Tag: Tradition

Why the waltz? What gives with this senescent New Year’s tradition of still waltzing 200 years since the birth of the dance’s greatest maker, Johann Strauss II?

One simple answer is that this longest-running popular dance is a simple thing. The structure of the waltz is little more than movement in three-four time, a very natural human rhythm, so natural you hardly need to think about it. The waltz becomes, thus, a nice, elegant, sensual, romantic, harmless way to welcome in a new year, to attempt, or at least pretend, to be optimistic.

Another simple answer is that nostalgia haunts New Year’s. For old time’s sake, we sing “Auld Lang Syne.” We embrace the waltz to remember and ward off depression. Everywhere in the world there are New Year’s concerts featuring Strauss waltzes. As always, the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s concert will be broadcast to 90 countries, providing waltzes to millions. (It airs locally on PBS SoCal [KOCE] at 8 p.m. Wednesday and streams Thursday on pbs.org and the PBS App.)

Riccardo Muti is this year’s conductor for one of the profession’s most prestigious gigs and one that went to Gustavo Dudamel in 2017. There will be effusive flower arrangements in the gorgeous Vienna concert hall, the Musikverein. The orchestra will be formally dressed, very old-school. The audience will be elegant — demand for tickets is so great that they can only be purchased through a lottery. Looking for a reason to dub classical music elitist, an ongoing memory of monarchs, look no further.

But look further. The waltz happens to be one of history’s great subversive endeavors. It has been an entertainment capable of subtly disquieting empire, class, sexuality, music and dance. For two centuries, the waltz has collided with gunpowder and, more lately, AI, in ways that have shaped culture and society.

The dance came into fashion in the late 18th century and became a phenomenon in the 19th by mirroring a newly emerging sense of social freedom. This was no primly patterned minuet, where dancers stood side by side, attention directed to precisely mapping elaborate steps. In the waltz, the couple hugged and glided and touched. The dance represented scandalous freedom. It represented scandalous intimacy. It spread from Vienna throughout Europe and America with scandalous ease.

The great waltz kings became great innovators as a way of maintaining their unprecedented popularity, which also led them to become the entrepreneurial innovators, basically inventing the modern music business and breaking down the distinction between “art” music and popular music. In welcoming the erotic on stage, the waltz-based Viennese operettas liberated all forms of theater.

What had been the backbeat of a bygone epoch, the waltz amazingly survived in the 20th century. Operettas became more melancholic and activist, merging into everything from the Brecht-Weill theater to the modern musical. Waltzes by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Shostakovich were tinged with memory, cutting sarcasm and outrageous spoof. Later, Elvis crooned “The Tennessee Waltz”; Sinatra, “The Christmas Waltz.” Martin Scorsese’s 1976 documentary of the Band’s last concert, “The Last Waltz,” was hardly the last waltz.

Waltzes have, indeed, continued to have a funny way of showing up where least expected. The “Chairman’s Waltz” in John Williams’ score to the 2005 film “Memoirs of a Geisha” is another lilting, lovely example of grappling onto a dance that refused to die. But the elephant in the cosmic waltz room was “2001.” The spaceship approaching the space station, floating, as if in an interstellar dance, to the strains of Strauss‘ “The Blue Danube Waltz,” remains the meme of film. The power of the waltz here is how it humanizes the space station as it’s about to be taken over by an inanimate AI, namely the computer called HAL. There is no lilt in its artificial voice.

Another power of the waltz is that you can have fun with it. In what Alfred Hitchcock wrongly called “the lowest ebb of his career,” he made an outrageously fanciful biopic about Johann Strauss II, “Strauss’ Great Waltz,” in 1934. Who else but Hitch would have the young Strauss, working in a bakery, finding his inspiration for “The Blue Danube” among baking equipment? It’s a riotous scene in an unjustly neglected feel-good film next to impossible to find.

Hollywood has been at its happy biopic best when it comes to Strauss. The depression-era 1938 “The Great Waltz,” starring opera star Miliza Korjus, is a minor cheer-up classic. The 1972 remake is another unjustly neglected film. Shot in 70mm, it never seems to find its way onto the big screen and is not currently available on video. Also forgotten is Disney’s 1963 musically satisfying “The Waltz King,” featuring the wonderful Senta Berger and directed by André Previn’s older brother, Steve.

Fun is how the waltz is often presented. Grand balls. Whirling couples. The simpler splendor of yore. But for all its imperial finery and grandeur, the waltz was the people’s dance. Johann Strauss II, in particular, had a way of going far beyond merely making people feel good. He empowered his listeners and dancers.

Neither the court nor the church could contain the waltz’s liberating spirit. We are in need of a grand study of how the waltz empowered people and what that might have meant. The waltz crossed all barriers. During Strauss’ own lifetime the musical world was split between Wagner heralding a music of the future and the supposed stuffiness of traditional Brahms. Both composers embraced Strauss. Everyone did.

As recently as 1977, John Cage wrote “49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs.” In this assemblage of street addresses throughout New York City, sounds are collected with the intention of making all partners in a grand civic waltz. Cage noted the principle could easily be applied to any city as a means for finding means of cooperation, communion, commonality, construction and confluence.

Strauss’ operettas, beginning with “Die Fledermaus,” another New Year’s tradition, mocked the rich and the powerful, and undermined mores. They still do. And in this year’s holiday spirit, Bavarian State Opera in Munich has released on DVD and Blu-ray its ecstatic recent production of “Fledermaus” directed by Barrie Kosky and conducted with extraordinary dynamism by Vladimir Jurowski.

The first sentence of the plot synopsis in the booklet reads: “The more bourgeois, the more unfulfilled.” This production — full of Kosky’s trademark cross-dressing and buoyant, all-inclusive sexual emancipation — is an intoxicating road map for fulfillment. The implausible becomes plausible. Hang-ups fly away in three-four time.

Kosky reminds us that as long as we have ranks of unfulfilled bourgeois, the waltz’s work will not be done.