads, the Taborstrasse, led to the Augarten (literally meadow garden), a large green space criss-crossed by wide alleys, home to the celebrated porcelain factory and a small palace that for over twenty years had offered summer concerts; Mozart, his wife and children are known to have frequented the gardens. The second thoroughfare was to acquire the rather unimaginative name Praterstrasse in 1862; in Johann Strauss’s time it bore the much more evocative name Jägerzeile (huntsman’s lane), as a long straight road that led to the former imperial hunting ground and the zoological gardens of the Prater. Covering over 4,000 acres, the parkland was traversed by a seemingly endless central alley flanked by deciduous trees, leafy in spring and summer, colourful in autumn, stark in snowy winter. Most visitors walked in the parkland, but those who could afford it went by coach and horses.

To the east of the Taborstrasse and between it and the Jägerzeile, there was a network of streets whose inhabitants were notably different from those of the inner city, predominantly artisan and working class rather than aristocratic and wealthy. Located close to various Danube waterways, yet near the city, Leopoldstadt was a natural destination for visitors and immigrants to the city anxious to make a living, temporary or permanent. For several centuries it had a strong Jewish community (including Johann Strauss’s grandfather), though it did not become predominantly Jewish until the second half of the nineteenth century. The inns in which Johann Strauss lived as a child not only catered for the local population but also provided accommodation and recreation for travellers arriving in Vienna by boat or by long-distance coaches and wagons. There were three Catholic churches, one of which had a hospice ran by the Order of St John of God (the Barmherzige Brüder) that dispensed medicines to the local community; the slender spire of its church on the Taborstrasse gave it a visual presence too, a comforting, human counterpoise to the imposing gothic spire of St Stephens in the inner city. Five minutes away, where the Weintraubengasse branched off the Jägerzeile, there was a theatre, the Theater in der Leopoldstadt. Built in 1781, it was the first private theatre in Vienna, had a permanent orchestra of some twenty-five players and offered a popular diet of comic plays and operas in German, with, in Johann Strauss’s youth, a veritable craze for stories featuring magical characters performing improbable tricks.Footnote ⁴

There is no evidence that the young Johann Strauss attended any of the churches in Leopoldstadt or went to its theatre, and since the inner city was socially and musically very different, he is unlikely to have visited its theatres and churches too. As for the two great parks, on the other hand, the Augarten and the Prater, Strauss must have frequented them from early childhood onwards. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars they were the venues for two large-scale public celebrations, attended by all ranks of society, unlike the many exclusive events in the palaces of the inner city and the even more exclusive Habsburg summer palace of Schönbrunn. As well as rejoicing in the peace, the beginning of a healing process that pushed the two invasions of 1805 and 1809 into the past, the organizers of the events promoted a newly energized patriotism. On 6 October 1814, as international delegates at the Congress of Vienna began shaping the post-war settlement, the Augarten was the venue for a Volkfest – acrobatics, dancing, fireworks, illuminations, regional costumes, sport, all filtered through the perspective of Habsburg identity: national in nature, international in its intended wider impact. That it was also occasionally chaotic, with adverse weather, poor crowd control and opportunistic thieving, only added to the sense of a city letting its hair down. A couple of weeks later, on 18 October, a much more organized mass celebration took place in the Prater to commemorate the first anniversary of the decisive victory over Napoleon in the Battle of Leipzig. Two Austrians had played crucial roles in that campaign: Prince Karl Philipp Schwarzenberg as a diplomat and commander-in-chief of the allied armies, and General Count Josef Radetzky (1766–1859) as chief of staff for the allied forces. Appropriately, this celebration had a strong military feel. Witnessed by thousands of spectators, there was a review of 14,000 soldiers followed by a banquet on miles of specially erected tables, all rather grimly surrounded by trophies of war, French cannons, rifles and banners; Habsburg banners, by contrast, flew proudly in the air, also on barges and pontoon bridges on the Danube.Footnote ⁵

For any ten-year-old boy like Johann Strauss, these public celebrations would have been a blur of sensations, beyond comprehension in their scale and impossible to articulate in their symbolism. Yet here, clearly, were many of the key elements of Strauss’s later fame and that of his sons: dancing, eating and drinking, fireworks, illuminations, Austrian identity, willing patriotism, militarism, national heroes and massed public participation. Some of these individual characteristics were long-standing ones, now brought together with particular force. In particular, dancing and the dance already had a distinctive place in the collective psyche of the Viennese.

To the Dance: Vienna

Twenty year earlier, in 1794, when Austria had first begun to feel nervous about the wider impact of the French Revolution, a political scientist named Ignaz de Luca (1746–99) produced a survey of the capital, Topographie von Wien.Footnote ⁶ In twenty fact-packed chapters the coverage is exhaustive – geography, climate, population, physical layout, structure of the imperial court, commerce, finance, education, religion, the military and the police. One chapter is devoted to what would now be called the arts: architecture, draughtsmanship and engraving, music and painting, together with associated institutions, such as the Hofkapelle for music. For the art form itself, de Luca expands the traditional three categories of chamber, church and theatre to five: ‘I divide music as follows: 1) church music, 2) concert music, 3) military music, 4) theatre music, and 5) dance music.’Footnote ⁷ He then goes through each category in turn, outlining its main characteristics. By far the longest section is on dance music. With the practised eye of a social scientist, he notes its wide appeal: ‘Dancing is a ruling passion of my people; the general populace, of both sexes, take dancing lessons’ (‘Das Tanzen ist eine Hauptleidenschaft meiner Landsleute; die gemeinsten Personen beyderley Geschlechts nehmen Unterricht im Tanzen’). There are several dance schools; the number of dance halls is considerable (ten venues in the inner city and the suburbs are named); he comments that the minuet is danced very correctly by people of distinction, but that the German dance (‘der teutsche Tanz’) is favoured by the Viennese in general, and that a vigorous variant of this dance, the waltz, is even more favoured.Footnote ⁸

