Waltzes

With Weber’s Invitation to the Dance Op. 65, the waltz developed into a great virtuoso form. This art dance was brought to perfection via Schubert and Chopin to Brahms’s ‘Love Song Waltzes’. Composers such as Smetana, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak or Grieg added elements from the folk music of their home countries to their waltzes. As a result, the waltz may appear as an English Waltz, American Boston, Polish mazurka or French valse musette. Debussy and Martinu turned it into a mechanical puppet dance, Ligeti used its form for his bold experiments, while Joplin or Eduard Pütz incorporated it in jazz music. This collection provides a musical history of the waltz: sturdy and high-spirited, dreamy and melancholic, slow and virtuosic, mechanical and ironic – waltzes for every day!