Johann Strauss I

Michael Pamer's dance band was the escape from a bookbinder's apprenticeship for the young and orphaned Strauss, who joined forces with Joseph Lanner, parted from him and formed an orchestra of his own. Directing from the violin, he built a touring dance orchestra as a commercial enterprise, carrying waltzes, galops, quadrilles and marches through Germany, France and Britain. In Vienna he was appointed music director of the court balls. More than 250 works survive, among them the Radetzky March of 1848. He tried to keep his son Johann out of the profession. Johann, Josef and Eduard all made careers in it. He died in 1849, aged forty-five. Born in Leopoldstadt in 1804, he was apprenticed by his guardian to the bookbinder Johann Lichtscheidl while taking violin and viola lessons on the side, and it was in 1824, as deputy to Lanner, that he was given charge of a second orchestra; his own band is documented by 1827. He married Maria Anna Streim in 1825 and had six children with her, among them Johann, Josef and Eduard; the marriage ended when he acknowledged a daughter by Emilie Trampusch, and it was his wife who pushed the eldest son's career forward. The orchestra he founded passed to those sons and was wound up by Eduard in 1901.