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THE WALTZ AND THE STRAUSSES
By Justin Davidson
Even a second or two of waltz music -- a brisk oom-chuck-chuck in the bass and sinuous violins above -- are enough to conjure a cinematic wealth of associations: gowns, gilded ballrooms, and carriage horses stamping in the snow. A waltz, properly played in the Viennese style, has the power to evoke not just the mingled scents of perfume and swirling bodies, the tingle of champagne, and the glister of chandeliers, but a whole world of privilege, excitement, and glamour. One cannot hear a waltz, particularly a Strauss waltz, without being flooded with wistfulness for lives one has not lived.
The waltz comes by these associations honestly. It acquired them over the course of a long history, a reign over popular music that no other dance or style of music could ever hope to match. Ragtime ruled for a decade, disco for a paltry few years, but the waltz was king for more than a century. And like both those later forms of musically induced whirling, it was first considered dangerous and morally suspect. When the waltz craze began, in the early 1800s, the dance was distinguished by two particularly suggestive traits: it involved rapid movements and public embrace. The more straitlaced areas of Swabia and Switzerland banned it -- a sure sign of its success elsewhere.
Even in the 20th century, the waltz had still not lost its erotic connotations. The waltz, wrote H.L. Mencken in 1919, in a tone more tickled than scandalized, "is magnificently improper -- the art of tone turned lubricious. ... There is something about a waltz that is irresistible. Try it on the fattest and sedatest or even on the thinnest and most acidulous of women, and she will be ready, in ten minutes, for a stealthy smack behind the door -- nay, she will forthwith impart the embarrassing news that her husband misunderstands her and drinks too much and is going to Cleveland, O. on a business trip tomorrow."
The waltz came to Vienna from the countryside, and it was soon so firmly entrenched that dance palaces had to be built to contain it: first the suburban Sperl in 1807, then the enormous Apollosaal the following year. Leisure and caste were both highly regimented in Vienna, but in the dance halls the rules slackened a bit. The middle and upper classes mixed in the Apollosaal, and in the festive period between the Epiphany (January 6) and the beginning of Lent, the Viennese channeled their collective sensual energy into the officially sanctioned activity of waltzing.
In 1815, the waltz was engraved on the map of Europe even as that map was being redrawn. The Congress of Vienna was taking place that year, an eight-month cosmopolitan political festival whose ostensible purpose was to forge a continent that would be safe from the ambitions of any future Napoleon. In fact, the heavy-duty negotiating took place among a handful of major-power ministers, leaving the thousands of delegates, petty princes, and ornamental aristocrats free to party the months away. They did so with such enthusiasm that the Prince de Ligne remarked, memorably: "Le Congrès ne marche pas -- il danse" ("The Congress doesn't work [or walk] -- it dances").
By 1825, the waltz was a venerable dance form, but it was due for a new surge of popularity -- two, actually. That year, the first Johann Strauss, a violist in a popular dance band headed by Joseph Lanner, struck out on his own, having mastered the violin and written some of his own numbers. In the same year, a second Johann was born to the first, ensuring that the Waltz Age in Vienna would have a third act.
The elder Strauss became a fixture at the Sperl, and he evolved an intricately rhythmic style of waltzes and a sparkling manner of playing them. Eventually, the music began to upstage the dancing, and Johann Sr. honed his band into a concert ensemble. Richard Wagner heard Strauss perform at the Sperl in the 1830s and described him as a Dionysian virtuoso: "At the beginning of a new waltz this demon of the Viennese musical spirit shook like a Pythian priestess on the tripod, and veritable groans of ecstasy . . . raised their [sic] worship for the magical violinist to almost bewildering heights of frenzy."
Top banner photos: Host Walter Cronkite; Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic (photo courtesy of ORF); the caryatids in the Musikverein's main hall (photo: ©2001 Robert Zival, Musikverein). |
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The first piece that the orchestra ever performed by Johann Strauss, Jr. was his waltz "Wiener Blut." |
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A musician can apply to become a member of the Philharmonic only after playing with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra for three years. |
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The DVD and CD are available from Amazon.com. |
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