Hello, I'm Simon, producer of In Our Time.
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.
In due course, we'll return with new programmes and a new presenter.
But now we have this listener favourite to offer from last year.
Here's Melvin.
Hello, when the waltz 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.
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.
And soon the waltz expanded the creative world in poetry ballet, novellas and in music that was neither exclusively classical nor vulgar, but popular.
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 Theresa Buckland, Emeritus Professor of Dance History and Ethnography at the University of Roehampton.
Theresa, can you give us some clear idea of the origins of the waltz?
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 dancers, couple dancers, a man and a woman turning together.
But it's not until the mid-18th century that we start to get more and more references to dancers such as Walser and Dreher.
And these are mostly in the Germanic lands that we hear about them.
These dancers then, are taken, sometimes by aristocrats, sometimes by soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars to Britain.
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.
Prior to this, the main ceremonial dance in high society was the minuet.
And in that people stood side by side, ie a man and a woman stood side by side, and they traced elaborate patterns on the floor.
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 anti-clockwise around the ballroom.
So this was totally revolutionary face each other, they held each other.
They held each other 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.
And in a way... What do they mean by that?
Body Paradigm is the shift of the whole way of moving, a whole corporeal relationship to space and to other people.
And from that a whole new realm of dancers came out, which were known as round dancers.
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, Teresa, can you describe what it's like to dance the waltz?
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.
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.
And the sensation, typically, if it's fast, you can get easily out of breath easily.
And it's a very exhilarating feeling.
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.
But of course the couple was actually locked into their own space, and that's the radical aspect of the waltz.
Thank you.
Derek, Derek Scott, from early on, the waltz was associated with the Germanic world.
At first, yes, the waltz very much associated with the German dance.
Often a German dance meant a waltz to the British.
But what intrigues me is that the 1820s, when Joseph Lanner and Joseph Strauss the Elder come on the scene.
Then we have a revolutionary style of music that goes with the waltz, 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.
There's also the folk traditional kind of music, but now we have this third type of music.
And if no one objects to my singing examples, I can give you an idea of some of the new things that Johann Strauss Senior did.
For example, his waltz Heimat Klänge, the sounds of home, begins... HE SINGS
Well, that note is known as the leading note in music.
Da should go to la.
It's the note ti, which will bring us back to do.
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 Wienerische Note, or in England, the Viennese Note.
He soon does the same with the sixth degree of the scale, the La, in Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La.
If I quote from Johann Strauss the younger, Die Fledermaus, That note should resolve downwards on.
He leaves it hanging like that.
That becomes a marker of the waltz and of the new populist style.
Avoid that note.
And finally, the umpapa accompaniment.
That was very rare before Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss the Elder.
In fact, if you hear the umpapa in late Schubert, you'd bet that it's because he's been listening to Lanner or Strauss.
Can you account for the combination of music and the dance?
I mean, they seem made for each other.
Who made them for each other?
Well, of course, Strauss was a very proficient dance violinist, so he's very immersed in the style.
Strauss and Lanner played together.
Lanner got the really the best job of being the leader of the court orchestra and playing for the court balls.
But Johann Strauss, when he argued with Lano Splitter, made his way successfully in playing for dance halls for the middle class in Vienna.
And 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?
I think there's surprise in your voice, which surprises me, really.
Well, I do have a puritanical nature.
Can we go to you, Susan?
You have the music.
Yep.
Who was dancing it in the first place?
And then why did it sort of spread across the plain?
It was sponsored by the court.
And we're talking about the Austro-Hungarian Empire here.
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 War.
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.
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 waltz coupling.
So when it's, Are you suggesting that the lascivious and the invasive side is only when you go down the chain?
I'm not suggesting that at all.
And I think, for example, Lord Byron was one who thought that it was there all the way through.
So when it comes to England, you know, you're really dealing with...
I mean OK, it has a kind of moral opprobrium attached to it, but at the same time it is acknowledged by the Hanoverian monarchs that this is doable, because they like doing it.
And it becomes irresistible very quickly, doesn't it?
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 walls.
When 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.
