The Waltz (Archive Episode)

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Speaker 4 Hello, I'm Simon, producer of In Our Time.

Speaker 4 Following Melvin's announcement that he's stepped down from In Our Time after almost 27 years, we're taking the time to celebrate his outstanding work with some favourite episodes from our archive.

Speaker 4 In due course, we'll return with new programs and a new presenter, but now we have this listener favourite to offer from last year. Here's Melvin.

Speaker 4 Hello, when the walse reached Britain in the early 19th century, it revolutionised the role of dancing and music in our society, fracturing old ways and giving rise to new.

Speaker 4 While it may seem formal now, it was the informality and daring that drove its popularity, with couples holding each other as they spun round the room to the blue Danube.

Speaker 4 And soon the waltz expanded the creative world in poetry, ballet, novellas, and in music that was neither exclusively classical nor vulgar, but popular.

Speaker 4 With me to discuss the waltz are Susan Jones, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, Derek Scott, Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Leeds, and Teresa Buckland, Emeritus Professor of Dance History and Ethnography at the University of Roehampton.

Speaker 4 Teresa, can you give us some clear idea of the origins of the waltz?

Speaker 3 Of course, it's very difficult to pinpoint the origins of any popular dance, but we know that during the Renaissance and the Baroque period in Europe, there were several turning dances, of couple dancers, a man and a woman, turning together.

Speaker 3 But it's not until the mid-18th century that we start to get more and more references to dancers such as Waltzer and Drea, and these are mostly in the Germanic lands that we hear about them.

Speaker 3 These dances then are taken sometimes by aristocrats, sometimes by soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars to Britain.

Speaker 3 And by the end of the first decade of the 19th century, the waltz had arrived and was here to stay, and it actually permeated throughout the whole of society.

Speaker 3 Prior to this, the main ceremonial dance in high society was the minuet.

Speaker 3 And in that, people stood side by side, i.e., a man and a woman stood side by side, and they traced elaborate patterns on the floor.

Speaker 3 And the revolutionary aspect of the waltz was that the man and woman turned to face one another and then they spun round on their own axis, going clockwise but progressing anticlockwise around the ballroom.

Speaker 3 So this was totally revolutionary.

Speaker 4 They not only faced each other, they held each other.

Speaker 3 They held each other

Speaker 3 very closely, sometimes a bit too closely for the likings of pastors and moral commentators. But it's such a revolutionary move.
In fact, it's often been referred to as a shift in body paradigm.

Speaker 3 And in a way, it's

Speaker 3 body paradigm. It's a shift of the whole way of moving, a whole corporeal relationship to space and to other people.

Speaker 3 And from that, a whole new realm of dancers came out, which were known as round dancers.

Speaker 3 And there were lots of these dancers, not just the waltz there was later followed by the polka and the mazurka and there's a whole century of these round dancers but the waltz was the first and the most stable so theresa can you describe what it's like a dancer waltz there are lots of waltzes but the main one in the 19th century was what was known as the rotary waltz i.e revolving around and in that the dancers took six steps over two bars of music and of course the key thing about the waltz is that it's in triple time.

Speaker 3 So it's one, two, three, two, two, three. And in that time, you've done a whole circle, but at the same time, you're progressing around the room.
And the sensation depends, of course, on the music.

Speaker 3 And the sensation typically, if it's fast,

Speaker 3 you can get easily out of breath. And it's a very exhilarating feeling.

Speaker 3 But if the music's slower, of course, there's more of a sense of dreaminess, a dreamy quality, a sense of being lost in your own space.

Speaker 3 But of course, the couple was actually locked into their own space, and that's the radical aspect of the waltz.

Speaker 4 Thank you. And Gary, Gary Scott,

Speaker 4 from early on, the waltz was associated with the Germanic world.

Speaker 4 At first, yes, the waltz very much associated with the German dance.

Speaker 4 Often a German dance meant a waltz to the British.

Speaker 4 But what intrigues me is that that the 1820s, when Joseph Lane and Joseph Strauss the Elder come on the scene, then we have a revolutionary style of music that goes with the waltz.

Speaker 4 And in the hands of Johann Strauss the father, new things happen which create the chasm that then opens up in the 19th century between what is seen as entertainment music and what is seen as art music or serious music.

Speaker 4 There's also the folk traditional kind of music, but now we have this third type of music.

Speaker 4 And if no one objects to my singing examples, I can give you an idea of some of the new things that Johan Strauss Sr. did.
For example, his waltz Heimat Klenge, Sounds of Home, begins da da da.

Speaker 4 Well, that note is known as the leading note in music. Da should go to la.

Speaker 4 It's the note T which will bring us back to do.

Speaker 4 But no, he goes da da da da da da da. It falls downward.
This was regarded as very, very unusual at the time. In fact, it became known as the Venerische nota, or in England, the Viennese note.

Speaker 4 He soon does the same with the sixth degree of the scale, the la.

Speaker 4 Dorémi Passo La.

Speaker 4 If I quote from Johann Strauss the Younger, De Fledermaus, Da da da

Speaker 4 That note

Speaker 4 should resolve downwards on da da.

Speaker 4 He leaves it hanging like that. That becomes a marker of the walls and of the new populist style.
That if you're a serious art musician, avoid that note. And finally, the umpapa accompaniment.

