Ttime is fast approaching when millions of music lovers around the world turn on the television, turn off their critical faculties and sink into the warm bath of nostalgia that is the Philharmonic Orchestra’s New Year’s Eve concert of Vienna. There is something about the vision of eighty (approximately) badges (mostly) in their penguin costumes, which played a large part of the music when it was written: Vienna was besieged by political and social conflicts in the middle of the twentieth century. 19th century. and he needed a comforting myth of “old Vienna,” which would make people normally healthy and balanced get soft on their heads.
It wasn’t always like that. There was a time when the waltz, far from being an embalmed relic, encouraged people and made them misbehave. In the 19th century, visitors to Vienna, such as Mark Twain, were amazed at how lewd dance was. When the great late-century Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler wrote Reigen about a group of people going from one amoral erotic encounter to another, the waltz was surely the “round dance” he had in mind.
But by the end of the 19th century, the feeling of misty eyes was gaining ground and the waltz has already been thoroughly domesticated. She has become the symbol of the “good old lady,” a feeling everyone seems to have adopted. And the focus of this nostalgia, the moment when the whole planet seems to gently sway in three or four beats with tears of feeling in your eyes, is the New Year’s Day Concert.
There are only about two thousand members of the audience for each of the three performances in the opulent Golden Hall of the Musikverein, the Vienna hall where the concert takes place, but worldwide in almost a hundred countries there will be more than 60 million viewers, for the broadcast of the third concert on January 1. Even in the People’s Republic of China, they will influence the sounds of a waltz.
This transformation of something that until the 19th century was a true local dance rooted in the rustic ländler of Beethoven and Schubert, into a hardened “globalized” ritual has been surprisingly rapid. Many people think that the New Year’s Concert must be as old as the orchestra itself, which was born in 1842. In fact, the idea of a year-end concert celebrating the great dance composers of Vienna, he focused on the so-called “waltz kings” of the Strauss dynasty, but sometimes dating back to Mozart and Verdi and Tchaikovsky, was born in 1939 only.