Popular Culture
The specifically Viennese sentiment associated with Strauss's melody has made it a sort of unofficial Austrian national anthem. The waltz is traditionally broadcast by all public-law television and radio stations exactly at midnight on New Year's Eve, and on New Year's Day it is a customary encore piece at the annual Vienna New Year's Concert. The first few bars are the interval signal of Österreichischer Rundfunk's international programs.
The international popularity of the music was reinforced by its prominent use in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the waltz is heard as a Pan Am space plane docks with a space station while another spacecraft departs for the Moon. The music suggests a parallel between the intricate docking procedure and the role of dancers in a waltz. The waltz is also heard over the film's closing credits. This use of this piece has led to further use of the waltz in pastiche.
Read more about this topic: The Blue Danube
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“The very nursery tales of this generation were the nursery tales of primeval races. They migrate from east to west, and again from west to east; now expanded into the “tale divine” of bards, now shrunk into a popular rhyme.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
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