André Rieu

"The Second Waltz" is not from the Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2. The composer is indeed Dmitri Shostakovich, but the work it comes from is another one: it is Waltz No. 2, the seventh of the eight movements of the Suite for Variety Orchestra. The detail is wrong on sleeves half the world over, in programme notes, in the platforms' metadata and also in the catalogue of the man who turned that piece into a planetary hit. André Rieu released it in 1994 with the wrong title and still announces it that way: on the platforms, his tracks are titled, literally, "Jazz Suite No.2 – Arr. André Rieu: Waltz No.2".

And the error is not an announcer's slip: it has an editorial origin and a date. A mistake in volume ten of Shostakovich's complete works, published by the Muzyka house in Moscow in 1984, identified that suite as the Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2, and the score was not published under its correct name until 2001. Seventeen years of catalogue with the label swapped. The real Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2 is something else and almost nobody has heard it: Shostakovich composed it in 1938 for Viktor Knushevitsky's State Jazz Orchestra, it premiered on the twenty-eighth of November 1938 on Radio Moscow and the score was largely lost. A piano reduction resurfaced in 1999, Gerard McBurney reconstructed and orchestrated three movements —Scherzo, Berceuse and Serenade— and they were premiered at the London Proms in 2000.

From Moscow the error passed to the West through a record, and from the record to the cinema. Riccardo Chailly recorded the suite with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1991 and Decca released it under the false title on Shostakovich: The Jazz Album. Eight years later, Stanley Kubrick took that same recording for the opening and closing titles of Eyes Wide Shut. Chailly did not invent the error: he globalised it. Kubrick made it indelible. And Rieu's hit is from 1994, three years after the Decca record.

The suite Shostakovich did not assemble

Underneath there is another layer, and it is the one no popular source tells: the Suite for Variety Orchestra was not composed by Shostakovich as a suite. It was assembled by Levon Atovmyan after 1956, out of film and theatre music the composer had already written. Atovmyan was a close friend of his and his habitual assembler of concert suites, often without the author's involvement and with nothing more than his tacit consent. The publisher itself, Boosey & Hawkes, admits it cautiously in its catalogue entry: the suite "was compiled by unknown colleagues of Shostakovich, possibly in the 1950s, from his film and stage scores".

The waltz in particular was born between 1955 and 1956, and not in a concert hall. It is the adaptation of the eighth number of the suite from The First Echelon —Pervyi eshelon, op. 99a—, the Mikhail Kalatozov film premiered on the twenty-ninth of April 1956 about the Soviet volunteers who went to settle the virgin lands of Kazakhstan in Nikita Khrushchev's campaign. Put without ornament: the most melancholy and most danced waltz of the twentieth century is commissioned music for a reel of late Stalinist agricultural propaganda. The lightness Rieu is accused of came fitted at the factory, and it came from Moscow.

The title was Marjorie's

"The Second Waltz" is not its name either. The commercial name was invented by Marjorie Kochmann, a language teacher, composer and Rieu's wife since 1975, and she invented it because the real one did not sell. He tells it himself on his official page: his first hit is "The Second Waltz", a very melancholy waltz whose original name —he writes— is "Waltz No. 2 from Jazz Suite No. 2", and which under that name would never have been such a big hit, so Marjorie called it "The Second Waltz". In the very sentence where he explains the marketing operation, Rieu repeats the wrong attribution. And on the official Nederlandse Top 40 entry the composer is credited in one single way: "Chostakovitch". No suite, no opus, no arranger.

It worked. The single came out in 1994 on Mercury, with Ruud Jacobs producing, reached number four on the Nederlandse Top 40, spent twenty-eight weeks on the chart and ended up seventh on the annual Top 100 for the year; on the Mega Top 50 it reached number five and passed fifty thousand copies. In September of that same year Strauß & Co, with the Johann Strauss Orchestra, was number one in the Netherlands and sold seven hundred thousand copies there alone: seven times platinum from the NVPI. On the fourteenth of July 1995 the newspaper Trouw headlined it without metaphors, a Dutch violinist outsells the Beatles, and his own press office adds that he sold more records in the country that year than Michael Jackson. He was forty-five and had spent sixteen years conducting small orchestras: the Maastrichts Salonorkest since 1978, founded with Gemma Serpenti and with five musicians counting himself, and the Johann Strauss Orchestra since 1987, whose first concert was on the first of January 1988 with twelve.

