19^th Century Central European Dance

Historical Background

Very few European folkdances were invented from scratch by peasants living in isolated villages in the countryside. Certain areas were indeed more isolated than others, such as mountain valleys in parts of South Tirol, Transylvania and Slovenia, and kept a relatively ‘pure’ volkstänze idiom, but seldom in central Europe did even relatively isolated villages exist without outside influences impinging on them and influencing to varying degrees the development of music, steps, and style.

From the middle ages onward, most areas of central and eastern Europe had been marched over and fought over by armies of various sovereigns of the expanding nation states whose complex dynastic wars were endless. Few regions escaped either the armies or having their boundaries and ruling houses changed several times over; hence isolation in central Europe was an extremely relative matter, dependent on the history of a particular area, its nearness to major and secondary roads and trade routes, or later the railways, and of course its distance from larger towns and cities. And even the lowliest hamlets at the farthest distance from the capitals were visited by recruiting forces of the different armies.

After the Napoleonic wars ended in the early 19th century, most of Europe then enjoyed a long era of peace, save for the convulsions of the year of revolutions in 1848 and an interruption in the summer of 1870 for the Franco-Prussian war. After this brief conflict, peace resumed until the Balkan Wars, prelude to World War I, began in 1912.

In the Austrian monarchy, despite battles in north Italy until 1866, the Seven Weeks War with Prussia, and continual skirmishes on the outposts of empire, from the accession of Franz-Joseph in late 1848 the long years of his reign until the Balkan Wars were relatively settled: roads became notably better and safer, means of transport increasingly efficient, and commerce and trade flourished. There was much travel for pleasure as well as commerce, not just among the upper class but also by well to do bourgeoisie and wealthy peasant farmers. Circuses and troupes of actors and musicians also traveled widely, as well as the troops of the emperor, always being moved about to different provinces of the dual monarchy. All these factors ensured that music and dance styles from widely separated regions would be disseminated with fair rapidity, coming to be enjoyed by people far from their point of origin. To illustrate one example: in Bohemia in 1835 a dance composer saw the polka being danced and sung by a peasant girl; in 1837 it was being done in society ballrooms in Prague and a collection of polkas for pianoforte was published there. In 1839 the band of a Bohemian regiment brought the music to Vienna and that year it also reached St. Petersburg. It was introduced to Paris in 1840 by a Prague dancing master, though it did not become a popular favorite until 1843-4, about the same time polkamania began sweeping England, America and around the globe.

19^th Century Dance Forms

In the 18th century it had been mainly the nobility who had performed the highly codified court dances and minuets that had been handed on and buffed to a high gloss by generations of dancing masters, while the lesser gentry and middle classes enjoyed cotillions, quadrilles and sets of country dances. Toward the end of that century and as the 19th century progressed, however, European society was changing radically and, except in the courts, the social behavior of the upper classes became much less constrained; balls of the aristocracy began featuring many of the same country dances (called contredanses on the continent) as were performed by their social inferiors. And in this new century, the middle classes became more well to do and more able to imitate both the clothes and manners of the classes above them.

In this new era, ballroom dancing was a recreation that became immensely popular, enjoyed by both aristocracy and all sections of the emergent, aspiring middle class. There was a need for more rapid tempo dances to take advantage of the smoother floors available in the new large halls being built in entertainment complexes in city parks, and also for numbers that were less stately than the old court dances. As the century progressed with its gradual, continual relaxation of rigid social codes, it became possible more and more frequently for men and women to participate in dancing face to face in close proximity linked by tight arm and handholds without incurring social censure. At balls for both aristocracy and middle classes, dances changed from being, early in the century, primarily minuets and cotillions or country dance sets, offset by a few couple dances such as the allemande, to being, only a few decades later, primarily couple dances interspersed with the occasional quadrille.

Peasant dances, perceived as quaint and energetic, were considered far too rough and uncouth for polite society in their original forms. Nevertheless they were of considerable interest to seekers for new material for the new ballrooms and a public hungry for exciting new dances. Consequently, these lively and frequently scandalous-seeming numbers were polished and smoothed by city and court dancing masters and given genteel manners by writers of etiquette manuals. Hence the lilting and sometimes rowdy peasant ländler was transformed into the dizzying, continually whirling fast waltz or, alternately, a slower turning waltz, with languorous hesitations and a first beat that was held longer and longer as the century progressed. The leaping, energetic mazur from the plains of Poland was transformed into a more discreet, elegant configuration, and the csárdás, a frenzied spinning dance of booted Hungarian peasants, grew much more subdued in city ballrooms. Even the wildly popular polka underwent a certain leveling of its bouncy Bohemian steps and was given variations more suitable for ballrooms, though its speed and verve continued to betray its peasant origins more openly than any other ballroom dance. A polka variant, the Polka française, was popular from mid-century and was simply a slower version of the polka, sometimes with old-fashioned minuet figures, that was used as a 'rest' dance between faster polkas and waltzes.

Ballroom dance, besides deriving steps and styles from folkdance and modifying these via dancing teachers, was also influenced by ballet choreographers of the period. These men, employed by various monarchs as well as opera houses of the great cities, were always seeking different material for their productions and traveled across the map of Europe in quest of picturesque stories and piquant dance styles. In the music and dances of the ethnic populations of more out of the way regions in Eastern Europe, they frequently found such sources of inspiration and exciting new material. Arthur Saint-Léon’s work is a prime example of this process. Saint-Léon, a highly acclaimed dancer-teacher-choreographer of the period, traveled widely in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Russia, France, and Italy, discovering new steps and styles that he then polished and set into ballets, many displaying the first examples of national dance ever seen on stage. These popular stage spectacles gave impetus to the modification of both the Hungarian csárdás and Polish mazurkas into forms that could be danced in ballrooms of the time. Saint-Léon’s La Vivandière, choreographed with and danced by his wife Fanny Cerrito, introduced the redowa first in London in 1844, then in Paris in 1848. The redowa was billed as the 'Original Polka of Old Bohemia' but is actually an exhilarating forward and back three-quarter time maneuver which quickly became a popular craze and was freely inserted in ballroom waltzes and mazurkas from the late 40s through the 80s. In 1864 Saint-Leon choreographed Koniok Gorbunok (The Humpbacked Horse) in St. Petersburg, concluding the final act with a grand divertissement of Russian national dances, and in Paris in 1870 he choreographed exuberant sequences of both csárdás and mazurka in Coppélia, giving western Europe its first glimpse of the csárdás in this story set in Galicia, then a part of the Austrian Empire, now in Poland.

19^th Century Viennese Ballroom Dance

The music and dances of the final flowering of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the long reign of Emperor Franz-Joseph (1848-1916) have become world famous as the ultimate artistic expression of that period in history. Austria and her crown lands were the source of all the best known and most popular dances of the new age: polka and schottische from Bohemia, csárdás from Hungary, mazur and polonaise from Poland, and of course from the heart of Austria itself, the peerless waltz. The Austrian Empire was also the source of the majority of the dance orchestras of the time, and the best-known composers of the period’s music. While Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, and London had their orchestras and composers, no city could compare in the area of popular music with the quantity and quality of Vienna’s musical output, the result of an ethnically diverse profusion of talent and above all the stellar musical genius of the Strauss family. The world of that time danced to this music at balls large and small, played the tunes on pianofortes at home, and were serenaded with it at bandstands and restaurants in every park, resort, grand hotel, casino and spa of the Empire.

The music of the Strauss dynasty and their peers (Millöcker, von Suppé, Ziehrer and others) contains some of the most beautiful and sensuous melodies ever written to delight the human race. Some of their music was written for concert hall and operetta stage, much more was written to be danced by the fortunate inhabitants of one of Europe’s most civilized cities. How they danced! In the evenings of the social season bejeweled aristocrats, gorgeously attired officers in the king’s favorite regiments, lesser gentry, government officials, wealthy industrialists, merchants, bankers and their wives revolved and twirled on parquet floored ballrooms under crystal chandeliers; as well the members and families of the city’s many social clubs and trade unions danced at their own special balls: architects, firemen, journalists, choral and music societies, and many other organizations. And afternoons and evenings during the week and at weekends nearly year round a much wider cross section of the populace enjoyed dancing to this music at taverns in the city’s suburbs, and in the dance pavilions attached to many of the numerous cafes dotting Vienna’s parks. Venturesome aristocrats and petty bourgeois, bureaucrats, clerks, soldiers, actors, artists, writers, teachers, students, tradesmen, and shop assistants, all accompanied by wives, daughters, sweethearts and country cousins, shared dance floors at these venues. At the apogee of Empire many people knew and could dance polkas and redovas from Bohemia, as well as the mazurs from Poland and csárdás from Hungary popularized by regiments in the monarchy’s service.

