A PEASANTS' BALL
We were especially fortunate whilst recently there in witnessing not only peasant dances such as we have referred to, but also a peasant ball.
Amongst the dances specially notable was a variety of "Gaillarde," and "Allemande," a type of the dance known as "Siebensprung," where the male performers make a series of seven different movements with hands, elbows, knees, feet; and then almost touch the floor with their foreheads whilst their female companions pirouette around them. The "Allemande," with its graceful twirling and twisting, and interlacing of the arms, and graceful bending of the bodies of the dancers, showing off the lines of the women's figures, is especially picturesque.
Then came types of other and more local dances, in one of which the women pirouetted round and round the room until scarcely able to stand, their short skirts gradually seeming to become inflated like balloons, and ascending inch by inch until knee high, when suddenly the dancers paused, their skirts fell, and with a sharp twirl and swish the latter were wound around their lower limbs in plastic folds.
Then there was a pretty dance commencing with a figure of the "Allemande," and proceeding to a courtship in pantomime, in which the women peered shyly at their partners between the circle formed by the interlaced arms, and ending by the men stooping, and whilst continuing a waltz step, suddenly seizing their companions round the knees and lifting them breast high, all the while continuing to circle the room in a "springy" rather than a gliding waltz.
Then followed a still more dramatic dance-play, in which the whole story of a peasant courtship from early days until the wedding was depicted in pantomime, with half a dozen characters beside the happy pair. Most of the performers were not only graceful and finished dancers, but were possessed of distinct dramatic gifts. The folk songs, accompanied upon rather weird instruments consisting of shepherds' pipes, guitars, fiddles, horns, and what, until it was put together, appeared to be a collection of short pieces of gas pipe of various lengths or strips of metal, were intensely interesting and musical.
What struck us perhaps more than anything else, save the actual dancing and singing, was the charming manners of the women, and the perfect manners of the men. Peasants though they were, there was a complete absence of coarseness or roughness in general behaviour, in place of which one had perhaps a rather grave courtesy. And when at last it occurred to some of the men that perhaps the "foreigners" might like to dance, they approached the ladies of the party with a striking grace and courtesy of manner. The Salzburg girls, too, in their pretty costumes were just as gracious and charming as English girls of the upper middle class, when asked to favour some of the English men of the party with a dance. The scene was made even more kaleidoscopic in effect when at last the sombre evening dress of the latter mingled with and formed a foil to gay kerchiefs, snowy white bodices worn under a type of bolero jacket of the women, and the green and bright brown waistcoats and short knee breeches of the men. Across some of the waistcoats, which were many of them fastened with silver buttons, jangled quite a collection of coins, exhibiting (so we were told) the financial position of the wearer, so that any girl might know what a suitor or possible suitor was worth! We hope that no young man ever puts upon his waistcoat a single silver krone piece more than he is entitled to. But if very much in love to what deception of this kind might he not stoop? And mercenary indeed must be the maiden who would not in the end pardon his offence, which was so warm a tribute to the power of her charms.
SALZBURG MARKETWOMEN