In 1810, an article appeared in the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung on the current state of dance music in Bohemia.Footnote ¹ The author cited its general appeal as one of the merits of this repertoire. Its short and simple melodies could be enjoyed even by uncultured people with little appreciation for symphonies and cantatas. At the same time, dance music was becoming increasingly sophisticated, particularly in the hands of recent composers who had stretched the traditional boundaries of form and instrumentation. The author nevertheless acknowledged that the sheer quantity of music required for each new carnival season had resulted in a flood of poor-quality music, amongst which even the good dance music was sometimes lost. When ballroom orchestras rehearsed the new season’s repertoire, the music had to be transported in a wheelbarrow, and the rehearsals themselves sometimes lasted half a day.Footnote ²

Whatever the quality, these barrow loads of dance compositions performed in the ballrooms of Central Europe formed an essential part of the soundscape of social and cultural life in the decades around 1800. This was especially true in Vienna, whose renowned ball culture came to be the primary influence on nineteenth-century social dance.

This study focuses on the culture and repertoire of the Viennese ballroom from the opening of the first public dance halls in the 1770s to the dawning of the golden age of Viennese dance around 1830, when Joseph Lanner (1801–43) and Johann Strauss Sr (1804–49) represented the first generation of dance composers whose waltzes became a popular music phenomenon internationally. This period neatly spans the lifetime of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), hence the title of this book. However, the book’s title also helps to emphasise one of the main aims of this study – namely, to investigate the intersections between areas of Viennese music that are generally treated separately by music scholars. Social dance music belongs to an area of Viennese musical life that is apparently antithetical to the serious music culture with which Beethoven is usually associated. Whereas the ballroom repertoire was functional music from the realm of entertainment and sociability, Beethoven’s music was central to a new direction in musical culture and aesthetics that placed value on abstract instrumental works and notions of attentive listening.Footnote ³ As this book demonstrates, however, the ballroom repertoire of Beethoven’s lifetime connected with virtually every aspect of Viennese musical life, from opera and concert music to the emerging category of entertainment music later exemplified by the waltzes of Lanner and Strauss.Footnote ⁴

Viennese social dance culture was already renowned across Europe during Beethoven’s lifetime. Contemporary travel guides give ample coverage to the city’s many ballrooms and its residents’ famous love for waltzing. The Eipeldauer-Briefe (1785–1821), a series of fictional letters sketching a humorous picture of daily life in the city, includes many accounts of visits to various dance halls during the carnival season.Footnote ⁵ During the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15, the famous peace conference at the close of the Napoleonic Wars, the city’s dance culture proved such a draw that it allegedly impeded the progress of international diplomacy, prompting the legendary quip ‘Le congrès danse, mais ne marche pas’ (‘The Congress dances, but it doesn’t progress’).Footnote ⁶

Dance music also spilled out into domains beyond the dance hall. Many of the city’s ballrooms were also restaurants and coffee houses, so that dance music accompanied general socialising as well as dancing. Vienna’s music publishing industry grew at an equivalent rate to its dance hall industry between the 1780s and the 1810s, when the number of dance halls in the city more than tripled. Dance music formed a large portion of the music regularly churned out on the publishing market, much of it in the form of keyboard transcriptions of repertoire from popular dancing venues. This repertoire could accompany dancing in the home, or take on a second life as so-called Hausmusik for the enjoyment of amateur keyboard players. Instrumental music and opera of the period also routinely incorporated social dance forms, from the minuet and contredanse-type movements of symphonies and chamber music to onstage depictions of social dancing in theatrical works.

Despite the centrality of the ballroom repertoire to Vienna’s musical life in the decades around 1800, music scholarship has traditionally devoted little attention to dance music. Scholarship on social dance music has tended to be limited to discussions of the generic formal characteristics of different dance types rather than investigations of specific repertoires. As a result, current knowledge of Viennese ballroom dance music before the era of Lanner and Strauss centres primarily on a handful of orchestral dances by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. (The well-known keyboard dances by Schubert were composed for domestic settings rather than the ballroom, and therefore fall outside the main scope of this study.) Scholars, listeners and performers are today most likely to encounter the orchestral dance music of the Viennese Classics in modern editions and recordings as part of a series devoted to the complete works of individual composers. This repertoire is therefore understood primarily in the context of the broader output of the canonical masters, rather than in the wider context of Viennese social dance music.

