The Blue Danube Waltz

When Johann Strauss II premiered this waltz at a concert in Vienna in 1867, the audience demanded it be repeated nineteen times before they would allow the evening to continue. Three centuries of European concert-hall etiquette dissolved in the presence of a melody so immediate, so perfectly designed to lift the body into motion, that resistance felt churlish. The waltz opens with a famous introduction — pizzicato strings and horn calls that suggest an awakening — before the first theme arrives in the violins with the unstoppable inevitability of something that was always going to happen. Strauss chains several distinct waltz themes across the work's roughly ten minutes, each one shaped differently but all sharing the same quality of elegant, slightly dizzying forward motion. The tempo's three-beat lilt creates a physical response in any listener even while seated: a swaying, an involuntary alignment of the body with the pulse. *The Blue Danube* is the most famous waltz ever composed for reasons that have nothing to do with cultural promotion and everything to do with craft.