Whence
Waltz (the dance)
Music & dance

Where does Waltz (the dance) come from?

The waltz comes from the Alpine country of Bavaria and Austria. Ordinary people there were whirling in couples by the mid-1700s, and within decades the dance had taken over the ballrooms of Vienna and then of Europe.

A turning dance of the countryside

Around 1750, the lower classes in Bavaria, Tyrol and Styria began dancing a couples dance called the Walzer. The name comes from the German verb walzen, 'to turn, roll or revolve'. The waltz grew out of the Ländler, a country dance in three-four time popular in Austria and Bavaria, and its basic pattern is a simple step, slide and step. Close couple dancing was not entirely new: in 1580 Montaigne saw dancers in Augsburg holding each other so closely that their faces touched.

Vienna's dance halls

The dance shocked many people at first, but in the 1780s it became fashionable in Vienna. The waltz in Martín y Soler's 1786 opera Una cosa rara moves at a walking pace, but in Vienna the dance was sped up. Huge dance halls opened for thousands of dancers, the Zum Sperl in 1807 and the Apollo in 1808. It gained more ground at the Congress of Vienna and through the music of Josef Lanner and the two Johann Strausses.

Too close for comfort

Much of the outrage was about how close the partners came. In Sophie von La Roche's novel of 1771, a character fumes at the 'shameless, indecent whirling-dance of the Germans'. In 1797 a pamphlet called waltzing the main source of weakness of body and mind in its generation, and an English handbook of 1825 still called it 'a riotous and indecent German dance'. Earlier social dances had been group patterns, but in the waltz each couple turned towards each other, and its closed hold became the model for many later ballroom dances.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Waltz ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Viennese waltz ↗ · britannica.com ↗ · etymonline.com ↗

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