I didn't educate you to do waltzes

His father was Andries Antonie Rieu, principal conductor of the Maastricht Symphony Orchestra, today the Limburg Symphony Orchestra, the same one in which the son played the violin between 1978 and 1989. It was the mother who chose the instrument —"my mother chose the violin as the most suitable for me, and she was right"— and who took the six siblings to her husband's concerts. In one of them lies the origin of Rieu's whole trade, and it is an encore. After playing the announced programme, the father would often give away an extra, and every now and then it was a waltz. While the orchestra played The Blue Danube or Gold and Silver, by Franz Lehár, the boy noticed that people who had been absolutely still and silent in their seats all evening suddenly began to move their bodies a little. He was astonished that his father's music could cause that. Apparently it could.

The father never forgave him. "He was very strict, not pleasant. We did not have a warm relationship," Rieu told The Times in March 2013. When the son started playing with a salon orchestra, the reaction was the sentence that defines the whole conflict: "Ah, I didn't educate you to do waltzes!" According to Rieu's account, the father lived to see the Johann Strauss Orchestra's first successes and wrote a letter saying that there was only one person capable of doing that, a letter André heard about from third parties. Andries Antonie Rieu died in 1992. Success came in 1994: he did not live to see it. There is one more sentence from the mother that explains the son's whole staging by contrast: "Don't look into people's eyes, it's not polite." Rieu's show consists, literally, of looking the audience in the eye.

The seven-hundred-tonne castle

On the ninth of December 2007 he announced the World Stadium Tour: A Romantic Vienna Night with the largest travelling stage that had been taken on tour until then: a full-size replica of Vienna's Schönbrunn palace, a hundred and twenty-five metres wide, thirty deep and thirty-five high. It carried two ice rinks, two fountains, a dance floor of more than three hundred square metres, fourteen carriages, thirty-six horses brought from Vienna, two hundred and fifty performers, eighty debutantes from the Elmayer dance school and real champagne for the audience. A hundred riggers and six days of work per venue. And a second castle had to be built, because the Australian distances did not allow it to be moved in time: suddenly three million euros more were needed.

What happened next is almost always told wrongly, in both directions. The filed accounts, analysed by the business magazine Quote on the eleventh of February 2010, show a 2008 financial year with a net loss of almost eleven million euros and negative equity of around five million: a gross margin of almost fifty million against fifty-nine in operating costs, seven million in depreciation of old sets, almost four in losses from the aircraft rental company and six in payroll. André Rieu Productions reached twenty million euros of negative equity. And in that file lies the hard fact: the Rabobank granted him a credit of fifteen million euros in exchange for guarantees over practically everything he had —the "André Rieu" brand, his copyrights and the insurance on his violin, described in the document as Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis Faciebat Anno 1732—. He has publicly put the debt at around thirty-four million, and the headline of his interview with The Guardian of the twentieth of December 2015 is literally that he spent thirty-four million pounds on fountains, ice rinks and gold carriages. That is also where the violin appears in its only genuinely documentary moment: there is no reliable purchase price for any of his Stradivarius instruments —he used to play the 1667 one and today he plays the 1732 one— but it is on record that he pledged it, and that in 2020, with the pandemic, he was willing to sell it. "People make romantic stories about violinists and their violins," he said in 2013, "but to me it is just a violin."

There was no bankruptcy. The Dutch headline of the twentieth of February 2010 says that Rieu dodges bankruptcy, and it is a difference that matters: he maintained that cancelling the tour was the one thing that really would have finished them all off, he carried on, the publicity from the scandal sold out every one of his 2009 concerts and he entered 2010 twenty million in the black. In September 2010 he postponed the Australian, New Zealand, British and Irish dates because of a viral infection of the vestibular nerve, and he was back at the Vrijthof in early 2011. The epilogue came on the sixteenth of April 2019, the day after the Notre-Dame fire: he offered the seven hundred tonnes of steel from the Schönbrunn set free of charge to put up the scaffolding for the cathedral's restoration. The castle that almost ruined him ended up offered as scaffolding. His 2023 accounts record a record turnover of almost seventy-three million euros, eighteen and a half million in net profit, and a line of nine hundred thousand euros for an option right to buy another violin.

