5 - Dance Arrangements from the Viennese Stage

Summary

Viennese dance composers in the decades around 1800 frequently used melodies from current operatic repertoire as the basis of their dance compositions. This practice belonged to a wider culture of arranging popular repertoire for other mediums. However, the transfer of music from the stage to the ballroom also has much to reveal about the overlap between these two areas of Viennese cultural life, and about operatic reception history. A reciprocal effect existed between an opera’s popularity and its arrangement for the ballroom, wherein success in the theatre contributed to success in the ballroom context and vice versa. Operas that contained an abundance of dance-like melodies therefore held an advantage both in the theatre and the ballroom context. This has particular relevance for the respective reception histories of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Martín y Soler’s Una cosa rara, and for the notorious Rossini craze of the 1810s and 1820s.