In the late `80s, British teenagers stayed up for days at a time dancing to house music at ”Rave” parties. In the `70s, Manhattan disco-philes partied until dawn to KC and the Sunshine Band. During the Depression, couples swayed to Big Bands for hours in marathon dance contests.
But the dance craze to beat all dance crazes was the waltz, according to Frank Winkler, conductor of the Symphonic Pops Orchestra of Chicago.
”People would literally starve themselves all week long just to save money for the Friday and Saturday dances,” Winkler said.
”The dancing would go all night, and people would have to be hospitalized from exhaustion because they couldn`t stop dancing the waltz.”
Winkler hopes to re-create some of that excitement on Saturday, when he brings his program, ”A Night in Old Vienna,” to Schaumburg`s Prairie Center for the Arts.
Winkler said that the waltz originated as a peasant dance, accompanied by simple folk melodies typically performed by a trio of two violins and a string bass. In the early 1800s, Franz Schubert and Johann Strauss Sr. began using the form as a basis for more complex compositions.
”They solidified the form, making it more genteel and less bombastic. The orchestras gradually grew and grew, and the arrangments became more sophisticated,” he said.
By 1867, when Johann Strauss Jr. wrote the ”Blue Danube Waltz,” the music`s popularity had spread from Austria to England and America, where Strauss played a concert that would put most rock festivals to shame.
”There were 100,000 people at a show in Boston,” Winkler said.
”Strauss conducted an orchestra of 1,000 players and used a dozen assistant conductors whom he would relay the beat to.”
As a music that appealed to all classes of society, the waltz introduced an egalitarian element to Austrian culture, Winkler said.
”The masquerade balls that were so popular in the weeks before Easter were the first time that the lower classes had a chance to rub shoulders with the aristocracy. Because everyone at these parties were wearing masks, everyone was, in a sense, equal.”
Knowing that there was an audience eager for new music, composers were more than happy to provide ”occasional” pieces, on the slightest pretext.
”Every time there was a new opening, a birthday of a prince, a festival, Strauss would compose a piece for it,” Winkler said. ”When they demolished a wall in the old part of Vienna, he wrote `The Demolition Waltz.` When someone started publishing a new daily paper, Offenbach wrote `The Evening Paper Waltz,` so Strauss came back with `The Morning Paper Waltz.` ”
The music also provided the ever-changing Austro-Hungarian empire with a sense of continuity, Winkler said.
”There were always political intrigues and plots going on, but the music is so optimistic.”
”A Night in Old Vienna” will be performed by the 35-member Symphonic Pops, which includes musicians from the Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera orchestras. The concert begins at 8 p.m. at the Prairie Center for the Arts, 201 Schaumburg Ct., Schaumburg.
Tickets are $16, or $14 for senior citizens and students. Call 708-894-3600.
