6 - Battle Waltzes

Summary

This chapter examines waltzes with programmatic battle sequences, focusing on specific examples by Stanislaus Ossowski, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Friedrich Starke. These waltzes represented a subgenre of Viennese social dance music that enjoyed brief popularity at the turn of the nineteenth century, and they belonged to a wider culture of commemorative battle music during the periods of the Austro-Turkish War (1788–91) and the Napoleonic Wars. The public ballroom was an especially appropriate setting for battle music, which often appealed to popular patriotism and emphasised communal celebration, and social dancing allowed the public to become active participants in the act of commemorating military victories. Battle waltzes also suggest that a variety of listening practices existed simultaneously in the ballroom setting, since programmatic music requires listeners to follow a narrative over time, a mode of listening associated more with concert audiences than with dancers.