The waltz's second wave of popularity in Vienna in the first decades of the nineteenth century did not need to cover a trajectory from lower-to-middle class entertainment to middle-to-upper class entertainment–instead, it added the powerful influence of a new middle-class consumer culture to move from the beer garden and dance hall to open-air and promenade concerts by 1830 and also to the musical stage, both comic and serious. As Donald Tovey puts it, "Let us not forget that this dance music is no dream of Utopia, but was a bourgeois reality in Vienna [in the early nineteenth century]" (27). (Tovey is actually referring to German dances by Mozart [K.567 and 601], but he muddles the two generations of the waltz's early popularity by mixing Mozart with Schubert and Carl Maria von Weber.)
Vienna, alone among the major capitols of Europe, in fact, maintained both dancing and listening at promenade concerts and similar events throughout the century (Weber 112-13). Miriam Hanson also observes that "The great demand for new dance music . . . promoted competition and experimentation that contributed to the high quality and unique character of the classical Viennese waltz. Around 1830, . . . the suburban dance halls and restaurants fostered . . . a music which clearly reflected the city's predominantly bourgeois taste" (168). In the following, William Weber is referring to concerts and similar musical performances, but the same was certainly true of dancing:
after the end of the Napoleonic wars a new era began in the history of the concert world, one in which the middle class began taking on dramatic new roles. . . . [By] the early 1830s the concert life of [London, Paris, and Vienna] exhibited similar dramatic growth, and by 1848 a commercial concert world had emerged in each city, over which the middle class exerted powerful, if not dominant, control (6-7).
In the reminiscence below, a contemporary observer, Heinrich Laube, gives a particularly vivid account of the dancing segment of a Strauss concert at the Sperl in 1833. It is important to remember that these were complex events, not merely music played to serve social dancing, and that these "garden concerts" became the model for similar events throughout Europe. Dance music was played at times for listening, at times for dancing, and audiences also heard potpourris, special-effects compositions (such as battle pieces), opera overtures, and what today would be considered "concert music": "Next to the Zauberflöte Overture stood the Annen-Polka, and after the orchestrated Adagio of the Sonata Pathétique a waltz by Lanner, Fahrbach or Ziehrer" (Schönherr, 187).
Now preparations for the actual dance are made. To keep the unrestrained crowd in line, a rope is spanned . . . to separate the dancers from the rest. But this border is constantly fluctuating and yielding; only the rhythmically whirling heads of the girls are noticeable in that dancing stream. In bacchantic abandon the pairs waltz . . . joyful frenzy is on the loose, no god checks it . . . The beginning of each dance is characteristic. Strauss intones his trembling preludes, longing to pour forth fully . . . the Viennese girl snuggles deep in her lad's arm, and in the strangest way they sway to the beat. For a long while one hears only the long-held breast tones of the nightingale with which she begins her song and enchants the listeners, then suddenly the piercing trill bubbles forth, the dance itself begins with whirling rapidity and the couples hurl themselves into the maelstrom of gaiety. (Gartenberg 98)
By 1840, dance masters might still encourage health officers to intervene when "inexperienced youth" danced too quickly (Litschauer, 7-8), but almost all other trace of criticism was gone, and the way was paved for the eminently middle-class couple dancing of the polka, which quickly joined (and for a time nearly replaced) the waltz in the first years of that decade. Addressing himself to young composers, the very respectable Carl Czerny could write matter-of-factly that "the unparalleled favor which Waltzes have obtained throughout the world, has arisen from their cheerful, exhilarating and universally intelligible character." But the compositional pedagogue could not resist locating some plane of disapproval, which he shifts to matters of taste: "the circumstance that only few composers have yet distinguished themselves in this branch, is a proof that, even for this, talent and a just apprehension of all that the public especially prefers are required" (1:101). Czerny's deprecating "even for this" reminds us that the light music/serious music opposition was forged in its modern sense during the early nineteenth century. The waltz–and the venues in which it was played and danced–was very much a part of that process. Friedemann Otterbach examines the social and philosophical contexts of this process in detail (215-257; especially 220 ff.). See also David Gramit's comments on the dance in the context of the early nineteenth century establishment of the "serious concert" as a privileged venue (131-3).
References:
Czerny, Carl. John Bishop, tr. School of Practical Composition, Op. 600. 3 vols. London: Cocks, 1848; repr. ed., NY: Da Capo, 1979.
Gartenberg, Egon. Johann Strauss: The End of an Era. New York: Da Capo Press, 1979. Original edition published in 1974.
Gramit, David. Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770-1848. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Hanson, Alice. Musical Life in Biedermeier Vienna. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Litschauer, Walburga. "Franz Schuberts Tänze: Zwischen Improvisation und Werk." Musiktheorie 10/1 (1995): 3-9.
Otterbach, Friedemann. Die Geschichte der europäischen Tanzmusik. Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichson's, 1980.
Schönherr, Max. "On the Development of Austrian Light Music (1973)." [English summary]. In Lamb, Andrew, ed. Unterhaltungsmusik aus Österreich: Max Schönherr in seinen Erinnerungen und Schriften/Light Music from Austria: Reminiscences and Writings of Max Schönherr, 187-9. New York/Bern: Peter Lang, 1992.
Tovey, Donald. "[Mozart:] Orchestral Dances." In his Essays in Musical Analysis. Vol. 4: Illustrative Music. London: Oxford University Press, 1936. Pp. 26-7.
Weber, William. Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna. London: Croom Helm, 1975.
