The Viennese waltz: social transformation and the shock of the new

ABSTRACT

The Viennese waltz was the first vernacular, modern dance. Modern, here, Carrie’s the meaning of modernity. Such dances have an expressive relationship with the body and this requires a specific discursive understanding of what a body is and how it can be experienced. That is, modern, vernacular dancing is a function of the modern body. The modern body evolved as part of the social transformation of society from a feudal order to one founded on capitalism and industrialisation. The modern body is understood, and experienced, as limited by the body’s physical form, distinct from its environment. The body is the site of the individual, and, at the same time, it is the expressive site of mental stimulation. Notoriously, René Descartes theorised this construction in terms of a distinction between the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’ in Meditationes de Prima Philosophia published in 1641. A problem for modern, bourgeois society then became, how to control the expressiveness of the body in dance. This problem of management pervades modernity and is central to this article. The Viennese Waltz was the first modern dance, the first manifestation of dance as individual expression and, consequently, the first time the problem of how to control expression presented itself, and what the consequences might be if the dancing body was not controlled.

KEYWORDS:

• Viennese waltz
• ecstasy
• the body
• rationality
• vernacular dancing

Writing in 1973 and commenting on the social dancing of the time which ‘seems to isolate the individual in a trance-like self-absorption which virtually disconnects him [sic] from the world and even from his partner’, Ruth Katz (368) observed that:

Today’s developments, both in the dance and in society, provide more than the usual justification for looking back to one of the earliest manifestations of individualism and escape in the dance and its association with the values of liberty, equality and uncertainty which followed upon the French Revolution.

Implied in Katz’s argument here is a continuity of social dancing from at least the eighteenth century to the 1970s founded on the increasing centrality of individualism in western society. Her reference to ‘trance-like self-absorption’ would be even more apposite a decade later in the time of EDM (Electronic Dance Music) and rave dancing.

Katz’s concern was with the Viennese waltz. In this article I follow in her footsteps and extend a key aspect of her argument, that the popularity of the waltz was linked to the transformation of the social order and the rise of individualism. I will set aside Katz’s (1973, p. 375) discussion of the relationship between the social anomie produced by the French Revolution and the relief of ‘losing oneself in the waltz’ while examining further the idea of the loss of self in the dance. The waltz evolved among the aristocracy and bourgeoisie at the end of the Holy Roman Empire and during the Austrian Empire of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries out of one, or more, peasant dances. Its popularity was founded in the new understanding of the body as the site of pleasure as well as of individualism and rationality. The waltz, like later dances of modernity, always held the possibility of tipping over from rational enjoyment to something more out of control, something that could be called ecstasy. This was considered to be more of a problem for female than male dancers because women were thought to be inherently less rational than men. Finally, in the early twentieth century, the dance itself was transformed – some would say refined – into the slow, or English, waltz so that the possibility of female dancers losing control was minimised if not eradicated.

The novelty of the Viennese waltz

Through the nineteenth century, and in spite of its many critics, the waltz very quickly became very popular. This was aided by its importance at balls for the diplomats and their entourages who attended the discussions at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815. The purpose of the Congress was to establish a new European order after the Napoleonic wars had laid waste to much of the old geo-political structure. The Congress included representatives from Austria, Prussia, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden among other countries. While some of the attendees were aristocrats, many were from the new, professional elite. The balls were frequent. So many, in fact, that the Austrian field marshall Charles de Ligne coined the bon mot, ‘Le Congres danse beaucoup, mais il ne marche pas’. Indeed, the Congress became known as the Dancing Congress and the Waltzing Congress. It contributed to the rapid spread of the waltz across the European continent.

The acceptance of the waltz marked a generational cultural shift as well as a shift in class power towards the new bourgeoisie. Erika Buurman (2021, p. 88) has described the celebrations at the nuptials of Francis I, Emperor of Austria, and his third wife, his cousin Maria Ludovika of Moderna, at the palace of Duke Albert of Sachsen-Teschen on 12 January 1808:

Around one thousand people attended the ball, Duke Albert danced the first minuet and the first contredanse with the empress. … At ten o’clock dinner was served … . After the meal the court withdrew and the dancing continued, this time with lively waltzing that continued until three o’clock in the morning.

As Buurman (2021, p. 89) explains, the ball fell into two distinct parts:

During the first part, the dancing of the most distinguished individuals was the focus of attention. … Their dance thereby served the same formal purpose as the dancing at French court balls of the early eighteenth century, where the dance formed part of a spectacle centred on power and status. Only the first part of the ball was effectively a court occasion, after the emperor’s family withdrew, the dancing turned to waltzes and the emphasis was on general participation rather than formal ceremony.

The first part of the ball was formal and the dancing reflected this. The most important dance was the minuet. The second part of the ball, for the benefit of the invited guests who were not members of the aristocracy or the royal court, and no doubt included many of the most important professional and business leaders in the community, was offered for their pleasure. The dancing of the waltzes was for everyone and was for the dancers’ enjoyment. The split ball signalled the transitioning to a new, more egalitarian social structure, one no longer founded on monarchical absolutism. In France the last absolutist king, Louis XVI, had been guillotined in 1793 during the French Revolution. Six years after her marriage, Empress Maria Ludovika was the hostess of the Congress of Vienna, in charge of the entertainment, and, being twenty-seven, was no doubt responsible for encouraging the large number of waltzes danced at the balls.