The presence of dances and dancing in Viennese society at the turn of the eighteenth century is even more vividly evident in the business activity of the most important music dealer in Vienna at the time, Johann Traeg (1747–1805). From his premises in the Singerstrasse, a side street that went from the Kärntnerstrasse down a slight incline towards the city wall and the nearby Stubentor, Traeg sold all kinds of music, especially instrumental music, concertos, quartets, sonatas, symphonies, trios, wind music and so on. In 1799 he issued a cumulative printed catalogue of his holdings, 233 pages detailing over 14,000 items, divided broadly into genres. Section 26 is devoted to ‘Tanz-Music’, subdivided into minuets (45 collections), German dances (‘Deutsche’, 61), Ländler (23) and contredanses (17).Footnote ⁹ But documenting the total number of sets of dances in his store had clearly defeated Traeg; at the end of the Ländler list he notes that there are ‘also a few hundred for one violin by various masters’; likewise, at the end of the contredanse section that ‘still more contredanses, cotillions and quadrilles are available’; and at the end of Section 26 as a whole he indicates other miscellaneous dances that are available: ‘Cosak Hungar, Polon, Strassburg, Zingaresi &., &.’. The dances were sold as manuscript parts in sets of six, twelve or occasionally more, to be played by a variety of forces, from one violin, two violins with bass (three parts) through to an orchestra of strings, flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets and timpani (sixteen parts). As for composers, the names of many of Vienna’s leading figures are included: Beethoven (1770–1827), Gyrowetz (1763–1850), Haydn (1732–1809), Krommer (1759–1831), Mozart (1756–91) and Vanhal (1739–1813), alongside many that are less known, such as Bock, Haydenreich and Schwanenberg. A particular feature of the alphabetical lists, not as evident in other sections of the catalogue, are the many collections of dances by anonymous composers; it is clear that while dance music by known individuals had a certain cachet, that outlook existed alongside a more utilitarian one that privileged the commercial product over its creator – an outlook that dance music was not entirely to overcome until well into the following century.

An even more important characteristic of dance music that was to be crucial to the local and international careers of all members of the Strauss family is revealed in another, very large portion of Traeg’s catalogue: ‘Clavier-Music’. Occupying approximately a quarter of the volume, it lists concertos, chamber works with piano, solos, duets, variations, preludes and, finally, dances; as earlier in the catalogue, dances are then divided into minuets (30 items), German dances (71), Ländler (14), contredanses (12) and miscellaneous (25).Footnote ¹⁰ Purchasers of keyboard music were predominantly amateur, mainly women, with skills that ranged from basic to the equal of professional men, and arrangements of dances served two purposes: individual pleasure or actual accompaniment to private dance parties that occurred in larger homes and palaces. The entries in Traeg’s catalogue reveal considerable overlap between dances for instrumental ensemble and piano arrangements, including works by Haydn and Mozart, but there were some dances that were available only as piano music – the beginning of a practice that was to yield a distinctive part of nineteenth-century piano repertoire, from Chopin and Schumann to Brahms and Liszt.

Three years before the publication of Traeg’s catalogue, a publisher named Johann Ferdinand von Schönfeld had issued a Jahrbuch der Tonkunst von Wien und Prag, an account of musical life in those two cities that mixes broad description, dictionary entries for individuals and lists of personnel in various theatre orchestras. He includes the following paragraph on dance music in Vienna, the venues that were served by Traeg’s shop:

Schönfeld identifies three different clientele: a middle class of officials and shopkeepers; a lower class that frequented dance halls in inns; and the aristocracy. This broad division into three social classes is superimposed on a topographical division, already mentioned, between the inner city and the fairly self-sufficient suburbs. In practice, there was considerable migration between venues, especially from the inner city to the suburbs, from Jahn’s restaurant to ‘Zum Sperl’ in Strauss’s Leopoldstadt.Footnote ¹²

It was also a changing picture. While the Mehlgrube in the inner city was losing some of its fashionable status as it began to attract a less desirable clientele, a brand-new, purpose-built venue, the Apollo-Saal, was opened in the Zieglergasse to the south-west of the city in time for the 1808 Carnival season. This soon became the most fashionable venue for dancing in Vienna. It was modestly named – more a sumptuous palace than a Saal and, for modern readers, rather akin to a large indoor entertainment complex. One person who attended the opening night on 10 January was Joseph Carl Rosenbaum (1770–1829), formerly an official in the service of Prince Nicolaus Esterházy and a lifetime friend of Haydn, who lived just outside the inner city, near the Schottentor. He recorded his impression in his diary, overwhelmingly positive but with some ritual moans about prices and the practicalities of travelling to the suburbs.

Rosenbaum’s prediction that the Apollo-Saal would not last was to prove correct. It managed to survive the economic pressures of the Napoleonic period, but a period of decline set in from 1819, the lavish contents of the building were sold, the dining room closed, the spaces used as an emergency hospital during the cholera outbreak of 1830 and, finally, it was converted into a candle factory. It never, therefore, featured in the working lives of the Strauss family, but the fundamental idea of hundreds of people dancing in large spaces watched by hundreds of onlookers was to be replicated in other venues, outdoor as well as indoor, providing a collective experience that surpassed anything that a theatre or concert room could provide.

One has the impression that Rosenbaum, aged fifty-seven and someone who had gone unaccompanied to the Apollo-Saal, did not dance and had just savoured the overall experience. Being present and being seen were as much part of the attraction as actual dancing, and while Rosenbaum did not comment on the music itself, there is evidence that part of the enjoyment, even at the turn of the century, was listening to the music rather than dancing to it.Footnote ¹⁴ This was the beginning of a process that, ultimately, in the hands of Strauss family and others, led to waltzes, polkas and marches not only being performed as concert pieces (with no dancing or marching) but also being first composed as concert pieces.

To the Dance: The Young Johann Strauss

At the age of twelve Johann Strauss had lost both his mother and his father. Although Strauss and his sister Ernestine had a stepmother, Katharina Strauss, Austrian law required that their interests were represented by a nominated male guardian, someone who was capable of supervising their education and financial well-being.Footnote ¹⁵ A respected tailor, Anton Müller, who lived and worked in Leopoldstadt undertook the role. Although next to nothing is known about him, it is clear that he acted conscientiously. As a skilled artisan himself, he sought to secure a future for Johann as a bookbinder. At the age of thirteen, Strauss was taken on as an apprentice (Lehrling) by a local master bookbinder, Johann Lichtscheidl – a five-year period that Müller and Lichtscheidl hoped would lead to the next stage, a journeyman (Geseller) and, eventually, to Johann becoming a master bookbinder (Meister). As was often the practice, he went to live with the Lichtscheidl family, an environment that provided a degree of social stability. He was now receiving violin lessons from an experienced orchestral player, Johann Pollischansky, who also lived in the Leopoldstadt, acquiring sufficient skill to play with the dance orchestra of Michael Pamer, including at the local inn ‘Zum Sperl’. Over time, it became increasingly evident that Strauss was more interested in music than bookbinding – Eduard Strauss was to write in his memoirs that his father had little time for ‘glue and covers’Footnote ¹⁶ – and by 1822 he had given it up.

