Just as Gustav Mahler wove a bugle fanfare into his symphonies, so Joseph Roth wove martial music into his novels. In Roth’s case, it was invariably Johann Strauss’s ‘Radetzky March’, a signature tune which tum-te-tums through his earlier fiction and then becomes the title of this, his 1932 masterpiece.
For Roth, like Mahler, military tunes were the very symbol of Austria-Hungary. They underpinned a whole way of life, uniting that multi-ethnic empire that stretched precariously across central Europe. Born in 1894, Roth arrived too late to be a part of the astonishing creativity of Vienna in the dying days of Habsburg power. Most of his output focused on the sense of fracture and alienation after its collapse – but The Radetzky March examines instead its protracted death, and reveals Roth’s ambivalent attitude to the ancien rZgime.
A saga depicting three generations of the Trotta family, it opens at the battle of Solferino in 1859, where the first Trotta of the story saves the young Emperor Franz-Josef’s life.
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