Dancing the minuet

The minuet was the favourite dance of Louis XVI’s great-great-great-grandfather, Louis XIV, the absolutist monarch who called himself le Roi Soleil. It had evolved in France during the 1660s and in a society where power was associated with spectacle, the form of the minuet lent itself to display. Christian J. von Feldtenstein, in his book on the art of dancing published in German in 1767, described the minuet as ‘the queen of all dances’ and ‘the test of every dancer who wants to acquire a reputation; … and … the best occasion for displaying everything beautiful and charming in nature which a body is capable of employing’. (Yaraman, 2002, p. 1) This was not about dancing for pleasure or personal enjoyment. Sevin Yaraman (Yaraman, 2002, p. 1) tells us that:

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries court dancing was a social activity through which members of the aristocracy demonstrated their refinement and their adherence to the established social system. It was a formal and learned activity, requiring both a grasp of social hierarchies and rigorous training and skill.

Those performing the minuet were not only judged on their ability and skill but also on their having the appropriate physical endowments. As Yaraman (2002, p. 2) explains quoting from ‘A New Treatise on the Art of Dancing’ published in 1785:

Physical endowment also dictated who should, or should not, perform the minuet. “Well-shaped,” “undeformed,” and “well-proportioned” persons were encouraged to dance; those with “natural defects” were advised not to take part in court dancing of any sort. Indeed, it was considered absurd for people with “weak loins” or “very long arms” to attempt the minuet: “they are sure of being laughed at, or pitied as idiots.”

This judgement of people’s appropriateness for particular activities on their physical appearance was a characteristic of the absolutist era. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (1975/1977, p. 136) quotes from Louis de Mongommery’s La Milice francaise (The French Militia) published in 1636 describing what a soldier should look like:

The signs for recognizing those most suited to this profession are a lovely, alert manner, an erect head, a taut stomach, broad shoulders, long arms, strong fingers, a small belly, thick thighs, slender legs and dry feet, because a man of such a figure could not fail to be agile and strong.

Bodies should be suitable for the task required of them. Like soldiering, dancing was a task.

As Louis XIV increasingly centralised state power in himself so aristocratic dancing became not just a spectacle where the dancers were observed and judged but also a show in the service of the monarch. Anthony Shay (2021) relates that Louis XIV.

starred in court ballets and spectacles that gave the message to the viewer that he was the absolute center of the universe, that all power was vested in him, and that all good flowed from him. It was a symbolic message that the viewers of these court ballets unambiguously received.

Those who performed the minuet did so in a spectacle of power organised by the position of the king.

We can compare this with the spectacle of punishment. Foucault details the public, torturous execution of Damiens, the regicide, in 1757. By this time such spectacles were becoming rare. The spectacle of the punishment of transgression was of the same structural order as the spectacle of dancers of the minuet within the confines of the court. In the former case, the spectacle exhibited the power of the king over his subjects. In the latter case, the spectacle was a demonstration of the courtly order and of the court members’ obedience to the monarch. This was all the more the case when the king, himself, danced. We have already seen this practice in the minuet at the marriage ball of Emperor Francis I.

The waltz, morality and enjoyment

Where the minuet was entangled with power and display, the development of the waltz, danced for pleasure, was intimately aligned with notions of morality that were increasingly associated with the bourgeoisie. The waltz was not a dance thought up by the dancing masters who taught the aristocracy how to perform the minuet. Rather, the waltz evolved out of dances performed by Central European peasants. There was a genre of such dances known as round dances. These date back as far as the twelfth century. Egil Bakka places the waltz among a group of round dances which includes the Polka, the Mazurka and the Schottische. Among his criteria for round dances Bakka (2020, pp. 6–7) lists:

1. One couple can realise a complex version of a dance

2. Couples turning along a circular path is a major characteristic of round dances

3. Couple turning in which both partners face each other is a major characteristic of round dances.

Bakka makes the point that these dances were popular in Europe until the early twentieth century when they were supplanted by African-American dances such as the foxtrot and, later, we can add the jitterbug and the Twist. Paralleling this development was the increasing importance of drums as time-keeping instruments. All the dances taken up in Europe by the bourgeoisie were from external origins, first of all from peasants and later from African-Americans. All were modified to fit bourgeois moral standards.

Exemplifying the restraint expected of respectable, bourgeois dancers as compared with the ways peasants and later the working class, danced, Christian Heinrich Theodor Schreger, a professor of chemistry who wrote one of the first beauty manuals for women, Kosmetisches Taschenbuch fur Damen, published in 1812, asserted,

The moderate, easy, effortless, moral dancing at not too crowded, draft-free places, preferably in small circles of friends and family under the eyes of a watchful elder, belongs to the appropriate movements of this age. That does not include the bacchanical ‘Walzen und Drehen’, whirling until the dancer falls about, nor the wild, unruly, flying around in the ‘Schleifer’, in the rapid and fiery Schottische, or in the shattering ‘Hopsanglaise’ on public dance floors. (Bakka, 2020, p. 11)

We will find that this fear of a loss of decorum persists through discussions of the waltz. In England, in the mid-nineteenth century the waltz was danced in the dancing saloons frequented by the non-respectable working class. David Taylor (2021) refers to the nineteenth century social reformer ‘Charles Booth’s observation about ‘the scandal that surrounds all dancing saloons’’ noting that it ‘still held true in the early twentieth century’. This description comes from the journalist and social explorer Henry Mayhew in his London Labour and London Poor, published in 1862:

The music itself is striking in the extreme, and at all events exhilarating in the highest degree. The shrill notes of the fifes, and the braying of the trumpet in very quick time, rouses the excitement of the dancers, until they whirl around in the waltz with the greatest velocity.