One member of Michael Pamer’s orchestra, a violinist named Joseph Lanner (1801–43), was to play a part in Strauss’s life for the next twenty years, first as a colleague and mentor, then a professional collaborator and, finally, a rival who, nevertheless, remained on friendly terms with his former protégé. Although not quite three years older than Strauss, his career was more advanced. Lanner invited him to play the viola in a quartet that provided dance music, which then became a quintet, before blossoming into a small string orchestra. For six months Strauss’s increasingly busy life as a player was interrupted by conscription into the army as a member of the Fourth Infantry Regiment, ‘Hoch- und Deutschmeister’ – a formative experience that may have built on his boyhood experience of the victory celebrations during the Congress of Vienna, but certainly instilled that typically Austrian quality of absolute respect for the military. However, this period of service, from September 1824 to February 1825, had also thrown up a pressing, personal issue. He had met the daughter of a well-connected coachman, Maria Anna Streim, three years older than Strauss, who was now expecting his child.

They had decided to marry, but there were legal complications that had to be worked out. The age of consent in Austria at the time was twenty-four: with a birth date of 30 August 1801, Anna was short by a few months, while Johann Strauss fell short of it by a full three years. Anna was able to gain permission from her father, but Johann Strauss had first to have the personal approval of his guardian, Anton Müller, and then seek permission from the municipal court. Ever supportive, Müller submitted his case on behalf of Strauss early in April.Footnote ¹⁷ To present his ward in the best possible light, as someone who was able to support Anna Streim, there was some glossing of evidence. Rather than a violinist, Johann Strauss was described as an educated musician acquainted with persons of rank, someone who could be expected to earn the respectable sum of 400 gulden per annum. During a forthcoming absence from Vienna, Anna would live and earn some money from her needlework (a craft, incidentally, she had learnt from Franz Schubert’s aunt, Magdalena Schubert).Footnote ¹⁸ Johann Strauss had, indeed, planned a visit to Graz, though it never took place. Whether it had already been cancelled or was conveniently cancelled after the petition had been submitted is not clear. Permission was finally granted on 24 June; on 11 July, Johann and Anna were married at the parish church in Lichtental, a couple of minutes’ walk away from where Anna lived in the Thurygasse. Husband and wife moved to rented accommodation in the Lerchenfeldstrasse to the west of the city, where, on 25 October 1825, a baby boy was born. Following a practice that was not uncommon, the boy was named after his father, Johann Baptist.

In a clear response to the demand for his services, Lanner had divided his ensemble for the oncoming winter season into two groups, one directed by himself, the other by Johann Strauss. This was complemented by a second notable development, the beginning of a business relationship between Lanner and the music publisher Anton Diabelli (1781–1858), which was to lead to the publication of fourteen sets of dances by Lanner in two years.Footnote ¹⁹ Strauss, too, benefited from that development. On Monday, 21 November 1825, the Wiener Zeitung contained a substantial advertisement for the Newest Dances for the Piano for the 1826 Carnival (Neueste Tänze für das Pianoforte zum Carneval, 1826), available from Diabelli’s shop in the Graben. Altogether, sixteen sets of dances by eleven different composers are listed, headed by Schubert’s Valses sentimentales (D779) and his Galop and Ecossaises (D735), followed by dances by Kapellmeister Röth, Kapellmeister Riotte and Lanner (four sets). There are also several unfamiliar names: Johann Faistenberger, Count Janus Ilinsky, a woman composer by the name of Eleonore de Contin (née Förster), Adolph Müller and E. J. Schra, to which one could add the then unknown Johann Strauss, listed as the composer of seven waltzes for piano, priced at one florin (‘7 Walzer für das Pianoforte. 1 fl.’). This one advertisement exemplifies the general practice evident in Traeg’s catalogue of 1799 – namely, the importance of the domestic piano-playing market for dances, whether originally written for the instrument (as in the Schubert items) or arranged from instrumental dance music (as in the items by Lanner and Strauss). Lanner, Strauss and others were violinists rather than pianists and their natural environment was very different – public dance halls rather than the salon or drawing room. But they also made the journey from the former to the latter, nurturing a popularity that was both public and private. The voracious appetite for piano music in Vienna – and, increasingly, in other European towns and cities – helped to further the careers of the Strauss family in ways that history has undervalued.

Whereas large quantities of dance music issued by Diabelli have survived to the present day, no exemplar of Strauss’s early seven waltzes for one florin is known. The earliest surviving publication of music by Johann Strauss dates from six months later: a collection of eight waltzes, each sixteen bars in length, all in E major except for the fifth, which is in A major. First performed in an inn situated east of the city, whose name, ‘Zu den Zwey Tauben’ (the two doves), informed the title of Diabelli’s publication, Täuberln-Walzer, here signalling two dancing and cooing sweethearts rather than an inn. Strauss’s increasing presence as the director of the second Lanner orchestra and growing confidence as a composer, together with the promise of wider popularity that followed publication, led inevitably to the next stage, which was to leave Lanner and set up an ensemble of his own, marking the beginning of a non-stop career as manager, violinist, director and composer that was to last over twenty years. There was a sense that, aged only twenty-two, Johann Strauss had rather swiftly put his difficult upbringing behind him, a personal achievement that was complemented by the birth of a second child the following August. The baptismal record gave the boy’s name as Joseph (possibly a gesture of thanks to Lanner); in later life it was habitually spelt Josef.Footnote ²⁰

A feat of engineering and a change of publisher added further momentum to Strauss’s fledgling career. The year 1828 saw the opening of a new footbridge over the Danube canal, the Kettenbrücke (today Salztorbrücke), the first suspension bridge in the world to be made of steel, an elegant walkway from the inner city to Leopoldstadt.Footnote ²¹ A nearby inn at the northern end of the bridge capitalized on the new sense of mobility between city and suburb by building a spacious new dance hall, the Kettenbrücke-Saal. Slender pillars divided the central dance floor from adjacent seating areas that provided refreshment and gossip in equal measure; as in the Apollo-Saal and other venues, the instrumentalists sat in a gallery overlooking the scene, perfectly placed to ensure that sound and movement were co-ordinated. From 1827–28 onwards, Johann Strauss’s ensemble performed regularly in the hall.

