Immediately after Austria had been defeated by the Prussians in 1866, The Blue Danube Waltz was composed.
At the first performance, it was performed with a chorus which sang a political poem, a wretched poem, to the effect that things would get better in spite of the defeat, Austria would rise again. The audience, gloomy and ashamed, remained unconvinced. Strauss shrugged his shoulders—what was one waltz more or less to him? The following year he appeared at the Paris World Exhibition. He remembered the “Blue Danube” and he now performed it as a purely orchestral composition, without the words. It proved an immediate sensation. Paris went mad over it. He had to perform it every night. The Prince of Wales heard it and, returning to London, whistled it to his mother, Queen Victoria. It made its triumphant way through Europe and America, and though it has been maltreated in a hundred versions, and though it is over-familiar to all of us, it still delights and enchants – if it is played well.
Here it is played in its original version, as Strauss played it in Paris.