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Peter Neville-Hadley

In Austria, the arrival of the New Year is always celebrated to the sounds of Strauss, and in particular the great swirling tune that has become the country’s unofficial national anthem – Johann Strauss II’s An der schönen blauen Donau, or The Blue Danube waltz.
Every New Year’s Eve, all six tiers of the haughty Vienna State Opera’s glittering auditorium are packed for a performance of the only operetta the company condescends to perform, the same Strauss’ Die Fledermaus.
But at midnight, television, radio and the internet all broadcast first the chimes from Vienna’s venerable St Stephen’s Cathedral, and then The Blue Danube. Across the country, in bars and in restaurants, on ski slopes or just on the street, young and old alike begin the New Year by dancing to the most famous waltz in the world.
It’s not about sadly saying goodbye to the old year but a joyful renewing, and the New Year in Austria wouldn’t be the same without it.
In 2025, however, the band will play on as the country spends all year celebrating the 200th anniversary of Johann II’s birth. In addition to the many glamorous balls held every year until late February, and where dancing to Strauss is guaranteed, there will be 65 Strauss-related performances and three exhibitions at 71 locations around the city, detailed at johannstrauss2025.at.

There will be a rare chance to hear some lesser-known works from his repertoire, to see performances in historic venues, to visit where he lived and even to stay where he played. But there’ll also be much that places Strauss in the 21st century, with concerts outdoors and in a circus tent; electronic versions and shows with augmented reality; a Strauss film, a Strauss detective novel and even a Strauss escape room.
The Strauss story is complicated, and many visitors will be surprised to discover that The Blue Danube began as something rather less joyful, and that the Waltz King of Vienna made many a misstep.
The French composer Hector Berlioz once commented that “Vienna without Strauss is like Austria without the Danube”. But he was referring not to Johann II, but to his father, who was the Waltz King well before his son took the crown.
“Without the father there would be no son, not only biologically, but musically,” says Professor Eduard Strauss, Johann II’s great-grandnephew, who is showing me round the recently opened House of Strauss, a museum occupying several upstairs rooms at the recently restored Casino Zögernitz, the elegant 1837 dance hall in which all four musical Strausses, Johann I (1804-49), Johann II (1825-99) and his younger brothers, Josef (1827-70) and Eduard (1835-1916), once performed, and the last of its kind to have survived intact.
The House of Strauss contains intelligently organised hi-tech displays that offer much more than a straightforward swing through the lives of the musical members of the family, but more a chance to participate in them, with plenty of audio, video and interactive digital trickery.

Johann I and his musical partner, Joseph Lanner, developed waltz music from its peasant origins into far grander fully orchestrated concert pieces. The dance itself, although it may now seem starchily formal, was then seen as shockingly intimate, and was denounced from pulpits across Europe.
But it had been gradually embraced by the upper classes and, elbowing out the more genteel minuet, was enthusiastically adopted by the crowned heads and government figures attending the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna, convened to redraw the borders of Europe after the first defeat of Napoleon. They were sometimes criticised for doing more dancing than debating, and carried the waltz contagion home with them.
Johann I rose to fame as a waltz specialist, with a rock-star-like popularity, and corresponding failings such as keeping a mistress. He had three children by her as well as his legitimate sons and was divorced by Johann II’s mother.
But the younger Johann went on to exceed even his father’s success, often dashing from venue to venue in an evening to conduct a few waltzes at each before moving on. He drew his two brothers into the family business, to develop yet more music and to conduct his orchestra while he was away at regular summer engagements in St Petersburg, Russia.
The modern Eduard, 69 and silver-haired, is not a musician but a retired judge; genial and fastidious of thought and speech. He leads the Vienna Institute for Strauss Research, determined to refute the many misunderstandings about the musical family’s history, and is often found at the museum.

“There’s a myth that at the time of the 1848 [Austrian] revolution that Strauss the son was for the revolutionary youth,” he says, “and his father, with his Radetzky March, was for the conservative element.”
Joseph Radetzky von Radetz was indeed an imperial field marshal, but Strauss senior believed in press freedom, says the professor, and often named his music for famous and influential people, just as he indulged in an early form of sampling, lifting recognisable phrases from other famous composers to use in his waltzes.
It was all just business.
And if he expected a youthful audience rather than an establishment one, he would instead play his March of the Student Legion or the Freedom March. He simply gave the crowds what they wanted.
At the peak of handsome Johann II’s fame, women would request locks of his hair as keepsakes and swoon at his concerts – like The Beatles at Shea Stadium a century later, but with less screaming.
At the museum, someone points out Professor Strauss to a family visiting from Beijing, and we cannot proceed without photos, an invitation to visit and a big hug for Strauss from the family’s violin-playing young son. The Strauss name apparently still has rock-star status globally.

Johann II’s wife, Jetty, encouraged her husband to develop the Strauss brand by writing operettas. Waltzes, polkas and marches simply earned a flat fee from the sheet music publisher, the professor explains, but stage productions paid royalties for every performance. And he could also recycle those melodies into further waltzes.
After Jetty’s death, in 1878, Johann II married again unhappily, and later divorced, but as a result could not remarry in Catholic Austria. So he became a citizen of the more permissive protestant Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in modern-day Germany, and married again while continuing to live in Vienna.
Although this caused a certain coolness with the Austrian royal family, Strauss was by this time too big to fail, and for most Austrians his peccadilloes were probably part of his entertainment value. He remains an Austrian rather than a German hero.
The climax of the visit is the elegant chandelier-hung dance hall, still much as the Strausses saw it. Between live concerts, including an expanded programme for 2025, and a New Year’s Eve Strauss gala, visitors can see a Johann II avatar give 15-minute digital performances, conducting with his violin beneath his chin, year-round.
Away from the limelight there’s a more domestic sense of the man at his apartment, at 54 Praterstrasse, the place where he wrote The Blue Danube. It’s tucked away behind a cafe appropriately named 3/4 Time.