As Traeg’s catalogue from 1799 shows – as well as Strauss’s earliest compositions announced in the Wiener Zeitung – dance music was usually advertised and distributed with generic titles such as waltzes and Ländler, reflecting the basic utilitarian need of something to dance to, and with no defined extra-musical associations. When descriptive titles (or nicknames) did arise, they were of two types: dances that included musical quotations, such as the war song ‘Der Sieg von Helden Coburg’ in Mozart’s Contredanse in C (K587), or simple pictorialism, such as the sleigh bells in his well-known German dance ‘Die Schlittenfahrt’ (K605/3). The six waltzes composed for the fashionable Kettenbrücke-Saal were almost certainly not initially called that; it was just another set of waltzes. Only when they were subsequently published did they acquire the title of Kettenbrücke-Walzer, literally waltzes that had recently been played in the Kettenbrücke-Saal. The waltzes themselves did not attempt to present a musical image of a bridge – an impossible musical task that would have defeated even Richard Strauss – but that association was embedded in the consciousness of the purchaser and performer by the neatly engraved image of a suspension bridge that is printed across the oblong format of the title page.Footnote ²² In this subtle way, six straightforward waltzes with no pictorial content acquired overlapping extra-musical associations: a wondrous new feature of the local environment, the suspension bridge, and the new dance hall from which it had benefited. Celebrating the Viennese environment became a key part of the aesthetic of the music of the Strauss family. In the formative years of the 1820s, while the young Johann Strauss could be relied upon to compose any number of carefully crafted dances and to direct them in a communicative and memorable way, the promotion of wider resonances of the environment was usually the work of another person, a music publisher by the name of Tobias Haslinger (1787–1842). In many ways, he was the man who created ‘Johann Strauss’.

Tobias Haslinger and Johann Strauss

Born in Linz – another Danube town – in 1787, Haslinger was a proficient composer and instrumentalist who in 1810 had moved to Vienna, where he was able to develop his interest and aptitude for the commercial side of musical life. Vague plans to set up a music-hire business were put to one side when he joined the leading firm of Steiner, becoming a partner in 1815 before taking over as sole owner in 1826. Steiner’s catalogue covered the full range of music, from variations and dances by Gelinek (1758–1825) to sonatas and symphonies by Beethoven. Although commercial success was clearly a basic consideration, Haslinger also sought to define and promote the status of composers and their works, rather than just benefiting from them. As a close friend and admirer of Beethoven, he underwrote a largely forgotten project: a complete edition of his music – sixty-two volumes copied by one professional scribe – that eventually landed up in the possession of one of the composer’s most important patrons, Archduke Rudolph. A year after Beethoven’s death, he embarked on an even more definitive public project: a printed complete edition of the composer’s music; seventy-three volumes were to appear before it was abandoned a few years after Haslinger’s death in 1842.Footnote ²³

To appreciate the impact and presence that Haslinger had on the musical society in Vienna, and in Austria more generally, it is worth looking at a contemporary encyclopaedia, the Oesterreichische National-Encyklopädie, a six-volume work (plus a supplementary seventh) that appeared in the 1830s, a few years after the publisher began working with Strauss. This was an encyclopaedia that prioritized the newly confident Austria established by Emperor Franz and Prince Metternich (1773–1859) in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. It had a clear sense of objective detachment, ‘prepared in the spirit of impartiality’ (‘Im Geiste der Unbefangenheit bearbeitet’), as the title page puts it. Its reach was a wide one, including ‘culture and knowledge, literature and art’ (‘Bildung und Wissenschaft, Literatur und Kunst’).Footnote ²⁴ Haslinger is given an entry of three packed pages, presented in two clear stages: an account of his career, followed by a summation of his contribution to contemporary Austria. He is described as the most significant music publisher in the Austrian monarchy, particularly for original works, someone whose total stock now ran to over 7,000 items. These publications were produced by fifty workers working on fourteen presses and were distributed throughout Europe. In recognition of ‘his tireless endeavours on behalf of the industry of the Fatherland’ (‘sein unermüdetes Streben für vaterländische Industrie’), he was awarded an imperial warrant in 1830, ‘k. k. Hof- und priv. Kunst- und Musikalienhändler in Wien’ (Imperial-Royal Court and Privileged Art and Music Dealer in Vienna). Altogether, Haslinger ‘has shown what one can achieve with knowledge and industry, strength and courage, earnestness and perseverance’ (‘hat gezeigt, was man mit Kenntniß und Thätigkeit, Kraft und Muth, Ernst und Ausdauer vermag’).Footnote ²⁵

It was during the summer of 1828 that Haslinger approached Johann Strauss with a proposition that he should become his nominated publisher. While no details of the nature of the discussion are known, it is likely that the appeal of that offer was primarily based on what the publisher could do to promote Strauss’s wider career, rather than simply the traditional element of the size of any one-off fee. For that one-off fee per publication, Haslinger acquired exclusive rights to Strauss’s music, its publication and its distribution, signalled on title pages by the standard statement ‘property of the publisher’ (‘Eigenthum des Verlegers’). Strauss accumulated prestige and fame; Haslinger gathered the profits. In September 1828, Strauss wrote a very polite letter to Diabelli, explaining that he had been in discussion with Haslinger, that a contract had been signed, that he could no longer offer Diabelli his dances, that this development should not be regarded unfavourably and that he was returning a recent honorarium of fourteen florins.Footnote ²⁶

