Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)
It is difficult to realize, under the spell of Die Fledermaus, that its perfection is really an accident, albeit a happy one. Conductor Bruno Walter, one of Fledermaus’ greatest admirers and interpreters, described its happiness as an intoxication, like the champagne celebrated in the operetta, ‘contained in the immortal melodies of the most typically Viennese of geniuses’. Yet the true inclination and ability of this composer, whose inspired music lifts an effective libretto to the heights, lay in a different direction.
Johann Strauss the Younger, becoming first his father’s rival then his successor, took over the mantle of most popular and gifted composer and performer of waltz music. He raised Vienna’s early 19th century craze for dance music to new levels of breadth, subtlety, and craftsmanship. Above all, his poetic instincts distilled the essence of the Viennese love of pleasure in music: the relaxed gaiety, with its melancholy undercurrent in the midst of abandon.
By the time he started to write for the stage, Strauss had enjoyed for 20 years the undisputed title of Waltz King. He was famous not only in Vienna but all over Europe; he had travelled to Paris, and even as far as Russia. The demand for him seemed insatiable.
Strauss’ life was entirely taken up with music – whether conducting and leading with his violin at countless balls or, increasingly as his life drew on, snatching time for composing, yet achieving an extraordinary consistency of invention, craft, and refinement. He expanded the very idea of the waltz into ever more complex, more symphonic forms. Strauss is said never to have read a book, and rarely a newspaper; he never went to plays, and had no sense of the theatre.
This was unpromising material for a stage composer, and Strauss was understandably reluctant to become one. It was Strauss’ first wife, former singer Jetty Treffz, who persuaded him to begin. She was friendly with the impresario Maximilian Steiner, director of the Theater an der Wien; together they devised the ruse of ‘stealing’ some of Strauss’ unpublished music, fitting it to scenes written by the theatre’s house librettist, and performing the result for Strauss to see. He yielded to his wife’s persuasion.
Strauss’ first venture into music theatre, The Merry Wives of Vienna, was beset by intrigue and never reached the stage. The second, Indigo and the Forty Robbers (1871) was at least a succès d’estime, encouraging Strauss to continue, which he did with Carnival in Rome. The main trouble with these early efforts was the complete ineptitude of the librettos, which Strauss had neither the experience nor the judgment to reject. It was said that the 40 robbers in Indigo were the 40 plagiarists who cobbled together the libretto.
Strauss probably kept going with these early theatrical efforts to keep his wife in good humour. His subsequent career tends to confirm that he was basically not suited to composing dramatic music: only two of his stage works have enjoyed enduring success (the other is Der Zigeunerbaron). One commentator takes the extreme view that Strauss’ time spent composing for the theatre was ‘an artistic suicide attempt lasting almost 30 years’.
The ‘happy accident’ of Die Fledermaus remains, escaping all the strictures on Strauss’ other stage works. What is the secret of the success of this piece, for most people the epitome not just of Viennese operetta but of operetta itself? It is intensely Viennese yet has universal appeal – a paradox dispelled by understanding how, in Fledermaus, varied musical and dramatic sources were ‘naturalised’ in Vienna.
The book on which Steiner had lighted this time had already proved its box-office potential on the legitimate stage; its origin lay in a farcical comedy by a German playwright, Roderick Benedix, called Das Gefängnis (The Jail). Taken up by Meilhac and Halévy, it became Le Réveillon, set in Paris on Christmas Eve. Produced in 1872 at the Palais Royal, this was a satire on French society immediately before the just-concluded Franco-Prussian War.
Meilhac and Halévy were the highly successful librettists who provided so many books for Offenbach (and Carmen for Bizet). Le Réveillon had the kind of plot Offenbach could well have taken up but didn’t. It came to the attention of Vienna publisher Gustav Lewy, and Steiner of the Theater an der Wien. It was Lewy who had the idea it might make a good libretto for Strauss, containing the ingredients he had lacked up until then: believable characters and situations, genuine wit, and mild satire.
Steiner thought the script too Parisian for Viennese taste, so he commissioned the writers Richard Genée and Karl Haffner – both Prussians, ironically – to adapt it. The new story they wrote around the farcical happenings could have been set anytime, anywhere – but it was plausibly 1870s Vienna, a topical comedy in modern dress. Vienna audiences were sure to recognise the husband flirting with his own disguised wife, the chambermaid posing as a fashionable lady, the devious and corrupt lawyer, the sybaritic prince. In all these characters Strauss discovered real people who engaged his attention.
It was Genée and Haffner, too, who had the idea of writing the story around its second act, the supper dance at Prince Orlofsky’s. They knew dance music was Strauss’ great strength (and the public would want to hear a lot of it in a Strauss operetta). Thus the plot helped Strauss escape the criticism of influential critic Eduard Hanslick, that in his operettas the waltzes stop the action. In Act I, as everyone looks forward to the ball, waltz music anticipates the action; in Act III, shreds of waltz flit reminiscently through the hung-over head of prison director Frank.
