Johann Strauss II wrote the melodies that define Viennese elegance, yet his own father, the celebrity composer Johann Strauss I, whipped him for practicing violin and vowed to beat the music out of him. This episode follows the boy who took secret lessons from the first violinist of his father’s own orchestra, was bankrolled by his mother Anna after his father abandoned the family, and debuted with his own orchestra at Dommayer’s Casino in 1844 while venues across Vienna feared to book him. It also explains why the waltz, with its close hold and dizzying spins, was the scandalous pop music of its day.

We cover the 1848 revolution that split the family politically, his arrest for playing rebel anthems, the merger of the two orchestras after his father’s death in 1849, and the 180 patriotic marches that eventually won him the court ball director post in 1863. Then come the Russian residencies, the 1872 Boston monster concert with over a thousand performers, and a valet who handed adoring fans fur clipped from Strauss’s Newfoundland dog. We also look at his 1853 breakdown, his avoidance of funerals, a disastrous second marriage that led him to change his religion and nationality to obtain a divorce, the stabilizing influence of his third wife Adele, and his brother Eduard’s 1907 decision to burn the family’s archives.

• Why a touring superstar wanted his son to become a banker instead
• How the Nazi regime falsified records to hide the Waltz King’s Jewish great-grandfather
• The logistics of conducting a thousand musicians through a network of sub-conductors
• Brahms’s autograph confession that he wished he had written Strauss’s most famous waltz
• The brothers’ pact that sent unpublished manuscripts into an industrial furnace