When was waltz popular

However, it was not the rotation that gave the waltz its notoriety, it was the position that the dancers took, a "closed" dance position, face to face. While this seems innocent enough in today's dance world, at the time it horrified many "proper" folk, such as novelist Sophie von La Roche, who described it as the "shameless, indecent whirling-dance of the Germans" that " Scandalous or not, the waltz became immensely popular, spreading from Germany to the dance halls of Paris as soldiers returned from the Napoleonic wars.

By the mid18th century, it had spread to England in spite of, or perhaps because of, its continued notoriety. An entry in the Oxford English Dictionary described the waltz as "riotous and indecent. One of the earliest appearances of the waltz in a play was in the opera Una Cosa Rara by Soler in This set the tempo of the waltz at andante con moto , which is defined as "a walking pace.

However, around the Austrian composers Lanner and Strauss composed a series of of pieces that as an ensemble became known as the Viennese Waltz. This was a very fast music played at about 55 - 60 measures per minute, or to use today's music terminology about beats per minute.

Suddenly, the slow and sedate dance moves were wild and frenetic, couples whirling around the dance floor at almost dangerous speeds. Rather than replacing the original waltz, Viennese style waltzing became a popular alternative, especially among young dancers who wanted to show off their athletic prowess. It remains a popular social dance as well as an integral part of ballroom dance competitions. It's not clear when exactly the waltz crossed the Atlantic to America, but by the end of the 19th century it was an established part of the U.

Of course the Americans had their own particular variations, such as the "Boston" waltz, which slowed down the tempo in favor of long, gliding dance steps and fewer circular motions. American style waltzes eventually developed several "open" dance positions as well.

Another key difference in what has become known as the American waltz as opposed to the international version , is that the dancers' legs cross each other with each step as opposed to closing together. At the end of the manual, he includes several figures to illustrate these points.

Of course, the waltz was not the only closed-couple dance to emerge during the Victorian period. Opponents of the morality of such dances focused on the waltz, however, and dance masters continued to work to legitimize the dance and instill confidence in their students. A man by the name of Gault, a French dancing master, originated the waltz in the year He was licentious in the deepest sense of the word, and gloried in the fact that he had led many girls into lives of sin and shame.

He had gone down so low in the moral scale that, finally, in an attempt to ruin his own sister he strangled her to death, for which he was guillotined in Needless to say, this account does not reflect that of any other dance historians, but it does effectively tap into anxieties about both ostensibly nefarious French influences and the degradation of women that many conservative commentators associated with the waltz.

As its popularity in the ballroom increased, the waltz began to appear in literary works, serving multiple functions as authors drew on the social and cultural significance of the dance in incorporating it into their texts. For instance, the depiction of a couple waltzing could be sign of often illicit intimacy.

Flaubert describes the physicality of the encounter in great detail:. They began slowly, then quickened their pace. They whirled and everything whirled around them—lamps, furniture, walls and floor—like a disk on a spindle.

They began to dance again; drawing her along more swiftly, the viscount led her to a remote corner at the end of the gallery, where, out of breath, she almost fell, and for a moment she rested her head on his chest. Here, Flaubert captures the experience of spinning wildly while enjoying an intimate embrace in which legs and eyes are locked together.

Emma is removed from reality for these few moments and must sit down to gather herself and absorb the aftershock of such an exhilarating encounter. Indeed, Flaubert seems to suggest that the physicality of the experience awakens something in Emma that had previously been dormant.

The waltz is significant within the novel as well, of course, because the dance, and the ball at which it takes place, becomes a turning point for Emma, which Flaubert develops to devastating ends. Indeed, for some English readers, the foregrounding of the sexualized and disruptive partnership of the waltz in a French novel would serve to further underscore the idea of the dance as a threatening foreign import.

Plantagenet is much more active than Charles Bovary in responding to the situation, and his strong reaction is caused not only by the intimacy of the waltz embrace between Glencora and Burgo but also by the publicity of the dance, which, as in many cases, is the greater offense. In addition to marking a change in ballroom fashions, for Ritchie, the waltz also symbolized a move from the heroines of Jane Austen to those of later Victorian novelists.

George Eliot, however, creates two heroines who decline to waltz although they recognize the importance of such ballroom partnerships. When Stephen Guest approaches her for a waltz, she agrees to a walk instead, and arm-in-arm, they approximate the physical closeness of the waltz.

This disinclination towards being locked in a partnership may provide some foreshadowing about her marriage to Grandcourt and its consequences. The waltz also appears in poetry from the period, with some writers borrowing the triple meter of the dance in constructing their own texts. O sway, and swing, and sway, And swing, and sway, and swing! Ah me, what bliss like unto this, Can days and daylight bring? Like the waltz itself, the poem moves full circle, from the initial idealistic enjoyment of the dance, to the realistic acknowledgement of the social rules and codes employed in the ballroom.

In the concluding stanza, Levy gently tweaks the initial verse, inserting her cynical commentary between the steps of the dance to reflect the hollowness of such artificial partnerships, which, from her perspective, cannot produce real, lasting relationships.

The concluding stanza echoes the first:. O swing, and sway, and swing, And rise, and sink, and fall! There is no bliss like unto this, This is the best of all. In contrast to the continual movement suggested by the first stanza, the fall in the concluding stanza is a terminal motion that foreshadows the end of the dance, the poem, and the romance of the ballroom partnership.

Employing the repetitive and formulaic nature of the waltz itself as a poetic model, Levy challenges the scripted expectations of ballroom courtship, which transform the enjoyment of the dance articulated in the first stanza into a codified encounter in which women are often pressured into partnerships.

As with many aspects of Victorian society, the ballroom changed significantly after World War I, and the waltz—once so scandalous and controversial—became a relic of an older age, replaced by raucous Ragtime and salacious Tangos. Moreover, the impact of the waltz and its presence at the forefront of discussions about dance in historical, critical, and literary works produced throughout the Victorian period underscore the importance of dance history to a wide range of cultural, social, and literary narratives.

Cheryl A. Wilson, Cheryl A. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Adburgham, Alison. London: Constable, Austen-Leigh, J. New York: Oxford UP, Buckland, Theresa Jill. Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, New York: Palgrave, Byron, George Gordon.

Jerome J. Chancellor, E. Memorials of St. London: Grant Richards Ltd. Childers, William. Dodworth, Allen. Dancing and its Relations to Education and Social Life.

New York and London: Harper and Brothers, Engelhardt, Molly. Ohio State UP, Faulkner, T. A blistering editorial in The Times a few days later stated: "We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced we believe for the first time at the English court on Friday last So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society by the civil examples of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.

But as history repeats itself over and over again, the antagonism only served to increase the popularity of the waltz. The bourgeoisie took it up enthusiastically immediately after the French revolution. Paris alone had nearly seven hundred dance halls! A German traveler to Paris in stated, "This love for the waltz and this adoption of the German dance is quite new and has become one of the vulgar fashions since the war, like smoking. Lorenzo Papanti, a Boston dancing master, gave an exhibition in Mrs.

Otis' Beacon Hill mansion. Social leaders were aghast at what they called "an indecorous exhibition. Music plays an important role in dance, and every dance is dependent upon the availability of the appropriate music. The waltz was given a tremendous boost around by two great Austrian composers - Franz Lanner and Johann Strauss.

These two composers were by far the most popular during the nineteenth century: they set the standard for the Viennese Waltz, a very fast version of the waltz. By , a typical dance program was three quarter waltzes and one quarter all other dances combined. Around the close of the nineteenth century, two modifications of the waltz were developed.