Not only did Haslinger become Strauss’s preferred publisher but effectively his artistic manager and agent, too. Over the next two years, Haslinger issued over two dozen works by Strauss, publications that placed the composer into a virtuous circle of composition, performance, publication and popularity. Haslinger took great care over these publications. Very few were issued in orchestral parts and none in score, which effectively gave Strauss a monopoly on the prime version. Instead, they were issued in a wide variety of arrangements, mainly for piano, but also piano duet, three performers on one piano, violin and piano, violin duets with bass, solo guitar, solo flute and the very fashionable csakan (a low recorder-like instrument pitched in A flat). As a trained musician himself, Haslinger, together with his associates, prepared full scores from the sometimes rather disorderly orchestral parts that the comparatively untrained Strauss gave him; these scores served as the basis for the various arrangements.Footnote ²⁷ Printed dance music had always had the appeal of the new: the latest offerings as recently experienced in the dance hall, topped up by the allure of a named director-composer. Haslinger not only continued to strengthen the appeal of those features but promoted their permanence, too: this was music that was to be collected and kept in much the same way as that of other composers who figured prominently in Haslinger’s catalogue: Beethoven, Czerny (1791–1857), Hummel (1778–1839) and Schubert (1797–1828).Footnote ²⁸ As well as having sequential opus numbers – itself a signal of value – most title pages had attractive, well-executed engravings of an image associated with the given title. Over the next few years, the new suspension bridge for the Kettenbrücke waltzes was followed by engravings of ceremonial natural trumpets with pennants on the title page of the Trompeten-Walzer (Op. 13), raised champagne glasses for the Champagner Walzer (Op. 14), a dance hall located in woodland for Fort nach einander! (Onwards in Order, Op. 16) and a military camp with visiting civilians and children in Lust-Lager-Walzer (Pleasure Camp Waltzes, Op. 18). Particularly evocative is the engraving on the cover of Op. 40 from 1830, the Wiener Damen-Toilette-Walzer. It shows a Viennese lady at her dressing table, reflected in a full-length mirror and with a piano clearly visible in the background (Figure 2); opera-goers of the day might have been reminded of the Countess at the beginning of Act 2 of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, and it was an image that was to inform the richly resonant Viennese ambience that Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss created in Der Rosenkavalier. Some of these title pages were offered in two formats: the basic black and white engraving for thirty kreutzer or a coloured version (prepared in-house by Haslinger) for forty-five kreutzer.

Figure 2 Johann Strauss (Father), Wiener Damen-Toilette-Walzer (Op. 40, 1830), title page.

© The British Library Board, e.285.h.(4)

With these titles and images Haslinger clearly wanted to supplement the standard bibliographical display of composer, genre, instrumentation and opus number on his title pages. Particularly characteristic are titles that reflect the increasing number of venues in which Strauss and his orchestra were appearing in Vienna and its environs. As well as the Kettenbrücke salon, there is the garden salon of the Josefstadt theatre (Josephstädter-Tänze, Op. 23), the outer suburb of Hietzing just beyond Schönbrunn palace (Hietzinger-Reunion-Walzer, Op. 24) and the fashionable summer spa of Baden (Souvenir de Baden, Op. 38; see title page in Figure 3). Back in the suburb of Leopoldstadt, the ‘Zum Sperl’ became a focus for Strauss’s activity following his appointment as music director in 1829 in succession to Lanner; it is likely that Haslinger played a role in that appointment, since the contract was a favourable one that gave Strauss an annual salary of 600 gulden, two benefit concerts and, crucially, the freedom to accept invitations to perform elsewhere – conditions that benefited Haslinger as much as Strauss.Footnote ²⁹

Figure 3 Johann Strauss (Father), Souvenir de Baden (Op. 38, 1830), title page.

© The British Library Board, e. 285.h.(9)

The previous year, 1828, had seen the presence in the city of a very different kind of violinist-composer, the sensationally gifted virtuoso Nicolò Paganini (1782–1840) who, at the age of forty-five, had embarked on a European tour that would last six years. Encouraged by Prince Metternich, Paganini began that tour in Vienna, where he stayed for four months. Through his government contacts he was granted the use of the Grosser Redoutensaal for a sequence of six concerts, an unparalleled event in the history of that concert space. Many Viennese would have remembered the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the venue in 1824 – a concert that helped to fashion the composer’s status in the last few years of his life. Three days after Beethoven’s death on 26 March 1827, his funeral was witnessed by a devoted public that, according to some reports, numbered several thousand. Paganini, who is said to have wept on hearing of Beethoven’s death, gave his first concert in Vienna on the anniversary of that memorable public occasion, 29 March 1828. The concert began with a performance of the overture to Fidelio, before moving on to blatantly virtuoso music of a kind that Beethoven would have despised. As well as his own concertos and a popular set of variations on a Neapolitan song, ‘The Carnival of Venice’, Paganini was careful to woo the Viennese with music well known to them: ballet music by Süssmayr (1766–1803), numbers from operas by Rossini (1792–1868) and, most audaciously, a set of variations on the national anthem, Haydn’s ‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’, played entirely on the G string. The technical side of his showmanship was audacious: a bowing action that was a visual whirl, complemented by an unerring mastery of double trills, left-hand pizzicato and natural and artificial harmonics. Johann Strauss, Lanner and Haslinger must surely have attended one or more of concerts, and they certainly would have been aware of the splurge of idolatrous consumerism that resulted: Paganini’s image appeared on snuff boxes, walking sticks and fans; men wore Paganini hats (a top hat); women requested a Paganini hair style (long, curly and slightly unruly); and bakers prepared Paganini bread (loaves in the shape of a violin).Footnote ³⁰

Within a month of Paganini’s first concert, Haslinger had advertised two works by Lanner and Strauss that tapped into this wider social and musical sensation: Lanner’s Wiener Quodlibet, Op. 22 (advertisement in the Wiener Zeitung, 18 April) and Strauss’s Walzer à la Paganini, Op. 11 (Wiener Zeitung, 19 April), both available in the usual wide variety of arrangements. The advertisements carefully note that each work features ‘the little bell’ (‘mit dem Glöckchen’) – that is, the high harmonic that characterizes the main theme in the finale of Paganini’s First Violin Concerto. The swiftness of this musical response, largely driven by Haslinger, is striking: within a month of Paganini’s first concert, Lanner and Strauss had composed the music, Haslinger had made several arrangements, the plates of the title page and the music were engraved and the music advertised.

As an eager and imaginative businessman, Haslinger would have noted the impact this extraordinary performer had on the Viennese public. Johann Strauss was never going to rival Paganini as a violinist, yet, in a little over four years he had grown from being an anonymous jobbing violinist to the leading figure in dance music in the city, eclipsing his former colleague and friend, Joseph Lanner. They had different personalities: Strauss was comfortable with the part he was playing in Haslinger’s unfolding plans; the slightly older Lanner was more conservative. In the autumn of 1829, Lanner changed his allegiance to a less ambitious publisher – Mecchetti – a move that allowed Haslinger to focus his attention on Strauss.Footnote ³¹ It coincided with Strauss becoming the music director at ‘Zum Sperl’. Haslinger moved quickly to promote the new director. Strauss’s first benefit concert took place on Wednesday, 25 November, St Catherine’s Day, one of the highlights of the social as well as the church calendar. Lanner had provided new dances the previous year, duly published as the Katharinen-Tänze, Op. 26. With Strauss at the helm, Haslinger shifted the focus from the occasion to the new music director. A new set of six waltzes performed were rather cryptically titled Des Verfassers beste Laune (The Creator’s Best Humour, Op. 31), but with a reassuring French-German subtitle that Haslinger knew would appeal to a certain stratum of polite society: Charmant-Walzer. The associated image is of the composer himself. Youthful, with black eyes and dark hair, and elegantly dressed in a fashionable high collar and cravat, he also looks a little reticent.Footnote ³² But Haslinger’s intention is clear: message and messenger were completely aligned. Johann Strauss was to be at the centre of the appeal of the music, a position which he must have accepted and which he certainly fulfilled, becoming a much more animated figure than is evident from the image.