In this environment pleasure was more important than skill or bourgeois morality.

The particular origin of the waltz is usually connected with the Landler, a couple dance with rather more complicated arm movements and which included some hopping and skipping movements. The Viennese waltz is either descended from the Landler or the two dances evolved into bourgeois use together, with the waltz becoming the more popular and the Landler dropping into obscurity.¹ One obvious reason for this is that the waltz is a simpler dance. The hand and arm movements don’t change, arms stay in a form of an embrace, and the foot movements are few and easy to learn.

The movement of the feet was a crucial difference between the waltz and the Landler. As Katz (1973, p. 372) remarks:

The waltz attained its true character, however, by being danced like a Schleifer [slider], having given up the skips and the turning under the arm of the Landler in favor of dragging the feet along the floor.

Keeping the feet on the floor except when taking a step became a preoccupation of those guarding the morality of dancers and became a central tenet of dancing teachers during the time of the popularity of ballroom dancing through the first half of the twentieth century. When African-American dances were modified for bourgeois use, keeping feet firmly on the dance floor was a fundamental modification.

The waltz exploded in popularity in the first decades of the nineteenth century because it was a modern dance. It was simple to learn and it could be, and was, danced for pleasure. As the Schreger quotation suggests, the most important concern of the moral arbiters was to keep the dancing within the bounds of rationality; enjoy the dance but not too much. Underlying this idea was that rationality was increasingly ordering the modern world and its capitalist economy. As Hall and Gieben (1992, p. 6) so ably sums it up, a characteristic of modernity was, ‘The decline of the religious worldview typical of traditional societies and the rise of a secular and materialistic culture exhibiting those individualistic, rationalist, and instrumental impulses now so familiar to us’. Coming out of its peasant background, the waltz needed to be tamed of its bacchanal possibilities so that it could take its place as an acceptable bourgeois form of entertainment. Through the nineteenth century in England, while dancing was sometimes included as a form of rational recreation, the waltz never fitted into this category. For it to become acceptable any possibility of the dance exciting the emotions had to be eradicated.

At the same time, the waltz appealed to the experience of individualism which, as Hall signals, was another characteristic of modernity and complimented the importance of rationality. Hall and Gieben (1992, p. 7) defines individualism as, ‘the concept that the individual is the starting point for all knowledge and action, and that individual reason cannot be subjected to a higher authority’. The practice of the waltz for the bourgeoisie was constructed through rationality and individualism, and found its expression in the body. As David Le Breton (1985, p. 26) succinctly puts it, ‘the very notion of the body as such is an effect of individualism’. Where the body in the minuet existed for display, the body in the modern waltz was a vehicle for controlled, individualistic expression. It did not matter what the body, literally, looked like, it was about how the body learnt to express the individual through the taught moves of the dance, the waltz, and the pleasure that was experienced.

Foucault (1975/1977, p. 137) writes about this body,

it was a question not of treating the body en masse, ‘wholesale’, as if it were an indissoluble unity, but of working it “retail”, individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself—movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body.

Foucault describes the body as a mechanism reflecting the dominant nineteenth-century image of the body as a machine. Katz (1973, p. 371) writes that: ‘The waltz emphasized not uniformity but individual expression; there are no rules to be studied, save for a few basic steps’. The minuet privileged uniformity because what was important was display, the body existed in a network of overt power relations. However, it is an exaggeration to say that for the waltz the only rules were a few basic steps. While the steps in the waltz are few, this body had to be constantly controlled; the steps carefully made so that the partner’s toes are not trodden on and dancers had to be sure to keep their feet on the ground apart from the steps they were taking; the embrace arranged so that there is no hint of moral impropriety by either party but, of course, especially by the male; the turning carefully handled so that neither party gets dizzy. In sum, the body has to be carefully trained to dance the waltz so that both partners can experience rational enjoyment, that is where there is no loss of control and pleasure is kept within the bounds of reason.

The shocking embrace of the Viennese waltz

I have explained that the waltz was one of many round dances which were picked up by the emerging bourgeoisie from their peasant origins. This happened in the balls of Vienna around the last decade of the eighteenth century, resulting in its being known as the Viennese waltz. The most important innovation in the Viennese waltz when considered in relation to the previous dances of high society like the minuet and the quadrille was that it was a closed couple dance. Where previous popular dances involved couples, they danced side by side, touching each other’s hand only lightly. In the waltz, the couple were cut off from other dancers on the dance floor, holding each other in an embrace and looking not at their surroundings but at each other. As Yaraman (2002, p. 6) notes,

a firm eye contact between the partners is essential: the intense visual concentration orients each partner with respect of the other, thus minimising the effect of the whirling by creating the sensory illusion of standing still.

Gazing into each other’s eyes may have been necessary for stability but it could also be a means of indicating affection, introducing an emotional, or indeed erotic, element to the dancing which was considered shocking. Kelly Goshorn (2017) notes: ‘The intimate postures and intense gazes [of the waltz] were most likely to blame for the waltz’s initial disgraceful reputation’.

