Johann Strauss - Honorary SOLOist!
by Lindsay Perigo
An evocative bow at almost a fairy-tale Vienna, a Vienna of young hussars & beautiful ladies, a Vienna of sentimentality & charm. A pretty-pretty & never-never Vienna of dance & romance.
That's how Harold C. Schonberg describes the music of the composer Johann Strauss, Junior, in his book Lives of the Great Composers. A medley of themes from Strauss' Die Fledermaus used to open my Politically Incorrect Show.
I chose it because it is the antithesis of Political Correctness. Political Correctness is the Puritanism of our time, based, like its precursor, on the obsessive concern that - as H. L Mencken put it - somehow, somewhere, somebody just might be enjoying himself. Strauss says, "Someone is! And how!"
In Mencken's words, "The essence of a Viennese waltz, and especially of a Strauss waltz, is merriment, good humor, happiness" - as opposed to the Wimmin's Studies Department at any modern university.
The waltz as such really came into its own through Johann's father, & was described at the time by an English publication as "this fiend of German birth, destitute of grace, delicacy & propriety, a disgusting practice."
The critic Eduard Hanslick sniffed, "That the sweetly intoxicating three-four rhythm which took hold of hand & foot, necessarily eclipsed great & serious music & made the audience unfit for any intellectual effort goes without saying."
Hanslick would have been appalled to learn that no less "great & serious" a composer as Brahms autographed the fan of Johann Strauss Junior's wife with the opening measures of The Blue Danube & the words, "Alas, not by Johannes Brahms."
Mencken, like Brahms, & unlike Hanslick, recognised the subtle sophistication of this new art form & its chief exponents:
But the waltz! Ah, the waltz, indeed! It is sneaking, insidious, disarming, lovely. It does its work, not like a college-yell or an explosion in a munitions plant, but like the rustle of the trees, the murmur of the illimitable sea, the sweet gurgle of a pretty girl. The jazz-band fetches only vulgarians, barbarians, idiots, pigs. But there is a mystical something in 'Wiener Blut' or 'Kunstlerleben' that fetches even philosophers.
He goes on, however, to acknowledge its more earthy attractions:
The waltz, in fact, is magnificently improper - the art of tone turned lubricious. I venture to say that the compositions of Johann Strauss have lured more fair young creatures to compliance than all the movie actors and white slave scouts since the fall of the Western Empire. There is something about a waltz that is irresistible. Try it on the fattest and sedatest or even upon the thinnest and most acidulous of women, and she will be ready, in ten minutes, for a stealthy smack behind the door.
My, imagine how that would go down in the Wimmin's Studies Departments!
"A God-gifted dispenser of joy" is how the great & serious Richard Strauss (no relation) described Johann. What more suitable introduction than his music, seductive & insouciant, to a radio programme that was an antidote to kill-joys?
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