Johann Strauss Jr

Johann Strauss Jr grew up in Vienna as the son of a famous dance-orchestra leader who forbade his children to become musicians. He learned violin in secret, debuted with his own orchestra at eighteen in direct competition with his father, and after his father's death merged the two bands into a family business that toured across Europe and, once, to America. Vienna called him the Waltz King, and for half a century his dance music was the sound of the city.

He wrote hundreds of waltzes, polkas, and marches, and later a string of operettas, comic operas with spoken dialogue.

The Blue Danube waltz, An der schönen, blauen Donau, is the natural first stop. Then try Die Fledermaus, his operetta about revenge plotted at a champagne-soaked masked ball.