An der schönen blauen Donau

Everybody knows this most ubiquitous of waltzes, with its upward-sweeping arpeggios capped by repeated notes that would sound like car horns if they weren’t embedded in a context of such glamorous sophistication. But not everybody realises that The Blue Danube (or An der schönen blauen Donau, as the composer called it) is actually five waltzes in one, joined together to make a dance of roughly 10 minutes (just the right duration for a Viennese ball: not too short to be inconsequential, not too long to tire the dancers), with a prefatory introduction to set the scene and a concluding coda to round things off. Intended by Johann Strauss II to celebrate the spirit of Vienna in the aftermath of a humiliating military defeat and subsequent economic collapse, it first surfaced in 1867 as a piece for male voice choir, with mischievously satirical words by a local police official. But later the same year, Strauss completely recast the music as a piece of escapist elegance for orchestra—which it remains, perpetuating the myth that the Danube River is something other than the dull grey the Viennese know it to be in reality. And the escapism was only enhanced in 1968 when Stanley Kubrick used Strauss’ score as the soundtrack to a meticulously choreographed ballet for docking spacecraft in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey.