Lanner and Strauss

Strauss and Lanner

“Vienna without Strauss is like Austria without the Danube,” wrote Hector Berlioz on the death of Johann Strauss in 1849. But Vienna wasn’t without Strauss: the late Johann’s son of the same name was already engaged on the career that would make him far more famous than his father and probably much richer than any musician, Brahms included, living in Austria at the time. Besides, even if there had been no Strauss at all there would still have been the Viennese waltz, not to mention the polka, the quadrille, the galop and the other favourite ballroom items of the day.

Johannn Strauss I learned his trade in the dance orchestra of Michael Pamer, but so did another young violinist called Joseph Lanner, the two-hundredth anniversary of whose birth will no doubt be celebrated in his native Vienna throughout 2001 - if not perhaps with the extravagance lavished on the centenary of Johann II’s death in 1999. It was alongside Lanner, first in collaboration and then in competition with him, that Johann I so successfully developed the popular Viennese dance forms and the commercial organisation behind them. The reason why the name of Strauss rather than that of Lanner is now overwhelmingly associated with the Viennese waltz is not that Johann I was an overwhelmingly better musician. Johann Strauss had the good fortune to father three sons - Johann II, Josef and Eduard - all of whom were more than capable of carrying on where he left off. Joseph Lanner on the other hand had one son, August, who had both the talent and the inclination to follow him but who, sadly, died at the age of twenty-one.

The decisive factor was that, while Lanner’s daughter Katti was pursuing an illustrious career as a ballet dancer, Johann II was busy diversifying the family business with a series of popular operettas. Johann II’s tireless activity in the musical theatre, together with his unsurpassable and inexhaustible gift for melody, is what finally gave the Strauss family the monopoly in posthumous reputation.