Sphärenklänge, op. 235

Josef Strauss wrote this waltz for the carnival season of 1868 and it was played at the ball of the Vienna medical students. The title takes up the ancient notion of the music of the spheres, and the long introduction — tremolo strings, harp, a slowly rising figure — was unusually ambitious for dance music intended for a specific evening. It is now generally regarded as the finest of his some 280 works, and Johann is said to have remarked that his brother was the more gifted of the two and that he himself was merely the more popular.