As Goshorn signals, the same could be said, and was, about the embrace. How and where the man embraced the woman with his right arm was subject to much discussion. Yaraman (2002, p. 6) remarks that: ‘The firm embrace of the waltz is an absolute physical necessity, not an affectional preference’. Nevertheless, the embrace was thought to be disgracefully intimate. Eric McKee (2012, p. 96) tells us that: ‘Because of the implicit sexual nature of this embrace, many critics of the time, quite unsuccessfully, urged that, if the waltz were to be danced at all, only married couples should do it’. Sheenagh Pietrobruno (2006, p. 153) writes that: ‘Because of this embrace, and the rapid turning movements of the dance, the waltz was decried as a sinful and vulgar practice that would corrupt the moral sensibilities of respectable women’. Pietrobruno (2006, p. 154) adds that:

Of course, the physical contact of the waltz was tame by today’s standards: couples had to be separated enough that daylight could shine between them. Not until the beginning of the twentieth century could couples dancing variations of the “original” waltz actually come into close bodily contact.

She is referring here, to the slow or English waltz.

Cheryl A. Wilson (2016) quotes the correct form of embrace for the waltz from the dancing master William B. DeGarmo’s 1875 book, The Dance of Society:

The gentleman places his right arm round the lady’s waist, supporting her firmly, yet gently … The lady’s left hand rests lightly upon the gentleman’s right arm … the fingers together and curved, and not grasping or bearing down upon the gentleman’s arm.

While the respectable, nineteenth-century ideal was for couples to limit physical contact to a distant embrace this was not always adhered to. Wilson (2016) quotes an 1804 German travelogue: ‘When waltzing on the darker side of the room there were bolder embraces and kisses’. Yaraman (2002, p. 8) refers to a nineteenth-century German author, Ernst Moritz Arndt, who,

locates the source of the erotic nature of the waltz in women’s fashions of the mid-1800s and explains that men, grasping the long dress of their partner, so that it would not drag and be trodden upon, and lifting it high, bring both bodies within its folds as close together as possible: “In this way the whirling continues in the most indecent positions, supporting hand lay firmly on the breasts, at each movement making little lustful pressures”.

The fear was always that those dancing the Viennese waltz would revert to the hedonistic, sensual enjoyment of the peasant dancers from whom the dance was appropriated. Self-control had to be learnt. The body, discovered by individualism, had to be kept under control.

Imported, it would seem, by way of Paris, the waltz arrived in England in 1812 when it was danced at Almack’s Assembly Rooms on King Street in St James by the fashionable, cosmopolitan, aristocratic elite. Wilson (2016) explains that Almack’s was a kind of marriage market for these people. At the same time, for dancers used to the figures of the English country dances, the waltz appeared a step too far. Even Lord Byron, a member of this elite and a rake known for his advanced sexual interests including homosexuality during a time when such behaviour could be severely punished and for a possible sexual liaison with his half-sister, wrote a satirical poem about the waltz, published in 1813, apparently written by a country gentleman shocked by the dance named Horace Hornem.

The waltz’s breakthrough into English aristocratic society took place on 12 July 1816, when it was danced at the Regent’s Fete at Carlton House. The Prince Regent, subsequently George IV, was a man of developed aesthetic taste, building the Brighton Royal Pavilion, as well as being a notorious playboy. The waltz opened his fete. It is likely that the trigger for this intrusion of the dance into mainstream aristocratic society was the dance’s spread as a consequence of the Congress of Vienna. Be that as it may, its appearance at the Regent’s fete precipitated an outcry from the paper of record, The Times (Rust, 1969, p. 69) which thundered:

National morals depend on national habits and it is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies, in this dance, to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females.

The diatribe concludes hoping that this ‘indecent dance … will never again be tolerated in any moral English society’. (Rust, 1969, p. 69) The hope was in vain. Taken up by the more adventurous aristocrats and by the burgeoning English bourgeoisie, and subsequently danced in saloons and ballrooms frequented by the lower classes, the waltz became the mainstay of English dancing by around the turn of the twentieth century.

As Katz (1973) argues, the couples dancing the Viennese waltz had a certain egalitarian quality. Where the minuet could emphasise hierarchy in the order of the dancers, in the waltz each couple danced separately from the other dancing couples. There was a flattening effect on the dance floor. Couples danced independently of each other, while acknowledging the existence of their neighbours, and this was only to ensure that the couples did not collide or interfere in any other way with the other couples. In the minuet, the quality of the dancer was decided by their display. In the waltz, the quality of the dancer was, in the first instance, recognised by their dancing partner because of their close embrace. The waltz was also the first popular dance where one partner led and the other followed. But we need to remember that the waltz was danced for the personal pleasure of the couple dancing.

Conventionally, the couple was made up of a male and a female, any other arrangement would have been more than just shocking, and the male led while the woman followed. The male moved forward, the woman had the more difficult task of following the male’s steps while moving backwards. This patriarchal structuring of the waltz is obvious. As Wilson (2016) has written about ballrooms in England at that time, ‘the nineteenth-century ballroom was a largely patriarchal and heteronormative space designed to promote socially appropriate matches and reinforce traditional class and gender hierarchies’. In exhibiting this structure the waltz also emphasised the heteronormative, dyadic nature of the nuclear familial order. Couples dances became popular as the nuclear family replaced the extended family as the preferred family form. As Elaine Leeder (2003, p. 26) puts it: ‘In the nuclear family there is more emphasis placed on individualism, romantic love, freedom to choose one’s partner, separate residence from the extended family, and strong intimate relationships’. On the waltz dance floor, there was individualism, increasing freedom to choose one’s partner and separation of couples. Intimacy, and romantic love, were ideally closely patrolled.