Speaker 4 That was very rare before Josef Lana and Johann Strauss the Elder. In fact, if you hear the umpapas in late Schubert, you bet that it's because he's been listening to Lana or Strauss.

Speaker 4 Can you account for the that combination of music and the dance? I mean, they seem made for each other. Who made them for each other?

Speaker 4 Well, of course, Strauss was a very proficient dance violinist,

Speaker 4 so he's very immersed in the style.

Speaker 4 Strauss and Lana played together.

Speaker 4 Lana got

Speaker 4 really the best job of being the leader of the court orchestra and playing for the court balls.

Speaker 4 But Johann Strauss, when he argued with Lana, split up, made his way successfully in playing for dance halls for the middle class in Vienna. And he saw what was attracted.

Speaker 4 He was very alert to what was going to attract audiences. And it has to be said that half of the reason he was alert was he wanted to make money.
Well, it makes many people alert, doesn't it?

Speaker 4 I think there's surprise in your voice, which surprises me, really.

Speaker 4 Well, I do have a puritanical nature, you know.

Speaker 4 Can we go to you, Susan? You have the music. Yeah.
Who was dancing it in the first place, and then why did it sort of spread across the plain?

Speaker 8 It was sponsored by the court, and we're talking about the Austro-Hungarian Empire here.

Speaker 8 And of course, famously, the Congress of Vienna is a moment when nations are coming together to solve the problem of the end of the Napoleonic era.

Speaker 8 And a lot of diplomacy was going on during the day, and a lot of waltzing was a kind of relief at night. So you were getting diplomats in all sorts of people.

Speaker 8 And then, of course, it spreads to further down the chain. But it's also associated with the lascivious, the rather racy side of the wolf coupling.

Speaker 8 So when it comes to

Speaker 4 basic side is only good when you go down the chain.

Speaker 8 I'm not suggesting that at all, and I think,

Speaker 8 for example, Lord Byron was one who did not, who thought that it was there all the way through.

Speaker 8 So when it comes to England, you know, you're really dealing with I mean, okay, it's been it has a kind of moral opprobrium attached to it, but at the same time it is acknowledged by by the Hanoverian monarchs that this is doable because they like doing it.

Speaker 4 And it becomes irresistible very quickly, doesn't it?

Speaker 8 It becomes very irresistible and it's interesting you use that word irresistible because that's exactly what Jane Austen's narrator in Emma talks about the waltz when

Speaker 8 they're going to have a gathering which is hopefully going to generate some kind of romantic coupling and somebody's playing the irresistible waltz.

Speaker 8 It's very interesting the way Austin uses this particular word here.

Speaker 4 Its influence seems to spread outside dance and into the other arts.

Speaker 8 Yes, I think it, particularly in

Speaker 8 relation to Byron, for example, who famously wrote a satire on waltzing in 1812. He published it in 1813 and then really distanced himself from this satire.

Speaker 8 He gave the poem, it's the long poem, a narrative voice by one gentleman farmer or gentleman, a yeoman, Horace Hornham, and he's worried about his daughters, you know, engaging in this.

Speaker 8 So Byron kind of sets a certain tone for the literary responses to the waltz, particularly I think, because he introduces into the poem a reference to

Speaker 8 to Goethe's Werter, which was extremely influential throughout literary revolutions in Alberta, that was extraordinarily influential, a young man

Speaker 4 in his own life.

Speaker 8 And this kind of anxiety comes out in Byron's reference to Werter, where he actually cites Wethe's reference to the waltz.

Speaker 8 He and Lottie are getting together and having this amazingly out-of-body experience almost. He said, I feel I'm not human, which is an extraordinary.

Speaker 8 We don't know exactly what Goethe was thinking of there, but I think that's the idea that there's a kind of transportation of the body, beyond the body.

Speaker 3 I think that's true, Sue, that there's the idea of being out of your own body, the sense of entering another world.

Speaker 3 But in the initial years, there was a lot of antagonism towards the waltz, but it then became the staple dance of the 19th century. It was so important.

Speaker 3 And it lasted, well, it still dances today, but it was the main dance on the ballroom. It went waltz, quadruote, quadru, waltz, waltz, waltz, waltz.

Speaker 3 By the end of the century, it was almost as though there was nothing other than waltz.

Speaker 3 And the problem was, by the end of the century, of course, was that young people were getting very tired of it indeed. And there was.

Speaker 4 Tired of it or tired by it?

Speaker 3 Probably a bit of both, because by the end of the century, the military bands were the main music providers.

Speaker 3 And they, obviously, as professional musicians, got bored with the music and they wanted a bit more pep and go into it. And so they sped everything up.

Speaker 3 And of course, that delighted the young people, but not the old people who were watching. And there were lots of complaints about rowdyism in the ballroom.

Speaker 4 So, can you just tell us a little bit more, in your view, why there was, you alluded to, this worrying side for parents and the more stayed in society that this was taking over?

Speaker 3 Well obviously it's about young men and young women being in very close proximity. They're dancing very often in

Speaker 3 ballrooms which are lit only by candlelight and they might sneak off and get up to illicit activities.

Speaker 4 You were to come in?

Speaker 4 Well, first of all I would say that the earlier waltz, when Byron gets annoyed about the waltz, is different to the waltz of the later 1820s. The waltz changes a lot.