Escapism and the Environment

The rapid rise of Johann Strauss in the late 1820s was followed by a couple of years of consolidation. The year 1830 saw a marked reduction in the number of publications of new dances by Haslinger, just seven compared with eleven in 1829 and fourteen the year before. Wider disruptive circumstances were at work, including flood, disease and politics. It began with the Danube. In a notable development in the history of the river as a transporter of people and goods, two Englishmen, John Andrews and Joseph Prichard, founded the Erste österreichische k. k. privilegierte Donau-Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft (First Austrian imperial-royal privileged Danube Steamship Company) in 1829 to provide a regular service between Vienna and Pest.Footnote ³³ If that signalled the growing confidence in modern engineering and associated international co-operation, the Danube itself soon provided a reminder of its devastating natural power. The winter of 1829–30 was a particularly cold one, with temperatures below freezing for weeks on end. The various branches of the Danube to the north of Leopoldstadt were frozen solid for over three months. With the arrival of a sudden thaw, the ice flow broke and unleashed sudden flooding on that suburb and other areas that lay between the river and the inner city. Countless buildings were damaged from the cellars upwards and seventy-four people were killed, including nineteen children. Strauss did not compose any dances for ‘Zum Sperl’ or the Kettenbrücke-Saal that season, and the two publications by Haslinger that included a place or a venue in their title referred to localities well to the south of Vienna – namely, the spa town of Baden (Souvenir de Baden, Op. 38; see Figure 3) and the Tivoli pleasure garden in Meidling (Tivoli-Rutsch-Walzer, Op. 39).Footnote ³⁴

A year later, in February and March 1831, a revolution broke out in the Habsburg territories in northern Italy, prompted by the July Revolution in Paris the previous year, which had overthrown Charles X. Austria felt it had no choice but to act militarily in its own territory; with Josef Radetzky as commander-in-chief of the Austrian army in Italy, the revolution was eventually suppressed.Footnote ³⁵ This year of political tension may not have directly affected daily life in Vienna, but it ran in counterpoint with something that spared no one: a cholera epidemic that had spread from the east, an alarming and highly contagious disease from which the city was not to be entirely free until 1832, by which time some 2,000 people had died.Footnote ³⁶ At the time of the flood and the cholera outbreak, the Strauss family had returned to live in Leopoldstadt; the elder son, Johann, was now four years old and Josef two; in addition, there was a baby girl, Anna, born on 22 December 1829; Strauss’s sister, Ernestine, also lived with the family.Footnote ³⁷ All managed to survive this uneasy and apprehensive period. As for Strauss’s music, at the point when the cholera epidemic was receding and the uprising in Italy had been defeated, two sets of waltzes were published with titles that assuaged public concern: Heiter auch in ernster Zeit (Calm Even in Serious Times, Op. 48) and, more uplifting, Das Leben ein Tanz, oder Der Tanz ein Leben! (Life Is a Dance, or Dance Is a Life, Op. 49).

As was often the case, the musical content of these two sets of waltzes is not noticeably different in nature from many other sets of dances. That tone reflected a wider characteristic that many visitors to the city commented upon: collective well-being through escapism rather than through stoicism or resistance. Forty years earlier, it was something that had struck the young Beethoven, when French revolutionary fervour threatened to spread to Austria in the summer of 1794. He was sceptical that it would, however: ‘We are having very hot weather here; and the Viennese are afraid that they soon will not be able to get any more ice cream … I believe that so long as an Austrian can get his brown ale and his little sausages, he is not likely to revolt.’Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, the twenty years of intermittent warfare that followed seemed to legitimize the need for an absolutist state in the eyes of the Austrian people, whose largely quiescent attitude allowed Metternich to establish what has often been termed a police state in the post-Napoleonic period.

Not all its citizens were content. Karl Anton Postl (1793–1864) was one such. Born in Moravia, he had trained as a priest, became interested in progressive democratic politics in Germany and elsewhere, offended Prince Metternich and the Austrian authorities in some unspecified way and fled the country in 1822, first to America, where he assumed a new name, Charles Sealsfield, before returning to Europe to live, mainly in Switzerland. While in London in the late 1820s, he wrote a sustained critique of the Austrian state, written anonymously in English and entitled Austria As It Is: ‘There is not a less popular government in Europe; one where people, and government and its officers, are more virtually separated’; and as for Emperor Franz, he ‘thinks himself and his family secure as long as his subjects are dancing and singing’.Footnote ³⁹

Similar sentiments had been recorded by John Russell, a Scottish lawyer and travel writer who had visited Vienna in the early 1820s as part of an extensive tour of German-speaking Europe. Perturbed by the consequences of Habsburg rule on the wider curiosity of the Viennese, he is nevertheless much taken with their sociability:

A few pages later he returns to his theme, in a tone that is more exacerbated than critical:

Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49) was in Vienna during the cholera epidemic, from November 1830 to the following July. His correspondence mentions the epidemic, but it also reflects a good deal of frustration with musical life there, which he regarded as unambitious; Haslinger was reluctant to publish his music, preferring instead to focus his attention on Johann Strauss.

A year later, a slightly younger musician, the nineteen-year-old Richard Wagner (1813–83), was in Vienna. He, too, was worried about the cholera but was altogether more enthusiastic about its musical life, especially opera. The theatrics of a Johann Strauss performance of a waltz also captured his imagination:

Despite Chopin’s reluctance to acknowledge Strauss’s music as ‘works’ and his status as a ‘Kapellmeister’, both he and Wagner recognized the impact of the public event, different from any other kind of musical entertainment. As an aural and visual spectacle, it shared something with opera, while the focus on a single commanding performer was akin to that found in the concerts of the greatest virtuosi, such as Paganini the violinist and Liszt the pianist. But, as well as witnessing the spectacle, Strauss’s public were often active participants. At ‘Zum Sperl’ and the Kettenbrücke-Saal, formal participation occurred indoors in the newly built ballrooms, but events also spilled out into the surrounding gardens, especially during the summer months, where behaviour would have become even less restrained.

