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Johann Strauss music biography continued...

many fine polkas, marches and operettas, as well. Johann Strauss II was born on October 25, 1825, as the first son of Johann Strauss Sr. His father, a famous musician himself, forbid him to become a musician and wanted his son to work in a bank. But Johann Strauss Jr. cared more for his violin lessons, than his schoolwork. In 1844 he performed his first concert at the Dommayer in Hietzing, a Viennese suburb. He was successful and soon rose to be the most dangerous competitor to his father. When the elder Strauss died from scarlet fever in 1849 in Vienna, the younger Strauss merged both their orchestras and began touring extensively. It was during this period that he composed a number of popular Viennese marches and polkas. He would eventually surpass his father's fame, and become one of the most popular of waltz composers of the era, extensively touring Austria, Poland, Russia and Germany with his orchestra and creating such beautiful pieces as the Blue Danube that were adopted by Viennese royalty. During this time, Strauss also earned a following in the rest of Europe and even in the United States. Jaque Offenbach's operettas inspired him to drift towards stage work and he characterized his work as comical operas. His first operetta "Die Fledermaus" had its premiere in 1871, and in 1874 he released "Der Zigeunerbaron".
Strauss was married three times, wrote 17 operettas and an uncountable amount of waltzes—with his "Schöne Blaue Donau" remaining a kind of an unofficial anthem for Austria to this day. Although all the members of his family were involved in music, Johann II became the most prominent of them. He died a wealthy and famous man in 1899. Today, he is recognized as a supreme master of the classical genre, who composed with "style, elegance, taste and wit." Though much of his work was decimated in a 1907 fire, The Johann Strauss societies around the world have, however, painstakingly pieced together a large body of these destroyed works to be appreciated by future generations