Speaker 4 And yes, at first the worry is about the face-to-face and hand contact, although gloves become mandatory to try and reduce fingers on bodies.

Speaker 4 But then you have to consider at that time the Empire line, there's not much corsetry or undergarments, so men can kind of feel around if they choose when they're dancing but as the 1880s progress and ballrooms are built and parquet flooring is introduced the waltz speeds up the landlord it had hops in it it had some stamps in it the waltz has glides it gets faster and faster people worry about women's dresses whirling up as they're going around

Speaker 4 and all this begins to give the waltz a very sensual kind of atmosphere to it. And I'm thinking

Speaker 4 the one thing that always comes to mind when I think of the waltz in literature is Madame Bovary dancing the waltz in Flaubert's novel.

Speaker 4 You read that description, she's probably had a couple of glasses of champagne. The waltz makes you dizzy, it goes on for about seven or eight minutes.

Speaker 4 You get a five-minute break, then another waltz starts. You're going, her head falls on the Viscount's chest at one point, she notices her dress is rubbing against his trouser leg, you know.

Speaker 4 And it's all very central. She collapses onto her chair at the end.
But when she's on her deathbed, you know, the remarkable thing is that this is the one thing, the great thrill of her life.

Speaker 4 She remembers that waltz.

Speaker 4 Her life was a mess, but the waltz did it for her. They also carried their own

Speaker 4 kitty. The seamstresses were

Speaker 4 around the ballroom edges because if anybody stood on a dress and he got ripped, they rushed on with a needle and thread and

Speaker 4 men were not to wear boots in the dance hall.

Speaker 3 And especially military men were not to wear spurs, of course.

Speaker 3 But then there were these poor wallflowers who used to go to the ballroom expecting to have their first debutante dance, and there were no men sometimes coming in.

Speaker 3 So the poor women would spend a lot of time in the ante-rooms pretending they were having their dresses sewn, when really it was because they couldn't get a partner, because there weren't enough men in the ballroom by the end of the century.

Speaker 4 Now let's talk about not enough men. It was quite difficult to get men onto the floor at the beginning, wasn't it? Because dancing for these are reasons, you'll tell me if I'm wrong, obviously.

Speaker 4 First of all, it was not thought to be manly to dance.

Speaker 4 Secondly, it was not thought to be the done thing to clasp a woman to your bosom and dance. And thirdly, it was thought to be a rather

Speaker 4 rather lower cluster dance like this. You should go back to the Minuet and be good-mannered like your parents had been.
Is there anything in that?

Speaker 3 There's a lot to say about this because, certainly, in the late 18th, early 19th century, if you wanted to be regarded as a gentleman, you should be able to dance and have the appropriate training from a dancing teacher.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 4 it had gone into a different phase there. It wasn't a sort of the rascals' dance,

Speaker 4 it became a sort of low-graduate dance.

Speaker 3 It became so accepted in society that it was expected that a man knew how to waltz.

Speaker 3 And one of the issues, of course, was

Speaker 3 dancers always had a problem with Christianity and also with Cartesian philosophy about the body being lesser than the mind and there being the mind-body split, etc.

Speaker 3 And of course the Victorians were wonderful at

Speaker 3 using this sort of philosophy to justify things. So for the men, very often they thought, well, that's to do with the body.

Speaker 3 It's what women do dancing and also they thought that it was unmanly to dance because from the mid-19th century in Britain men were being sent away to public school and at that point dancing lessons had been replaced by rugby and organized sports so the boys would be get a little bit of training at home with their sisters in dancing, go away to public school, then they would go to university, then they would go into men's clubs.

Speaker 3 And so, it created by the end of the century this homosocial atmosphere where they didn't really want to be with women and do women's things.

Speaker 3 So, consequently, they just used to hang around in their London clubs and turn up when supper was served at some of the balls.

Speaker 3 And the poor hostesses were getting very annoyed because they had all these wallflowers and nobody to dance with them.

Speaker 4 I think Theresa is right about the unmanliness of music in general, actually, but dancing in particular. And I think that it was helpful that the waltz was easy to dance.

Speaker 4 I mean, Mark Twain said it was the only dance he could do. All you had to do was whirl your partner around and try not to bump into the furniture.

Speaker 4 Whereas a minuet, you could spend weeks trying to learn the steps of a minuet.

Speaker 3 With a minuet, you really needed a dancing teacher or a dancing master.

Speaker 3 And because what you were trying to to do was to demonstrate your social distinction because you could afford to employ somebody, and therefore, with these social skills, you might be able to rise up the hierarchy.

Speaker 8 Susan? Yes, I think that whole improvisational quality of the waltz is

Speaker 8 very important there. But on going back to the issue of gender, of course, we're jumping ahead here to the coming of the ballet russe in Paris and London.

Speaker 8 You know, one of the characters who was so formative in

Speaker 8 thinking about male dancing is Nijinsky, Vaslov Nijinsky, of the Ballet Russe company run by Serge Diagilev.

Speaker 8 Now, there were plenty of male dancers on stage before Nijinsky, but he had a particular hit with a ballet in 1911, Le Spectre de la Rose, Spectre of the Rose, which was based on a Gauthier and Vaudoy

Speaker 8 scenario and with choreography by Michel Fauquin.

Speaker 8 And it tells the story of a young woman coming back from the ball. She's asleep, so she has to dance as if she's asleep, but she's being driven by the spirit of the waltz.

