With the present release, Nikolaus Harnoncourt is calling for a revolution: a revolution in the field of the waltz and of dance in general that goes back to its actual origins. Rediscovery and re-interpretation result from stepping back from an overwrought tradition and turning away from customs and rituals that cultural historians have come to associate with the concept of the waltz, but which in terms of its form and significance and also in its inherent complexity and subtle elegance have in fact forced this dance form back to the very brink of musicological seriousness.
The dance music of the nineteenth century has developed over the decades into the musical expression of revolution and of a conceptual emancipation dating back to the Age of Restoration in Europe. Even though continuing developments in the held of dance no longer go hand in hand with social change, Nikolaus Harnoncourt has none the less succeeded in spearheading a musical revolution by deliberately going back to the historical sound of original and rarely performed dances. Simply through his use often different kinds of trumpet and five different types of clarinet, he creates a multi-faceted variety of sonorities that today’s listeners will find unusual in the case of the waltz.
Harnoncourt breathes new life into the waltz, treating it as a genre worth taking seriously in its original form, and at the same time demonstrating through his choice of pieces the significance of Mozart's music for the development of the dance from its humble origins to the emergence ofthe concert waltz as a genre.

The deplorable tendency to draw a distinction between "light" and "serious" music is a recent phenomenon in musical history. The criterion for dividing music into separate categories and excluding one or other of them has always been based on whether the music is inherently good or bad. Whether music is entertaining or boring, whether it puts us in a serious mood or whether we take it seriously - all of this depends on many imponderables and subjective predispositions, so that it can never be a taxonomic criterion. To recognise this and to be guided by that recognition is one of the great and important challenges that face us in cultivating and responding to music today.
Composing dance music requires just as much inspiration as composing other kinds of works. If we ignore buskers and bar-room musicians, then writing dance music has never been only the preserve of other musicians. Even in folk music the situation is the same: in village communities, it was teachers who were responsible for transmitting musical culture, which included not only church music but also dance music. As an assistant teacher, the young Anton Bruckner played the organ at church services and the violin in a dance band. In much the same way, court orchestras had to play dance music just like any other kind of music - here one thinks of the Prince-Archbishop’s court orchestra in Salzburg in Mozart's day and the Esterházy court orchestra under Joseph Haydn in Eisenstadt and Eszterháza.
When it became necessary to hire special ensembles to play dance music at public balls during the Age of Enlightenment,the musicians who were engaged were also active in other areas of the repertory. And when these ballroom ensembles grew into independent institutions under competent conductors in the early nineteenth century, finally enriching the world of music in the form of dance bands, these bands featured musicians of only the highest musical standards. Joseph Lanner was one such conductor. Indeed, the level of technical competence that he presupposed on the part of his musicians almost defies belief. And today's listeners, prejudiced as we are, may be unwilling to believe that opera and theatre orchestras and dance bands were the only professional bodies of musicians in Vienna during the first half of the nineteenth century. The same demands were placed on all these players, and it is entirely possible that Lanner's musicians performed to a higher standard than those in the average theatre orchestra. At all events, the instruments for which Lanner wrote were more modern and more advanced than those of many theatre orchestras, and in certain respects only the Court Opera Orchestra could hold a candle to them.The same is true of the orchestras formed by Johann Strauss the Elder and Johann Strauss the Younger. It was the latter’s orchestra that gave the local premières of a number of Wagner’s works, while the elder Strauss and Lanner both regaled their audiences with other highlights from what was then the contemporary, up-to-date repertory.
When Paganini undertook his tirst foreign tour and appeared for the first time in Vienna in 1828, he was not dubbed the "Devil's Violinist", as he was elsewhere. Instead, local audiences showed great understanding for what was so special about his technique and interpretative powers. His first concert was attended by both Schubert and Johann Strauss the Elder. The former wrote afterwards that he had "heard an angel singing", while Strauss responded by writing a Waltz à la Paganini, which is in fact a set of six waltzes with a coda. It reworks the "Campanella" theme from the final movement of the concerto that Paganini had written for his Viennese début and that he played for the first time on that occasion: Viennese audiences were captivated by the violinist's playing, and Strauss and his orchestra helped to disseminate reminiscences of the musician, even extending to the ballroom.
Much the same is true of Lanner's arrangement of ballet music by the Italian opera composer Saverio Mercadante (1795-1870),who was as popular in Vienna as Rossini and Bellini. Lanner arranged his Pas de neuf as a concert item for his own orchestra, its masterly instrumentation placing extreme demands on the wind section, demands that go far beyond anything expected ofthe usual opera or ballet orchestra of the time.
The autograph score of this unpublished work is now in the archives of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. The present recording is undoubtedly the first time that the work has been played since Lanner performed it with his orchestra. In writing it, Lanner brought a taste of grand Italian opera to his audience. For todays audiences, the piece affords admirable evidence of the high standards attained by the orchestras of both Lanner and Johann Strauss the Elder. We must not forget that both composers initially played together in the same orchestra before going their separate ways. Each of them was a very different person as a musician. Only in their artistic demands were they comparable.
For the present programme Nikolaus Harnoncourt has for the most part worked through the archives of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna.Three other pieces that are heard here for the first time since Strauss's day are the Kettenbrücke-Walzer (Chain Bridge Waltz), the galop Carnival in Paris and the Schäfer-Quadrille (Shepherd's Quadrille). All are performed in their original orchestration from manuscript sources preserved in Vienna. The Paganini Waltz is preserved in the Music Collection of the Vienna Library in the form of a set of contemporary parts and was made available to Nikolaus Harnoncourt through the intermediary of the present writer. The other works by Lanner are all performed on the basis of their first editions.