The excitement of the turning, whirling Viennese waltz

This brings us to the second foundational aspect of the Viennese waltz, the turning which was the key characteristic of round dances. While the embrace challenged the accepted moral order by placing men and women in such close proximity that they were required to exercise self-control, the turning aspect of the waltz was more visually arresting and offered a perhaps greater challenge to the new, modern ideology of rationality. The Viennese waltz was founded on not one but two turning motions. The couple turned constantly as a couple but also turned around the floor in concert with the other turning couples. All turning was in an anticlockwise direction. I have already noted the argument that it was necessary for each member of a couple to look the other in their eyes as a way to counteract the dizzying motion of the turn.

The Viennese waltz was danced at around 180 bpm. For comparison, the slow waltz that evolved in the early twentieth century was danced at around half that speed. Techno, the most prominent form of EDM in the 1980s and 1990s was danced at around 120–125 bpm. In other words, the Viennese waltz is a very fast dance. The turning is exceptionally rapid. This makes understandable Yaraman’s (2002, p. 6) point that: ‘The firm embrace of the waltz is an absolute physical necessity, not an affectional preference; without it the strong centrifugal force of the double circular motions would unbalance each partner and spin the couple apart’. At the same time, the fast turning also had an erotic quality. In Johan Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, first published in German in 1774, Goethe offers a view from the male waltzer. This is an epistolary novella and Werther is writing to Wilhelm, his friend. Werther describes dancing the waltz with Lotte, who is engaged to Albert whom she subsequently marries, and with whom he has fallen in love:

Never have I moved more lightly. I felt myself more than human, holding this loveliest of creatures in my arms, flying with her like the wind, till I lost sight of everything else and —Wilhelm, I vowed at that very moment that a girl whom I loved, or for whom I felt the slightest attachment, should never waltz with another, even if it should be my end! (Goethe trans 1971, p. 27)

The waltz was undeniably exciting, not least because it functioned at the border of rationality.

In 1929 Paul Nettl, the pioneering historian of dance, published ‘Notes on the history of the dance’. He (1929, p. 584) began by discussing the origins of dance:

The primitive ecstatic dance is in large measure a cult dance, a religious dance, although it is, of course, almost always of an erotic nature also. Witness the orgiastic dances of the Dyonisiac mysteries, … or take the whirling of the dervishes … . Characteristic of all these dances is the dissolution of consciousness—partial at least, and often complete—which always accompanies sensuous ecstasy.

For Nettl, the history of dance leads from the uncontrolled, ecstatic and erotic dance to the rational, restrained and therefore respectable dancing of his own time. We can see in Nettl’s discussion an anxiety over the loss of control of the body. The modern thinking of the body was characterised by Descartes’ distinction between a body and the mind signalled in the cogito, je pense, donc je suis, first announced in 1637 in Discourse de la Methode. As Le Breton (1985, p. 29) remarks, ‘it is this [individualist] view of the world that puts the individual at its center (the ego cogito of Descartes) which is at the origin of our prevailing conceptions of the body’. In this context the Sufi sect often identified as whirling dervishes is something of a touchstone. For the spinning Sufis: ‘The entire ritual of the Mehlevi [dervishes] is meant to bring about an emotional and ecstatic experience of closeness with God’. (Issitt and Main, Hidden Religion, 2014, p. 101) As we shall see, the rapid spinning of the Viennese waltz also offered the possibility of an experience beyond reason and approaching ecstasy, though more sexual than religious.

The French philosopher Catherine Clement (1994, p. 12) makes a connection between the whirling of the waltz and that of the dervishes:

We are in the third circle, the circle of ecstasy. It has been trailing its ineffability for quite some time, in the whirlwind of the waltz or in that of the dervishes where it is the avowed goal.

In 1836, Donald Walker (149), in Exercises for Ladies, recommended against waltzing for women:

Vertigo is one of the great inconveniences of the waltz; and the character of this dance, its rapid turnings, the clasping of the dancers, their exciting contact, and the too quick and too loud succession of lively and agreeable emotions, produce sometimes, in women of a very irritable constitution, syncopes, spasms and other accidents which should induce them to renounce it.

The syncope is a brief fainting fit, a loss of consciousness. It can be caused by overstimulation, in the waltz by the rapid whirling, or in some cases by orgasm. Rachel Maines (2001, p. 8) notes that in the nineteenth century:

During the syncope some hysterics were observed to experience … apparent loss of consciousness … associated with flushing of the skin, “voluptuous sensations,” and embarrassment and confusion after recovery from a very brief loss of control – usually less than a minute.

We will return to hysteria shortly.

We need to note here the change in importance given to the female orgasm during the eighteenth century as the conception of the individualist body evolved. Thomas Laqueur (1986, p. 1) writes:

Sexual orgasm moved to the periphery of human physiology. Previously a deeply embedded sign of the generative process—whose existence was no more open to debate than was the warm, pleasurable glow that usually accompanies a good meal—orgasm became simply a feeling, albeit an enormously charged one.

In the modern formulation where the physical body was distinct from mind, orgasm was considered to be bodily, a physical eruption which could overtake the controlling, rational mind. Without a purpose, female orgasm became a threat to the rationality which was now identified as a key human characteristic. Dancing, specifically here the Viennese waltz, is a practice which could overwhelm the mind’s reason, leading to a gratification which in some cases could culminate in orgasm. It had to be strictly patrolled.