Speaker 8 And the waltz is incarnated, embodied by Nijinsky, who is a very muscular dancer. But what he did was to kind of feminise the idea of that muscular masculinity.

Speaker 8 He made a pose with his arms in fifth position, au curon, which means the arms above the head, and he crossed the hands over and lent slightly to the side, as if he's, you know, about to fade perhaps, or give the scent of the rose to the girl he's driving through this waltz.

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Speaker 4 So we've referred a little to how the aristocracy took it to heart, and the Queen Victoria even went, yes, but she did go. She dated.

Speaker 4 She did.

Speaker 8 She danced and she liked it.

Speaker 4 She liked it.

Speaker 4 And we've talked about people who can go to ballrooms. But one of the interesting things for me is that it went right across society.

Speaker 4 So you're getting people in small towns and villages saying, No, we needn't do these folk dances, we'll actually

Speaker 4 have a waltz now.

Speaker 3 But the interesting thing is, is yes, they're all doing the waltz, but the question is where and how, because style distinguished who you were in the social hierarchy.

Speaker 3 So, there are lots of images from dancing teacher manuals which show you this is the correct way to stand, which is this is the aristocratic way to stand with an erect back at a respectful distance from your partner and glancing over the shoulder of your partner, never looking at them intently.

Speaker 3 Whereas if you're low class, you are very close together, you clutch your partner, and that was regarded as being the epitome of bad taste.

Speaker 4 Yes, I've certainly read reviews of dancing in some New York ballrooms in the 1870s remarking on this very thing, you know, they dance in such a vulgar way, these people.

Speaker 4 But the British seem to admit that the Americans danced better than they did.

Speaker 3 They did, they did. Well, that was because they took care over their lessons.
And the problem, of course, as we've talked about, the men, of course, they're responsible for steering.

Speaker 3 And if you haven't had lessons, you don't always know how to steer your partner. And they weren't very good at going the other way around, even when they'd grasped the basics.

Speaker 3 So that's why a lot of people got very dizzy, was because they did what's known as the natural turn. You turn to the right all the time.

Speaker 3 And there's a very funny song by George Grossmith called Do You Reverse?

Speaker 3 because it was thought to be the epitome of bad taste to reverse in front of Queen Victoria. And also actually in the Germanic courts as well.

Speaker 3 And I suspect that the reason for this is because people couldn't do it very well and they didn't want anybody falling over in front of royalty.

Speaker 4 Taught and taught and taught to do that.

Speaker 3 It's not easy, is it?

Speaker 4 Once you get the hang of it, it's all right. I mean, provided you don't want to be perfect.

Speaker 3 But perseverance.

Speaker 8 That's really

Speaker 8 interesting because, you know, James Joyce in Ulysses, in the CSA episode of Ulysses, actually talks about waltzing a lot. He's talking about

Speaker 8 night down double.

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 8 Of course. And he's talking about the red light district.
But there are reverse turns in that description there.

Speaker 8 And there's very much a sense that

Speaker 8 the waltz is driving this scene. So it still retains that association with doubtful morals

Speaker 8 in that particular.

Speaker 8 Actually, he mentions the hesitation waltz.

Speaker 8 Perhaps that's one for.

Speaker 3 Well, now we're into a sort of a new style of waltzing, which occurred towards the end of the 19th century, possibly from America.

Speaker 4 In England or everywhere.

Speaker 3 Mostly from America, but

Speaker 3 it was perfected, if one can say that, in England. It was called the Boston, which suggests where it came from.
And unusually for a popular dance form, it was developed by the upper middle classes.

Speaker 3 It wasn't one of those dances that necessarily came from the peasantry or from a folk background. It was already the existing style of, not the style, it was the existing basis of waltz.

Speaker 3 It was done to waltz music, but there's a new style of waltz music comes in in the 1900s, and the response of that

Speaker 3 by the dancers was to glide more and also not to turn the feet out because the waltz had always been danced in the 19th century using the ballet technique, toe down first, feet turned out,

Speaker 3 up on your toes as you went down, up, up, down, up. And you use your third position to turn.

Speaker 3 Young people didn't want that in the early 1900s, and listening to these dreamy waltzes, they wanted to glide.

Speaker 3 So, what they did was to walk, and you get this long, stretched-out walking on the diagonal to this dreamy music, which, Derek, I think

Speaker 3 you know, like the Merry Widow.

Speaker 4 Oh,

Speaker 4 Yes, two things happen, really. There is, as you say,

Speaker 4 the Boston waltz, it tends nearly always to be called the English waltz in England. And

Speaker 4 it doesn't matter who writes it. I mean, James Molloy was Irish, but just the song twilight is the English waltz, you know.

Speaker 4 It's a slower waltz, as Theresa's saying. Then with The Merry Widow in 1905, which is a sensation in London in 1907, we have the walse moderator.

Speaker 4 It falls a little bit between the two, but the Merry Widow Waltz, da da da da da.

Speaker 4 It's a little faster than the English Waltz, slower than the Venetian waltz. It sets off another waltz craze.

Speaker 3 And then we have that English school of

Speaker 3 waltz composers, Archibald Joyce.

Speaker 4 Of course.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 it went down well on the Titanic, but then it also went down badly on the Titanic as well.