Additionally, much of the existing scholarship on dance music has tended to engage only superficially with dance itself, or the contexts in which dancing took place. Until recently, considerations of the experiential and bodily aspects of dance were generally absent from investigations of dance music, beyond examinations of the formal properties of music that mirror the gestures of dance.Footnote ⁷ Philip Bohlman identifies musicology’s avoidance of dance as characteristic of the discipline’s historic ‘rejection of the body’, which is nowhere more obvious than in the aesthetic writings of Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904).Footnote ⁸ Although Hanslick’s writings stem from a later period than the music discussed in this book, they had a lasting influence in shaping the value systems that came to be associated with nineteenth-century music from Beethoven’s period onwards. In his treatise On the Musically Beautiful (1854), Hanslick articulated a theory of listening that distinguished between ‘true’ listening as an intellectual activity and ‘pathological’ listening as associated with physical and emotional responses.Footnote ⁹ He denigrates the latter as symptomatic of base impulses, thereby excluding considerations of the physicality of dance from serious intellectual engagement with music.

The emergence of topic theory, the branch of music scholarship originating in the work of Leonard G. Ratner in the 1980s, was the starting point for more serious musicological engagement with dance music.Footnote ¹⁰ Social dance types, according to Ratner, belonged to a ‘thesaurus of characteristic figures’ in music of the Viennese Classical period, which developed from music’s various social functions in eighteenth-century life.Footnote ¹¹ Wye J. Allanbrook’s seminal study of rhythmic gesture in Mozart’s operas placed particular importance on the social contexts for various eighteenth-century ballroom dances, and demonstrated that Mozart’s use of dance topics communicated additional layers of meaning to the interactions between his operatic characters.Footnote ¹² Allanbrook’s was the first in a long line of studies since the 1980s that have devoted serious attention to ballroom dance practice as a context for the music of the Viennese Classics, which has since become commonplace in topic theory.Footnote ¹³

While topic theory drew from aspects of social dance practice to offer new perspectives on musical meaning in the Viennese Classical style, it necessarily depends on a reductionist view of social dance that treats the ballroom as a uniform concept. Social dancing in the Viennese Classical period, however, took place in all kinds of different spaces against a backdrop of great social change. A German dance in the opulent surroundings of the imperial ballrooms was not the same as a German dance in one of Vienna’s suburban taverns. A contredanse performed at a social gathering in the home conjured up a different version of sociability from a contredanse performed by elite dancers at a public ball during carnival. A ballroom minuet in 1780 existed in a very different social context from a ballroom minuet in 1815. The blanket notions of musical meaning that topic theory tends to ascribe to different dance types has posed a barrier to a nuanced understanding of social dance music and practice of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

More recently, a burgeoning interest amongst musicologists in notions of embodiment and physicality has opened up new avenues of exploration in connection with dance music, particularly in the mutual interaction between music and physical gesture. Several recent studies have examined dance-music relations in the ballroom repertoire of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Maribeth Clark’s study of the Parisian quadrille as ‘embodied experience’, Eric McKee’s study of minuet-trio contrast in Mozart’s ballroom minuets, and Lawrence M. Zbikowski’s investigation of the waltzes of Schubert and Lanner as ‘sonic analogues’ for the dynamic processes of dance.Footnote ¹⁴ Joseph Fort’s 2015 dissertation on Haydn’s minuets and the ‘somatic’ experience of dance is especially valuable for incorporating discussions of ballroom dance repertoire by non-canonical composers, in this instance the minuets composed for the annual charity balls for the Viennese Artists’ Pension Society between 1792 and 1802.Footnote ¹⁵ Essays in a recent collection edited by Davinia Caddy and Maribeth Clark explore further critical perspectives on music’s intersection with dance, including issues of agency, subjectivity and representation, though only Joseph Fort’s contribution deals with Viennese social dance music.Footnote ¹⁶