It's very interesting the way Austin uses this particular word here.
Its influence seems to spread outside dance and into the other aspects.
Yes, I think it, particularly with 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.
He gave the poem it's the long poem a narrative voice by one gentleman farmer or gentleman, yeoman Horace Hornham.
And he's worried about his daughters, you know, engaging in this war.
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 Werther, to Goethe's Werther, which was extremely influential throughout literary revolutions in Well Werther, that was extraordinarily influential.
A young man who took his own life and...
And this kind of anxiety comes out in Byron's reference to Werther, where he actually cites Werther's reference to the waltz.
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 thing.
Was this while he was dancing?
I guess it was.
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.
I think that's true Sue, that this idea of being out of your own body, the sense of entering another world.
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.
And it lasted, well, it still dances today, but it was the main dance on the ballroom.
It went waltz, quadrille, quadrille, waltz, waltz, waltz, waltz.
By the end of the century, it was almost as though there was nothing other than waltz.
And the problem was by the end of the century, of course was that young people were getting very tired of it indeed.
Tired of it or tired by it?
Probably a bit of both, because by the end of the century the military bands were the main music providers.
And they obviously, as professional musicians, got bored with the music and they wanted a bit more pep and go into it.
And, of course, that delighted the young people, but not the old people who were watching.
And there was lots of complaints about rowdyism in the ballroom.
So can you just tell us a little bit more, in your view...
Why there was what you alluded to this worrying side for parents and the more staid in society that this was taking over.
Well, obviously it's about young men and young women being in very close proximity.
They're dancing very often in ballrooms which are lit only by candlelight, and they might sneak off and get up to illicit activities.
You were to come in.
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.
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.
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 Landler, 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 round.
And all this begins to give the waltz a very sensual touch. kind of atmosphere to it.
And I'm thinking.
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.
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.
You get a five-minute break then, and then another waltz starts.
You're going, her head falls on the Viscounts. chest at one point.
She notices her dress is rubbing against his trouser leg.
And it's all very sensual.
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.
She remembers that waltz.
Her life was a mess, but the waltz did it for her.
They also carried their own.
Their own little seamstresses were around around the ballroom edges, because if anybody stood on a dress and he got ripped, they rushed on with a needle and thread.
Men were not to wear boots in the dance hall.
And especially military men were not to wear spurs, of course.
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.
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.
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, these are reasons you'll tell me if I'm wrong, obviously.
First of all, it was not thought to be manly to dance.
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 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?
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.
So it had gone into a different phase then.
It wasn't a sort of the rascals dance, it became a sort of important social accomplishment.
And one of the issues, of course, was 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.
And of course the Victorians were wonderful at that, using this sort of philosophy to justify things.
So for the men, very often they thought, well, that's to do with the body.
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 organised sports.
The boys would 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.
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.
So consequently, they just used to hang around in their London clubs and turn up when supper was served at some of the balls.
And the poor hostesses were getting very annoyed because they had all these wallflowers and nobody to dance with them.
I think Teresa's 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.
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.
Whereas a minuet, you could spend weeks trying to learn the steps of a minuet.
With a minuet, you really needed a dancing teacher or a dancing master.
And because what you were trying 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.
Yes, I think that whole improvisational quality of the waltz is very important there.
But 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.
You know, one of the characters who was so formative in thinking about male dancing is Nijinsky.
Václav Nijinsky, of the Ballet Russe company run by Serge Diaghilev.
Now, there were plenty of male dancers on stage before Nijinsky, but he had a particular hit with a ballet in 19.
Onar XI Le Spectre de la Rose Spectre of the Rose, which was based on a Gautier and Baudoyer scenario and with choreography by Michel Fokine.
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.
And the waltz is incarnated, embodied by Nijinsky, who is a very muscular dancer.
But what he did was to kind of feminize the idea of that muscular masculinity.
He made a pose with his arms in fifth position au courant, which means the arms above the head, and he crossed the hands over and leant 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.
So we've referred a little to how the aristocracy took it to heart and the Queen Victoria went, yes.
But she did go.
