Transcript of The Waltz (Archive Episode)

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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 favorite episodes from our archive.

In due course, we'll return with new programs and a new presenter.

But now we have this listener favorite to offer from last this year.

Here's Melvin.

Hello. When the waltz reached Britain in the early 19th century, it revolutionized 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 around 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. We need 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 dances, a couple of 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 dances such as Valtse and Dreya. And these are mostly in the Germanic lands that we hear about them. These dances then are taken sometimes by aristocrats, sometimes by soldiers returning from the Holi on, it was 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, i. E. A man and a woman stood side by side, and they traced elaborate patterns on the floor. 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.

So this was totally revolutionary.

And not only faced each other, they held each other.

They held each other. Often very closely. Very closely, sometimes a bit too closely for the likings of pastors and moral commentators. But it It was 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, it's a shift of the whole way of moving, a whole corporate curatorial 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 Polca and the Mazurka. And there's a whole century of these round dancers. But the waltz was the first and the most stable.

So, Trisha, can you describe what it's like to dance the waltz?

There are lots of waltzers, 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. 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. And it's a very exhilarating feeling. But if the music's slower, of course, there's more of a sense of dreaminess, 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 the German dance meant a waltz to the British. But what intrigues me is 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 music. But now we have this third type type of music. 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, high mat, klanger, the sounds of home, begins, da, da, da. Well, that note is known as the leading note in music. Da should go to la. It's the note t, which will bring us back to do. But no, he goes, It falls downward. This was regarded as very, very unusual at the time. In fact, it became as known as the Vinorische nota, or in England, the Viennese note.

He soon does the same with the sixth degree of the scale, the la. Do, re, mi, fa, so, la. If I quote from Johann Strauss, the younger, de Fledermaus. That note, da, should resolve downwards on da, da. He leaves it hanging like that. That becomes a marker of the waltz and of the new populace style that if you're a serious art musician, avoid that note. Finally, the umpapa accompliment. 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 that combination of music and the dance? I mean, they seemed 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 best job of being the leader of the court orchestra and playing for the court balls. But Johann Strauss, when he argued with Lanner, split up, made his way successfully in playing for dance halls for the middle class in Vienna. And he saw what was... 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 I think the 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. Yeah. Who was dancing it in the first place? And then why did it 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 at the end of the Napoleonic era. And a lot of diplomacy was going on during the day, and a lot of waltzing was a relief at night. So you were getting diplomats in all sorts of people. 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- Are you suggesting that the lascivious and the basibus 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 did not, who thought that it was there all the way through. So When it comes to England, you're really dealing with... I mean, okay, it has a moral approbrium attached to it, but at the same time, it is acknowledged by the Hanoverian monarchs that this is doable because they like doing it.

It becomes irresistible very quickly, doesn't it?

It becomes very irresistible. 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 romantic coupling, and somebody's playing the irresistible walls. It's very interesting the way Austin uses is this particular word here.

It influence seems to spread outside dance and into the other arts.

Yes, I think it, particularly with relation to Byron, for example, who famously wrote a satire on Walsing in 1812. He published it in 1813 and then really distanced himself from this satire. He gave the the poem, it's the long poem a narrative voice by one gentleman farmer or gentleman, Yeomen, Horace Hornum. And he's worried about his daughters engaging in this. So Byron sets a certain tone for the literary responses to the Walsh, particularly, I think, because he introduces into the poem a reference to Werther, to Gertas Werta, which was extremely influential throughout literary revolutions in-Werther, I think, was extraordinary influential.

A young man who-Incredibly.

Took his own life. And this anxiety comes out in Byron's reference to Werther where he actually cites Véuthe's reference to the wolves. 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-Was this while he was dancing? I guess it was. We don't know exactly what Gerta was thinking of there. But I think that's the idea that there's a 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 dance today, but it was the main dance on the ball room. It went waltz, quadrill, quadrill, waltz, waltz, waltz, waltz, WALTS. 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. 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. But 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 stayed 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 Walsh, is different to the Walsh of the later 1820s. The Walsh 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 undergarment, so men can feel around if they choose when they're dancing. But as the 1880s progress and ballrooms are built and parquet flooring is introduced, the Walsh speeds up. The Walsh, it had hops in it, it had some stamps in it. The Walsh 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 Walsh a very sensual 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 Flowbeer'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 viscount's chest at one point. She notices her dress is rubbing against his trouser leg. It's all very sensual. She collapses onto her chair at the end. But when she's on her deathbed, 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 kid, the seamstresses were around the ballroom edges because if anybody stood on a dress and it got ripped, they rushed on with a needle and thread.

