Émile Waldteufel

Émile Waldteufel (1837–1915), the waltz king of Paris, was born in Strasbourg and had his first lessons from his father before studying at the Paris Conservatoire with Laurent and then Marmontel, where Massenet was a fellow pupil. At twenty-seven he became court pianist to Empress Eugénie, and Napoleon III put him in charge of the music at the state balls, which took him to Biarritz and Compiègne and into the company of the leading artists of the Second Empire. The empire fell in 1870 and his native Alsace passed to Germany for the rest of his life, but his fortunes turned again in October 1874, when the Prince of Wales heard his waltz Manolo at a Paris soirée and resolved to make him known in Britain. A long contract with the London publisher Hopwood & Crew followed, and through Charles Coote's dance orchestra his music reached Buckingham Palace and the ballrooms of the world. Les Patineurs, the Skaters' Waltz, and España remain the pieces by which he is remembered. Joseph Heyberger, a musician of Strasbourg, taught him alongside his father, and at Compiègne he accompanied the emperor, who played the violin. Les Patineurs dates from 1882; he conducted in London in 1885, in Berlin in 1889, where Johann Strauss was a friendly rival, and at the Paris Opéra balls of 1890 and 1891, going on with the presidential balls until he retired in 1899. He died at his home in Paris at the age of seventy-seven.