Johann Strauss: Leben und Werk in Briefen und Dokumenten, vol. 10: Erganzungen und Korrekturen, Register. Ed. by Franz Mailer.

Abstract

For virtually a quarter of a century, Hans Schneider of Tutzing has been putting out handsomely bound volumes in which Franz Mailer has assembled not just letters written by the Waltz King Johann Strauss (1825–99) but also letters to him and other directly related documents. Volume 9 brought the collection up to the end of his life. Reviewing it (Music & Letters, 54 (2003), 505–6) I commented that, though Strauss may not have aspired to symphonic composition, the edition had achieved completion at the magical figure of ‘9’ that haunted the symphonic output of Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Dvořák, and Mahler. It seems that I was wrong. Mahler-like, we now have ‘number 10’, made up of additions and corrections, undated documents, a list of works, and an index covering all ten volumes. The additions and corrections are not altogether clearly classified, since the initial eighty-page ‘Ergänzungen und Korrekturen’ is then followed a further sixty pages of ‘Ergänzungen’. The former section, it seems, deals solely with material already presented in some way in the first nine volumes, while the latter presents material newly discovered since the relevant volumes. In the first section the sole item relating to volumes 6–9 is a letter of 13 March 1897 to Strauss and his wife from his brother Eduard's son Johann, informing his aunt and uncle of the nephew's embezzlement of a substantial part of Eduard's assets. This is a fact already well known, and the relevance of the document here is purely to pinpoint when the Waltz King and his wife learned about it. Such is the degree of detail with which the edition concerns itself.