Ohne Sorgen!, op. 271

Josef Strauss wrote this fast polka in Russia in the summer of 1869, during the season he and Johann spent giving concerts at Pavlovsk near St Petersburg, and it was first played there on 10 September. The orchestra laughs out loud in the course of it. Nothing in the music betrays the composer's state at the time: the childhood illness he had never shaken off had returned, and he wrote to his wife that he looked ill, that his cheeks were hollow, that he had lost his hair and had no will to work. He died two years later.