She did.
She danced and she liked it.
She liked it.
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.
So you're getting people in small towns and villages saying we needn't do these folk dances.
We'll actually have a waltz now.
But the interesting thing 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.
So there are lots of images from dancing teacher manuals which show you this is the correct way to stand.
This is the aristocratic way to stand with a direct back, at a respectful distance from your partner and glancing over the shoulder of your partner, never looking at them intently.
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.
Yes, I've certainly read reviews of dancing in some New York ballrooms in the 1870s, remarking on this very thing.
They dance in such a vulgar way, these people.
But the British seem to admit that the Americans danced better than they did.
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.
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.
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.
And there's a very funny song by George Grosmith. called Do You Reverse?
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.
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.
I remember being taught and taught and taught to do that.
It's not easy, is it?
Once you get the hang of it, it's all right.
I mean, provided you don't want to be perfect.
But perseverance.
That's really interesting because you know James Joyce in Ulysses, in the CSA episode of Ulysses, actually talks about Walsing a lot.
He's talking about night down Dublin, of course, and he's talking about the red light district.
But there are reverse turns in that description there.
And there's very much a sense that... that the waltz is driving this scene.
So it still retains that association with doubtful morals in that particular.
Actually, he mentions the hesitation waltz.
Perhaps that's one for...
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.
England or everywhere.
Mostly from America, but 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.
It wasn't one of those dances that necessarily came from the peasantry or from a folk background.
It was already the existing dance style of, not the style, it was the existing basis of waltz.
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 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 Up on your toes as you went down up up down, up.
And you use your third position to turn.
Young people didn't want that in the early 1900s.
And listening to these dreamy waltzes, they wanted to glide.
So what they did was to walk.
Oh, yes, two things happen, really.
There is, as you say, the Boston waltz.
It tends nearly always to be called the English waltz in England.
It doesn't matter who writes it.
I mean, James Malloy was Irish, but just the song Twilight is the English voice.
You know, it's a slower voice, as Teresa's saying.
Then with The Merry Wither in 1905, which is a sensation in London.
In 1907 we have the waltz Moderata.
It falls a little bit between the two.
But the Merry Widow waltz It's a little faster than the English waltz, slower than the Venice waltz.
It sets off another waltz craze.
And then we have that English school of waltz composers, Archibald Joyce.
Of course.
Went down well on the Titanic, but then they also went down badly on the Titanic as well.
What seems to me is that it keeps getting an extra charge.
It's going well and then...
The Ballet Russe come in, it goes in better.
It seems to be fading in.
And then this English Waltz comes in.
Does it always sort of recharge itself?
It sort of recharges itself now, doesn't it?
It does, look, it's strictly.
It was.
And even today, 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 programme about waltzing.
Are you learning something tonight, Elvis Presley?
I have the last waltz with you.
Save the last waltz for me.
Save me the last waltz.
Zelda Fitzgerald's novel.
But also I was thinking of The Merry Widow.
Of course it gets into Beckett's Happy Days.
It's the last... Of course.
Winnie is listening to the gramophone and they're playing.
Da-da-da-da.
It causes another resurgence of the waltz, but by the mid-30s, people are getting a bit sick of it.
Yes.
They preferred the foxtrot by then much.
Well, they had a big tussle to try and wrest the waltz back from the foxtrot.
Can we go back...
Can we go back to who is being pulled in by this?
Who is following it?
Like nowadays, young people follow particular groups and bands and so on.
Who were people following the waltz?
They'd go anywhere for a waltz, to see a waltz, to dance a waltz, obviously.
There was a huge dance craze from about 1910 across Europe and North America, mainly pushed along by, of course, the arrival of ragtime music and the tango.
And the waltz had a bit of a struggle keeping up.
But then, of course, there were these people, these dancers, these social dancers, and also these teachers.
What do you mean by social dancers?
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.
And, of course, again, it's this aspirational society.
People wanted to look glamorous and dance well.
Like people like Josephine Bradley.
They were featured in all of the magazines.
George Fontana, Victor Sylvester, of course.
