Willi Boskovsky

Willi Boskovsky had no ambition to achieve global fame as a conductor. While serving as concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic, he ranked among Europe’s leading violinists at the time he assumed direction of the orchestra’s annual New Year's Day concerts. In time he became the preeminent authority on Viennese dance music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and earned equal respect for his interpretations of widely loved pieces by Mozart, Liszt, Dvorak, and the Strauss family.

The elder brother of clarinetist Alfred Boskovsky, Willi Boskovsky began studies at the Vienna Academy of Music at the age of nine and received the Kreisler Prize when he completed the program at seventeen. His first public appearance occurred at a concert organized by the Vienna Railway Company, after which he quickly established himself as a distinguished soloist. He entered the Vienna Philharmonic in 1932; seven years later conductor Hans Knappertsbusch appointed him one of the orchestra’s four leaders. From 1935 he headed the violin school of the Vienna Academy. He also led the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, drawn from the same expanded roster of Philharmonic musicians, and in 1937 formed the Boskovsky Trio. In 1947, amid the postwar devastation of Vienna, he founded the Vienna Octet during a concert devoted to works by Schubert and Beethoven and continued as its leader through 1958. His earliest deep engagement with Mozart’s music developed in the 1930s while performing the composer’s violin concertos under Bruno Walter, an experience that later shaped his conducting approach.

In his capacity as Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster, Boskovsky contributed to numerous postwar recordings, among them the 1951 production of Die Fledermaus led by Clemens Krauss, widely regarded as the definitive account of Johann Strauss’ opera. His international breakthrough arrived on New Year’s Day 1954, when he was invited to conduct the Philharmonic’s New Year’s Day concerts, a series Krauss had begun during World War II. Amid the shifting roster of postwar conductors that ranged from the veteran Knappertsbusch to the still-youthful Karajan, Boskovsky emerged as the internally acceptable choice. He proved an inspired guide to the music of Johann Strauss Jr. and Sr. and the rest of that celebrated lineage, as well as to other Viennese waltz repertoire, bringing a new refinement to performances of the form.

Beginning in 1958, his Decca/London recordings enjoyed worldwide sales and generated multiple volumes and fresh cycles across the following three decades. Yet the public soon encountered a broader range of repertory. His complete survey of Mozart’s dances, marches, and minuets, recorded with the Vienna Mozart Ensemble and eventually filling nine LPs, attracted a large international following and prompted further releases of the composer’s serenades and divertimentos. From the 1970s onward Boskovsky also documented many celebrated German operettas and light operas for EMI.

Boskovsky restored serious attention to the Strauss family and its music. Although this standing had never been questioned in Vienna, elsewhere the waltzes had long been treated as second-rate light-classical fare. Following Krauss’s sudden death in 1954, Boskovsky became the first conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic to record the waltzes and comparable popular works in stereo. Leading the Vienna Philharmonic, the Johann Strauss Orchestra of Vienna, or other ensembles, he produced dozens of albums containing waltzes and polkas by the Strauss family. His podium career proceeded steadily until 1969, when English Decca issued a budget collection of ten favorite waltzes that entered the British Top 20; thereafter demand remained constant for the next decade from both Decca and EMI, with which he worked throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In collaboration with orchestras in Vienna, Cologne, and Munich he recorded major German operettas, including Strauss’ Die Fledermaus and Wiener Blut, Zeller’s Der Vogelhandler, Suppé’s Boccaccio, and Lehár’s Paganini and Giuditta, together with popular Romantic concert works such as Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances.