Of course the honor of making the waltz cosmopolitan does not belong to the Strausses alone. The Austrian Lanner, the Bohemian Labitzky, the Hungarian Gungl and others had their share, but they can be regarded merely as satellites, who could only revolve around the world by revolving around Strauss. Nor did Strauss invent the waltz. It "just growed," like Topsy, among the people, and the time and even the country of its origin are under dispute. It was at Vienna however, about a century ago, that it first came into notice; and as it was developed chiefly by Viennese composers, and is danced most generally by the people of that part of Europe, the popular notion that Vienna is the home of the waltz does not call for correction. A few waltz-like pieces had been written by Mozart and Beethoven, but they are, as Dr. Hanslick remarks, "astonishingly dry and insignificant," and it remained for that genuine Viennese genius Franz Schubert, to first infuse true musical genius into this form of composition. Schubert is the real originator of the modern waltz, as of the Lied for the voice, and the song for the piano. In the Peters edition there is, besides a volume of Schubert's Marches and one of Polonaises, one of his "Dances" (seventy-four pages), mostly waltzes, "valses nobles," "valses sentimentales." No. 13 of the last name is that most exquisite piece which Liszt has made such fine use of in his "Soirées de Vienne," and which may be regarded as the predecessor, and the equal, of the noble waltzes of Chopin, Rubinstein, Brahms and other modern composers. Indeed, these Schubert waltzes contain the germs of most of the later developments of the waltz for the piano. In thus giving Schubert his due we do not detract from the merit of the elder Strauss. He was of course far from having the genius of Schubert, but he did a great work in transferring the Schubert spirit to the orchestral and dance-waltz. For the first time people came to cafés and dance halls to listen to music for its own sake instead of regarding it merely as an aid to conversation and dancing. Strauss not only had the gift of inventing original themes, he also had the skill to clothe them in a charming orchestral garb. Great composers, like Cherubini, Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, recognized his talent, and Wagner wrote in 1863 that "a single Strauss waltz surpasses in grace, refinement and real musical substance, the majority of the oft-laboriously-collected foreign products."