Waltz this way: rival venues in Vienna compete to celebrate Johann Strauss's 200th birthday

The Guardian

22-02-2025

The music of Johann Strauss streams through Vienna like the stately Danube. Even the syllables of the composer's name beat out the rhythm of a waltz, as all Austrian dance teachers know. In their lessons, the words 'Jo-hann Strauss' are often swapped in to replace the conventional 'one, two, three' step count.
Viennese children learn to waltz just like they learn to ride a bike, so the muscle-memory never leaves them. Just as well, because the city is still famous as the home of a 19th-century dance craze that shaped its international image. In this 200th anniversary year of the birth of the 'waltz king', there are rival bids jostling to become the focus of the swirling celebrations.
'His music was for everyone, of every class and background. People danced to it at grand balls but also at private parties and at home,' said Eduard Strauss, the composer's great-grand-nephew. 'He really was the first pop star.' As a descendant of Johann's youngest brother, also Eduard, he's batting for the Strauss bicentenary venue he thinks has more authenticity than most: a museum set up inside a small dance hall, or casino, where the musician conducted his own hit waltzes for his fans. 'It is an original and I am an original,' Eduard says, adding that the building, now the House of Strauss museum, was important not just for its lively music, but as a place to keep warm and meet people in bright lights on dark evenings.
This coming weekend, the exclusive 67th Vienna Opera Ball takes place amid the vast grandeur of the State Opera house, with tickets at €395. Hundreds of similar balls, at varying scale, dominate Viennese social life from November to March every year. Formal and lavish, they're a bit of nostalgic play-acting, with tailcoats, tuxedos and long swishy dresses, and yet staged in deadly cultural earnest. The city's guilds, professionals and tradespeople, from the cake-makers to the scientists, host glittering events. This weekend, the Viennese kaffeesieder, or coffee brewers, transform the Vienna Hofburg into the 'largest and most beautiful coffee house in the world' in tribute to the heritage of another Viennese tradition. Strauss may be best known for the Blue Danube, Austria's unofficial national anthem, but there are about 500 pieces by him played each ball season. All this comes on top of the New Year's concert, brimful of his waltzes, beamed out across the world from the Golden Hall of the Musikverein. Before this, at midnight, the Blue Danube is played to the nation after the chimes of Vienna's cathedral sound. Each January, the gilt auditorium of the opera house sells out for a performance of Strauss's comic operetta Die Fledermaus.
So it seems odd the city has waited for this major anniversary to work out how to honour its most on-brand composer. Vying for the role alongside the House of Strauss, the museum housed in the refurbished Casino Zögernitz, is a new, permanent, immersive exhibition in the city centre displaying his life and work to a musical accompaniment, the Johann Strauss Museum: New Dimensions. Vienna's Theatermuseum is also running a bicentenary exhibition, hailing the composer as 'the first international superstar', until June. More conventional historic sites for Strauss pilgrimage remain his former apartment in the Praterstraße Strauss apartment, the gold Strauss monument in the Stadtpark and the Strauss tomb in the Central Cemetery. Further out, the Dommayer Cafe is billed as the place where he first picked up a baton in public. The delayed response to the Strauss legacy is probably due to the complexity of the real story. The 'waltz king' title originally belonged to his father, Johann Strauss I, who toured Europe with an entourage of 18 to 20 carriages before his son ever stepped into the limelight as the next master of the dance. And then there were Johann II's younger musical brothers, Josef and Eduard. 'People should not just say 'Strauss',' says his great-grand-nephew. 'They should say which one.'
The arrival of the waltz, condemned for immorality like all new crazes should be, was the birth of the modern music industry. Each tune was sold to a music manuscript publisher, who took a photograph or commissioned a portrait of the composer to help sell the sheet music.
The catalyst for the trend is thought to have been the Congress of Vienna of 1814, when politicians and monarchs came together in the Habsburg capital to decide on the borders of the continent after the defeat of Napoleon. Entertainments, adhering to the rules of court ceremony, were set up for the dignatories and new dance music commissioned.
Within a decade or two there were more than 60 dance halls in the city, and Strauss senior set up financially risky, festival-like outdoor events.
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There are still more than 30 dance schools in Vienna, with classes gearing up for the ball season, including sessions on dancefloor etiquette. Wearing a wristwatch is not encouraged and neck ties are forbidden. Each male dancer must also bow and kiss the hand of any woman he asks to dance.
At 3am this morning, the guests at the House of Strauss's anniversary ball were set to spill out on to the cold pavements of Vienna, many in search of a Wiener sausage stand, the traditional street food. But there are still many nights of waltzing to go, with ball directors all over the city calling out 'Alles Walzer!' to start dances into the early spring.