Beyond Traditional Perspectives

Born as a simple peasant dance in the Austrian countryside, the waltz has grown into a nearly ubiquitous feature of classical and popular music. In the realm of solo piano music alone, the waltz has served as a common subject for experimentation and the expression of personal artistic idioms. The solo piano waltz grew significantly after the Romantic period, experiencing a myriad of styles, transformations, and exploitations by some of the most brilliant composers of the modern and postmodern periods. The waltz began from Ravel in grand nineteenth century fashion, but introduce startling changes in form and harmony. Between 1920 and 1950, the piano waltz splits into the traditional route, and the esoteric route, reflected by Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method. From 1950 to 1980, the eclecticism of the postmodern era splintered the piano waltz even further. After 1980, Pütz’s Waltzes, Gould’s Ghost Waltzes and Helps’ Shall We Dance fuse both the new and the old. This book invites the interested reader to step outside the “quaint” piano waltzes of Chopin and Tchaikovsky, and take a journey through the twentieth-century, where the waltz is more alive than at any point in its history.