Skaters’ Waltz (Les Patineurs), Op.183

Emile Waldteufel, who worked mainly in Paris, is with Franz Lehár one of the two most popular waltz composers after Johann Strauss II. In the most famous of all his compositions, the Skaters’ Waltz, written at the height of his powers in 1882, he reveals not only a considerable gift for melody but also, in spite of an obvious debt to his Viennese contemporaries, an early inclination towards the French tendency to adopt a more relaxed attitude to the form, reducing the number of waltzes in the sequence and occasionally - as in the main theme of the Skaters’ Waltz - sliding rather than skipping into the triple-time rhythms.