Weekly SpinOn:
The Maiden’s Dance

The Maiden’s Dance is a playlist about dance — but not ballroom or ballet. The focus is on folk dances and music inspired by folk traditions. These pieces draw on rural rhythms, local stories, and traditional forms. Some are lively, others reflective, but all share a connection to music made for movement and community. Each recording in this playlist was conducted by Herbert von Karajan, showing his own interest in folk-inspired repertoire across different periods of his career.

 

Track 1: Dance of the Polovtsian Maidens from Prince Igor – Alexander Borodin

This playlist begins, quite literally, with a dance of maidens — but this one isn’t light-footed or innocent. Alexander Borodin’s Dance of the Polovtsian Maidens is a ritualistic scene of spectacle, sensuality and power. In the opera Prince Igor, the women dance not for joy, but to entertain their captors. The music carries that tension — pulsing, seductive, and vivid.

Borodin wasn’t a full-time composer. He was also a chemist and a professor, and wrote music only in the margins of a demanding academic career. He was part of the so-called “Mighty Handful” of Russian composers in the 19th century who wanted to create a national musical voice, rooted in Russian themes, scales, and stories. Prince Igor was his great operatic project —one he famously worked on for nearly two decades but never finished. The opera was eventually completed by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov after Borodin’s sudden death in 1887 from his sketches, including the dances that would become some of Borodin’s most famous music.

The Dance of the Polovtsian Maidens appears in Act II of the opera, where the captured maidens of the Polovtsian Khan Konchak perform for Prince Igor, their prisoner. The music is seductive, rhythmic, and colored with an Eastern, almost Persian atmosphere — a stylized musical fantasy of the steppe peoples. It’s not an accurate ethnography, but it captures the 19th-century Russian imagination: wild, free, dangerous, and beautiful.

In this recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan adds his signature touch: he doesn’t play up the earthiness or folkloristic grit — instead, he leans into the dance’s sensuality and polish. Recorded in the 1950s, this is young Karajan, still in London, bringing an almost cinematic clarity to the score. The tempo is spacious but not slow; the orchestration glows. The woodwinds flutter like veils in a stylized ballet, the strings shimmer, and every entrance feels choreographed. It’s no longer a dance around the fire — it’s a dance on a concert stage, refined but still pulsing.

Track 2: Slavonic Dance No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 72 – Antonín Dvořák

Unlike Borodin, who staged an imagined Eastern world in Prince Igor, Dvořák wrote from within his own culture. While the melodies in the Slavonic Dances are his own, they closely follow the shapes, rhythms, and spirit of traditional Slavic dances. The result feels more organically folkloristic — less theatrical, more rooted.

Dvořák wrote two sets of Slavonic Dances, inspired by the success of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances but shaped by the musical language of his Czech homeland. The first set, Op. 46, made him famous in 1878. Over a decade later, in 1886, he returned to the idea with Op. 72, a more mature, nuanced collection. Like Brahms, he avoided direct quotations of folk tunes, instead composing original material that feels traditional in mood and motion.

Dance No. 2, marked Allegretto grazioso, is one of the most tender in the set. It’s based on the dumka, a Slavic dance form known for its shifts between melancholy and liveliness. But Dvořák keeps this one gentle throughout. The music moves in soft waves, with clear melodic lines and a rhythm that never quite settles — like someone circling a thought they can’t quite let go of.

When Karajan recorded this track in 1959, he combined it with Brahms’s Hungarian Dances — a deliberate pairing that highlights the close relationship between the two composers’ stylized approaches to folk music. Karajan treats the Dvořák with elegant restraint: he doesn’t push the folk character to the foreground, but lets the phrasing unfold naturally, with warm strings and luminous winds.

 

Track 3: Polka from Schwanda the Bagpiper – Jaromír Weinberger

We now come to a much lesser-known countryman of Dvořák — Jaromír Weinberger. Today, most people know only this one piece: the fast and joyful Polka from his opera Schwanda the Bagpiper. But in the 1920s and 30s, Weinberger was famous. His music was performed all over Europe, and Schwanda became an international hit.

Weinberger was born in Prague in 1896, just five years after Dvořák’s death. Like Dvořák, he loved Czech folk music and used it in his own works. And like Dvořák, he studied at the Prague Conservatory — the same school where Dvořák had once been a professor and later director. By his early thirties, Weinberger was a successful composer and conductor. When Schwanda the Bagpiper premiered in 1926, it was an instant success. The opera was translated into many languages and performed on major stages across the world — something very rare for Czech music at the time.

The Polka comes from a lively scene in the opera. The music is fast, playful, and full of clever details. You can hear the energy of Czech dance, but also the skill of a composer who knew how to write for the big stage. It’s joyful and dramatic at the same time.

But Weinberger’s success didn’t last. He was Jewish, and when the Nazis came to power, he had to flee Europe. He moved to the United States in 1939 and continued to write music, but never reached the same level of fame again. By the time he took his own life after years of depression and health problems in 1967, his name had mostly been forgotten.

Still, this Polka lives on. It shows Weinberger at his best — full of rhythm, color, and charm. You can clearly hear the time gap between this and the earlier tracks: the harmonies are sharper, the orchestration more vivid, the pace more theatrical. It may be based on folk dance, but it sounds much more modern — a new century’s take on an old tradition.

Interestingly enough, although Weinberger’s fame had long been forgotten, Karajan made two recordings of the piece: one in 1954 and one in 1960, both with the Philharmonia Orchestra. He had conducted it in his time in Ulm in the 1930s in 6 concerts and seems to not have forgotten about it although many others did.

Track 4: Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald, Op. 325 – Johann Strauss II

We close our playlist with one of the most famous dance pieces ever written: Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald — Tales from the Vienna Woods — by Johann Strauss II, the “Waltz King.” This piece takes us from folk-inspired concert works to the very heart of dance music: the Viennese waltz. It’s elegant, charming, and full of movement — but underneath its polished surface, there’s something more nostalgic and atmospheric.

Strauss composed this piece in 1868, at the height of his fame. He had already written dozens of waltzes, polkas, and galops for the ballrooms of imperial Vienna. But this one is different. It’s longer, more expressive, and begins in a curious way: a few formal ballroom gestures, almost like a false start — and then silence. What follows is something else entirely: the gentle plucking of a zither, a traditional Austrian folk instrument. That simple, rustic sound instantly shifts the mood. We’re no longer in the city — we’re somewhere in the countryside, hearing the first notes of a dance from far away.

That zither solo remains the piece’s most distinctive touch. It gives Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald a quiet, rural flavor before the full orchestra gradually takes over and the real waltzing begins. Strauss doesn’t quote specific folk melodies, but he captures the feeling of Vienna’s border between city life and forest retreat — a cultural in-between. The music swells, glides, and sparkles; then it recedes again, ending not in triumph but in a kind of gentle memory. It’s a musical postcard: birdsong, charm, and grace wrapped into one.

Karajan returned to this repertoire often. He recorded Strauss’s waltzes multiple times, including this one with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1959 — the same year he also recorded Dvořák’s and Brahms’s dances, though in separate sessions. Under his baton, the piece becomes more than ballroom music — it feels like a story in sound. He stretches the phrasing, highlights the woodwinds, and lets the music breathe. The elegance is there, but so is a quiet sense of longing. It’s not just a dance — it’s a memory of one.

—  Pia Bernauer (Karajan Institute, Salzburg)