Wagner does not indicate where he witnessed Strauss directing his music. He was there in the summer of 1832 and could have gone to the new, very popular outdoor venue, the Tivoli. Located in the countryside in Meidling, not far from the grounds of the Schönbrunn Palace, it was a purpose-built pleasure garden, which had been open for two seasons, with some eighty buildings, including a music pavilion.Footnote ⁴³ Firework displays were given on summer evenings, but the real novelty was a large toboggan run (Rutsch), suitable for adults as well as children; two people sat side by side in wooden carts that careered at breakneck speed down a wooden track. Strauss wrote two sets of waltzes for the Tivoli. The first, the Tivoli-Rutsch-Walzer (Op. 39), was published by Haslinger with an engraving of the gardens, including the Rutsch; the second, the Tivoli-Freudenfest-Tänze (Op. 45), has a very different, seemingly inappropriate, image: the imperial crown located within a glow of surrounding beams. This was prompted by the name of the dedicatee of the Tivoli-Freudenfest-Tänze, Archduchess Sophie (1805–72), wife of Emperor Franz’s youngest son, Franz Karl (1802–78). Both still in their twenties, the couple had married in 1824 and their first child, the future emperor Franz Joseph, had been born in 1830. They may have frequented the Tivoli and even tried the Rutsch, but Haslinger’s dedication and associated image pointed to a very different environment, the Hofburg itself. The archduchess was an enthusiastic dancer and in February 1831, some six months before the publication of the waltz, Strauss had made his debut at court, directing music for two balls hosted by the archduke and archduchess.Footnote ⁴⁴

‘Zum Sperl’, Kettenbrücke-Saal, the spa town of Baden, the Tivoli and the Hofburg evidence the ever-widening social appeal of Strauss, director, composer and performer. There was one further milieu to be added: the military. In 1832 Strauss was formally appointed kapellmeister of the First Citizen Regiment (1. Bürger-Regiment), a civilian unit that would see active service if Vienna were ever to be attacked. Within a hierarchical structure that was as characteristic of the military as it was of court bureaucracy, Strauss was fifth in the pecking order, following the commandant, adjutant, equipment inspector and regimental doctor. He was also given a uniform: a dark-blue coat with yellow buttons and bright-red collar, lapels and tails; a black neck tie with white edging; a pair of pale-grey cloth trousers with red stripes; and a pair of yellow leather gloves.Footnote ⁴⁵ If this was a new honour for the twenty-seven-year-old Strauss, it was an accolade shared with other dance musicians, including Joseph Lanner and Philipp Fahrbach (1815–85), who looked after the musical requirements of other citizen regiments. Their performing forces were very similar to those encountered in dance music – a full complement of string instruments as well as wind instruments and percussion – and their main role at public functions was to foster loyalty to the monarchy and to the city. As well as dance music, Strauss composed (or retitled) several marches for the regiment, which showed the same easy appeal as his waltzes. For the twenty-eight-year-old Strauss, it marked the final element in a balanced civic, imperial and national identity: the juxtaposition of the military with the dance, the open air with the ballroom, the informal with the formal and the public with the private.

One of Strauss’s fellow kapellmeisters, Philipp Fahrbach, was also a flute player in Strauss’s orchestra, from 1827 to 1835. Like Strauss, he had been born in Vienna, came from a lowly background and showed an early aptitude for performing, first playing the csakan and later the flute. He began to compose his own dance music, published in significant quantities by Haslinger, and was to form his own orchestra in 1835. In 1847 he wrote an article for a Viennese music journal, the Wiener allgemeine Musik-Zeitung, which looked back over the development of dance music in the city during the previous twenty-five years.Footnote ⁴⁶ Unlike the vivid, very personal impressions of Chopin and Wagner, it is a measured and informative account by an insider of some of the practices of the business.

Fahrbach notes that in the early days of the Strauss orchestra, waltzes were composed straight onto the orchestral parts, sometimes with the assistance of the players who knew the intentions of their director and, since Johann Strauss directed from memory, glancing as necessary at a violin part, there was little need for a written-up score. Fahrbach generously acknowledged that Strauss’s instinctive musicianship set him apart from all of his contemporaries – someone, as he put it, who composed ‘for the listener as well as for the feet’ (‘sogleich für’s Gehör und für die Füße’). Melody was the prime ingredient, crucially melody that curved across a four-bar phrase rather than a short-winded two-bar phrase. In that way, the old standard formal unit of sixteen bars was expanded to larger structures, always an accumulation of four-bar phrases and with a clearly marked binary structure with repeats. One highly distinctive feature of Strauss’s melodic capacity is not mentioned by Fahrbach. From his very first waltzes, his melodies reveal a natural expressive preference for the sixth degree of the scale towards the end of a phrase; this inevitably led to an equally distinctive harmonic colouring, a dominant ninth chord, a sonority that was to become as much a marker of Strauss’s style, and that of his three sons, as the diminished seventh in Weber or whole-tone harmonies in Debussy. Fahrbach reported that at the beginning of his career in the 1820s a standard dance orchestra consisted of ten to twelve players, with no violas or cellos: three separate violin parts (one player per part, sometimes two), one double bass, one flute, one clarinet, two horns, one trumpet and timpani. In response to larger performing spaces, indoors and outdoors, Strauss’s orchestra grew closer in size and internal balance to theatre orchestras in Vienna: first and second violins, violas, cellos, double bass, double woodwind, as many as three trumpets, plus one trombone to emphasize the all-important bass part; additional percussion instruments, particularly bass drum, usefully delineated the ebb and flow of the phrasing patterns. In terms of orchestral sonority, Fahrbach points to a crucial difference between Lanner and Strauss: the former liked a strong, imposing sound (‘vollstimmig und rauschend’); Strauss was more charming and ringing (‘lieblicher und schallhafter’).

