Johann Strauss II – but he was a dancer!

The newspapers in Vienna regularly provided their readers with news of the tour in the Balkans which Johann Strauss II began in the autumn of 1847. On 28 October the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung reported:

On 19 October Mr Strauss junior gave a concert with his orchestra in Semlin, and he aroused an indescribable enthusiasm in the unusually large audience. Mr Strauss was attentive enough to perform all his compositions with a link to Serbia, for which he received almost never-ending calls of Szivio (‘Long live Strauss’). During the finale Mr Strauss was given many little bouquets of flowers from the gentle hands of young ladies. On the 20^th Mr Strauss left the town of Semlin with the members of his orchestra and travelled in the best weather conditions on the Danube towards the Turkish shore, heading for Belgrade, in order to perform personally the original version of his Alexander Quadrille for His Highness Alexander Karageorgevits, the ruling prince of Serbia, in his residential city, which is developing into a finer place every day.

What has been unknown until now is that after the successful concert in Semlin (Zemun in Serbian, then situated on the Austrian military frontier, today a part of the city of Belgrade) there was a private festivity. In 1894 the daughter of the family that had been Strauss’s hosts, meanwhile named Marie Zacho Duma and living in the Landstrasse district of Vienna, sent a personal message to congratulate him on his fiftieth anniversary of his career as a musician:

Do you still remember how the people of Semlin never stopped calling out Zivio – Strauss! under my windows? Then I was a young woman of 16 – and was lucky to have you with us as our guest, where we spent half of the night happy – and dancing. While you were dancing with my girl friends I played your unforgettable waltz Sängerfahrten (Singers’ Journeys) on the piano. Then I had to dance at your request, and you played the music, which made me infinitely happy and which I have never been able to forget. And today – as an old sailor I still think in a melancholy way about those happy hours, which make up the only bright spot in my – unfortunately – sad life.

This letter, preserved in the Vienna City Library in a collection of material with the shelf mark lb 170308  (H.I.N.-201912), puts right the widespread opinion that goes back to Strauss himself, namely that he was a non-dancer throughout his life. The starting-point for this erroneous view is what he once wrote to his ‘deeply loved Adele’:

How did you make your Johnny go so mad! That’s what you did. How he got in such a good mood, that’s what you need to know. Making jokes, laughing – jumping, even dancing, that’s what he would like to do, although the last one would be difficult for him – after all he was never a dancer. 

If you do not want to accuse Strauss of giving obviously wrong information, a point that can be made in his defence is that the word ‘dancer’ can be interpreted in different ways. Strauss really was not a dancer in the stricter sense, but, as his comment shows, that does not mean that he did not occasionally dance when he was young – and clearly enjoyed this.

Thomas Aigner

English translation: Leigh Bailey