Joseph Lanner

Joseph Lanner, born in Vienna in 1801, was, alongside the elder Johann Strauss, one of the two founding fathers of the classical Viennese waltz. Largely self-taught, he began playing the violin in dance ensembles as a boy and formed a small string band that grew into a celebrated orchestra. For a time the young Johann Strauss I played in and helped lead Lanner’s group, before the two parted, amicably at first and then as rivals, to dominate the dance halls of Vienna in the 1820s and 1830s. Lanner refined the waltz from a simple peasant dance into an elegant, melodically graceful concert form, with a gentler, more lyrical sensibility than his rival’s fierier style; his Die Schönbrunner and Die Werber are among the loveliest products of the early Romantic Viennese dance. He composed over two hundred works before his early death in 1843, at only forty-two. Lanner laid the foundations on which the Strauss dynasty would build the waltz’s golden age.