To quote Johann the younger once more on his father: "He has borne the fame of German dance-music over the whole world, and severe judges have not hesitated to acknowledge that his gay and piquant rhythms bubbled from the pure fount of musical art. As a conductor he had that indefinable quality which carried away the performers, was communicated by them to the hearers, and made their hearts and pulses beat faster." He was the first to introduce the custom of giving a name to his dance music, and each of his pieces--including one hundred and fifty waltzes, fourteen polkas, twenty-eight galops, nineteen marches, and thirty-five quadrilles, has its own title, either characteristically Viennese, or referring to his travels or the emotions which a dance piece is apt to evoke, or purely fanciful. The quadrille was imported by Strauss from Paris. His marches are the least interesting of his compositions, and his waltzes the most fascinating and meritorious, the polkas ranking next. In his early waltzes the elder Strauss often begins, like Schubert, without an introduction and ends with a very short coda. Gradually, however (though with exceptions), the introduction and coda assume greater dimensions; but it remained for Johann the son to show how greatly the musical and emotional value of the waltz can be increased by elaborating the slow amorous introduction as well as the coda, in which all the themes of the preceding numbers can once more be brought forward and ingeniously developed or combined. Schubert's last set of waltzes consists of a chain of twenty links or parts. The elder Strauss has usually only five or six links in his chain; and his son shows a tendency to decrease that number to three or four separate parts, while giving the introduction the aspect of a short overture, with several changes of tempo, often delightfully fore-shadowing the waltz themes in a dreamy, passionate and tender manner, as if interpreting the thoughts of the young lovers who perchance are looking forward to their first embrace in the disguise of a waltz. In the "Stories from the Vienna Forest" Waltzes, opus 325, the introduction covers more than two pages of the piano score--one hundred and twenty bars, with four changes of tempo. The first number consists of forty-four bars, whereas originally each number consisted of eight or sixteen bars only; and the coda of one hundred and fifty-seven bars. And that this waltz, like all his best ones, is intended quite as much for the concert hall as for the ball room is indicated by the signs for retarding or accelerating and by the insertion of eighteen bars which are marked "to be omitted in playing for a dance." I have noticed, however, that at Viennese dances, when conductors, players, and dancers are simultaneously entranced by the intoxicating Strauss music, there is a slight tendency on the part of the couples to yield to the _rubato_ or capricious coquetry of movement which is natural to this music.