Speaker 4 It seems to me is that it keeps getting an extra charge it's going well and then the Ballerus come in it goes in better it seems to be hurting in and then this English waltz comes in does it always get does it always sort of recharge itself it sort of recharges itself now

Speaker 4 strictly

Speaker 4 and you know even today

Speaker 4 this morning I was listening to the radio and I heard someone singing Moon River I thought oh it's a waltz they must know I'm participating in a program about waltzing are you lonesome tonight, Elvis Presley?

Speaker 4 I had the last waltz with you, and you're humping

Speaker 4 away.

Speaker 8 Save me the last waltz is Zelda Fitzgerald's novel.

Speaker 8 But also, I was thinking of the Merry Widow.

Speaker 8 Of course, it gets into Beckett's happy days. It's the last

Speaker 4 Winnie is listening to the gramophone and they're playing.

Speaker 4 It causes another resurgence of waltz, but by the mid-30s, people are getting a bit sick of the waltz. Yes.

Speaker 4 They prefer the foxtrot by then much.

Speaker 3 Well, they had a big tussle to try and wrest the waltz back from the foxtrot.

Speaker 4 Can we go back to who is being pulled in by this? Who is following it? Follow it like byadas young people follow particular groups and bands and so on. Who were people following the waltz?

Speaker 4 They'd go anywhere for a waltz, to see a waltz, to dance a waltz, obviously.

Speaker 3 There was a huge dance craze from about 1910

Speaker 3 across Europe and North America, mainly pushed along by of course the arrival of ragtime music and the tango

Speaker 3 and the waltz had a bit of a struggle keeping up

Speaker 3 but then of course there were these people these dancers these social dancers and also these teachers. What do you mean by social dancers?

Speaker 3 By social dancers I mean people who were keen dancers, who belonged to societies, who were these upper class people, mostly in the west end of London.

Speaker 3 And of course again, it's this aspirational society. People wanted to look glamorous and dance like people like Josephine Bradley.
They were featured in all of the magazines.

Speaker 3 George Fontana, Victor Sylvester, of course, all of these people who had a hand in actually

Speaker 3 really, not quite cementing, but certainly tidying up and saying, no, a waltz has got to be two steps and the third step, you pull the feet together. It's not a foxtrot, which is more open-ended.

Speaker 4 But I was going to say that

Speaker 4 yes, there were men who were good at dancing whose services would be for hire in some ballrooms. For a time Victor Sylvester as well, although he became obviously a ballroom champion himself.
But

Speaker 4 interesting enough they were known as gigelos sometimes, weren't they? Yes.

Speaker 4 They were. I mean when I went to the game.
I'd like to comment on that. No no, you see, that's the connotation of the word you're taking.

Speaker 4 But when I'm on my one holiday bike board with my father, we went to the

Speaker 4 went to the tower, the tower ballroom, and these men sitting around and they were called the gigglos. They didn't mean they picked up the women to take them t to bed.

Speaker 4 It meant that the women were looking lonely and they picked them up to dance with them so that the thing would go with a bang. Well, I you didn't hear of that.

Speaker 4 I've had people called gigglers, but I obviously take your word for it. Yeah, I wouldn't if I'm you.

Speaker 4 Because I talked to one of the blokes and he was very pleased about being a giggler. He called it a giggler.

Speaker 3 That's exactly how my mother referred to them as well.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so you know about gigglers. There's two of us here, one of you.
We're doing well. Well,

Speaker 4 my ignorance is now on display for all.

Speaker 8 I'm on the fence, because I think that whole issue of improvisation is so interesting. You know, the fact that anyone can do it, and yet it...

Speaker 3 But there's an interesting aspect that the Victorian,

Speaker 3 you couldn't really do much in the way of improvisation because you were still tied. But in this new style of waltzing, you could go and stride off into new directions.

Speaker 3 You could go sideways if you're going to bump into somebody.

Speaker 8 Right, well, that's interesting because,

Speaker 8 bizarrely enough, Virginia Woolf takes off on that notion of improvisation in the waltz in her very first novel, Voyage Out, in 1915, which is interesting. William Jacksonville, what's she doing?

Speaker 4 I haven't read that.

Speaker 8 Well, she

Speaker 8 puts a waltz at the centre of the novel. I I mean, it isn't foregrounded as such, but it tells the story of a young woman trying to find herself.

Speaker 8 And this is where, you know, a lot of the literati are using the waltz as a cultural figure or cultural symbol of the possibility of freedom, because you can do things with the waltz.

Speaker 8 And she has a waltz being performed by the guests at a hotel in South America, they're all in South America, and the female protagonist is playing the walls with a trio, and the trio dashes into

Speaker 8 simultaneously getting the walls together at some point, and people just start doing their own thing, and then there's a crash, presumably the crash of cymbals of the trio, and then people break up.

Speaker 8 What Wolf is doing there is she's showing that there is a darker side to the walls, that there's a kind of potential for fragmentation as well as for harmony and getting together.

Speaker 4 Because that has a history, of course, because Liszt wrote four Mephisto waltzes, where the waltz becomes the devil's genre.

Speaker 4 And there's a kind of seedy side to the waltz that's always ready to emerge.

Speaker 4 Salome, Richard Strauss, the dance of the seven Veils, the striptease is a waltz, really, with some Orientalist features to it. And even in more recent times, think of Tom Jones with Delilah.

