The Legacy of Johann Strauss by Zoë Alexis Lang (review)

This is a book about the political and cultural appropriation of Johann Strauss, Jr., the composer of The Blue Danube Waltz and other middlebrow favorites. His works have enjoyed a seemingly endless afterlife in the culture of musical kitsch that flourishes in present-day Austria. Lang evokes this culture on her first page—Strauss on the Austrian Airlines, Strauss in the Viennese parks, Strauss at the New Year’s Concerts—and then uses the image of Straussian ubiquity and “unabated” renown to launch her exploration of how this situation came to be (1). Starting with an account of the “facts and fictions” of his life, she turns to a set-piece chapter on the Strauss centennial of 1925, two chapters on shifting constructions of Strauss’s identity (“Strauss as German” in the Nazi era; “Strauss as Jew” in the Nazi and postwar eras), and finally a case study of Straussian appropriation through examining uses of his “Emperor Waltz,” mainly in a trio of mid-twentieth century films. As Lang asserts, the “legacy of the waltz in Vienna” was “grounded in nationalism”; moreover, despite the view of some that this legacy testifies only to “unmediated and vapid nostalgia,” the Strauss family “continue to provide cultural meaning for Austrians because of the unique prestige in which their works are held” (9–10).

As Lang notes in her first chapter, the remarkable thing about the Strausses is that alone among all the vast number of composers and performers who provided sustenance to the nineteenth-century appetite for light music of quality in restaurants, spas, parks, dance halls, and even in the opera houses and concert halls where serious music was performed, only Johann Strauss, Sr. and Johann Strauss, Jr. are still remembered. This is indeed a puzzle. Much of the blame, if blame there needs to be for this anomalous condition, can be laid at the study doors of musicologists, who—not surprisingly—saw little payoff in analyzing or celebrating an enormous amount of music that is basically all the same. As long as the dominant method of musicology was analysis of musical form, those composers who churned out works that no one was really meant to scrutinize for their harmonic originality or subtle nuances of phrasing were allowed to pass into obscurity. Once musicologists of Western music began to accommodate the very different programs of ethnomusicologists and cultural historians, figures like the Strausses, so profoundly attuned to the devices and desires of their times, became more interesting.

But Lang’s purpose is not to rescue Johann Strauss, Jr. from the condescension of musicology, though there is some of that flavor to her work. She is mainly interested in explaining why this man, among so many musical entertainers, was taken up by Austrians in the twentieth century as the embodiment of who they were. Part of the explanation lies surely in the tremendous celebrity he enjoyed during his lifetime, a status that did not dissipate immediately upon his death in 1899, just as, say, Johnny Carson is almost a living presence in the world of late-night television and stand-up comedy, decades after he retired from the Tonight Show. Thousands would have retained fond memories of Strauss, Jr.’s performances, and the venues in which his music was heard never ceased to exist. Still, there is something more than cultural inertia at work in his continuing reputation, particularly after the catastrophe of the First World War interrupted and changed memories of the prewar period. The task Lang has set herself is to explain from whence came that extra measure of posthumous fame for a prolific but not profound composer.

The force that does the heavy lifting in this book is nationalism. In the first chapter, politically inflected national-cum-imperial agendas explain the vagaries of changing biographical views of the Strausses, father and son. In the second chapter, the centennial of Strauss, Jr.’s birth gives the postwar era’s existentially...