Robert Stolz

Robert Stolz: The Last Waltz in Vienna

Twenty-one times, Robert Stolz drove across the German–Austrian border with a human being hidden in the boot of his limousine. He was famous enough that nobody searched the car — the composer of the waltz half the continent was humming, on his way to another engagement. The same man had conducted at the Theater an der Wien while Franz Joseph was still on the throne, and lived long enough to make stereo recordings of Johann Strauss. Few careers have stretched further, or been put to better use.

A Child at the Keyboard

Robert Elisabeth Stolz was born in Graz on 25 August 1880 into a household where the profession was settled in advance: his father Jakob was a conductor and composer, his mother Ida Bondy a pianist, and the soprano Teresa Stolz — Verdi's Aida and his intimate — was his great-aunt. At seven he was touring Europe playing Mozart. He went on to the Vienna Conservatory, where his teachers included Robert Fuchs and Engelbert Humperdinck, the composer of *Hänsel und Gretel*. From 1899 he worked his way up through conducting posts in Maribor, Salzburg and Brno — the provincial circuit that produced most of the Austro-Hungarian empire's musicians.

Theater an der Wien

In 1907 he succeeded Artur Bodanzky as conductor at the Theater an der Wien, the house at the centre of Viennese operetta, and stayed until 1910. Among the works he conducted there was the world premiere of Oscar Straus's *Der tapfere Soldat* — the operetta that reached the English-speaking world as *The Chocolate Soldier*. He was twenty-seven, and standing at the exact centre of a form at the height of its powers.

The Tune Machine

He then spent five decades writing. *Der Tanz ins Glück* arrived in 1921; in 1930 he was among the composers of *Im weißen Rößl*, the White Horse Inn, which became one of the most performed operettas ever written. He moved to Berlin in 1925 and, as the cinema learned to talk, moved with it. The 1930 film *Zwei Herzen im Dreivierteltakt* — "Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time" — produced a title waltz that swept Europe and became one of the defining popular songs of the interwar years.

Twenty-One Crossings

Then the politics arrived. Stolz, an Austrian gentile at the summit of German popular music, used his position to move Jews and political refugees across the German–Austrian border, hidden in the boot of his car, twenty-one times. In 1939 he left for Paris, where the French interned him as an enemy alien — an Austrian passport being indistinguishable, to a frightened bureaucracy, from a German one. In 1940 he got out and reached New York.

Hollywood took him. He was nominated for Academy Awards twice: for the song "Waltzing in the Clouds" in 1941 and for the score of *It Happened Tomorrow* in 1945. An emigré in his sixties, writing in a foreign industry in a language not his own, he simply carried on producing the article.

Coming Home

He returned to Vienna in 1946, to a city and a form that had both been comprehensively wrecked. What he did next was odd and rather brilliant: he wrote nineteen ice operettas for the Vienna Ice Revue, taking a nineteenth-century genre and putting it on skates for a mass audience that no longer went to the opera house. Alongside that he recorded prolifically — the Strauss family, the operetta repertoire, the tradition he had inherited — building a discography that became for many listeners the definitive sound of Viennese light music.

He married five times; his last wife, Yvonne Louise Ulrich, known as Einzi, had herself helped exiled artists. Vienna made him an Honorary Citizen in 1970 and gave him its Grand Medal of Honour, an award that had gone to only one musician before him: Richard Strauss. He died in Berlin on 27 June 1975, aged ninety-four. Vienna brought him home, laid him in state at the State Opera, and buried him in the Zentralfriedhof beside Brahms and Johann Strauss II.

Why Robert Is Called a Genius

The quality in question is melodic invention, and it is worth being precise about what that means, because it is the least respectable of musical gifts and one of the rarest. Stolz could produce, on demand and in enormous quantity, tunes that lodge permanently in the memory of people with no musical training whatever — and could do it in the strict, unforgiving metre of the waltz, where the harmonic options are narrow and every predecessor from Lanner to Lehár has already taken the obvious ones. "Zwei Herzen im Dreiviertel­takt" is the demonstration: three-quarter time, a form exhausted by 1930, and he found a phrase in it that a continent adopted. He then proved the gift was not tied to a single culture by earning two Oscar nominations in Hollywood in his sixties, in English, in exile. Vienna's verdict was institutional: honorary citizenship, the Grand Medal after Richard Strauss, a grave between Brahms and Strauss.

The counter-case is straightforward and should not be softened. Operetta is light music, and Stolz never attempted anything else — no symphony, no opera, nothing that engages the serious critical tradition. His output was vast and much of it is interchangeable; a gift for tunes deployed at industrial scale produces a great deal of filler alongside the handful that survive. No historian ranks him with Johann Strauss II or Lehár as an innovator in the form; he perfected and prolonged rather than invented. And the twenty-one border crossings, which are the most admirable thing about him by a distance, are evidence of extraordinary courage, not of extraordinary cognition — it dishonours the act to file it as genius when the right word is decency at personal risk.

Legacy

He was the last living link to the Vienna of the operetta's imperial afternoon, and he spent his final thirty years making sure the recordings existed for a world that would otherwise only have the sheet music. His grave placement was Vienna's way of settling the argument: whatever the critics thought of light music, the city put him with its own. The waltzes are still played. The men he drove across the border had children.

Achievements

• Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• Genres: opera