There is no classical music concert that speaks more to the imagination than the New Year’s concert of the Vienna Philharmonic. The splendour of the Golden Hall, adorned to the heights of brilliance – with floral arrangements more expensive than the average annual income of an Austrian – and the reassuring familiarity of the unmissable encores The blue Danube Waltz and the Radetzky March guarantee that an audience of a million tune in to the event on television on 1 January at exactly 11:15 am local time. Anyone who wishes to attend the spectacle in person can easily have to pay a thousand euros for a ticket.

With all its pomp and ceremony, the New Year’s Concert may be thought to be a centuries-old tradition. But no, the custom is not even a hundred years old. On 31 December 1939, music was used for the first time in the Austrian capital to ring in the new year – and that was also the only time that the concert took place on New Year’s Eve, rather than on New Year’s Day. The date was no coincidence: a few months earlier, the Second World War had broken out. It was with this new event that Nazi Germany sought to boost the morale of the soldiers on the front, and at the same time to fill its war coffers. The popular tunes of Johann Strauss and his relatives were in that sense ideal to get a great many people to get on their feet. At the end of the war, the Nazi past was soon forgotten, and the concert continued every year without interruption.

Despite these dubious origins, there are few orchestras today that have not jumped on the bandwagon. 1 January is of course untouchable, and the Brussels Philharmonic has been celebrating since its existence the new year with music in the first few weeks of January. And, of course, the graceful waltzes are also an essential part of our programme.

Just like the New Year’s concert itself, the waltz is not all that old as a genre. In Southern Germany, there had been various local variants of a dance in ¾ time, to which, according to Goethe, ‘people were waltzing and circled round each other like spheres’. And yet, waltz was used in that era mainly as a verb. Only at the end of the 18th century did the waltz come to be known as a separate genre. The Journal des Luxus und der Moden devoted an article to nightlife in Berlin, where ‘waltzes and nothing but waltzes are now so much in fashion that at dances … one need only to waltz, and all is well.’

Nevertheless, there was also a good amount of criticism of the unbridled flamboyance. Seen through contemporary glasses, used to twerking rear-ends, half-naked video clips and sensual hip movements, it is hard to believe that the graceful oom-pah-pah in three-fourths time that seems outdated today was once the scandal of the ballroom. Medical professionals worried about the speed at which the dancers were twirled around. But it was mainly the common folk who were critical of the ‘erotic character’ of the waltz. Partners had to hold each other far too close, and men often had to lift the women’s long dresses so as not to trip on the fabric in the whirlwind. That often made for offensive positions with too much exposed skin. In the darker corners of the dance floor, things could sometimes be even more indecent. Pamphlets were printed with fulminating titles like Proof that waltzing is an important source of our generation’s weakness of body and soul, and according to some sources, the waltz was even banned in certain places.

Seen through contemporary glasses, used to twerking rear-ends, half-naked video clips and sensual hip movements, it is hard to believe that the graceful oom-pah-pah in three-fourths time that seems outdated today was once the scandal of the ballroom. Medical professionals worried about the speed at which the dancers were twirled around.

As is the case with many trends, the craze soon died out again at the beginning of the 19th century. Only the Viennese remained faithful practitioners of the waltz. Famous halls such as Zum Sperl and the monumental Apollo Hall, with a dance floor for 6,000 couples, opened their doors in the first decade of the century. For their enduring popularity, we have a new generation of composers to thank. Musicians like Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Joseph Lanner, and the Strauss family went on to give the waltz a more serious treatment. It was mainly the second generation of Strausses, with the brothers Johann and Josef at the helm, raised the waltz from something common to a more refined musical genre, with catchy tunes and inventive rhythms, and made the waltz into the elegant figurehead that it is today.