Johann Strauss, Jr.

Austrian composer
b. Oct 25, 1825 Vienna
d. June 3, 1899 Vienna

In Vienna, Johann Strausss, Sr., and his sons wrote much of the greatest dance music composed during the 19th century. The elder Strauss, the son of a poor tavern-keeper, apprenticed his son to a bookbinder, but the lure of the music was great. With a few violin lessons and a smattering of music theory, he worked his way up from a performer and composer of dance music to the directorship of the Imperial Court Balls in Vienna.

Johann, Jr., wrote 500 pieces of dance music and more than a dozen operas and operettas. He was greatly admired by the "serious" composers of his time. He might almost have been called "the Polka King," because he wrote about 150 of these lively dances.

His operatic masterpiece Die Fledermaus ("The Bat") of 1874 has spouses and lovers, masters and servants, nobility and workers, jailers and prisoners - all dancing the polka until dawn. The polka originated in Poland and arrived in Austria via Czechoslovakia. By the younger Strauss's time, it was danced in Vienna in several different versions, including the polka-mazurka, polka-quadrille, French polka and the fast polka. Most of the Strauss polkas are closest to this last style, and many are orchestrated with clever, novel effects.