Despite these recent developments, significant gaps remain in the current understanding of social dance music and practice in Beethoven’s Vienna. The most significant of these is the general unfamiliarity of the ballroom dance music of the period beyond the works of canonical composers. As John A. Rice points out, the over-representation of their ballroom dance compositions in music scholarship runs the risk of circular arguments, where the use of dance topics in works by the great masters is understood primarily in the context of the dance repertoire by those same masters.Footnote ¹⁷ Furthermore, since the dances of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven stem mostly from the 1780s and 1790s, the ballroom dance repertoire from between 1800 and 1830 is almost completely unknown in English-language scholarship.Footnote ¹⁸ We are therefore lacking the immediate musical context for Beethoven’s use of dance topics in his mature works, and for the ‘waltzing’ Congress of Vienna, which looms large in the cultural history of the period.

While dance scholarship has produced numerous studies that aim to reconstruct the choreographies of historic dance types, the social dances of Beethoven’s Vienna are surprisingly poorly documented in contemporary dance sources.Footnote ¹⁹ Reconstructions of historic dances depend heavily on published dance treatises, which sometimes provide the only detailed source of information on the steps of certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social dances. Very few such treatises were published in Vienna before 1830, however, and contredanse figures were not routinely published alongside contredanse music in Vienna as they were elsewhere in Europe. Whereas Viennese dance music circulated widely in print and manuscript form, it would appear that Viennese dance practice was shaped primarily in the city’s many dancing schools and in the ballrooms themselves. Indeed, the steps of some of the dances of the Viennese ballroom of the late eighteenth century, including the Ländler and the Langaus, are not described in any contemporary dance treatise. Current understandings of the social dance choreographies of Beethoven’s Vienna therefore necessarily draw from dance treatises and theoretical writings published elsewhere in Europe, some of which may have had little connection with dance practice in the Habsburg capital.

This book seeks to fill some of the most significant gaps in current knowledge of the social dance music of Beethoven’s lifetime, and to widen the scope of investigations of the original performing contexts for this repertoire in Viennese dance culture. The music discussed stems from both canonical and non-canonical composers, the latter including relatively unknown figures such as Stanislaus Ossowski (c.1766–1802), Friedrich Starke (1774–1835) and Joseph Wilde (1778–1831). Detailed attention is also given to dance compositions by Johann Nepomuk Hummel that have never been published in modern editions and are little known today. This approach allows the well-known dance music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven to be positioned in its wider context. It also, however, sheds light on areas of Viennese dance music that are mostly absent from the works of these canonical composers, but nevertheless represented important subgenres of the ballroom repertoire. These include arrangements of melodies from opera for ballroom dancing, and programmatic dance music, which are given detailed treatment in Chapters 5 and 6, respectively. The book also draws on a wide range of primary sources, including travel guides, memoirs, journalistic writings and unpublished archival material relating to the organisation of public balls in the Viennese imperial ballrooms, in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the various social functions of specific dance repertoires in the ballroom context.

Devoting serious attention to Viennese social dance music and its contexts illuminates an area of Viennese musical life that has been largely neglected in scholarship on this period, but that nonetheless represented a much larger proportion of the musical landscape than the elite musical world of Beethoven and his circle. While Beethoven’s works have traditionally been the standard reference point for studies of Viennese musical culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, this book adds to a growing body of scholarship that seeks a greater understanding of the wider landscape of Viennese music-making.Footnote ²⁰ In examining the music of the ballroom, the book also challenges some of the assumptions musicologists have made about the intersections between different areas of Viennese music during Beethoven’s lifetime. In particular, a closer look at the social contexts for various dance types complicates one of the main premises of topic theory – namely, that musical topics derived their affective and social connotations primarily from contemporary social life. This premise assumes that the ballroom existed in a one-way relationship with the wider musical language of the Viennese Classical style, in which social dance informed the use of dance topics in opera and instrumental music. Contemporary dance practice indicates, however, that a dance’s affective connotations did not always correlate with what took place in the ballroom. Instead, social dances derived meaning from a network of reciprocal relationships between different areas of Viennese cultural life.