All of these people who had a hand in actually 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.
I was going to say that 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.
Interesting that they were known as gigolos sometimes, weren't they?
Yes.
They were.
I wouldn't like to comment on that.
Well, no, you see, that's the connotation of the word you're taking.
But when I'm on one holiday...
Blackmore with my father.
We went to the tower, the Tower Laurel, and these men sitting around, and they were called the gigolos.
They didn't mean they picked up the women to take them to bed.
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 it?
No, no.
You don't know about it?
That's amazing.
I've not heard before of gigolos, but I'll obviously take your word for it.
Yeah, I would if I were you.
Because I talked to one of the blokes and he was very pleased about being a gigolo.
He called it a gigolo.
That's exactly how my mother referred to them as well.
Yes, so you know about Giggle.
There's two of us here, one of you.
We're doing well.
Well, my ignorance is now on display.
I'm a red light.
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.
But there's an interesting aspect that the Victorian 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 stride off into new directions.
You could go sideways if you were going to bump into somebody.
Right.
Well, that's interesting because...
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.
What do you mean, takes off?
What did she do?
I haven't read that.
Well, she puts a waltz at the centre of the novel.
I mean, it isn't foregrounded as such, but it tells a story of a young woman trying to find herself.
And this is where you know a lot of the literati are using the waltz as a cultural form, figure or cultural symbol of the possibility of freedom, because you can do things with the waltz.
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 waltz.
With a trio.
And the trio dashes into simultaneously getting the waltz together at some point.
And people just start doing their own thing.
And then there's a crash, presumably the crash of symbols of the trio. and then people break up.
What Woolf is doing there is she's showing that there is a darker side to the walls, so there's a kind of potential for fragmentation as well as for harmony and getting together.
That is interesting because that has a history.
Because Liszt wrote four Mephisto waltzes, where the waltz becomes the devil's genre.
And there's a kind of seedy side to the waltz that's always ready.
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.
I saw the light on the night as I passed by the window.
It's all, you know, Delilah and seductiveness.
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.
The Victorians, and later viewed the women and earlier indeed as having two sides the angel and the devil in their make-up.
Yes.
So the waltz can go either way, as you say.
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?
To an extent.
If I jump in here and say that well, is it not interesting that the wall spreads to so many countries, whether it's Australia, South America China, all over Europe?
People develop their own local waltzes.
There'll be Scottish waltzes, Irish waltzes, cockles and mussels, old English waltzes.
Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green, which then becomes a Geordie Walsass, Cushy Butterfield.
You have these waltzes everywhere.
You know, so somehow...
The unity, if there is one, and I think there is, is the unity of the urban experience.
These are no longer country dances.
These are urban dances, and cities become more and more like each other as the 19th century progresses and into the 20th century.
And I think the waltz fits into that so well.
Is that because of the rhythm, partly, though?
You know, I mean, obviously it is to some extent.
I'm thinking that, you know, John Cage writing 49 waltzes for five boroughs...
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.
It's very difficult to know, but certainly there's something about the waltz that made it a cosmopolitan genre.
The Ländler, never.
You play a Ländler, people think of Austria.
You play a Strathspey, people think of Scotland.
There are certain things that don't seem to move globally.
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 around the world.
I've never found a satisfactory explanation why that sometimes happens.
New Orleans and jazz.
But a similar thing happened with the polka, wouldn't you say?
In fact I was singing the polka when you were saying the waltz drove out everything, because the polka has always been enormously.
The Suns certainly did write loads of polkas.
And yes, the polka is also cosmopolitan.
You get Native American polkas, you know, you get polkas everywhere.
But I would say that the polka never ousted the waltz as the epitome of the most romantic dance possible.
No, and it's still.
For many people, the polka seems more like a folk dance than a dance with any sign of modernity.
Is that because it's chirpy?
It's chirpy.
Edward Scott, the dancing master, said that if you read any novel, you know, the hero is always...
Perfect waltzer.
Exactly.
And so is the heroine, the perfect waltzer, that no words of love were ever uttered when they were dancing the polka.
