As the steps and the pulses quicken, there comes on that exhilaration of mood familiar to all dancers, caused by the lights, the flowers, the perfumes, the music, the gay costumes, the beauty and the gallantry of a ball-room, the rhythmic exercise of the muscles and free circulation of the blood, all acting together to produce upon the senses and the fancy an effect amounting almost to intoxication; an echo of which is awakened in every breast, which has felt it often and keenly, on catching a strain of distant dance music, to the end of life. This mood is depicted in the composition before us by an exuberance of runs and ornamentation, following the first simple enunciation of the waltz melody.
After rising to quite a little climax of ecstasy, this mood lapses abruptly into the second waltz theme, slower, more lyric, dreamy, languorous, almost melancholy in tone, conveying that impression which every susceptible person feels, to the verge of rising tears, after listening long to waltz music, which is quite different from its first inspiring effect, and which every devoted dancer feels equally surely in the prolonged waltz. The time has come when one has grown so accustomed to the waltz movement as to be scarcely conscious of it, seems rather, in a state of rhythmic rest, to be floating on the atmosphere, which ebbs and flows to a three-four measure. Thoughts, breath, pulses, flying feet, the murmur of voices, all existence has adapted itself to this waltz tempo, as to its normal element, and the very planets seem to swing through space in triple rhythm. The true waltz has but two moods, which touch the opposite poles of emotion—that of joyous elation and of dreamy languor. We may call them the Allegro and the Penseroso of the waltz. And Weber, in the “Invitation to the Dance,” has recognized this and woven his composition of but two themes, representing the contrasting phases of feeling described.
In the midst of the second warm and sinuous melody, we hear again the masculine voice, in less conventional accents, and the soft responses of the treble, through quite a colloquy, while the accompaniment keeps ever steadily to the undulating waltz movement, till the two voices merge gradually into the general murmur and are drowned in the flourishes of the orchestra, as our couple disappears in the whirl, with which the waltz, taking up again the first sparkling melody with accelerated pace, draws with increasing confusion to its close. When the dance has ceased, and the orchestra is silent, the introductory theme recurs, as the gentleman leads his lady to a seat and expresses his thanks with the sedate courtesy of his first greeting; and thus ends this charming composition and this glimpse into that gay social world, where the hand some, talented, but rather dissolute young composer was only too great a favorite in his early years.
In spite of a certain baldness and primitive naïveté noticeable in the treatment at times, the “Invitation to the Dance,” so widely and justly popular, is one of Weber’s ablest pianoforte compositions, both from a musical and a dramatic standpoint. Regarded from that of pure music, it is especially interesting from the fact that it was the first composition to raise the waltz, used up to that time only as an accompaniment for dancing, to the level of legitimate and recognized artistic musical forms. In the hands of Schubert, Chopin, Strauss, Rubinstein, and Moszkowski, these successive kings of the waltz, it has since reached its present development.
The “Invitation to the Dance” was written a few months after Weber’s happy marriage with the opera singer, Caroline Brandt, and is dedicated to “My Caroline.”
Weber: Rondo in E Flat, Op. 62
The rondo is the most ancient, simple, and natural form of homophonic musical construction. It is based upon the folk-song and is always in one or the other of the more or less complex song forms. It consists of a simple melodic period, usually eight measures in length, bright and cheerful in character, alternating several times, virtually unchanged at each reappearance, with one or more subordinate subjects, in a more lyric or dramatic mood, for the sake of variety and contrast.
An apt but homely illustration of the rondo may be found in that most laborious and indigestible product of American cookery, that culinary absurdity, originating in our natural tendency toward display and dyspepsia, the layer cake. In the most primitive form of rondo, or more strictly speaking, rondino, the first theme appears but twice, corresponding to a first and second layer of cake, with the filling of cream or jelly between, represented by the second contrasting subject, of a more piquant and savory flavor, between the first theme and its reappearance—a sort of musical Washington pie. In the more extended forms, the principal melody recurs several times, occasionally with slight changes of treatment, but without radical transformation or development, like a successive series of cake layers of slightly different flavor, but the same fundamental material and an entirely different filling between them, each time; and a coda, or musical postscript, is occasionally added by way of frosting over the whole.
The rondo form is by nature adapted to the expression of the lighter, more pleasurable emotions. Graceful fancy, playful tenderness, arch coquetry, sparkling vivacity, here find their most ready and appropriate embodiment. The form is sometimes employed to express pensive sadness or restless, impatient longing, but never effectively to utter grave, profound thought or grand and lofty sentiment. Hence it most frequently appears as the final movement of symphony or sonata, a sort of light, pleasant dessert after the more substantial repast.