A syncope, as Clement (1994, p. 1) notes, is ‘so similar to death that it is also called “apparent death”’. It is related to the idea of la petite mort, the little death, a term which is sometimes used to describe the loss of self-consciousness associated with the female orgasm. Clement makes the connection between a syncope and female orgasm. She notes that: ‘The romantic and clinical scenario [of the syncope], in our society, has usually been allotted to woman. (1994, p. 1) Syncopes, and spasms, are beyond the rational pleasure of dancing.

Women irrationality and waltzing

That it was women who were most likely to suffer a syncope while dancing a waltz was grounded in the idea that women were less rational than men. This was justified in the claim that hysteria was a female malady. Denis Diderot, the French Enlightenment philosopher, in ‘Sur Femmes’, published in 1772, identified hysteria as specifically female and linked it with sexual passion. In 1748 he had published the notorious Les Bijoux Indiscrets in which a magical ring enables the sultan to make women’s genitals speak without their consent. Elaine Showalter (1993, p. 287) discusses the accepted relationship between women and hysteria:

“As a general rule,” wrote the French physician Augusta Fabre in 1883, “all women are hysterical and … every woman carries with her the seeds of hysteria. Hysteria, before being an illness, is a temperament, and what constitutes the temperament of a woman is rudimentary hysteria.” The hysterical seizure, grande hysterie, was regarded as an acting out of female sexual experience, a [quoting a 1989 review article by Mark S. Micale] “spasm of hyper-femininity, mimicking … both childbirth and the female orgasm”.

We can find here Walker’s concern with women of ‘a very irritable constitution’ and the possibility not only of syncopes but of spasms. Jules Evans (2015) remarks that: ‘In the nineteenth century unstable women were increasingly diagnosed with “hysteria”’. The unsaid in Walker’s concern is the connection between syncopes, spasms and female orgasms which became linked with the secularised understanding of ecsta, and the loss of rationality, all brought about by the whirling of the waltz.

The eminent French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, worked at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century. He made a particular study of women identified as hysterics. For Charcot: ‘Ecstasy, diagnosed in Les demoniaques dans l’art as belonging to that period of the grande attaque called the phase of the attitudes passionnelles, was by 1886 an established hysterical symptom’. (Mazzoni, 1996, p. 27) Ecstasy was both sexualised and medicalised as an aspect of hysteria. On Thursdays, Charcot would put on displays of his hysteric patients, hypnotising them and placing them in illustrative poses, for the edification of a bourgeois, male audience which included Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of Sociology (Evans, 2015). One of Charcot’s prized exhibitors was Jeanne Avril, known by her stage name of Jane Avril. Avril’s father was Luigi de Font, an Italian aristocrat. Her French mother, Léontine Clarisse Beaudon, was a sex worker. Avril managed to escape from Salpêtrière and became the lead dancer of the cancan at the Moulin Rouge where she was painted a number of times by Toulouse-Lautrec.

The cancan makes a useful comparison with the Viennese waltz. The cancan evolved in the working-class dancehalls of Paris out of a dance called the chahut which Claire Parfitt (2007), the historian of the cancan, translates as uproar. Here we should be reminded of Schreger’s lower class dancers and their ‘bacchanical “Walzen und Drehen”, whirling until the dancer falls about’. Parfitt (2007) writes that: ‘In working class dance halls in Paris, this idea of a body liberated from the confines of rationality was applied to the quadrille, creating a parody of what had previously been a bourgeois dance’. This makes the creation of the chahut sound intentional. It is much more likely that the chahut and cancan evolved in the early part of the nineteenth century as working-class, vernacular, social dances influenced by the quadrille in an environment far removed from the rational and moral preoccupations of the bourgeoisie.

Parfitt (2007) describes how: ‘By freeing the limbs from central control, and liberating the dancer from set figures, the cancan performed a body that appeared to escape the rational regulation of the mind and was therefore irrational’. As a social dance, this version of the chahut and cancan was danced by both men and women. However, as Parfitt explains, this started changing by the 1840s, at this time, men stopped dancing the cancan and instead started watching the women dancing.

The cancan involved high kicks. This is most obvious in the performed version which was considered to be scandalous. At the Moulin Rouge, which was opened by the bourgeois entertainment entrepreneurs Charles Zidler and Joseph Oller in 1889, the women wore pantalettes which had an open crutch. In the first half of the nineteenth century, at least, it was common for working-class women not to wear underwear at all (Richmond, 2013, pp. 34–40).² Given this, the pantalettes worn by the dancers at the Moulin Rouge, whether or not they had open crutches, could be read as an attempt at modesty and respectability. Nevertheless, the audience of bourgeois men found the dancers fascinating. Parfitt (2007) quotes the journalist Edgar Baes: ‘More than one [spectator] sticks his tongue out and twists his arms craving more, as if hypnotized by the hectic transports of a monstrous lack of decency’. Parfitt (2007) goes on to tell us that, ‘the cancan was often described in the same terms as hysteria, the supposedly contagious pathological affliction of late-nineteenth century lower-class women’. Having entertained the bourgeois men at Charcot’s gatherings at the Salpêtrière by performing hysteric poses, it was but a short step for Avril to entertain possibly even some of the same bourgeois men by dancing the cancan at the Moulin Rouge. Parfitt notes the division between the rationality of the bourgeois men and the irrationality of the working-class women. As at Charcot’s invited presentations, the class divide reinforced the gender divide. More, even with the relatively modest dress at the Moulin Rouge, the cancan remained a working-class dance where the Viennese waltz had been thoroughly revised, losing even the limited aerial steps that remained part of the Landler, to become morally acceptable to the bourgeoisie.