It's difficult to be taken seriously while you're hopping around the dance floor.
I love you.
How did it connect with modernism?
Well, I think it's that issue of fragmentation that we mentioned, that the idea that there's a potential, as I said.
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.
Stravinsky wrote waltzes at the same time as Spector was being performed.
So he did a waltz for Petrushka.
And it's extremely dark.
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 Patryczka.
But I think it's this idea that there's disintegration as well that's possible.
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.
Didn't Ravel say something about we're dancing on the edge of a volcano?
He wrote La Valse in 1921 and then 1920.
There were two. then I think it picks up on some of those effects.
I mean, famously, Diaghilev refused Ravel's La Valse, but Fredrik Ashton...
Maybe you know... No, but I also think Diaghilev was unreliable in the way that he refused things.
He would refuse things that we now think are great.
He refused Vaughan Williams' Job, for example, which is one of the best works, you know.
Yes, yes, Stravinsky was something... how long the piece of music lasted.
Stravinsky said, to the end, my dear.
It's a great answer.
Yeah.
But then Ashton and Balanchine to go back to Melvin's question, they choreographed La Valse and it was again it's open-endedness.
It's bizarre kind of sense of... drifting into, in Balanchine's case, into the arms of death.
You know, there's this worry about character changing.
As you know, Wolfe talked about in 1910 human character.
And I do think a lot of people think that about Laval's, but Ravel himself denied it.
Exactly.
But one thing I'd like to say, I'm glad you mentioned jazz modernism because it's a raggy waltz.
Exactly.
Great.
But the other thing I think we have to be clear, the waltz is seen as modern music.
Not necessarily modernist.
You know if we're talking about modernism.
The second Viennese Schoenberg wrote a waltz.
You know it's different to the modernity of the waltz.
And when you think that something like Johann Strauss' waltz accelerations accelerazione inspired by the electric motor.
It's part of the modern age.
Electricity is part of the time when the Strausses were writing and electrical references are found in their waltzes.
So they're aware of modernity.
And there's a school of thought, isn't there, in that the rhythm of the waltz is industrial in tone, that it's mechanistic.
People do think that, but I think that it's so wrong.
I don't agree with it, but it's an argument.
LAUGHTER
People look at notes on the page or they hear a calliope, a Steenwagen playing a waltz, and it's boom bing bing, boom bing.
But you listen to... an orchestra like Venus Philharmonic that know their horses, it's not bum-ching-ching, but it's often ahead of the beat, bum-ching-ching, bum-ching-ching, just slightly ahead, and not all the time.
You have to have the feel of it.
It's just like in jazz.
If you've got no feel for swing, it doesn't work.
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 of becoming a museum piece.
What I worry about is when I see Strictly come dancing and they use pieces that are not waltzes to dance the waltz, just because you can divide something into threes.
For example, Memory of Lloyd Webber.
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.
So you can think of it as um-pa-pa, um-pa-pa.
But it's not at that speed.
It's a slow four.
It's not a fast three.
And I wish Strictly would use the right meters for their dancers.
Anything?
Well, I do agree, but of course it's about attracting an audience with popular music, music that they can recognise music of now.
So I understand why they do it.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thanks to Teresa Buckland, Sue Jones and...
Derek Scott, and to our studio engineer, Sue Mayo.
Next week, Julian the Apostate, the Roman emperor, who removed Christianity as a straight religion and restored paganism.
Thanks for listening.
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now, with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
What would you like to have said you didn't say in the programme?
I've only just thought of this, but probably I'd like to say something about showmanship and show business and Johann Strauss.
How did he portray himself?
Why did people go into ecstasies at his concerts?
Well, sometimes they were concerts and And at his playing, what was it about him?
Why did he do what he did, you mean?
And why did it thrill people?
Well, you're supposed to be an expert.
What's your view?
You are an expert.
You're not supposed to be an expert.
You are an expert.
What's your view?
I thought you were going to go around and find out what everyone wants to talk about.
Well, briefly, it was the way that he did not conduct his orchestra with a baton.
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.
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 up and then paying for spectacular displays, lighting fireworks, all that kind of thing.