She 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 wall flowers who used to go to the ballroom expecting to have their first débutant dance, and there were no men sometimes coming in. So the poor women would spend a lot of time in the anti-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 rather low, a class to dance like this. You should go back to the minuit and be good mannered like your parents would be. Is there anything in there?

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, though. It wasn't the Rascals dance. It became a very important social accomplishment.

It became so accepted in society that it was expected that a man knew how to waltz. And one of the issues, of course, was, dance has 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, et cetera. And of course, the Victorians were wonderful at using this philosophy to justify things. For the men, very often they thought, Well, that's to do with the body. It's what women do, dancing. 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. At that point, dancing lessons had been replaced by rugby and organized sports. So 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 wall flowers and nobody to dance with them.

I think Therese 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. 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. 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.

Susan.

Yes, I think that whole improvisational quality of the Walsh 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 Rousse in Paris and London. One of the characters who was so formative in in thinking about male dancing is Nijinski, Vassilov Nijinski, of the Ballet Rousse Company run by Serge Diaghilev. Now, there were plenty of male dancers on stage before Nijinski, but he had a particular hit with a ballet in 1911, Le Specter de la Rose, Specter of the Rose, which was based on a Gautier and Vaudoyer scenario and with choreography by Michal Fouquien. 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 Nijinski, who is a very muscular dancer. But what he did was to 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 lent slightly to the side, as if he's about to fade, perhaps, or give the scent of the rose to the girl he's driving through this waltz.

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So if 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 did. 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 thing 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 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 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 1817s as remarking on this very thing, They dance in such a vulgar way, these people.

But the British seem to admit that the Americans dance better than they did.

They did. Well, that was because they took care over their lessons. 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 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 Grossmith called Do You Reverse? Because it was thought to be the epitome, a 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 James Joyce in Ulysses, in the CSA episode of Ulysses, actually talks about waltzing a lot. He's 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 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 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 dancers 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. 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 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 waltzers, they wanted to glide. 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 you know, like the Merry Widow.

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 a song, twilight, is the English waltz. It's a slow waltz. And as Theresa's saying, Then with the Merry Widow in 1905, which is a sensation in London in 1907, we have the Vals, 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 Veneers waltz. It sets off another waltz, Grace.

And then we have that English school of waltz composers, Archibald Joyce.

Of course, So it went down well on the Titanic, but then it also went down badly on the Titanic as well.

It seems to me is that it keeps been getting an extra charge. It's going well and then the Bannerus come in, it goes even better. It seems to be heading a bit, and then this English waltz comes in. Does it always recharge yourself? It recharge yourself now.

It does look strictly.

It does. 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 program about waltzing. Are you lonesome tonight, Elvis Presley? I have the last waltz with you, Angelbert Humboldt. Save the last waltz for me. Walsing don't go away.

Save me the last Wals. It's Zeldas Fitzgerald's novel. But also I was thinking of the Mary Widow. Of course, it gets into Beckett's Happy Days. It's the last... Of course. When he is listening to the gramophone and they're playing It causes another resurgence of the waltz, but by the mid-30s, people are getting a bit sick.

They prefer the foxtrot by then much.

Well, they had a big hustle to try and rest the waltz back from the foxtrot.

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 are keen dancers, who belong 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 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 higher in some ballrooms. For a time, Victor Silvester as well, although he became obviously a ballroom champion himself.

But interesting enough, they were known as gigalos 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 my one holiday bike with my father, we went to the tower, the Tower Loral. And these men sitting around and they were called the gigalos. 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. You didn't hear of it? No. You don't know about that?

That's amazing. I'm not heard before gigalos, but I'll obviously take your word for it now.

Yeah, I'm going to tell you. Because I talked to one of the blokes and he was very pleased about being a giggler. He called it a giggler.

