Cycloiden op. 207 - Johann Strauss II

Cycloiden (Cycloids), waltz op. 207. Author: Johann Strauss II (1825 - 1899).
Picture: "The Banks at Oise" by Alfred Sisley.
The 32-year-old Johann Strauss lifted the title of his enchanting waltz Cycloiden straight from the everyday scientific vocabulary familiar to "the Gentlemen Technical Students at Vienna University", for whose ball in the Sofienbad-Saal on 10 February 1858 he wrote and first conducted this waltz dedication. Since in the Vienna of that time military orchestras were only permitted in exceptional circumstances to provide the music for balls, Johann and his brother Josef once again enjoyed undivided sovereignty over the numerous carnival-time dance festivals. Indeed, on 28 February in the Volksgarten at the Strauss brothers' traditional revue of novelties composed for that year's Vienna Carnival, Cycloiden was just one of ten new works presented by Johann, while Josef contributed a further five numbers.
Cycloids, and their more complicated variants like epicycloids and hypocycloids, fall into the classification of 'special curves', and were developed partly as a result of the studies of the Greeks into pure geometry, but principally through the influence of analytic geometry. The cycloid itself is one of the most celebrated of all special curves and describes the locus of a point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a straight line. The name cycloid was given circa 1599 by Galileo Galilei, who later recommended the form of the cycloid for the arches of bridges. Applying the principle in 1658, Sir Christopher Wren discovered that the length of a single arch is four times the diameter of the generating circle. Not surprisingly, the illustrator of the title page design for the first piano edition of Johann Strauss's Cycloiden Walzer restricted himself to a straightforward circle incorporating the name of the work and its composer together with the dedication to the students. Alongside this feature he preferred to depict not only the tools of the technician (like set square and compasses), but also a number of mankind's more tangible technical achievements, such as the steamship, lighthouse, theodolite, steam engine, blast furnace and plough.