In a frequently quoted letter of January 1787, Mozart reported to his friend in Vienna about a ball he had just attended in Prague, where he was delighted to have seen people ‘hopping around with sheer delight to the music of my “Figaro.” In an age before copyright, Mozart would not have received any income from arrangements of his music made by other composers. He nevertheless had reason to be pleased: the presence of music from Figaro at the Prague ball was a sign of its great popularity with the public there, and the ballroom dance arrangements might even help drive the opera’s further success in the theatre.

Arrangements of popular Viennese stage works for ballroom dancing were a new development in Mozart’s lifetime, and they quickly accounted for a significant portion of the dance music in circulation on the sheet music market, most of it in the form of keyboard transcriptions. Today, apart from a few exceptions, such as the arrangements from Mozart’s Figaro (including Mozart’s own contredanse K. 609), most of this music is unfamiliar. Yet this body of music can offer important insights into various aspects of Viennese cultural life at the turn of the nineteenth century, including operatic and balletic reception history, the commercialization of music and theatre during the early flowering of the sheet music market, and the overlaps between different areas of Viennese music. This presentation explores the wider context of dance arrangements from the Viennese stage, and offers new perspectives on the early reception history of Mozart’s Figaro in Vienna as well as that of other important works of the period, from the Viganó-Beethoven ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus to the stage works of Wenzel Müller, Gioachino Rossini or Daniel-François-Esprit Auber.

Dr. Erica Buurman is Director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies and Associate Professor in the School of Music and Dance at San José State University, CA.