The critics have names

That the purists "turned up their noses" is the soft version. Tom Service, in The Guardian of the twenty-third of July 2015, reviewing the film of one of his Maastricht concerts —which at that moment was the highest-grossing filmed concert in British history— called it the very acme of commodified classical music, and wrote that Rieu turns unsuspecting masterpieces into saccharine fodder. Donald Clarke, in The Irish Times of the thirteenth of April 2013, said that Rieu, a good violinist by all accounts, rehearses a kind of decaffeinated classical music that makes Richard Clayderman look like Karlheinz Stockhausen, and that every rough edge has been planed away. Nina Siegal portrayed him in The New York Times of the twenty-first of December 2016 as a maestro for the masses, if not for the critics, and compared him to Liberace. Dean Paton, in The Christian Science Monitor of the first of December 2017, found more of a pop concert than a classical recital in him, although he placed him in the line of Arthur Fiedler with the Boston Pops and of Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic.

He answers, and he always answers from the same place. To Clarke, in 2013: "Critics and musicians who attack me are jealous of my success and the fact that I make people happy." To Siegal, in 2016, on the saccharine label, which he takes as a compliment: "I'm trying to create a Gesamtkunstwerk where music, décor and costumes all add up to a magical evening." To The Irish Times in December 2019: "I see a lot of jealousy around me. People say: Oh my God, he plays waltzes. And the money is coming in." And to Violinist.com in October 2017, in the most elegant and most venomous reply of all: that the magic word in his case is authenticity, that his orchestra feels every note it plays, and that it may be that this love and this authenticity are things that are sometimes hard to find at other classical concerts.

The numbers of that fight are worth giving exactly, because they also get exaggerated. He was the eighth highest-grossing artist in the world in 2008 according to Pollstar, with seventy-one concerts, seven hundred and fourteen thousand tickets and seventy-six million nine hundred thousand dollars. The "highest-grossing male artist in the world" line is a half-truth: it happened in Billboard's mid-year assessment for the first half of 2009, where he was fourth in the world and first among men —with only Madonna, Tina Turner and Britney Spears ahead of him— and in the annual assessments he came considerably further down: sixteenth in 2010, ninth in 2011, tenth in 2012, twentieth in 2013 and in 2015, twenty-first in 2018. The formulation that does hold up is Billboard's: the highest-grossing classical artist in the history of its Boxscore, with more than five hundred and fifty million dollars accumulated and almost six million spectators. And the least emotional figure of all is the one that measures him best: a study commissioned by Maastricht city council from the Zuyd Hogeschool, made public on the third of July 2019, concluded that his annual run of concerts on the Vrijthof square —which began in 2005— leaves the city more than thirty million euros a year. In 2018 it was almost a hundred and fifty-three thousand people; in July 2026, twelve concerts, some hundred and fifty thousand visitors, an audience from eighty countries and hotel occupancy of ninety to ninety-five per cent from Wednesday to Sunday across the whole city. A publican on the square itself summed it up better than any critic: for Maastricht's economy this is the number one, more important even than the four days of carnival.

What to remember

The piece with which André Rieu reached half the world is not from the work its label names. It is Waltz No. 2 from the Suite for Variety Orchestra, a compilation Shostakovich did not assemble —Levon Atovmyan put it together after 1956—, and the waltz itself was born as music for The First Echelon, a Soviet film of 1956 about settlers in Kazakhstan. That we all call it part of the Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2 is down to a misprint in volume ten of the complete works that Muzyka published in Moscow in 1984, corrected in the score only in 2001, globalised by Riccardo Chailly's 1991 recording and fixed for ever by Eyes Wide Shut in 1999. And that we call it "The Second Waltz" is down to Marjorie Kochmann deciding that the real name was not going to sell. The man accused of vulgarising the sacred repertoire propagates an error he did not commit, about a work its composer did not put together, with a title his wife gave it.