Visitors must be buzzed in as if making a social visit to a Strauss family still alive (just walk up to the door and press the bell marked “Johann Strauss Wohnung”). Several comfortable high-ceilinged but homely rooms contain not only portraits of family members but many personal items, including his piano, harmonium and his violin, made by Amati of Cremona in 1615.
Anticipating modern trends, Strauss liked to work standing up, and there’s a high desk made specially for him in 1884, of darkly stained alder wood and maple, with brass and mother-of-pearl inlays.
There are copies of his hits for home use, scored for piano or domestic musical groups, which were where music publishers made their profits. Strauss’ publisher conceived the novelty of putting the composer’s image on the cover, boosting both sales and brand recognition.
It’s fitting that of the city’s three opera venues, the MusikTheater an der Wien should be reviving some of Johann II’s lesser-known works: 13 of his operettas were given their premieres in this jewel of a venue, a cosy traditional horseshoe-shaped auditorium of considerable magnificence, just renovated in time for the anniversary.
Opened in 1801, it’s the oldest still-active theatre in the Austrian capital, and will present further performances of Die Fledermaus later in the year, its well-plotted satirical look at late-19th century Viennese society perfect for those nervous of opera’s portentousness. But among other shows will be the rarely performed Das Spitzentuch der Königin (The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief), one of its themes recycled by Strauss as the still-popular waltz, Roses from the South.

Strauss and his orchestra also performed on demand for the aristocracy at private events, including at the Palais Coburg, built between 1845 and 1850 partly on one bastion of the city walls, before these were pulled down, in 1858. (Ever opportunistic, Strauss wrote a Demolition Polka.)
Here, up a grand staircase, the ornate rooms where Strauss played and premiered well-known works such as the Windsor Echoes waltz have been restored in great detail, their columns topped with gilded scrollwork, floral motifs and other golden trim, and with painted putti pursuing each other around the ceilings.
It was the Prince Coburg of the day, a musician himself and sympathetic to Strauss, who used family connections to arrange for the composer’s temporary removal to Coburg, in Germany, for a convenient conversion to Protestantism, so he could divorce and remarry.
The palace is now a hotel of immense comfort with just 34 rooms and suites, and is still popular for state visits, and perfect to return to after a ball.
A portrait of the French princess for whom the palace was originally built, and who would have known Strauss, smiles down on those taking breakfast, and the hotel has maintained a tradition of matinee concert performances in the same rooms where Strauss performed and socialised, and where there will be plenty of his music in 2025.

The Blue Danube is perhaps now more commonly known outside Austria for its use as the background music to spacecraft scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. But, as Professor Strauss tells me over lunch at the House of Strauss, this waltz was originally commissioned by a male-voice choir as a choral piece, and written with cynical lyrics that reflected Austria’s recent loss of a brief war with Prussia, and the lamentable state of the country’s economy.
The Danube was never beautiful, and never blue, he says, and the romantic lyrics used now date from several years later. In the original, the basses open with a declaration, “The Viennese are happy!”, which ought to be played more briskly than it usually is today. But the tenors reply sceptically, “Oh ho! How so?”
The river makes an appearance in the slow introduction, says the professor. “But it’s the only place in the whole waltz when we hear the Danube. It’s all a description of the bad circumstances of the Vienna of 1867.”
But it does conclude with one happy idea, that many might feel still speaks to them today: even if everything is bad, at least we can still dance.


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Straussomania: Austria prepares to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Johann Strauss II’s birth

An homage to “Die Fledermaus” will be projected onto building facades in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier in April 2025. Photo: Modulux

The 2025 Strauss anniversary celebrations will include concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic at Musikverein. Photo: Rolex

A violin that belonged to Johann Strauss II, made by Amati of Cremona in 1615, on display at the composer’s former apartment in Vienna. Photo: Peter Neville-Hadley

A postcard from 1900 depicts the Palais Coburg, where Strauss and his orchestra performed at private events for the aristocracy. Photo: Getty Images

Johann Strauss II, the Waltz King, was a rock star in his day, with women competing for locks of his hair as keepsakes. Here he is seen at a more mature age in a bust on display at his former apartment in Vienna. Photo: Peter Neville-Hadley

Johann Strauss II’s former apartment in Vienna displays the instruments on which the Waltz King composed the most famous waltz of all – the Blue Danube. Photo: Peter Neville-Hadley

The hi-tech House of Strauss museum in Vienna, at the historic Casino Zögernitz, is full of the sounds of the Strauss family’s most famous creations, and assorted ways of digitally interacting. Photo: Peter Neville-Hadley

The Palais Coburg is now a hotel where visitors to Vienna may stay during the 2025 celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Strauss’s birth, and hear concerts in the same rooms where he originally performed. Photo: Peter Neville-Hadley

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Travel

Two hundred years after the birth of Vienna’s Waltz King, the fan frenzy around the composer is still going strong


Two hundred years after the birth of Vienna’s Waltz King, the fan frenzy around the composer is still going strong.


Straussomania: Austria prepares to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Johann Strauss II’s birth

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Two hundred years after the birth of Vienna’s Waltz King, the fan frenzy around the composer is still going strong

Two hundred years after the birth of Vienna’s Waltz King, the fan frenzy around the composer is still going strong