At the beginning of her third chapter (“Johann Strauss Jr. as German”), Zoë Lang points out a curious paradox: the founding of the annual Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert was not an Austrian idea. Despite seeing and hearing Julie Andrews (Hollywood's most famous “Austrian”) narrate, and despite the fact that the Philharmonic's Web site states that the waltz concerts were “an act of resistance” during the war years, quite the opposite is true. The purpose of the first New Year's Concert, held on 31 December 1939 under the baton of Clemens Krauss (a favored conductor during the Nazi regime), was to present the Austrian Johann Strauss Jr. as a “quintessential German composer” for a recently annexed nation. Vienna was no longer the capital of Austria, as it had been just two years earlier, but rather the seat of the newly formed Ostmark, a territory within the Third Reich.

Granted, Austrian composers such as Mozart, Schubert, and Bruckner had also been brought into the German fold, as Lang compellingly shows, but the stakes for the Johann Strauss Jr. legacy were higher. Lang also shows that the question of Strauss and national identity was a significant issue throughout his life and after his death, from the end of World War I and the instability of an Austrian Republic (a highlight being the 1925 centennial of his birth), to the time of National Socialism, the postwar years, and even in our current day, when the New Year's concerts (with tickets just under 1,000 euros per seat) have become a self-congratulatory gathering of the world's richest and most powerful people.

Lang's book is an extension of her doctoral work at Harvard, which was completed in 2005, and I see it as an ideal companion volume to another Cambridge book, Camille Crittenden's Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and Politics of Popular Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Both highly recommended books show that one of the sharpest lenses through which to observe the vicissitudes of Austrian politics, culture, and issues of Central European nationalisms is that of music from the so-called lighter repertoire, be it operetta, waltz, polka, or march. Such music often seems less about abstract musical ideas than a reflection of the times, both nationally and internationally.

Such was true for Johann Strauss Sr. (1804–1849), who, with his dark complexion, seemed to personify the “other,” the international Austrian national, whereas his blonde-headed contemporary, Josef Lanner (1801–1843), did not escape his stereotype as an Austrian Biedermeier composer. But the central figure of this book is Strauss's son, Johann Jr. (1825–1899), who soon became the undisputed waltz king. Among the various chapters, three are central to understanding the Straussian paradox: “The Strauss Centennial (1925),” “Strauss as German,” and “Strauss as Jew.” In the 1920s, in a time of political and economic crisis following Habsburg collapse and military defeat, the Strauss waltz served two functions: it was a way to unify a new republic and a response to Weimar-era decadence (jazz and such lewd dances as the shimmy), filtering in not so much from the United States as from across the northern border.

But here is the paradox: during the 1920s there was a strong pan-Germanic sentiment on the Austrian left. Politicians, such as Karl Seitz, saw Strauss as a symbol for Austro-German cultural renewal. At the centennial celebration, Seitz, a Social Democrat, declared that with the Strauss revival in 1925, “German Vienna will soon smile again.” Arnold Schoenberg, too, saw Johann Strauss as the German master of Austrian musical dialect. Strauss's music was German because of its underlying musical profundity yet Austrian in its pure levity; such a balance of depth and surface, according to Schoenberg, was never achieved even by Mozart or Schubert. That Beethoven was an Austrian symphonist and Hitler a German dictator is a well-worn international joke.

Things took a strange twist with the advent of German National Socialism; pan-Germanism in Austria took on an entirely different meaning, although the goal was ostensibly the same. Hitler, as an Austrian, grew up loving the music of Johann Strauss, and both he and Goebbels were at one with the idea of elevating “light-classical” music to a higher status, educating the National Socialist masses. Thus, with the founding of the New Year's concerts in the sacred space of the Musikverein, Strauss was “raised” from Austrian waltz king to German tone poet. The waltz had gone from the ballroom to the concert stage; the Danube had reached the Rhine. Nazi-era music critics extolled the symphonic qualities (with their introductions and codas) of such works as The Emperor Waltz and The Beautiful Blue Danube. The Third Reich had it both ways: it was at once the Apollonian nation of thinkers and poets, yet it contained, in Straussian Vienna, the hedonistically Dionysian.

There was just one problem. As Lang points out in her fourth chapter, Johann Strauss was, according to the anti-Semitic Nuremburg race laws, a Mischling (mixed breed) second class, which would have caused him trouble had he lived in National Socialist-era Germany. Both Camille Crittenden and Lang describe the concerted governmental effort to hide these inconvenient facts; Strauss was too important to the Nazi cultural narrative to be eliminated from concert programming. Lang reminds us of the famous line by Karl Lueger: “I decide who is a Jew.” Such relativity could be extended to the 1930s and 1940s, when music commentators could decide who was Austrian or who was German. This paradox (Austrian/German, Jew/Aryan) forms a major theme in Lang's work. This is, simply put, an excellent, well-researched book, and despite an occasional reluctance to broaden some of the fascinating quotations she brings to light (especially in the 1920s chapter), this book is a must for any reader of this journal.