And because this all... gave him a kind of superstardom.
And he became, I think, the first global musical superstar.
I know Paganini toured, but Johann Strauss' father could tour with an entire orchestra.
People wanted him so much.
I would like to add something about the waltz being associated with modernity all the time.
Yeah.
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.
Why?
Because the English, whoever the English, are.
There's this notion that develops in the 19th century that the English are true characters.
When you look at, when they looked at people from France say, which had retained a more, 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.
And so, for the English, it was restrained, it was elegant, it was natural, lack of showmanship, but in total control.
And that accords very much with the Victorian notion of the upper class gentleman.
Sure.
I would like to have added something about the novelist George Eliot in the 19th century, whom we didn't get to talk about.
But she actually uses the dance as form in several of her novels, and particularly in Adam Bede.
But she uses the dance form as a way of showing moral turpitude to some degree.
You know, when Arthur Donna Thorne has organised a dance performance to get off with Hetty Sorrell, you know, and it leads to the demise of Hetty Sorrell, I mean to her tragedy, particularly because it's at the centre of the novel.
It's not like Shakespearean comedy where you have a dance at the end.
But what's interesting about Elliot 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 Teresa's point.
She references the bird waltz, 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, where the waltz was looked down upon at the beginning of the century.
And the bird waltz she sees as something as highly artificial that it has nothing to do with real birds.
And of course that was Eliot's structuring of her novel around the whole issue of what is real realism.
She was very interested in thinking about ordinary people as well as the aristocracy.
Maggie Tulliver in Mill on the Floss famously doesn't know how to waltz.
She does the rustic dances.
And Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda in 1876 has physical antipathy to the closed position of the walls.
There's a particular character she wants to avoid and she refuses to waltz, even though people tell her she can waltz very well.
I've thought of another thing that I wish I'd said, and that's the business aspect. of the waltz.
Johann Strauss' father and the publisher Tobias Hasslinger just thought.
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, and these waltzes are then easy because they're learning.
So the term is leichte Musik, and it's that term, leichte Musik, that gives us the term light music, although we no longer think it means.
We think we know what light music means, and that's why someone then invented easy listening as another one.
And another thing on 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.
And she was the one that set them on... very good business career.
She was the one that was in charge of over 200 staff running the Strauss business.
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?
Yes.
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 that.
Well, Mr Pooter was not happy about that at all in The Diary of a Nobody, where he thinks he's made it because he's going to the mayor's ball.
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.
You see, they didn't get invited to the hunt balls, did they tradespeople?
But of course they're quite elevated.
Tradespeople would be at the bottom and there the twain should meet.
It was all very strictly controlled.
It gets very, very hierarchical in the 19th century in Britain.
People put up with it, did they?
Obviously.
They didn't tear the place down, no.
Yes, but then I think they got more subtle means by getting stewards and 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.
Right, really.
Yes.
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.
You know, someone like Arthur Sullivan was...
It became quite gentrified, didn't it?
Yes, it did.
But then there were the, you know, you could sit in the gods as well.
Oh, absolutely.
Yes.
And you could see waltzes being performed.
In the ballets, in part of the music halls.
And there's some wonderful footage from the late Victorian period of street girls dancing in the East End of London doing waltzes and all.
But, backing up on what Sue has 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.
LAUGHTER
Very unfair.
I do remember that, yes.
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.
I think we've enjoyed it.
It's quite dry in here, isn't it?
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by me, Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios production.
I think we need to be jolted out of thinking this is just a programme of tributes to people.
It isn't.
It's an exploration, and we may not always like what we find.
It's such a clichéd idea to say a chimpanzee.
At least say an octopus or a wasp or something.
God's sake.
There's Elizabeth Day on the pharaoh Hatshepsut.
The subsequent ruler defaced a lot of her statuary, and so we also have very little clue of what she actually looked like.
Miles Jupp on the novelist J.L.
Carr and Stuart Lee on guitarist Derek Bailey.
You've got to meet the challenge of a culture that is failing the public.
Great Lives continues on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