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

So you know about giggler? Yes. There's two of us here, one of you. We're doing well.

Well, my ignorance is now on display.

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

But there's an interesting aspect. 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 go and stride off into new directions. You could go sideways if you're going to bump into somebody. Right.

Well, that's interesting because bizarrely enough, Virginia Wolf 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 to accept what she do? I haven't read that.

Well, she puts a waltz at the center 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 A lot of the literate are using the waltz as a cultural figure or cultural symbol of the possibility of freedom because you can do things with the Walsh. She has a Walsh being performed by the guests at a hotel in South America. They're all in South America. And the female protagonist is playing the Walsh with a trio, and the trio dashes into 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 symbols of the trio. And then people break up. What Wolf is doing there is she's showing that there is a darker side to the walls, so there's a potential for fragmentation as well as for harmony and getting together.

That is interesting because that has a history, because List wrote four Mephisto waltzes, where the Walsh becomes the devil's genre. And there's this seedy side to the Walsh that's always ready to emerge. Salomy, Richard Strauss, The Dance of the Seven Vails, The Stripteases, a Walsh, really, with some Oriental 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 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 As we say, there's these Victorians and later that view that women and earlier indeed as having two sides, the angel and the devil in their makeup. 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 program might have given society some cultural unity, did it?

To an extent.

If I jump in and say that, 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 waltz? It'll be Scottish waltz, Irish waltz, cockles and muscles, old English waltz, the pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green, which then becomes a Jody Walsh as Cushy Butterfield. You have these Walsh everywhere. Somehow the unity, if there is one, I think there is, is the unity of the urban And it's an 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 Walsh fits into that so well.

Is that because of the rhythm, partly, though? I mean, obviously it is to some extent. I'm thinking that John Cage writing 49 Walses 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 lendler, never. You play a lendler, people think of Austria. You play a Strathspae, 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 rises and goes around the world. And I've never found a satisfactory explanation why that sometimes happens. New Orleans and jazz.

But the similar thing happened with the Polca, wouldn't you say?

In fact, I was singing the Polca when you were saying the waltz drove out everything.

But because the Polca in the 1840s.

It's always been enormously... But Johann Strauss, the elder, didn't write many polkers, but his sons certainly did write loads of polkers. And yes, the polker is also a cosmopolitan. You get Native American polkers. You get Polkers everywhere.

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

No. It's still for many people, the Polker seems more like a folk dance than a dance with any sign modernity.

Is that because it's cherpy?

It's cherpy. Edward Scott, the dancing master, said that he said, If you read any novel, the hero is always the 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.

You need to be. 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 Specter was being performed. So he did a waltz for Patrushka, and it's extremely dark. It's the ballerina and the moor characters, puppet characters in Patrushka waltzing together, and then it breaks up and ends in disaster, in fact. With the murder of Patricia. 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 Vals.

He wrote La Vals, At the end of the first of all. And then 1920. There were two. Then I think it picks up on some of those effects. I mean, famously, Diagelef refused Ravel's Laval's, but Fredrik Ashton.

.

Maybe you know.

I also think Diagelef was unreliable in the way that he refused things. He would refuse things that we now think are great. He refused Vaughn William's Job, for example, for example. It was one of his best works.

He asked Stravinsky was something, how long the piece of music. Stravinsky said, to the end, my dear. It's a great answer.

Yeah. But then Ashton and Balanching, to go back to Melvin's question, they choreographed La Valls, and it was, again, it's open-endedness. It's bizarre sense of drifting into, in Balanchine's case, into the arms of death. There's this worry about character changing, as Wolf talked about in 1910, human character.

And I do think a lot of people think that about Laval's, but Ravel himself denied it. But one thing I'd like to say that I'm glad you mentioned jazz modernism because it's a raggy Wolf, but the Dave Rumer, great. But the other thing I think we have to be clear that the Wolf is seen as modern, not necessarily modern is. We're talking about modernism. The second being. Schoenberg wrote a waltz. It's different to the modernity of the waltz. And when you think that something like Johann Strauss's Walsh, 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 the in their waltzes, so they're aware of modernity.

There's a school of thought, isn't there? And 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.

