Tunes of vanishing glory
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.