Lob der Frauen

Johann Strauss II

Lob der Frauen (In Praise of Women): Polka-Mazurka, Op.315

Feminism was presumably not so advanced in 1867, when Johann II’s polka Lob der Frauen was first performed at the Vienna Carnival, that there were objections to it on the grounds that a piece written by a man in praise of women was a patronising exercise in male condescension. It was no doubt taken as it was innocently intended. Certainly, as a particularly graceful example of the Polka-Mazurka, a dance that ingeniously combines the duple-time step of the polka with the triple-time metre of the mazurka, it would have been difficult to resist from any point of view. Though slower and less energetic than the average polka, it is only a little longer and is restricted to three sections, the last of which recalls the first.