Invitation to the Dance (Weber)

Invitation to the Dance (Aufforderung zum Tanz), Op. 65, J. 260, is a piano piece in rondo form written by Carl Maria von Weber in 1819. It is also well known in the 1841 orchestration by Hector Berlioz. It is sometimes called Invitation to the Waltz, but this is a mistranslation of the original.

Weber dedicated Invitation to the Dance to his wife Caroline (they had been married only a few months). He labelled the work "rondeau brillante", and he wrote it while also writing his opera Der Freischütz.

It was the first concert waltz to be written: that is, the first work in waltz form meant for listening rather than for dancing. John Warrack calls it "the first and still perhaps the most brilliant and poetic example of the Romantic concert waltz, creating within its little programmatic framework a tone poem that is also an apotheosis of the waltz in a manner that was to remain fruitful at least until Ravel's choreographic poem, La valse…".

It was also the first piece that, rather than being a tune for the dancers to dance to or a piece of abstract music, was a programmatic description of the dancers themselves.

Invitation to the Dance was part of the repertoire of Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, and many other pianists. It has been recorded by great artists of the past such as Artur Schnabel, Alfred Cortot, Ignaz Friedman and Yvonne Lefébure, through to those of the present day such as Stephen Hough, Jean-François Heisser, Michael Endres, Hamish Milne, and Balázs Szokolay. The Carl Tausig transcription has been recorded by Benno Moiseiwitsch and Philip Fowke.

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