In Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century, the enjoyment of music and dances of various national origins was both common and unsurprising, as subjects from lands throughout the Habsburg Empire flocked to the city to make their living. In Viennese author Joseph Ferdinand Kringsteiner's 1807 farce Der Tanzmeister, a chorus of guests at a private ball provides humorous confirmation of the multitude of dances that could be included in such an event. I reproduce the text of the chorus here, both in its original dialect and in an approximate English translation.

Most of the dances mentioned in this chorus—the minuet; the German dance and Ländler, whose names were often used interchangeably; the English dance, or longways contredanse; the Cossack dance; and the Kehraus, or last dance of the ball—were common at the turn of the nineteenth century, and references to and descriptions of them appear in numerous contemporary sources. The allusion to a Turkish dance, however, is more unusual; Turkish dances were sometimes imitated in stage works, but Turkish music and the militaristic alla turca style that evoked it for Western European consumers were not typically associated with social dancing