Essential Johann Strauss II
As the son of Vienna's – and Europe's – most celebrated dance-band leader, there was never much doubt about the career that the young Johann Strauss II would follow. But the son quickly eclipsed the father, and over a 51-year career as composer and bandleader, he elevated popular music – waltzes, polkas, galops, quadrilles and operettas – to the level of high art, earning himself the title (still undisputed) of the "Waltz King".
Read more…It’s true that the music of Johann Strauss II was the sound of Vienna in the second half of the 19th century – and that since his death, he's become a Viennese institution. It's equally true that his musical roots lay in the popular songs and dances of Vienna's wine gardens and cafés. Spirited, gracious and endlessly tuneful, his art is unambiguously about pleasure. But to confine Strauss to Viennese Evenings is to overlook the sophistication and range of his greatest music. Admired without reservation by both Brahms and Wagner, Strauss returned the compliment, and his finest waltzes are effectively romantic tone-poems: in the words of the critic Eduard Hanslick, "each one a little love-story of bashful courtship, impulsive infatuation, radiant happiness and easily-consolable melancholy". He brought an inimitable inspiration and panache to polkas, galops, marches and quadrilles, and of his 16 operettas, two in particular – "Die Fledermaus" and "Der Zigeunerbaron" – set the template for Viennese operetta for a generation: near-perfect comic masterpieces, bubbling over with melody, wit and unquenchable joie de vivre.
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