The reciprocities of ballroom dance culture with other areas of music-making also have implications for our understanding of listening practices in Beethoven’s period, which have been the subject of several major studies in recent years.Footnote ²¹ These studies have sought to separate the listening norms established later in the nineteenth century (which have largely persisted to the present day) from the music culture of Beethoven’s lifetime, particularly in the realms of the opera house and the concert hall. Dance music has been mostly absent from these discussions, but aspects of the ballroom repertoire and its performing contexts indicate that the divide between music for listening and music for dancing was not always clear-cut. The music of the ballroom not only found its way into other areas of musical life, but could also cater simultaneously for different modes of listening even in the ballroom context. The multiplicity of ways in which contemporaries engaged with dance music challenges the notion of siloed listening practices associated with distinct areas of musical life, and illustrates that the ballroom was as much a part of the city’s musical culture as concerts and opera.

The first four chapters of the book deal primarily with wider contexts for social dance. Chapter 1 focuses on the production and consumption of dance music during Beethoven’s lifetime, and explores the ways in which Vienna’s ballroom dance culture developed in response to broader social, political and economic changes at the turn of the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 investigates the musical and choreographical variants of the waltz dances of the early Viennese ballroom, and argues that music and dance were not always mutually dependent. Whereas social dance histories have traditionally sought to trace the waltz’s origins in specific eighteenth-century dance forms, this chapter instead posits that the Viennese waltz developed in response to a network of influences from different areas of music and social dance. Chapter 3 focuses on the minuet and interrogates its role as the archetypal signifier of nobility in the musical language of the Viennese Classical period. While topic theory views the minuet as deriving its meaning from the social dancing of the aristocracy, this chapter challenges the notion of a straightforward relationship between contemporary dance practice and musical meaning. Instead, the chapter argues that the minuet’s association with nobility stemmed as much from theatrical representations on stage, theoretical writings, and masquerade as from the ballroom context. Chapter 4 investigates the performing contexts for the contredanse and related social dances in Beethoven’s Vienna, and explores an aspect of Viennese ballroom culture that has been underappreciated in scholarship on social dance – namely, the formal performance of social dances by elite dancers at public balls. This performance context disrupts some of the commonly held assumptions regarding social hierarchy, participation and spectatorship in the public ballroom, and has implications for the conventional notion of the contredanse as associated with middle-class sociability.

The final three chapters focus on specific repertoires. Chapter 5 investigates the Viennese practice of arranging melodies from opera for ballroom dancing, and argues that a reciprocal relationship existed between an opera’s popularity and its success in the form of dance arrangements. The chapter focuses particularly on repertoires that occupy a prominent position in operatic reception history – namely, Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and its notorious rival, Martín y Soler’s Una cosa rara, and the Rossini operas that famously sparked a popular music craze in Vienna during Beethoven’s later years. Chapter 6 investigates programmatic dance music, focusing on waltzes for the early nineteenth-century ballroom that incorporate musical depictions of battle. These waltzes raise questions about modes of listening amongst dancers and non-dancers in the Viennese ballroom, and indicate that a variety of listening practices coexisted in relation to the dance repertoire. The final chapter investigates the famous ball culture at the Congress of Vienna and examines the music that formed the backdrop to these occasions. The chapter argues that court-sponsored balls did not merely offer a distraction from the serious political negotiations of the Congress; rather, the Habsburg court deliberately incorporated Vienna’s public dance culture into its wider festivities in a way that underscored its political aims, particularly through representations of monarchical power and military display. Through examining these specific repertoires and cultural contexts, the book positions the ballroom as an integral aspect of Viennese musical life, whose reciprocities with other areas of culture can yield new insights into the wider music and dance practices of the age of Beethoven.