Oscar Strock’s father was a professional musician in a theater orchestra.

Since Strock was very enthusiastic about music as a child, he learned violin and later piano after guitar and balalaika. At the age of twelve, he began studying music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. One of his first compositions, with which he drew attention to himself, was the setting of a poem by Pushkin, which later became known in the interpretation by the popular Russian singer Anastassija Wjaltsewa.

His seven brothers also studied music in St. Petersburg; most famous of them was the concert violin Leo Strokoff (also: Strockoff), a student of Eugène Ysaÿe.

The beginnings of Strock’s music career were rather modest: He worked as a répétiteur, as a cinema piano player and as a café pianist. He married an Italian of Austrian origin and founded a family. After the birth of his first child, Strock returned to Latvia. In Riga he tried as a publisher and brought out the literary journal Novaya Neva, in addition he published books and music notes. His first own compositional success was the Tango Black Eyes (Черные глаза), made famous in the interpretation of the Russian singer Pyotr Leshchenko living in Riga.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Strock was a pianist and conductor of a dance band in Latvia. He also composed and wrote songs, ballads, waltzes and jazz pieces. His special love, however, was the tango,  which he understood not only as utility music or even as a concession to fashion.

In 1928 he started his first concert tour to France. In Berlin, he recorded with his own orchestra in 1929 several of his compositions at Adler-Electro. In this company, he accompanied in August 1930, the refrain singer and then successful hit composer Walter Jurmann. A recording with the refrain singer Alexander A. Balaban as “Fred King” is obtained on the Ultraphon label.

Well-known performers such as the baritone Petr Leshchenko / Петр Лещенко and the tenor Konstantin Sokolski / Константин Сокольский sang his tango ballads  and gypsy romances for the record. Three of his most famous pieces were recorded by Marek Weber for Electrola; the refrains sang in Russian Marek Belorusov.  In the Soviet Union played the great jazz orchestra by Alexander Naumovich Zfasman, Leonid Ossipovich Utyosov / Леонид Осипович Утёсов and Yakov Borisovich Skomorovsky Stroks compositions.

The transfer of power to the National Socialists forced him as a Jewish artist in 1933 to escape. He left Germany and returned home with his family to Latvia. There he played with his own orchestra (“Oskara Stroka džesa orkestris”) his compositions on records of the company “Bellaccord”, which had founded Helmars Rudzītis 1931 in Riga.

Financial problems in the 1930s that arose when his attempts as a publisher failed and also the opening of a restaurant in Riga was unsuccessful, followed by political persecution and performance bans in the late 1940s and 1950s, when Latvia was a Soviet Union republic for Strock life before and after the return difficult.

During World War II, he was evacuated to Alma Atá with his family before the German conquest of Latvia, where he found employment as a pianist of an entertainment orchestra in troop management. After the war, he returned to Riga, but now his compositions were considered decadent: After the Second World War, Western music in the Soviet Union was undesirable. The State Musicians Union refused to accept him, his compositions were no longer allowed to be printed, sold and performed.

Despite all adversities Strock did not let the music go until the last minutes of his life. At the age of 80, he sat down at the piano and played.

However, Strock did not come into the public eye until the 1970s. However, before it could come to a comeback, he died while preparing for a concert on June 22, 1975 in Riga heart failure.

Strok wrote more than 300 pieces of music, which became well-known and performed in all the big cities: they could be heard equally in Berlin, Paris and Warsaw, in inns and cafes as well as in concert halls and dance halls. Many records were taken and pressed from all over the world. Overseas they were accessible in repressions of European matrices (“recorded in Europe”).

His most famous tangos include:

Black eyes (Чёрные глаза)
Do not leave me (Не покидай)
Tell me why (Скажите почему)
Musenka (Мусенька родная)
Blue Rhapsody (Синяя рапсодия)
Sleep my poor heart (Спи, мое бедное сердце)
My last tango (Мое последнее танго)
Oskar Strok’s tango compositions were successful throughout Europe and were also played in Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary and the Soviet Union. When he undertook a Far East tour in 1935, they even reached China and Japan. So it came that he was given the nickname “Tango King”.

Despite his worldliness, Strok never forgot his Jewish roots.

To Jack Yellen and Lew Pollack’s famous song My Yiddish Mame, which he also edited himself as a tango and recorded, he wrote a Russian text: Сердце матери.

Together with Igor S. Korntayer he wrote the Yiddish tango song Vu Ahin Zol Ikh Geyn? / Скажи, куда мне идти ?,  which the Dutch singer Leo Fuld made world-famous.