Kaiser Waltz: A Song History

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Johann Strauss II wrote the Kaiser-Walzer (Emperor Waltz), Op. 437, in 1889 to mark a state visit: Austria's Emperor Franz Joseph I visiting the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, a year after Franz Joseph's jubilee.[1] Strauss called the piece "Hand in Hand." The name it carries today came from his Berlin publisher, Fritz Simrock, and it was a shrewd one, since "Kaiser" could mean either monarch.[1][2] Which emperor Strauss really meant has been debated ever since, and the first piano edition, with the Austrian imperial crown on its cover, appealed to buyers in Vienna.[1]

Color photochrom of the exterior of the Hofburg imperial palace in Vienna

Photoglob Zürich, “Wien. K. & K. Hofburg,” the imperial palace in Vienna, photochrom, between 1880 and 1910. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The waltz had its premiere in Berlin on October 21, 1889, in the Königsbau concert hall. Played by an orchestra of a hundred, it went over so well that it was encored twice, and Vienna first heard it at the Musikverein on November 24 of the same year.[1] The music itself seems to gesture toward both capitals: it opens with a march, which suggests Prussia, then turns to a chain of four Viennese waltzes, and a long coda takes up close to two-fifths of the whole piece.[1]

Arnold Schoenberg later took up the waltz: in 1925 he arranged it for a concert tour to Barcelona.[3] He scored it for a small chamber group of flute, clarinet, piano and string quartet.[4]

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Sources

  1. Oxford University Press, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities: "Hand in Hand; Strauss' Kaiser-Walzer as a case study of interdisciplinary collaboration in digital musicology".
  2. Wikipedia: "Kaiser-Walzer".
  3. Arnold Schönberg Gesamtausgabe (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz): "Preface Vol. 28B".
  4. IMSLP Petrucci Music Library: "Kaiser-Walzer, Op.437 (Strauss Jr., Johann)".