On the Beautiful Blue Danube almost sank beneath the waves at its launching. Johann Herbeck, director of the Vienna Men’s Chorus, asked Strauss if he could provide a new piece for his ensemble, and Strauss responded with a melody inspired by a line from a poem of Karl Isidor Beck: “On the Danube, on the beautiful, blue Danube.” Herbeck assigned Josef Weyl, a police clerk who sang in the chorus and a poet-manqué, to concoct some verses to fit Strauss’ exquisite melody. “Vienna, be gay! And what for, pray? The light of the arc! Here it’s still dark!” was the best that Weyl could do. (Hans Fantel suggested that this doggerel may have been prompted by the carbon-electrode lights just beginning to sprout on Vienna’s street corners.) The press notices of this new choral number’s premiere on February 15, 1867 were not unkind, but Strauss judged the whole thing a marginal fiasco, and tucked The Blue Danube in his desk. Later that year, he was invited to take part in the International Exhibition in Paris that Napoleon III was staging in honor of himself. His music proved so successful in the French capital that he dusted off On the Beautiful Blue Danube, and displayed it to the delirious Parisians. Within weeks, demand for the work had spread across the western world, and On the Beautiful Blue Danube has since come to be regarded as the quintessential expression of the Viennese waltz.