Johann Strauss statue

Johann Strauss II, the "Waltz King" of Vienna, was born in 1825 into a family his composer father had explicitly forbidden from following him into music. He defied that prohibition and produced over five hundred waltzes, polkas and operettas during a fifty-year career, including "The Blue Danube" of 1866, which became the unofficial second anthem of Austria. The gilded statue of Strauss in Vienna's Stadtpark, sculpted by Edmund Hellmer and unveiled in 1921, is among the most photographed monuments in the city and the prototype of every later figure of the composer with his violin at his shoulder.