Speaker 4 I saw the light on the night as I passed by the window. It's all that, you know, Delilah and seductiveness.

Speaker 3 The waltz is associated with women very much, and because it's regarded as very graceful, but of course, with women, as we say, you know, there's these.

Speaker 3 The Victorians and later, the viewed the women, and earlier indeed, as having two sides, the angel and the devil in their make-up.

Speaker 3 So the waltz can go either way, as you say so.

Speaker 4 You would have thought that the fact that it went through society in the way you suggested earlier in the programme might have given society some kind of cultural unity, did it?

Speaker 8 To an extent.

Speaker 4 If I jump in here and say that

Speaker 4 well, is it not interesting that the waltz spreads to so many countries, whether it's Australia, South America, China, all over Europe, but people develop their own local waltzes, the Scottish waltzes, the Irish waltzes, cockles and mussels, you know,

Speaker 4 old English waltzes, the pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green, which then becomes a Geordie waltz as Cushy Butterfield.

Speaker 4 You have these waltzes everywhere, you know, so somehow the unity, if there is one, I think there is, is the unity of the urban experience. These are no longer country dances.

Speaker 4 These are urban dances, and cities become more and more like each other as the 19th century progresses and into the 20th century.

Speaker 4 And I think the waltz fits into that so well.

Speaker 8 Is that because of the rhythm partly though? You know, I mean, obviously it is to some extent.

Speaker 8 I'm thinking that, you know, of John Cage writing 49 waltzes for five boroughs,

Speaker 8 which, of course, there isn't a note of music in it anywhere. It's films of trains and urban noises that replicate that waltz rhythm, that one, two, three.
There's something atavistic about it.

Speaker 4 It's very difficult to know, but certainly there's something about the waltz that made it a cosmopolitan genre. The Lendler, never.
You play a Landler, people think of Austria.

Speaker 4 You play a Strathspérate, people think of Scotland.

Speaker 4 There are certain things that don't seem to move globally.

Speaker 4 But then you'll get a place like Vienna, a new type of waltz arises, goes around the world, you'll get a place like Trenchtown, Jamaica, reggae arises and goes round the world.

Speaker 4 And I've never found a satisfactory explanation why that sometimes happens. New Orleans and jazz.

Speaker 3 But a similar thing happened with the polka, wouldn't you say?

Speaker 4 I would. In fact, I was singing the polka when you sang

Speaker 4 the waltz drove out everything, but the polka polka in the 1840s.

Speaker 4 Johann Strauss the Elder didn't write many polkas, but his his sons certainly did write loads of polkas. And yes, the polka is also a cosmopolitan.

Speaker 4 You get Native American polkas, you know, you get polkas everywhere.

Speaker 3 But I would say that the polka never ousted the waltz as the epitome of the most romantic dance possible.

Speaker 4 No, and it's still, for many people, the polka seems more like a folk dance than

Speaker 4 a dance. Is that because any sign of modernity?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 Scott, the dancing master, said that he said, if you read any novel, you know, the hero is always the perfect waltzer.

Speaker 8 Exactly.

Speaker 3 And so is the heroine,

Speaker 4 the perfect waltzer.

Speaker 3 That

Speaker 3 no words of love were ever uttered when they were dancing the polka.

Speaker 4 It's difficult to be taken seriously while you're hopping around in these floors.

Speaker 4 I love you.

Speaker 4 How did it connect with modernism?

Speaker 8 Well, I think it's that issue of fragmentation that we mentioned, that the idea that there's a potential, as I said,

Speaker 8 for the waltz to break up, for the waltz to insert gaps into itself, like the hesitation waltz, to syncopate. You can get a jazz waltz, which is a two-four time with a waltz rhythm.
over the top.

Speaker 8 Stravinsky wrote waltzes at the same time as Spectre was being performed.

Speaker 8 So he did a waltz for Petrushka. And it's extremely dark.

Speaker 8 It's the ballerina and the Moor characters, puppet characters in Petrushka, waltzing together and then it breaks up and ends in disaster, in fact, with the murder of

Speaker 8 Petrushka. But I think it's this idea that there's disintegration as well that's possible.

Speaker 8 I mean, I would think perhaps Ravel is someone to bring in at this point because of the idea of the turn of the century.

Speaker 8 Didn't Ravel say something

Speaker 8 about we're dancing on the edge of a volcano?

Speaker 4 He wrote La Vase

Speaker 4 1911.

Speaker 8 And then 1920. There were two, two.

Speaker 8 Then I think it picks up on some of those effects that, I mean, famously, Diagilev refused Ravel's Laval's, but Frederick Assyria.

Speaker 8 Maybe you know,

Speaker 4 but I know. Diagalev was unreliable in the way that he refused things.

Speaker 4 He would refuse things that we now think are great. He refused Bourne Williams Job, for example.

Speaker 4 Which is more

Speaker 4 best works, you know.

Speaker 4 How long the piece of music lasted? Sravinsky said, to the end, my dear.

Speaker 4 The great answer.

Speaker 8 Yeah, but then Ashton and Balanchine, to go back to Melvin's question,

Speaker 8 they choreographed La Valle, and it was, again, its open-endedness, its bizarre kind of sense of drifting into, in Balancine's case, into the arms of death.

Speaker 8 You know, there's this worry about the character changing, as Wolf talked about in 1910, human character.

