Why has the world turned on the Waltz King?

Spectator

4 days ago

On 17 June 1872, Johann Strauss II conducted the biggest concert of his life. The city was Boston, USA, and the promoters provided Strauss with an orchestra and a chorus numbering more than 20,000. One hundred assistant conductors were placed at his disposal, and a cannon shot cued The Blue Danube – the only way of silencing the expectant crowds. Estimates vary, but the audience was reckoned to number between 50,000 and 100,000; in all, there must have been a minimum of 70,000 people present. This month's Oasis reunion only played to 80,000.
The result, in an age before modern amplification, was much as you might expect. 'A fearful racket that I shall never forget as long as I live,' was Strauss's own description. Still, the point stands. Johann Strauss II was famous; very famous. A Europe-wide newspaper poll, conducted in 1890, named Strauss as the third most popular individual in Europe – pipped to the top slot only by Queen Victoria and (in second place) Otto von Bismarck. Strauss died in 1899, before the era of recorded music, but within his lifetime sheet music for The Blue Danube sold upwards of one million copies.
That's platinum disc territory, and in the 21st century, the phenomenon endures. The perma-tanned Dutch violinist André Rieu, whose classical pops orchestra is named after Strauss, has picked up some 500 platinum discs while his live shows – built around Strauss's music – play across the world to stadium-size audiences. His 2018 tour outgrossed Elton John, globally. Again, this is old news. I'm not here to tell you that Johann Strauss's waltzes, polkas and operetta hits were the pop music of their day: that people loved them, and continue to love them, is a matter of record.
So why – in 2025, the 200th anniversary of his birth – is there a Strauss-shaped hole in the programmes of our major orchestras and opera companies? Classical music is obsessed with anniversaries and Strauss is proven box office, so where are the festivals, the rediscoveries, the operetta revivals? The Proms has a single Saturday morning concert; the Grange Festival staged Die Fledermaus – and in the UK, that's basically it. In Britain, at least, it seems that the people who decide what classical music we should hear have rather fallen out of love with this most accessible of 19th-century masters.
If that's the case, they're swimming against the tide of history and the judgment of genius. The deepest divide in late 19th- century European music – a culture war of generation-defining bitterness – was between the devotees of Wagner and Brahms. Yet both composers revered Strauss. For Wagner, Strauss was 'the most musical man in Europe'. He hired a private orchestra so that he could conduct Strauss waltzes as a birthday treat, and licensed the Strauss orchestra to première excerpts from Tristan und Isolde in Vienna at a time when the city's ultra-conservative musical establishment refused all contact with Wagner's 'music of the future'.
Brahms, meanwhile, was practically a fanboy, comparing Strauss to Mozart. When Strauss's stepdaughter asked him for an autograph, Brahms scribbled the opening of The Blue Danube and wrote 'Unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms'. For several generations afterwards, to be a progressive force in European music was to admire Johann Strauss. Gustav Mahler put Die Fledermaus on the stage of the Vienna Court Opera, and there's hardly a Mahler symphony that doesn't, at some point, swing into waltz time, or pause to squeeze the sadness and sweetness of life out of the succulent close harmonies – the yearning, Italianate thirds and sixths – that were Strauss's hallmark. Mahler's disciples, the arch-modernists Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, made exquisite pared-down arrangements of the Emperor Waltz, the Treasure Waltz and Wine, Women and Song.
It wasn't just a German thing, either. In Paris, Ravel's La Valse portrayed the 19th century dancing to its doom, but Ravel had only love for the composer he called 'the great Strauss, not Richard, the other one – Johann'. A distinction needed to be made. The Bavarian Richard Strauss was no relation to Johann but in 1911 he'd woven a garland of waltzes into the score of Der Rosenkavalier. The opera was set in the 18th century, but that didn't matter. Like Stanley Kubrick (five decades later, in 2001: A Space Odyssey), Richard perceived that Johann's music embodied an entire civilisation.
I could say more: of the eminent conductors (from Henry Wood to Christian Thielemann) who've adored Strauss; of his legacy in popular music, from the Gershwins' admiring tribute 'By Strauss' ('It laughs, it sings! The world is in rhyme/ Swinging in three-quarter time') to the way the long, poetic introductions and codas of Strauss's greatest waltzes anticipate contemporary DJ sets – building and shaping a collective mood, as well as providing a beat for dancing. Most startling of all is the knowledge that, having outlawed the works of Mendelssohn and Mahler, Goebbels suppressed evidence of Strauss's Jewish ancestry. Cancelling Johann Strauss was a step too far even for the Third Reich.
Still, here we are, in a Strauss-deprived classical music world. Why? Perhaps the televising of the Vienna Philharmonic's annual New Year's Day concert has normalised the idea that Strauss is a purely seasonal treat. Most British orchestras programme a solitary Viennese evening in early January – typically under-rehearsed and delegated to a novice conductor, though artists who shortchange this music pass sentence on themselves. As with Mozart or Haydn, the superficial simplicity of Strauss's inspiration is a mirror that reveals a conductor's soul. Furtwängler's Emperor Waltz has a monumental inner logic; Karajan's Blue Danube shimmers with sensuous richness. Carlos Kleiber made the Thousand and One Nights waltz sound like a long, warm smile.
The original score of Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube (1867). ART IMAGES / GETTY IMAGES
And then there's our old friend snobbery. Rieu may be a factor there; likewise the high-kitsch framing of the annual New Year broadcast from Vienna. Euro-camp dance routines and crowds of Belgian retirees are just not cool. The tastemakers of the classical world say they want diverse audiences – but not that kind of diversity, and classical music social media foams with disdain on the morning of New Year's Day. It's embarrassing to witness. True, any creator as prolific as Strauss will have off days and arid patches (even Bach was no exception). But any truly musical listener should be able to discern the fundamental artistic quality of Strauss's finest work. Brahms heard it; Wagner heard it. It shouldn't be this hard.
We live in an aesthetic climate that favours the arduous over the graceful, and privileges the grim over the joyous (though no one with ears to hear can miss the ever-present melancholy that offsets Strauss's sweetness). In the meantime, it's hard not to feel that we're missing out on something life-enhancing – and god knows, we could use it. Strauss can (and does) flourish even without elite orchestras and big-name maestros, but the pleasure that comes from hearing genius exploring its own lighter side shouldn't be confined to the first of January. Until the 1980s, Viennese nights used to be a regular (and best-selling) feature of the Proms, and there is a vast untapped repertoire to explore.
Imagine an inventively programmed evening of Strauss rarities and favourites performed by, say, Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra (who played an exquisite sequence of Strauss waltzes in the 2014 Proms), or John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London (who delivered an exhilarating Fledermaus overture as recently as 2021). Preconceptions and prejudices would evaporate like mist on the Prater. Hope springs eternal. There's another Strauss anniversary in 2029: a second chance to celebrate some of the most perfect popular music ever created. And to join Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern, Ravel, Gershwin, Richard Strauss, Furtwängler, Karajan, Kleiber and (yes) André Rieu – plus millions of music-lovers across continents and centuries – in grateful homage to the Waltz King.