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The Egalitarian Waltz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Ruth Katz
Ruth Katz
Affiliation:
Hebrew University
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Extract

One need not be an anthropologist or a cultural historian to remark that social dancing these days seems to isolate the individual in a trance-like self-absorption which virtually disconnects him from the world and even from his partner. Indeed, the dance of the day—like other art forms—is often a good reflection of the values of a given time and place. Today's developments, both in the dance and in society, provide more than the usual scholarly justification for looking back to one of the earliest manifestations of individualism and escape in the dance and its association with the values of liberty, equality and uncertainty which followed upon the French Revolution. The dance was the waltz; the dancers, at first, were the middle classes, soon to be joined by both upper and lower classes; the time and place are Central Europe, and soon the whole Western world, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Type
Cultural Change
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , June 1973 , pp. 368 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1973

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References

1 Sachs, Curt, World History of the Dance (New York, 1937), p. 282.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., p. 298.

3 Ibid., pp. 299–302.

4 One will recall Warner Brothers' ‘The Great Waltz’ in this connection, as well as more recent offerings, such as a Walt Disney cartoon about Johann Strauss in which both cats and mice join together in the waltz.

5 Jacob, H. E., Johann Strauss, Father and Son (Richmond, Va., 1939), pp. 79–108.Google Scholar

6 Farga, Franz, Lanner und Strauss (Vienna, 1948), p. 42.Google Scholar

7 von Goethe, J. W., Italien, Zweiter Aufenthalt in Rom, 1788. Sachs uses this quotation in a somewhat different connection, primarily to emphasize the aesthetic values of the minuet, op. cit., p. 399.Google Scholar

8 The audience served as an integral part of the dance, the spectators, not only the audience, were saluted with ceremonial bows which preceded the actual dance. Dufort, Ciambattista finds it necessary to devote two whole chapters of his manual Trattato del hallo nobile (Naples, 1728)Google Scholar to this subject, Taubert, Gottfried devotes sixty pages of his Rechtschaffener Tanzmeister (Leipzig, 1717)Google Scholar to the same, and de Chavanne, J. M. devotes almost his entire book Principes du Minuet (Luxembourg, 1767) to that crucial opening which so well expresses the atmosphere of the whole dance.Google Scholar

9 See Reeser, Edward, The History of the Waltz (Stockholm, n.d.), p. 1.Google Scholar

10 Arbeau, Thoinot, Orchesography, translated by Mary Stewart Evans (New York, 1967), pp. 119–23.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., p. 121.

12 See Nettl, Paul, ‘KTanz und Tanzmuzik’ in Adler's Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (Berlin, 1930), Vol. II, pp. 979–80.Google Scholar

13 Cited in Reeser, , op. cit., p. 9.Google Scholar

14 See Nettl, Paul, The Story of Dance Music (New York, 1947), p. 252–86.Google Scholar

15 See Sachs, , op. cit., p. 433.Google Scholar

16 For a suggestive discussion of the above see Hauser, Arnold, The Social History of Art (London, 1951), Vol. II, pp. 622–710.Google Scholar

17 For a relevant sociological study of the European drama see Lowenthal, Leo, Literature and the Image of Man (Boston, 1957), pp. 136–220.Google Scholar

18 Jacob, , op. cit., p. 24.Google Scholar

19 Goethe, J. W., Die Leiden des jungen Werther in Goethes Samtliche Werke (München, 1910), Vol. II, p. 265.Google Scholar

20 Caillois includes waltzing in the type of game to which he assigns the term ilinx—the Greek term for whirlpool—to cover ‘the many varieties of such transport …which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of volup-tuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. See Caillois, Roger, Man, Play and Games (New York, 1961), pp. 23–6.Google Scholar

21 Jacob, , op. cit., p. 91.Google Scholar

22 Jacob, ibid., pp. 80–1.

23 SeeBerlioz, Hector, Memoirs (New York, 1966), pp. 375–7.Google Scholar Also see Barzun, Jacques, Berlioz and the Romantic Century (Boston, 1950), Vol. I, pp. 473–4.Google Scholar