The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: Learn more about the waltz — and other forms of dance music — and why it endures in classical music. Then tell The Ear about your favorite waltz and waltz composer.

By Jacob Stockinger

The Ear spent much of the past weekend listening to dance music.

To the tango, to be specific, the new tango or “nuevo tango.”

He heard eight or 10 sexy and bittersweet tangos that were played superbly by the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, which was certainly helped by the presence of pianist Pablo Zinger who played with New Tango master and Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla. (You can still catch the two BDDS concerts with tangos — and much more — TODAY at 2:30 and 6:30 p.m. at the Hillside Theater at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin compound in Spring Green. For details, visit, www.bachdancinganddynamite.org)

I will have more to say about those concerts later this week.

But all that South American dance music brought to mind what is no doubt the most popular dance of Western European classical music: the waltz. (Below are people dancing the Viennese waltz.) Music is so tied to the dance.

The great music blog “Deceptive Cadence” that is written by NPR recently featured an overview of the waltz with history and some very fine sound samples.

I thought the history was a little skewed or thin. Personally, I wish the blog had said how the waltz -– which by now we so identify with aristocratic nobility and with elegance – evolved out of rougher peasant dances, including the landler. You can hear the similarities especially in Landler movements by Franz Joseph Haydn (below) and even Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven.

I would also like to have heard a wider range of waltzes and waltz composers. Sure, there is the Strauss family. But some of my favorites are the smaller waltzes by Franz Schubert (below top) and Frederic Chopin (below bottom) to say nothing of Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Antonin Dvorak, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy and Dmitri Shostakovich among others.

But the waltz is a huge subject and the NPR essay is a fine starting point.

Here is a link to the NPR posting:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2014/06/18/322930952/a-rhythm-thats-waltzed-away-with-hearts

And here is a popular YouTube video, with more than 1.3 million hits, of the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein playing one of The Ear’s all-time favorite waltzes, which has just the right hint of bittersweetness, by one of the all-time great waltz composers, Frederic Chopin.