The Polka

The polka probably had its origin as a round dance; it was famously seen being danced and sung by a Bohemian peasant girl in 1835 when it was noted down by dancing master and composer Josef Neruda. It was introduced as a ballroom dance in Prague in 1837 and appeared that same year in a pianoforte collection.  At that time Bohemia was part of the Austrian Empire and in 1839 the band of a Bohemian regiment brought the polka to Vienna. That same year it reached St. Petersburg, and 'polkamania' went on to conquer ballrooms around the globe.  From the 40s through the 80s many variations were to be seen in ballrooms including the characteristic heel and toe steps as well as the rapid sliding galop figures which took couples up and down polished ballroom floors in a frenzied race often frowned on by chaperons.

The Waltz

Above all else, of course, the populace of Vienna danced waltzes: waltzes in a style so familiar, such a part of their own native heritage that it would seem most Austrians, and especially the Viennese, knew how to waltz from the time they learned to walk. They danced with such unaffected ease and naturalness because a solid generation before the elder Strauss (born 1804), the waltz was already being danced throughout the Austrian countryside in its early form, the peasant ländler. Mozart in the late 1780s and Beethoven in the first years of the 19th century wrote down some of these pretty melodies, and in their transcriptions the connection of waltz to the original folkdance is quite evident. As dance floors became smoother, the demand for faster, longer ländler grew, and Joseph Lanner, Johann Strauss Sr. and their contemporaries developed and extended the ländler into early waltz form; the next generation of composers polished the waltz into an ever more extravagant sweep of compelling, interlinked melody chains that reached its summit in the works of Johann Strauss Jr. and his brother Josef. But it must always be remembered that the root and inspiration for these works lay in the villages and hamlets of the forests, meadows, and alps of the Austrian countryside. The titles of some of these waltzes make this quite clear, such as Johann Jr.’s ‘Aus den Bergen’, ‘Gedanken auf den Alpen’, and ‘die Zillertaler, Walzer in Ländlerstyle’, and of course ‘Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald’, with its famous zither introduction (the zither was a folk instrument considered quite unsuitable for court and concert hall until this waltz was introduced). And what must be one of the most charming waltzes ever penned, Josef Strauss’s ‘Dorfschwalben aus Österreich’ with its evocation of the whitewashed, flower-bedecked villages of the countryside around Vienna.

In waltzes chosen for Mark & Djana’s Strauss Suite, certain musical passages have a definite folk motif, and these sections are choreographed using the interlinked arm figures so characteristic of the ländler style.

‘Vintage’ Waltz – Americans Love to be Different

The style of waltz that Mark & Djana present in their Strauss Suite is the classic Austrian style of period waltzing, rather than the style of ‘sideways waltz’ popularized in America in the 1860s by multitudinous dancing manuals, such as Hillgrove’s Ball Room Guide. This Civil War era waltz style is commonly designated the ‘Vintage Waltz’ in modern American dance clubs and is actually based on the polka step in that the movement of the dance is side to side – rather than forward and back as is exhibited in the classic Viennese waltz that is descended from the Austrian ländler.

While the polka was extremely popular in Europe from the mid-1840s, its popularity came well after the original ländler style waltz had already been firmly established – the ländler waltz was being danced by the end of the 18th century in the south German countries. Hence the sideways polka movement never challenged the continual forward and back turning rotation that constituted the waltz in Europe. In America, the craze for dancing the waltz and polka were more contemporary with each other and the two styles merged, giving us the sideways style of waltz now known as the ‘Vintage’ waltz.

Into the Modern Age

It is interesting that ballroom versions of polka, mazurka, schottische and waltz (albeit streamlined and modified, but still recognizable) are still vibrantly alive in the modern age, and are danced by hundreds of thousands of people around the globe every year, while many more recent novelty dances have long been consigned to limbo. Surely these dances, and above all the waltz – the priceless dance legacy of the southern Germanic people to the world – will continue to be done through and beyond the 21st century because they are such a perfect marriage of steps with rhythm and melody, and such a complete and satisfying joy for two people to execute together.