People look at notes on a page or they hear a collipia, Steen Morgan playing a waltz and it's boom, bing, bing, boom, bing. But you listen to an orchestra like Viennish Philharmonic know their waltzes is. It's not boom, but it's often ahead of the beat, boom, 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 a 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 to become 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. But each thing goes into... So you can think of it as... 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 recognize music of now. So I understand why they do it.

Thank you very much indeed. Thanks to Theresa 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.

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 program?

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 ecstasis at his concert, but sometimes they were concerts. And then at his playing, what was it about him?

Why did he do what he did, you mean?

And why did it thrill people?

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 wanted to talk. 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 violin 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. 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 thing. And because this all gave him a superstardum 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. Not necessarily modernism, but modernity. It seems to reinvent itself so that when it comes back again in the early 20th century, it's associated with all those qualities which were thought to be modern, that is, natural movement and a lack of artificiality. 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 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 dance. 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.

Sue.

I would like to have did something about the novelist George Elliott 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. When Arthur Donna Thorne has organized a dance to get off with Hettie Sorel, and it leads to the demise of Hettie Sorel, I mean, to her tragedy, particularly because it's at the center of the novel. It's not like Shakespearean comedy, where you have a dance at the end. But what's interesting about Elia 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 Thérèse's point. She references the bird wolves, 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 Walsh was looked down upon at the beginning of the century. And the bird wolves, she sees as something as highly artificial, that it has nothing to do with real birds.

And of course, that was Elliot'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. And Maggie Tulliver in Mylon the Floss, famously, doesn't know how to waltz. She does the rustic dances. And Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel de Ronda in 1870. 6. It 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.

I thought of another thing that I wish I'd said, and that's the business of the waltz. Johann Strauss' father and the publisher, Tobias Hatlinger, just thought, young women in middle class households are all playing the Why don't we do a waltz series for girls? And they published waltz for them to play. And these waltz 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 the easy music. 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 it. 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. 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.

I think following on from that, to highlight the role that the theater played in popularizing these tunes and also in developing the sheep music industry, which went back and forth, particularly across the Atlantic, didn't it?

And I have to say, because they popularized it so much, and the dancehalls did that as well, the nobility in Vienna began to be worried because if they went to the Spelle Dance Hall in Leopoldstadt, they could end up bumping into a green grocer. Something like a dreffle.

Mr. Pooter was not happy about that at all in the Diary of a Nobody. 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 he's dancing with green grocers and And he thought that he was going somewhere really important.

You see, they didn't get invited to the Hunt Balls, did they?

Well, the Hunt Ball was something else. And in the mid-19th century, they were still, in some places, putting a rope across the ball room so that the aristocracy could be the high position, which is nearest the musicians, and tradespeople, but of course, they're quite elevated tradespeople, would be at the bottom and near the twain should meet. It was all very strictly controlled. It gets very, very hierarchical in the 19th century in Britain.

I didn't know that. People put up with it, did they? Obviously, they didn't tear the place down.

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 the quadrill. And when you called for another couple, you had to make sure they weren't from the bottom of the room.

Yes.

And when you mention the theater, the importance of the theater, I'm thinking of the music halls as well at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century. Someone like Arthur Sullivan was doing-It became quite gentrified, didn't it? Yes, it did. But then you could sit in the golf as well. And you could see waltz is being performed in the ballets in part of the music hall.

There's some wonderful footage from the late Victorian period of street girls dancing in the East End of London doing waltzes.

But backing up on what Sue has just said, you remember that in Patience, the line, in the end, he was lost totally and married a girl from the cour de ballet. 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. Thank you.

I think you've enjoyed it.

I think we've enjoyed it.

Oh, I love it. It's quite dry in here. For tea. Yeah.

That's a tea. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. I think we've enjoyed it. I think we've enjoyed it. Oh, what a lovely color. It's quite dry in here. For tea. For tea, yeah. That's Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by me, Simon Tillertsson, and it's a BBC Studio's production.

I think we need to be jolted out of thinking this is just a program of tributes to people.

It isn't.

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

It's such a cliched 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 Hapshetsut.

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 the challenge of a culture that is failing the public. Great Lives continues on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.