The decision to go back to the sources is necessary for two reasons. First,there is no modern performing material and, second, because existing performing material is often the result of later arrangements and adaptations. Even the present version of the Radetzky March - recently published by Doblinger in an edition by Norbert Rubey - differs in discernible ways from the one that is normally heard. The march is not ushered in by a side drum, and there are only two horns, rather than the usual four - in general, the instrumentation is more translucent. In the Trio, the usual arrangements even take melodic liberties with the original.
In terms of today’s orchestral practices, the instrumentation of both Johann Strauss the Elder and Joseph Lanner is unusual and generally not easy to realise in the ways intended by both of these composers. Among its characteristic features is the use of a bass trombone instead of the usual three trombones, while the oboe tends to be used not in pairs but individually. Also worth mentioning isthe use of clarinets and of valve trumpets in highly unusual keys. Today's orchestras no longer include trumpets in E, A, low G or lovv A. If their parts are transposed or played on the sort of trumpets that are found today, the sound is completely different: the same note may lie (and sound) relatively high on one instrument but much lower on the other. When these parts are transposed or reallocated to other instruments, the effects that Lanner and Strauss wrote into their scores are lost. Exactly the same is true of the clarinets. The Concentus Musicus uses wind instruments at all the pitches prescribed by both composers.
A further word on the valve trumpets: orchestras in the first half of the nineteenth century generally still used valveless natural trumpets. Trumpets with valves operated by small levers already existed at this date, but traditional orchestras were slow to adopt them, if at all. Both Lanner and Johann Strauss the Elder showed themselves to be more progressive in this regard: both composers used the new instruments, which produce a sound very different from that of the natural trumpet. They also made extreme use of their chromatic compass, drawing explicit attention in their autograph scores to the fact that valve trumpets - or "machine trumpets", as they called them - were necessary for their music.
Also worth mentioning in this context is a further detail of Lanner’s scores: just as Haydn began all his fair copies with the words "In nomine Domini" (In the name of the Lord), so Lanner began his with the words "Mit Gott" (With God).
The titles of the dance numbers by both Lanner and Strauss are eloquent, referring, as they do, to the reasons for a work’s composition, to its dedicatee or to certain of its musical features. The Shepherd's Quadrille is dance music of a pastoral character,while the Chain Bridge Waltz recalls the place where it was first performed, close to the new bridge over the Danube Canal. The Carnival in Paris, finally, received its first performance in Paris during a tour that the composer undertook with his orchestra. The Malapou-Galopp even takes us to New Caledonia - it is named after Malabou in the South Pacific. And Cerrito is the name of a region in Paraguay. Both places symbolise the exotic and the remote, the desire to break free from western civilization being a characteristic feature of life during the Biedermeier Age and of the years leading up to the outbreak of revolution in March 1848.
The Letters of Hans Jörgel from Gumpoldskirchen were a popular periodical in pre-1848 Vienna: in them, contemporary events were reviewed by a simple country dweller, whose comments are remarkably sophisticated. The Hans Jörgel-Polka is a dance that reflects the city dweller's typical yearning for nature and for the simple, apparently carefree lives of the rural population. But the widespread historicism of the age also finds expression in the dance music of the period and in the titles of some of these works: Corso Donati was a Florentine nobleman who lived in the late Middle Ages; a well-known partisan and rebel leader, he was caught up in countless disputes, in one of which he met his death. By the early nineteenth century he had taken on a new lease of life in literature and on the stage. The phrase "Hunting Galop" says as much about the music as the "Shepherd's Quadrille". The Schönbrunner, finally, introduces us to the beautiful, ideal world of a courtly celebration worthy of our admiration.
Mozart scholars have failed to find a satisfactory answer to the question of why the composer wrote so much dance music towards the end of his life. Why was he commissioned to do so? And how are we to interpret these commissions? Yet it remains a fact that although there was no period in his life when he did not write dance music, he composed incomparably more during his final years in Vienna. A further factor to be borne in mind is that these works evidently gave him pleasure and he did not regard them as tiresome commissions. All are artistic jewels that we need to know if we are to form a true opinion of Mozart as a musician.
The Six German Dances, K 571 were written for the 1789 carnival. This was a time when Austria was at war with Turkey - it was the last of its eight historical conflicts with the Ottoman Empire. To dance to "Turkish music" was to express the certainty of victory and increase the Austrians' feeling of patriotic self-esteem. (It is worth recalling that in Così fan tutte, which Mozart completed in January 1790, Ferrando and Guglielmo leave - ostensibly - to fight the Turks: Mozart was not afraid to include such contemporary references in his works and evidently enjoyed doing so.) This bellicose anti-Turkish sentiment is expressed by the sound of percussion and piccolo and by typical thematic ideas, and is also found in the Two Contredanses, K 6o3 and Five Contredanses, K 6o9 that were all written for the 1791 carnival. To single out individual dances and perform them either on their own or in other combinations is all part of a self-evident and long-established tradition.
A further practical aspect of the dance music of Mozart and his age is also worth mentioning here: the orchestras and ensembles that played at dances in his day were arranged onstage in very different ways from those that were found at concerts. Like their counterparts in opera orchestras, the musicians sat in one or more long rows raised above the dance floor on a narrow stage erected especially for them, or else they were placed in a narrow minstrels' gallery likewise intended for their own particular use. The reason for this practice is not made clear by contemporary sources, although there are of course plenty of acoustic and musical grounds that make such a seating plan seem plausible.
Contemporary audiences responded positively to Mozart's late dance music, which was disseminated not least in the form of keyboard reductions, helping to bring the composer's name to the attention of wider audiences and contributing to his popularity and even to his fame. In writing these dances, he produced some good music, just as he did in the case of other musical genres.