Yaraman (2002, p. VIII) notes that: ‘An abundance of textual evidence reveals that the outrage generated by the waltz as a social dance was due almost exclusively to its purported effects upon women’. We have already examined some of this literature. At the same time, as with the cancan, the Viennese waltz provided the opportunity for bourgeois men to watch women dancing, both the women and the men often in a state of excitement. There is an account by the prolific French hack fabricator Gatien de Courtilz de Sandraz in a book he published in 1707, well before the Viennese waltz but as the body was becoming an object of desire, of a group of aristocrats retiring to a chateau for relaxation with some young women described as opera singers. Here, this is a code for women of the demi-monde. The women dance for the men. Then:

The dancers, to please their lovers the more, dropped their clothes and danced totally naked the nicest entrees and ballets; one of the princes directed the delightful music, and only the lovers were allowed to watch the performances. (Simons, 2001, pp. 617–635)

Regardless of the veracity of this account, it offers a structure of male eroticism where the aristocratic men’s desire is heightened by watching the young women dancing naked. A hundred years later, we have bourgeois men watching women like Jean Avril dancing the cancan with an erotic charge. There are stories that Avril used to dance naked for an audience, though not at the Moulin Rouge (de Lafayette, 2015, p. 16).

One basis for the fascination of men with women’s bodies was the new idea of their bodies as being different from the male body. Laqueur (1986, p. 16) remarks that:

The new biology, with its search for fundamental differences between the sexes and between their desires, emerged at precisely the time when the foundations of the old social order were irremediably shaken.

This new preoccupation with sexual difference was related to the modern discovery of the body as an object. The idea of the female body as being different from the male body rather than being an inferior version of it founds the new understanding of the female orgasm as being mysterious. This change was taking place at the same time that the Viennese waltz was becoming popular both as a dance and as a spectacle for bourgeois men who would watch the excited women dancing.

We might think of this fascination with surveilling dancing female bodies in terms of Foucault’s idea of the scientia sexualis. Linda Williams (1999, p. 36) uses this as the basis for her discussion of the discursive formation of hard-core pornography, a genre which provokes a fetishistic fascination of which she writes: ‘I call the visual, hard-core knowledge-pleasure produced by the scientia sexualis a “frenzy of the visible”’. Though much earlier, and less intense, we can describe the same structure of the bourgeois men watching the women dancing the Viennese waltz. McKee (2012, p. 103) writes that,

people attended balls not only to dance but also to watch dancers dance; and the focus of the spectator rested on the waltzing women, who provided the viewer a swirling concert of colors, perfumes, textures, and feminine forms all wedded to music that both reflected and motivated the dancers’ beauty.

These spectators were mainly men and McKee intimates the erotic charge for the men; the surveillance of the women increasingly out of control, beyond reason, and even possibly approaching a syncope which may have been founded in an orgasm.

The disreputable Viennese waltz

Gustave Flaubert published L'Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education) in 1869. The protagonist of the novel is Frédéric Moreau. We meet him first as a young bourgeois coming to Paris from Normandy. The narrative trajectory of the novel moves from Frédéric’s naive infatuation with older Mme Arnoux through his increasing cynicism caused by his experiences in love and his sexual adventures. In one early scene, Frédéric is taken to a ball by M Arnoux, the husband of the woman with whom he is infatuated. It is a costume ball. It turns out that the ball is being given by M Arnoux’s mistress, Rosanette. The men at the ball are bourgeois, like those who later watched the cancan at the Moulin Rouge; the women are from the demi-monde, mistresses, courtesans, indeed women whose occupations are similar to those at the chateau party depicted by Gallen de Courtilz de Sandraz and who much later danced the cancan.³ At the ball, the respectable quadrilles give way to waltzes. Frédéric watches. When asked to dance he says he can’t – an example of his naivety. The women who have been sitting around the sides of the room ‘get up with great alacrity’. Flaubert is making a connection between the morally questionable dance and the type of women at the ball. He describes Frédéric’s reaction to the constant, speedy turning movements of the dancers, ‘more and more lively, provocative of dizzy sensations, communicated to his mind a sort of intoxication, which made other images surge up within it, while every woman passed with the same dazzling effect, and each of them with a special kind of exciting influence, according to her style of beauty’. (Flaubert, 1869/2004: chapter 6) Watching the whirling dancers overwhelms Frédéric with desire.

It is clear from the manner in which Flaubert sets up this scene that the voyeuristic behaviour of men watching women dancing the waltz was very wellknown. Frédéric then begins to have sexual fantasies about the women as they pass him, whirling around the floor:

The Polish lady, surrendering herself in a languorous fashion, inspired him with a longing to clasp her to his heart while they were both spinning forward on a sledge along a plain covered with snow. Horizons of tranquil voluptuousness in a chalet at the side of a lake opened out under the footsteps of the Swiss girl, who waltzed with her bust erect and her eyelashes drooping. Then, suddenly, the Bacchante, bending back her head with her dark locks, made him dream of devouring caresses in a wood of oleanders, in the midst of a storm, to the confused accompaniment of tabours. The fishwife, who was panting from the rapidity of the music, which was far too great for her, gave vent to bursts of laughter, and he would have liked, while drinking with her in some tavern in the “Porcherons,” to rumple her fichu with both hands, as in the good old times. (Flaubert, 1869/2004: chapter 7)

These women, we should remember, are all in costume. While Frédéric‘s fantasies are provoked by the women’s exertions, they are reinforced by the women’s own fantasies as expressed in their fancy dress. We have already referred to McKee’s description of the predominantly male spectators watching the Viennese waltz and the aroused men watching the more explicit and uninhibited can can.