The rest is figures and an absence. Seven hundred thousand copies of Strauß & Co in a country of fifteen million inhabitants; a hundred-and-twenty-five-metre castle that left him with twenty million of negative equity and a fifteen-million credit from the Rabobank guaranteed with his name, his rights and the insurance on his violin; no bankruptcy; seven hundred tonnes of steel offered to Notre-Dame; thirty million euros a year for Maastricht, measured by a university of applied sciences and not by the audience's emotion. And a father, an orchestra conductor, who told him he had not raised him to play waltzes and who died in 1992, two years before the son became famous playing waltzes. When that waltz sounds and a whole square moves at the same time, there is the father's encore: the night a boy sitting in the audience saw that still people were beginning to move their bodies, and decided to spend his life provoking that.

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Sources

André Léon Marie Nicolas Rieu, born on 1 October 1949 in Maastricht, province of Limburg, the Netherlands; third of six siblings. Violinist and conductor, nicknamed "the waltz king". Alive as of the date of this profile: he turned 77 on 1 October 2026, gave twelve concerts on the Vrijthof in Maastricht in July 2026 and his official diary announces concerts up to July 2027 (Budapest, MVM Dome, 16 and 17 October 2026; Maastricht, MECC, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19 and 20 December 2026; Vrijthof, 12 concerts between 1 and 18 July 2027). Father: Andries Antonie Rieu, principal conductor of the Maastricht Symphony Orchestra (today the Limburgs Symfonie Orkest), died in 1992. Wife: Marjorie Kochmann, married in 1975, language teacher and composer, author of the commercial title "The Second Waltz". Children: Marc (1978) and Pierre (1981), the latter a producer of the Johann Strauss Orchestra; five grandchildren. Residence: Huis de Torentjes, Maastricht, a building from 1534. Violin from the age of 5 (1954); Conservatoire Royal de Liège and Conservatorium Maastricht, 1968-1973, with Jo Juda and Herman Krebbers; Royal Conservatory of Brussels, 1974-1977, with André Gertler, graduating with a "Premier Prix". He speaks six languages. Violinist of the Limburg Symphony Orchestra between 1978 and 1989. He founded the Maastrichts Salonorkest in 1978 with Gemma Serpenti (active until 1996; five musicians including himself, according to Rieu) and the Johann Strauss Orchestra in 1987, whose first concert was on 1 January 1988 with 12 musicians; today it is around 60 musicians (the 2023 annual report speaks of an orkest of 60; the figures of 80 to 150 in circulation include dancers, singers and touring extras). Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion, 2002; World Music Award, 1996; Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold of the Republic of Austria, 2011. The work: "The Second Waltz" is Waltz No. 2, the seventh of the eight movements of Dmitri Shostakovich's "Suite for Variety Orchestra" —a compilation assembled by Levon Atovmyan after 1956 out of the composer's film and theatre music; Boosey & Hawkes describes it as compiled by "unknown colleagues of Shostakovich, possibly in the 1950s"—, and it is an adaptation of the 8th number of the suite from the film "The First Echelon" (Pervyi eshelon, by Mikhail Kalatozov, premiered on 29 April 1956), op. 99a. It does not belong to the "Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2", composed in 1938 for Viktor Knushevitsky's State Jazz Orchestra, premiered on 28 November 1938 on Radio Moscow, with a partially lost score: a piano reduction resurfaced in 1999 and Gerard McBurney reconstructed and orchestrated three movements (Scherzo, Berceuse, Serenade), premiered at the London Proms in 2000. The origin of the confusion is a mistake in volume 10 of Shostakovich's complete works published by the Muzyka house (Moscow, 1984); the score was not published under its correct name until 2001. Riccardo Chailly recorded the suite