Blue Danube Waltz

Today waltzes may conjure up images of elegance: ball gowns, tiaras, and lovely gliding step, but two hundred years ago the waltz was considered shockingly risque'. Here was advance where you touched your partner's body and were swept into a dizzying whirl around the ballroom floor. Simply scandalous! When the waltz was danced at a ball in London, the Times reported:

"We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced...at the English         court on Friday last...it is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs and close compressor on the bodies in their dance, to see that it is indeed far removed from the modest       reserve which as hitherto been considered distinctive of English Females."

Despite such scandal, during the nineteenth century this Austrian peasant dance conquered the ballrooms of Europe. Vienna was the home of the waltz, and two Austrian composers, Johann Strauss I and II, were the nineteenth-century equivalent of Cole Porter, Elvis, and the Beatles rolled into one. This father and son duo was at the top of the charts for nearly 75 years.

Strauss the younger wrote On the Beautiful Blue Danube in 1867, just weeks after the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph suffered a terrible defeat by Prussia at the battle of Sadowa. It was a dark time for Austria, but Strauss's new waltz glittered. First performed as a choral work by the Vienna Men's Choral Association, the orchestral version quickly became Strauss's biggest hit, cementing the composer's reputation as Vienna's Waltz king.