Evidently the libretto of Fledermaus appealed greatly to Strauss, though he didn’t like the title, claiming ‘no one likes a bat’. It is a pleasant little irony that many people have no idea of the connection between the operetta and its title; they miss what Eisenstein relates about the trick he played on Falke – leaving him drunk and asleep in a wood after an all-night party, so that Falke had to make his way home in broad daylight, wearing his bat costume of the night before. The main plot of Die Fledermaus is Falke’s masterfully contrived revenge on Eisenstein.
Strauss composed the music in a frenzy, finishing it in just 43 days and nights. In spite of his lack of interest in either public affairs or books, he must have been sensitive to the satire in the script, a recognisable portrait of Vienna’s nouveau riche society in the era of the stock market boom. Financiers like Gabriel von Eisenstein were a familiar – and admired – type, prominent among Strauss’ patrons. So were bored and sexually ambivalent pleasure-loving aristocrats like Prince Orlofsky. Strauss’ own chequered love-life (13 publicly known liaisons before the first of three marriages, and liaisons after it) made him familiar with the sexual mores of high society – stratagems of social climbing adventurers or aristocrats slumming it.
A challenge to anyone writing operetta in Vienna was the comparison with Offenbach whose satirical works were already popular there. Strauss had conducted in Paris and he admired Offenbach’s opéras-bouffes. He knew the society they held up to ridicule. Offenbach reciprocated Strauss’ admiration, and remarked casually to him ‘you ought to write operettas’. From Offenbach Strauss took the wit and high spirits, but without Offenbach’s caustic bite or his peculiarly French flair. In Die Fledermaus French gaiety is transmuted into something more cozily Viennese, without lapsing into sentimentality, which cannot be said of all Viennese operettas. ‘Only a man who heard Offenbach’s music earlier in Paris could have written this work’, writes Strauss biographer Decsey, ‘the erotic sophistication has a certain Gallic charm’.
Where Strauss went beyond Offenbach is in the development of his musical ideas, and especially in using instrumental music independently for dramatic purposes. A particularly brilliant example is the passage of dumb-show where the prison governor Frank returns from the party, unable to get the tunes out of his head as he staggers drunkenly – a perfect little tone poem of stage comedy, this has been called, realised in terms of music. Inevitably this kind of thing recalls the evocative introductions to many of Strauss’ great waltzes.
Considering its composer’s inexperience Die Fledermaus shows surprising mastery of vocal writing: the characterisation by vocal personality is almost Mozartian. Parody, too, is handled with poise, as it needs to be in operetta. Alfred’s love music cocks a snook at romantic opera, and the coloratura of Adele showing off her ‘talent’ for the theatre is bel canto in process of transformation into waltz song. Strauss must have been helped by his wife Jenny’s experience as a singer (she was admired by Mendelssohn and hailed as another Jenny Lind), but in any case he had the ambition and ability to be much more than a composer of dance music.
Wagner, favorably influenced by Strauss’ admiration for his own works described him as ‘the most musical mind in Europe’. When the Vienna Opera, after many rehearsals, rejected Tristan und Isolde as too difficult, Strauss, with Wagner’s approval and cooperation, conducted the Prelude and Liebestod in the open air at his Volksgarten concerts. Later in life Strauss enjoyed a close friendship with the anti-social Brahms, whose Liebeslieder Waltzes pay tribute to the waltz of which Strauss was king.
Like many another master of gaiety in music or theatre, Strauss was a serious man, experiencing melancholy, even alienation and despair. Under the bubbling champagne gaiety of Fledermaus lie hints of the coming disintegration of the society it mocks and celebrates. Already when it was first performed in 1874 the boom had been shattered by the Vienna stock market crash. A legend grew that Fledermaus was a failure at first. Maybe in suddenly straitened times the Viennese did find it harder to laugh at themselves; Fledermaus was successful in Vienna, but even more elsewhere.
The complexity of Strauss’ personality is mirrored in his relations to the city of Vienna. His famous father, founder of the waltz destiny, had opposed his son’s desire to become a musician. Soon his son became his rival. Father and son found themselves on opposite sides in the watershed of the 1848 Revolution, with its profound effect on social attitudes in the following half century. The father, composer of the Radetzky March, backed the forces of reaction; the son lent active support to the revolution. While he was no public man, and generally little interested in politics, Johann Strauss was never again onside with the Imperial regime of Franz Joseph, for all his striving for official acceptance. When people joked that Franz Joseph would rule only until the death of Johann Strauss, they little knew the true situation.
Such knowledge is not needed to appreciate Die Fledermaus. The operetta escapes being imprisoned in a Viennese setting, while keeping its ‘echt-Viennese’ appeal: ‘beauty without heaviness, levity without vulgarity, gaiety without frivolity, and a strange mixture of exuberant musical richness and popular simplicity’. These words are again Bruno Walter’s. He understood that Strauss was a great artist who deserves from performers the same care as Mozart. Walter also thought Strauss was best appreciated in the Viennese context.
A perceptive interpreter of the city of Vienna’s historical destiny (Ilse Barea) has written that, amidst the social and ethnic mixing pot of 19th century Vienna, Strauss in Die Fledermaus clothed the dream of human brotherhood in the glad rags of champagne drunkenness, as if sober reality could not sustain it.
First published in Opera Australia, 1982