When Strauss began his career in the mid-1820s, a collection of waltzes might consist of as many as twelve short dances, each sixteen bars in length. But alongside the expansion from within each dance that Fahrbach mentions, the progressive trend was to reduce the number of dances, usually to five, and also to begin the set with an introduction (the Eingang) that allowed the dancers to assemble and follow it with an expansive coda, still in four-par units, that repeated one or more of the main waltz themes, piano as well as forte, before ending with a rousing conclusion. One salient feature of Strauss’s Op. 1 from 1827, the Täuberln-Walzer, was to remain constant throughout his career: a distinct preference for E major as the home key for a set of waltzes. Given the broader tradition in Viennese music of presenting public music with trumpets and timpani in C major or D major, as in any number of symphonies, masses and operatic finales, the favouring of E major is surprising. Its origins may well reflect Strauss’s limited musical training. He was not a pianist but someone whose tactile, as well as aural, experience of music was through the violin, left hand on the fingerboard, right hand with the bow. Doodling on the instrument or, more constructively, finding an appealing melody that could feature in a new waltz was done most naturally on the top string, the E string, which led to that pitch being favoured as tonic; its lower dominant, B major, was also easy to access in first position on the A string.

Viennese dance culture had a long tradition of repeating the final dance in a waltz collection at an accelerated speed, so as to provide an exhilarating conclusion, particularly if it was the last dance of the night – a feature that occasionally found its way into art music, such as the minuet in Beethoven’s Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4.Footnote ⁴⁷ This popular practice led to the composition of a new brisk dance, appropriately titled Galopp (or Galoppe), usually in 2/4 and in ternary form, plus the occasional introduction and coda, too. After the gentle, graceful steps of a waltz cycle danced by couples, the galop placed all the couples in a whirling circle, the man placing his right hand on the waist of the woman, while his left hand grasped her right hand to lead the charge. If individuals stumbled, that was part of the appeal; its excitable, over-exuberant nature even led doctors to warn that it could precipitate a heart attack.Footnote ⁴⁸ One of Strauss’s earliest examples, the Champagner-Galoppe (Op. 8) from 1828, requires the instrumentalists to shout ‘Sauf aus’ (‘Drink up’) to the principal musical motif. A year later, Vienna saw the first performance in the city of Rossini’s opera Wilhelm Tell; Strauss included its most popular number – conveniently in E major as well as in the requisite 2/4 – as the main theme of his latest galop, the Wilhelm Tell-Galopp, Op. 29b, published by Haslinger in November 1829.

Quoting music by other composers within a dance was to be an attractive, opportunistic resource in the careers of all four members of the Strauss family. Less frequently commented upon are those works whose entire raison d’être was quotation, the potpourri. Between 1829 and 1833 Johann Strauss composed four such works, featuring familiar music by other composers alongside rewarding self-quotation. Instead of dancing, they provided a different kind of entertainment: passive and intermittent listening while continuing to eat, drink and talk. The appeal lay in recognizing the familiar and taking delight in some of the incongruent juxtapositions of musical quotations. Haslinger’s titles for these works were appropriately allusive, occasionally even self-deprecating. The one for Strauss’s first potpourri was a tongue twister, Der unzusammenhängende Zusammenhang (The Incoherent Coherence, Op. 25, 1829), and was followed by Wiener-Tagsbelustigung (Daily Diversion of the Viennese, Op. 37, 1831) and Musikalisches Ragout (Musical Stew, Op. 46, 1831). By far the most extravagant was a potpourri that had the name of its audacious creator embedded in a punning title, Ein Strauss von Strauss: Aus Ton-Blumen (A Bouquet from Strauss: With Flowers of Sound, Op. 55, 1832). Haslinger’s print preceded the title page with a preliminary engraving of a large bouquet of flowers. In the piano version the potpourri occupies twenty-seven printed pages, lasting some twenty minutes in performance. Altogether, over twenty musical flowers are presented, some cultivated by Strauss himself (including Das Leben ein Tanz, oder Der Tanz, ein Leben! and Heiter auch in ernster Zeit), most taken from the gardens of other composers or from the wild. There are extracts from popular operas recently given in Vienna (all in German) – Auber’s Masaniello, Bellini’s La straniera and Hérold’s Zampa – an extract from Fahrbach’s Hungarian March, the sound of a post horn in the distance and a comic item described as a ‘Solo from the pantomime, The Magic Mandoline, played by the bass trombone’ (‘Solo aus der Pantomime Die Zaubermandoline vorgetragen mit Bass-Posaune’). But two other sections are wholly unexpected in these surroundings. The potpourri begins arrestingly with the opening thirty-two bars of Beethoven’s overture to Fidelio (in E major!), a work that was often played in concerts, though the opera itself was a rarity. Towards the end of the potpourri the sound of a wind machine heralds a storm, which inexplicably becomes an earthquake – an extended passage of music in C minor headed ‘Erdbeben’ but with no identified composer. It is, in fact, the final movement of Haydn’s Seven Last Words, ‘Il terremoto’, a depiction of the earthquake that convulsed Calvary following Christ’s crucifixion. The strict censorship rules would not have tolerated the identification of a religious work, but Vienna’s many quartet players would have recognized it immediately. All this terror is overcome by a ‘Feyerlicher Einzug’, a ‘festive entrance’ accompanied by the sound of bells, cannon shots and trumpet fanfares, all culminating in a much more familiar work by Haydn, one that did not need to be labelled: the national anthem ‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’.

Set alongside the allure of several sets of waltzes and the hyperactivity of a short galop, the broad, rather ramshackle appeal of this potpourri is very different: a large canvas, quickly filled with random colours and shapes. It also raises pertinent questions about how it was composed and the nature of Strauss’s wider musical interests. How did Strauss source the music, especially works that were only recently composed? Did he have the assistance of others, such as Fahrbach, or was the selection wholly or in part determined by Haslinger? Certainly, the latter is more likely to have had access (legitimate or otherwise) to musical materials. Given Strauss’s limited musical education and the indifference of his parents towards his musical interests, there has always been a natural tendency to assume that his musical experience was a wholly circumscribed one, restricted to dance music in suburban halls and in the open air. While there is no record of him ever attending the performance of an opera, an oratorio or a concert in Vienna, the contents of the potpourris suggest that his musical interests were broader than might be assumed. Later in the century, Eduard Hanslick was certainly of the view that his musical significance was a broad one, ‘as a composer and as a conductor of the music of others’, and noted that his concerts regularly included works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Spohr, Weber and others.Footnote ⁴⁹ Obviously, the appeal of the potpourri relied on the musical knowledge of the audience, too; individuals could identify extracts and laugh at the incongruence of their presentation. In the same way that Strauss’s career now embraced a wide range of venues and easily crossed social boundaries, the music, too, was fully engaged with the broader musical environment rather than separated from it. All this had been achieved in less than five years, a tribute to Haslinger’s marketing as well as Strauss’s creative imagination. He already stood apart from his former mentor, Joseph Lanner, as someone who embodied a wider culture rather than merely serving it. That dynamism would continue.