Sehnsuchts-Mazur (Yearning Mazurka) Op.89

By far the most fashionable dances during the period when the ballrooms of Vienna were ruled by the second generation of the Strauss dynasty - Johann II and his brothers Josef and Eduard - were the waltz and the polka. The latter, which had hopped over the border from Czechoslovakia in 2/4 time, was a comparatively recent craze but was so popular that it displaced everything else but the waltz. The two most prominent dance composers of the earlier generation, Johann Strauss I and his slightly older colleague Joseph Lanner, both wrote dozens of waltzes and many gallops but few polkas. Lanner apparently preferred the Polish mazurka to the Bohemian polka. Certainly, he wrote eight examples of the mazurka - including Der Uhlane in 1833 and the Sehnsuchts-Mazur a year later, both of them with solo violin parts - and only three polkas. He failed, however, to make it stick. Even though the displaced rhythmic accents of the mazurka make it quite different from the waltz, there was room in Vienna, it seems, for only one dance in triple time.