Speaker 4 And I do think a lot of people think that about Laval's, but Ravel himself denied it.

Speaker 4 But one thing I would like to say that I'm glad you mentioned jazz modernism because it's a raggy waltz, but Dave Bruber,

Speaker 4 great.

Speaker 4 But the other thing I think we have to be clear, the waltz is seen as modern, not necessarily modernist.

Speaker 4 You know, if we're talking about modernism, the second being East South is Schoenberg wrote a waltz, you know,

Speaker 4 it's different to the modernity of the waltz. And when you think that something like Johann Strass's waltz, acceleration's acceleration,

Speaker 4 inspired by the electric motor,

Speaker 4 it's part of the modern age.

Speaker 4 Electricity is part of the time when the Strasses were writing, and electrical references are found in their waltzes. So they're aware of modernity.

Speaker 3 And there's a school of thought, isn't there? And that the rhythm of the waltz is industrial in tone, that it's mechanistic.

Speaker 4 People do think that, but I think that's an awesome thing. I don't agree with it, but it's an argument.

Speaker 4 People look at notes on a page,

Speaker 4 or they hear a Calliope steam organ playing a waltz, and it's boom, bing, bing, boom, bing.

Speaker 4 But you listen to an orchestra like Venus Philharmonic that know their waltzes, it's not boom, jing, jing, but it's often ahead of the beat, boom, jing, jing, boom, jing, jing, just slightly ahead, and not all the time.

Speaker 4 You have to have the feel of it. It's just like in jazz, if you've got no feel to swing, it doesn't work.

Speaker 4 If you've got no feel for that Viennese rhythm in the waltz, it doesn't work as a Viennese waltz. So fine, you think it's in no danger become a museum piece?

Speaker 4 What I worry about is when I hear C strictly come dancing, and they use pieces that are not waltzes to dance the waltz, just because you can divide something into threes.

Speaker 4 For example, memory of Lloyd Weber. They've used this a couple of times.
It's a slow song. Memory, da da da da da da.
But each thing goes into da da da da da da da da da.

Speaker 4 So you can think of it as umpa pa, umpa pa, but it's not at that speed. It's a slow four.
It's not a fast three.

Speaker 4 And I wish Strictly would use the right meters for their dancers. Anything?

Speaker 3 Well, I do agree, but of course it's about

Speaker 3 attracting an audience with popular music, music that they can recognise music of now. So I understand why they do it.

Speaker 4 Thank you very much indeed. Thanks to Teresa Buckland, Sue Jones, and Derek Scott, and to our studio engineer, Sue Mayo.

Speaker 4 Next week, Julian the Apostate, the Roman Emperor who removed Christianity as a straight religion and restored paganism. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 11 And the In Our Time podcast gets some some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Speaker 4 What would you like to have said you didn't say in the programme?

Speaker 4 I've always just thought of this, but probably I'd like to say something about

Speaker 4 showmanship and show business and Johann Strauss.

Speaker 4 How did he portray himself? Why did people go into ecstasies at his concerts? But sometimes there were concerts and

Speaker 4 at his playing. What was it about him? Why did he do what he did, you mean?

Speaker 4 And why did it thrill people? Well, you're supposed to be an expert.

Speaker 4 What's your view? Oh, well, I... You are an expert.
You're not supposed to be an expert. You are an expert.
What's your view?

Speaker 4 I thought you were going to go around and find out whatever it was. Well, just when you've got it.
Well, briefly, it was the way that

Speaker 4 he did not conduct his orchestra with a baton.

Speaker 4 He led from the violin because he was a violinist and he was renowned for moving about. His whole body moved with the music.
He tapped his foot to the music.

Speaker 4 a classical musician shouldn't tap their foot to the music and when he gave performances for example in public parks he had the idea of ticketing the events paying police to rope things off and then paying for spectacular displays lighting fireworks all that kind of thing and of course this all gave him a kind of superstardom and he became I think the first global musical superstar.

Speaker 4 I know Paganini toured, but Johan Strauss's father could tour with an entire orchestra. People wanted him so much.

Speaker 3 I would like to add something about the waltz being associated with modernity all the time.

Speaker 3 Not necessarily modernism, but modernity, it seems to reinvent itself so that when it comes back again in the early 20th century,

Speaker 3 it's associated with all those qualities which were thought to be modern, that is, natural movement and a lack of artificiality. and that's so important in terms of the concept of Englishness.
And

Speaker 3 because the Engl the English, whoever the English are, there there is this notion that develops in the nineteenth century that the English are true characters.

Speaker 3 When you look at when they looked at people from France, say, which had retained a more,

Speaker 3 they would argue, affected etiquette and style of dancing, there was a very widespread notion that a national character could be seen in the way in which people danced.

Speaker 3 And so, for the English, it was restrained, it was elegant, it was natural, lack of showmanship, but in total control.

Speaker 3 And that accords very much with the Victorian notion of the upper-class gentleman.

Speaker 8 I would like to have added something about the novelist George Eliot in the 19th century, whom we didn't get to talk about,

Speaker 8 but she actually uses the dance as form in several of her novels, and particularly in Adam Bede. But she uses the dance form

Speaker 8 as a way of showing moral turpitude to some degree, you know, when Arthur Donofawthorne has organised a dance to get off with Hetty Sorrell, you know, and it leads to the demise of Hetty Sorrell, I mean to to her tragedy,

Speaker 8 particularly because it's at the centre of the novel. It's not like Shakespearean comedy where you have a dance at the end.

