An der schönen blauen Donau

The Blue Danube began as a choral piece for a carnival evening, written in the shadow of a lost war. In 1866 the Vienna Men's Choral Association reminded Johann Strauss II of a composition he had promised them a year earlier. Austria had just been beaten by Prussia at Königgrätz, many carnival balls were cancelled, and the choir wanted a waltz for its 1867 gathering. Their house poet, a police official named Josef Weyl, wrote satirical, topical words to Strauss's music. The title came from poems by Karl Isidor Beck, which in fact describe the Danube at Baja in Hungary, not Vienna. The choral premiere on 15 February 1867 has long been described as only a mild success, but the German Wikipedia account, based on the Strauss scholar Norbert Linke's work with original sources, says it was a hit; one newspaper called it a Schlager, the first documented use of the word for a popular song. His new orchestral version, first played on 10 March, struggled at first among 25 new works the Strauss brothers produced that season. Then he took it to the Paris World's Fair in 1867, where Le beau Danube bleu became a sensation. The sheet music is thought to have sold close to a million copies, yet under his publishing contract Strauss's share came to just 25 gulden. Brahms, asked for an autograph, wrote out its opening bars and noted that sadly they were not his. Today it is Austria's secret anthem, and every New Year it plays the country into the next year.