VIENNA —From golden rubber duckies in the image of Johann Strauss II to a signal encoding the “Blue Danube” waltz that was sent into outer space, the bicentenary of the composer has been a ubiquitous presence here. The official birthday celebration on Oct. 25 featured a full-day program at venues from the Rathaus to the Volksoper. At the Musikverein, the Vienna Symphony programmed new works by John Williams and Max Richter under the baton of Manfred Honeck.
Much more so than Mozart, whose face emblazons chocolate wrappers and other promotional material for the city, Strauss embodies Viennese musical culture in all its paradoxes: extravagance and conservatism, triumph and tragedy, kitsch and elegance. Perhaps most importantly, his dance numbers are vehicles of nostalgia — for a lost empire and a multi-cultural identity that was ultimately not able to assert itself against the rise of nationalism. This year’s program, including installations and new operetta productions, has also revealed Strauss as a projection for ahistoricism and political correctness.
Williams, for his part, did not shy away from commenting on the irony of reveling in a carefree, Old World dance. His score When the World Was Waltzing, dedicated to Honeck and the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, includes distorted melodies, jagged rhythms, and stormy passages that are juxtaposed with purely tonal elements evoking musicals and, not surprisingly, Hollywood grandeur. Toward the end of the short piece, the solo violin pleads and protests as the orchestra breaks out in a classic waltz, only to pull the ensemble into its own world and draw to a resounding close. The mood was at once celebratory and tongue-in-cheek, both homage and critical reflection.
Richter’s Three Dances, also performed with Mutter, responds very differently to the question of what Strauss’ music means today, avoiding direct quotations or references (surprising, since the composer did not shy away from remixing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons). The opening movement, “Circles in Circles,” features a melody that spirals upward over interlocking textures.
In the inner “Radiance,” time seemed to stand still through eerie, ethereal harmonies. The undulations of the closing “Time Colours” recalls the Aquarium movement from Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, also featuring the pulsating rhythms that are characteristic of Richter’s post-minimalist idiom for both film and the concert hall.
If Strauss were alive today (a speculation Williams raises in his program notes), chances are that he might have scored successfully for the big screen. Yet attempts to bring his music into the 21st century this year in Vienna have skirted around or even suppressed social issues.
An adaptation of Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron) by the folk-classical chamber ensemble Franui in March 2025 reorchestrated the operetta and expunged tensions between Hungarians and Germano-Austrians that are a part of the story. “The word ‘gypsy’ cannot be deployed without reflection at least since National Socialism,” read program notes.
Such revisionism was absent from a new production of Wiener Blut, a compilation of numbers that premiered shortly after Strauss’ death in 1899. The stage work, presented here in the small, gilded theater on the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace, is set at the time of the Congress of Vienna (organized in 1814 to restore order in Europe following the defeat of Napoleon). The second act takes place at a ball — a nod to the fact that this is where prominent guests danced the waltz and talked politics — a tradition that lives on today. The audience did not hold back chuckles as a marionette representing the censorship-friendly foreign minister Prince Metternich declared, “Democracy only stirs unrest.”
Strauss had in fact become a supporter of the revolution overthrowing imperial rule in 1848, when nationalist uprisings swept across Europe (they were ultimately suppressed). After witnessing the turmoil in Eastern European countries such as Hungary and Romania during his travels, he renamed a set of waltzes Freiheits-Lieder (Freedom Songs). He also reworked a Romanian National March as the Revolutions-Marsch. As David Wyn Jones explains in The Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna, Strauss’ Pesther Csárdás, a tribute to Hungary premiered in Budapest in 1846, was seized by the police.
In December 1848, Franz Joseph ascended to the throne as emperor of the Habsburg Empire and would remain in power until his death in 1916. As he mistrusted the emperor, the composer trimmed his beard to a large mustache resembling that of Franz Joseph at the behest of his first wife, the mezzo-soprano Jetty Treffz. He also composed two marches for the emperor and, in 1863, was permitted to succeed his father as director of Court Ball Music.
Strauss’ talent and celebrity appeal were already apparent in his late 20s, when he began to rival his father and made a public debut at a casino in the posh Hietzing district in 1844. A new AR-driven exhibit in the center of town calls him “the first pop star in world history,” which is an overstatement, although there are some facts to support the claim. Individual waltzes and polkas were printed and sold almost like pop songs in the wake of the Industrial Revolution (Strauss’ catalog includes some 500 individual dance numbers and 15 operettas, an opera, and a ballet).
He was also frequently on the road, traveling to Pavlovsk, Russia (the summer residence of the Tsars), every year for almost a decade starting in 1856, thanks to the expansion of a railway line through St. Petersburg. His popular “Champagne Polka” and the “Tritsch-Tratsch Polka” were composed for performances there. In 1872, he toured the U.S., conducting a 2,000-head orchestra for an audience of 100,000 at the Boston Colosseum and commanding nearly rock-star fees. For 16 concerts in Boston and three in New York, Strauss earned almost $24,000, the equivalent of $570,000 today (more details are available, in German, in the recently released book Johann Strauss – Amerikanische Reise by Bernhard Ecker and Peter Hosek).
Yet comparisons with the present can distort reality. “The Blue Danube” did not pave the way for Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter any more than the music industry that built their careers has anything to do with Strauss. Calling him the world’s “first pop star” may above all be a gag to attract tourists and a means of avoiding complexities that underlie his music: the tensions between old and new aristocracy in Vienna at the time, the bittersweet twilight of the Habsburg Empire, the fact that his part-Jewish ancestry was erased by the Nazis so that his music could be played on radio to boost morale, the quick rebranding of Vienna as a music capital after World War Two came to an end.
Rather than dig deep into the identity and history behind his dance numbers and operettas, the bicentenary of Strauss has largely been an occasion to repurpose his works as commodities that can be rewritten and reshaped. Which is a shame, because, after all, doesn’t his music allow us to waltz past political tensions, laugh caustically as the world spins into global disorder, and revel in the elegance of a simple melody?