Speaker 8 But what's interesting about Elliott is that she does pepper references to the waltz here and there, because she's talking about rustic dances, but she's also talking about waltzes as artificial, which is quite the opposite of Therese's point.

Speaker 8 She references the bird waltz, for for example, when people are discussing before the big dance in Adam Bede, that was in 1859, she's actually looking back to an earlier time

Speaker 8 where the waltz was looked down upon at the beginning of the century. And the bird waltz is she sees as something as highly artificial, that it has nothing to do with real birds.

Speaker 8 And of course, that was Eliot's structuring of her novel around the whole issue of what is real, realism.

Speaker 8 You know, she was very interested in thinking about ordinary people as well as the aristocracy. And Maggie Tulliver in Milon the Floss famously doesn't know how to waltz.
She does the rustic dances.

Speaker 8 And Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Durondarin in 1876

Speaker 8 has physical antipathy to the closed position of the waltz. There's a particular character she wants to avoid, and she refuses to waltz, even though people tell her she can waltz very well.

Speaker 4 I've thought of another thing that I wish I'd said, and that's the business of the waltz. Johan Strauss's father and the publisher Tobias

Speaker 4 Haslinger just thought,

Speaker 4 young women in middle-class households are all playing the piano, why don't we do a waltz series for girls? And they published waltzes for them to play.

Speaker 4 And these waltzes are then easy because they're learning so the term is Leichter musik and it's that term Leichter musik that gives us the term light music although we no longer think it means the easy music we we think we know what light music means and that's why someone then invented easy listening as another one.

Speaker 4 And another thing on the the subject of the business of music, I wish I'd credited Anna Strauss, Johann Strauss, the eldest wife, because he left her, he left the kids, and she had to take over.

Speaker 4 And she was the one that set them on very good business careers. She was the one that was in charge of over 200 staff running the Strauss business.

Speaker 3 And I think, following on from that, to highlight the role that the theatre played in popularising these tunes and also in developing the sheet music industry, which went back and forth, particularly across the Atlantic, didn't it?

Speaker 4 And I have to say, because they popularized it so much, and the dance halls that did that as well, the nobility in Vienna began to be worried because if they went to the spell dance hall in Leopoldstadt, they could end up bumping into a greengrocer, you know, or something like drill.

Speaker 4 Well, Mr.

Speaker 3 Putin was not happy about that at all in the Diary of a Nobody.

Speaker 3 The Diary of a Nobody, where he thinks he's made it because he's going to the mayor's ball.

Speaker 3 And when he gets there, he finds that there's, you know, he's dancing with greengrocers and he thought that he was going somewhere.

Speaker 4 You see, they didn't get invited to the hunt balls, they weren't there.

Speaker 3 There was a hunt ball or something else.

Speaker 3 And you know, in the mid-19th century, they were still in some places putting a rope across the ballroom so that the aristocracy could be at the high position, which is nearest the musicians,

Speaker 3 and tradespeople, but of course they're quite elevated tradespeople, would be at at the bottom and there the twain should meet. It was all very strictly controlled.

Speaker 3 It gets very, very hierarchical in in the nineteenth century in Britain.

Speaker 4 And people put up with it, did they? Obviously. They didn't tear the place down, no.

Speaker 3 Yes, and but then I think they got more subtle means by getting um stewards of MCs to make sure that the right person was in the right set because of course you have the quadrille and when you called for another couple you had to make sure they went from the bottom of the room

Speaker 4 really

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 8 And when you mention the theatre, the importance of the theatre, I'm thinking of the music halls as well at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century.

Speaker 8 You know, someone like Arthur Sullivan was doing.

Speaker 4 It became quite centrified, didn't it?

Speaker 3 The music halls.

Speaker 8 Yes, it did, but then there were the, you know, you could sit in the garlands as well.

Speaker 8 Yes. And you could see waltzes being performed in the ballets in part of the music hall.

Speaker 3 And there's some wonderful footage from the late Victorian period of street girls dancing in the east end of London doing waltzes.

Speaker 4 But backing up on what Sue's just said, you'll remember that in Patience the line in the end he was lost totally and married a girl from the Corps de Ballet.

Speaker 4 Very unfair.

Speaker 4 Some research has shown that was a very unfair remark about ballet girls. Well, thank you very much indeed.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you.

Speaker 4 It's quite dry in here.

Speaker 4 Thank you very much. Cheers.
Thank you very much. Thank you.

Speaker 4 In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by me, Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios production.

Speaker 4 I think we need to be jolted out of thinking this is just a programme of tributes to people. It isn't.

Speaker 1 It's an exploration, and we may not always like what we find.

Speaker 12 It's such a clichéd idea to say a chimpanzee, at least, say an octopus or a bus or something, for God's sake.

Speaker 4 There's Elizabeth Day on the Pharaoh Hapshetsut.

Speaker 13 The subsequent ruler defaced a lot of her statuary, and so we also have very little clue of what she actually looked like.

Speaker 4 Miles Jupp on the novelist J.L. Carr, and Stuart Lee on guitarist Derek Bailey.

Speaker 12 You've got to meet the challenge of a culture that is failing the public.

Speaker 4 Great Lives continues on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.

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