During the lifetime of Frederick Chopin (1810 – 1849), the Waltz became very popular, both as a dance and as saloon music. No worthy middle-class home could afford to be without the piano and the Waltz was the perfect piece for the pretty daughter or wife to play.
The dance was intimate and one cannot help to reflect how uneasy mothers and fathers were, watching their daughter in familiarly arms of a stranger. The grace sweeps and close body carriage in which the freedom is returned to the females.
Chopin himself had poured scorn on the Waltz, writing home from Vienna. “They actually call Waltzes works”. And so eventually did he as the businessman he was. His own Waltzes undoubtedly reached their finest flowering in Paris but he first discovered the form in Warsaw. He took special pains over the structure and continuity and the organic principle of developing variations lies in one way or the other behind most of them.