Flaubert (1869/2004: chapter 7) tells us that, ‘Rosanette was whirling with arms akimbo, her wig, in an awkward position, bobbing over her collar, flung iris-powder around her; and, at every turn, she was near catching hold of Frederic with the ends of her gold spurs’. Rosanette is lacking in decorum and respectability. She is out of control of her body and not acting rationally. As readers, we are supposed to be shocked by her inappropriate, indeed immoral, behaviour. We should also remember that Flaubert may well be being cautious in his description here. When his first novel Madame Bovary was published in 1856, Flaubert had been prosecuted for ‘an outrage to public morality and religion’. (LaCapra, 2018) He was acquitted but would not have wanted a repeat of that episode.⁴ In sum, Flaubert reveals the waltz without its trappings of respectability, suggesting why the dance was considered so problematic for dancing by well brought up women.

Conclusion

By the turn of the twentieth century, with the full ascendancy of the bourgeoisie to cultural power, the Viennese waltz was dying out. As Theresa Buckland (2018, p. 2) writes: ‘This erstwhile staple of the English ballroom looked, in the early 1900s, to be losing ground against the perceived relentless invasion of African American sourced dances such as the Onestep and the Foxtrot’. The First World War reinforced the desire for simple dances that servicemen on leave could learn quickly and easily.

However, in part because of the impact of the war on leisure activities, social dancing became a popular form of entertainment for both the middle class and working class alike. So much so that by the end of the war dancing was being described as a craze. In his book on social dancing in the twentieth century, James Nott (2020, p. 1) includes an extract from an article in the Sunday Sun from October 1919: ‘There is a big boom in dancing. Ever since the silencing of the guns last November it has loomed large in the life of the individual. Where it was once an art it has now become a craze’. Dancing was moving from being a learnt skill to being a popular form of pleasurable relaxation. As Allison Abra (2009, p. 31) remarks, ‘the postwar dancing boom was simultaneously a symptom and a catalyst of a much wider scale transformation of dancing as a leisure form’. Nott (2020, p. 16) reports an estimate of 11,000 dance halls and night clubs opening between 1919 and 1926.

The Viennese waltz was the first European popular dance we can call modern. This is because it enabled dancers to connect expressively with their bodies now understood as entities in their own right and experience the pleasure of the dance. The problem was that this could lead to a loss of rational self-control with socially reprehensible consequences especially for women. The revision of the Viennese waltz was a success for bourgeois morality. In making the waltz an acceptable, morally conservative dance, Phillip Richardson and the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dance (ISTD) in 1925, made two fundamental changes to the waltz. They roughly halved the speed of the Viennese waltz and they removed the constant rotary action, the rapid whirling, inserting instead an optional turn. The revised waltz became known as the slow waltz in England and the English waltz elsewhere.

This revised waltz, like the other dances advocated by Richardson and the ISTD, was brought fully within the constraints of rationality. Ballroom dancing became a pleasurable skill, its pleasure lay in the smooth association of steps with the music to which it was danced, something reinforced by Victor Silvester’s development of strict tempo music for dancing around 1936 which ensured that the music for the various dances was played at an unvarying tempo considered appropriate for each of the dances.⁵ A major concern of the ISTD was the patrolling of imported African-American dances to remove any suggestions of over-exuberance such as ariel steps, called ‘freak steps’ by the ISTD.⁶ In the new, slow waltz there was no longer a concern that women might become irrational, or even experience a syncope or spasm. Pleasure was kept to the level of rational enjoyment, and members of both sexes, not just men, now watched the dancers for their rationally expressed elegance and grace.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There is a short scene in The Sound of Music when the Landler is danced, in, it should be said, a very decorous manner.

2 See also, Rachael Harzinski ‘A tale of two cloths: the transition from wool to cotton undergarments in England during the Victorian Age’. Harzinski (2006, p. 82) writes that: ‘Drawers began in France where they were called pantaloons. While women there were wearing them as early as 1800, they were not really accepted until Princess Charlotte wore them in 1811.’ Harzinski is here writing about the French elite not the working class who continued to wear no underwear until much later.

3 Gatien de Courtilz de Sandraz titled La Guerre d’Espagne, de Baviere et de Flandre, ou Memoires du Marquis D*** includes this story. There is a German version in Olaf Simons (2001) Marteaus Europa oder der Roman, bevor er Literatur wurde.

4 On the trial of Flaubert, see Dominick LaCapra, Madame Bovary on Trial (2018).

5 There is a short discussion of Victor Silvester’s strict tempo dance music in Christine L. Baade, Victory through Harmony (2013, p. 8). See also Victor Silvester’s autobiography Dancing Is My Life (1958).

6 Cresswell (2006, p. 62) quotes a resolution passed at the 1920 conference at the Grafton Galleries: ‘That the teachers present agree to do their very best to stamp out freak steps particularly dips and steps in which the feet are raised high off the ground and also side steps and pauses which impeded the progress of those who may be following.’