with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1991 and Decca released it under the erroneous title on "Shostakovich: The Jazz Album"; Stanley Kubrick used that recording in the opening and closing titles of "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999). Rieu's catalogue keeps the erroneous title: the tracks are titled "Jazz Suite No.2 – Arr. André Rieu: Waltz No.2" and "Second Waltz (From "Jazz Suite No. 2") – Live", and the published sheet music under his name, "Second Waltz from Jazz Suite No. 2" (Musicnotes, SKU MN0113809). Discography and charts: "Strauß Gala" (1989, Marlstone Recordings BV 098917), no. 9 NL. "Preuvenemint / Vrijthofconcert" (1991, Mirasound 299079), no. 71 NL. "D'n Blauwen Aovond" (1992, CNR 100.385-2), no. 16 NL. "Merry Christmas" (1992, CNR 100.396-2), no. 34 NL, NVPI Gold. Single "The Second Waltz" (1994, Mercury 856 126-2, producer Ruud Jacobs): no. 4 on the Nederlandse Top 40, 28 weeks on the chart, 815 points, no. 7 on the annual Top 100 of 1994; no. 5 on the Mega Top 50 and more than 50,000 copies; on the chart entry the composer appears only as "Chostakovitch". Album "The Second Waltz" (1994), NVPI Gold. "Strauß & Co" (September 1994, Mercury 522 933-2): no. 1 NL, 700,000 copies in the Netherlands alone, NVPI 7× Platinum, BVMI Platinum. "Waltzing Matilda" (28 April 2008, with the soprano Mirusia Louwerse): debut at no. 2 and no. 1 in its second week on the Australian ARIA chart, Platinum, 20th best-selling album in Australia in 2008. "Forever Vienna" (2009, André Rieu Productions): no. 2 on the UK Albums Chart, no. 4 Ireland, no. 6 Scotland, no. 18 New Zealand, no. 25 Norway, no. 27 on the British annual chart of 2010. More than 40 million records sold (figure from his press office). "Trouw" headlined "Nederlandse violist verkoopt meer dan de Beatles" on 14 July 1995. In Australia: 54 platinum certifications in 18 months (May 2008), the hundredth in December 2008, 1.2 million units and more than 50 million dollars of wholesale turnover (May 2011); best-selling artist in the Australian market between 2006 and 2011. Largest concert: 38,605 people, Telstra Dome in Melbourne, 2008. Tours: Pollstar 2008, no. 8 worldwide (71 concerts, 714,617 tickets, 76.9 million dollars); Billboard, first half of 2009, no. 4 worldwide and first male artist (554,242 tickets, 57.4 million dollars), behind Madonna, Tina Turner and Britney Spears; Billboard Top 25 Tours: no. 16 in 2010 (86 concerts, 39,992,285 dollars), no. 9 in 2011 (102 concerts, 67,104,756), no. 10 in 2012 (99 concerts, 46,785,710), no. 20 in 2013 (70 concerts, 49,881,605), no. 17 in 2014 (70 concerts, 42,983,266), no. 20 in 2015 (101 concerts, 51,151,367), no. 23 in 2016 (71 concerts, 40,169,471), no. 21 in 2018 (71 concerts, 55,933,149); Pollstar 2017, no. 42 (89 concerts, 47.7 million). Billboard counted him in 2018 with more than 550 million dollars of accumulated gross and almost 6 million spectators, and his press office defines him as the highest-grossing classical artist in the history of Billboard's Boxscore. The Schönbrunn set: announced on 9 December 2007 for the "World Stadium Tour: A Romantic Vienna Night"; full-size replica 125 m wide, 30 deep and 35 high, with 2 ice rinks, 2 fountains, a dance floor of more than 300 m², 14 carriages, 36 horses, 250 performers on tour and 80 debutantes from the Elmayer school; 100 riggers and 6 days of assembly per venue; a second set had to be built for Australia, at an additional cost of 3 million euros. The 2008 accounts according to "Quote" (11 February 2010): net loss of almost 11 million euros, negative equity of around 5 million, gross margin of almost 50 million against 29 in 2007, operating costs of 59 million against 20 in 2007, 7 million in depreciation of sets, almost 4 million in losses from the aircraft rental company and 6 million in payroll; André Rieu Productions reached 20 million of negative equity; a credit of 15 million euros from the Rabobank guaranteed with the "André Rieu" brand, the copyrights and the violin insurance, described as "Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis Faciebat Anno 1732". He puts the debt at around 34 million and the spending on the set at 34 million pounds ("The Guardian", Alfred Hickling, 20 December 2015). There was no bankruptcy: the Dutch headline of 20 February 2010 is "André Rieu wendt faillissement af" (dodges bankruptcy); he sold out the 2009 concerts and entered 2010 with 20 million in the black. In September 2010 he postponed the Australian, New Zealand, British and Irish tours because of a viral infection of the vestibular nerve, and he was back at the Vrijthof in early 2011. On 16 April 2019, the day after the Notre-Dame fire, he offered the 700 tonnes of steel from the set for the scaffolding of the restoration. The 2023 accounts: record turnover of almost 73 million euros (almost 64 from concerts, of which more than 22 in the Netherlands; 6.8 from rights; 700,000 euros from merchandising), 18.5 million of net profit, 37 million in dividends and a line of 900,000 euros for an option right to buy a violin. Instruments: Rieu stated in October 2017 that he used to play a 1667 Stradivarius —the ex-Captain Saville— and that today he plays a 1732 one; there is no reliable source with a purchase price for either, and in 2020 he was willing to sell the instrument. Vrijthof: annual series since 2005 (2019 was the fifteenth consecutive year); capacity of around 12,000 people; the Zuyd Hogeschool study commissioned by Maastricht city council and made public on 3 July 2019 puts the impact at more than 30 million euros a year, with almost 153,000 attendees in 2018, half of them Dutch, and half a million euros of investment by Rieu in local production and marketing; in July 2025 and July 2026, 12 concerts per year, some 150,000 visitors, an audience from 80 countries and hotel occupancy of 90-95 % from Wednesday to Sunday. Criticism: Tom Service, "The Guardian", 23 July 2015 ("the very acme of commodified classical music"; "unsuspecting masterpieces" turned into "saccharine fodder"), on the highest-grossing concert film in British history at that moment; Donald Clarke, "The Irish Times", 13 April 2013 (Richard Clayderman against Karlheinz Stockhausen); Nina Siegal, "The New York Times", 21 December 2016 ("A Maestro for the Masses, if Not the Critics", comparison with Liberace); Dean Paton, "The Christian Science Monitor", 1 December 2017 (comparisons with Arthur Fiedler and Leonard Bernstein); in his favour, Eamon Kelly in "The Australian" and Alfred Hickling in "The Guardian". Rieu's replies: to Donald Clarke, 2013, on the jealousy of critics and musicians; to Nina Siegal, 2016, on the "Gesamtkunstwerk"; to "The Irish Times" (Tara Brady), 19 December 2019 ("I see a lot of jealousy around me"); to Violinist.com (Laurie Niles), 20 October 2017, on authenticity and on Franz Lehár's waltz "Gold und Silber" as the piece that made him fall in love with the genre. On his father, to "The Times" (Tim Teeman), 27 March 2013: "He was very strict, not pleasant. We did not have a warm relationship"; the sentence "I didn't educate you to do waltzes" is reported by him. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from the catalogue entries of Boosey & Hawkes and Wise Music Classical, Harlow Robinson's programme note for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Wikipedia in English (André Rieu, Johann Strauss Orchestra, Suite for Variety Orchestra No. 1, Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2, The First Echelon, Forever Vienna, Waltzing Matilda, List of Stradivarius instruments), the official biography and diary at andrerieu.com, the press room press.andrerieu.com, André Rieu's official Facebook page, Nederlandse Top 40, Billboard, Pollstar, "Trouw" (14 July 1995), auspOp, "Quote" (11 February 2010 and 9 September 2024), Radiowereld.nl, "The Guardian", "The Irish Times", "The New York Times", "The Christian Science Monitor", "The Australian", "The Times", Violinist.com, Classic FM, Classical-Music.com, Hart van Nederland / ANP, Misset Horeca, L1 Nieuws (18 July 2025 and 22 July 2026), Spotify and Musicnotes.