New Year’s Concert

Couples whirling in ecstatic embraces, bodies pressed close together—worlds away from the modest, hand-to-hand minuets once performed by the aristocracy; tempestuous raptures replacing stylised decorum. In the early nineteenth century, the waltz conquered the ballroom, and in the winter of 1814, during the Congress of Vienna, it even won over the upper class. “In the Viennese waltz one sees the man guiding the woman in time with the music, lifting her into whirling leaps as she abandons herself to a sweet, dizzying enchantment, with an expression in her eyes that heightens her beauty. One also perceives the power the waltz exerts. Just a few bars are enough for faces to light up, eyes to sparkle again, and a joyful thrill to run through everyone present,” reported Count Auguste Louis Charles de La Garde-Chambonas. The couple’s dance quite literally set Viennese legs—and heads—spinning. Johann Strauss II, the star of the New Year’s Concert, turned the waltz into the pop music of the nineteenth century—and made himself a superstar in the process. Among the most famous waltzes is the irresistibly catchy The Blue Danube, the very essence of Viennese lightness, which went on to captivate even the late-Romantic composers. Brahms is said to have remarked on the orchestral version of the Danube Waltz with a terse comment: “Unfortunately, it’s not mine.”