The Waltz King turns to operetta

JOHANN Strauss's waltz, ‘Seid umschlungen, Millionen’, was not the last time that Strauss and Brahms were linked together in a public manner. On 3 June 1899 Johann Strauss (the son) died at his home in Igelgasse in the Fourth District, exactly two years and two months after Brahms's death. The funeral arrangements were strikingly similar. Strauss had converted to the Protestant faith in order to marry his third wife, Adele, and the funeral service was held in the same church in the Dorotheergasse, attended by individuals as different in outlook and profession as Karl Lueger, the mayor, and Gustav Mahler, the director of the court opera. Following the service the funeral cortege made its way towards the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde where, as in Brahms's funeral, the Singverein sang that composer's ‘Fahr wohl’. The horse-drawn procession then made its way to the Zentralfriedhof, where Strauss was buried in a plot immediately adjacent to that of Brahms. At a memorial concert in the Musikverein on 25 October, Strauss's birthday, the Singverein, accompanied by an orchestra drawn from the court orchestra and conducted by Richard von Perger, performed Brahms's Requiem. The affecting waltz rhythms of ‘Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen’ could never have sounded more appropriate.

As two long-standing figures of the musical establishment, Strauss and Brahms had the affection and admiration of the Viennese public, but the nature of the affection and, arising from that, the appeal of their personal friendship was founded on a contradiction. Brahms was an outsider, from Hamburg, who had become an insider; Strauss, on the other hand was a Viennese, one of us, but for much of his career had been outside the mainstream of musical life in the city.

Born in 1825 in the suburb of St Ulrich (later incorporated into the Seventh District) to a family that could trace its Viennese roots back to the middle of the previous century, Strauss had lived in Vienna all his life. With his father, Johann, and his two brothers Josef and Eduard, he had established Viennese dance music – the waltz, the polka and the march – as a constant, highly idiomatic presence in the social and musical life of the city, not only as music for dancing but as dance music to listen to, outdoors and indoors.