G'day Hrothgar,

Like many dances that had a separate life in European tradition, the Varso was taken up by the French Ballroom dance masters ... and had brief period as a worldwide "dance craze" ... about the 1880s. In many countries, after it was no longer the latest fashionable dance, it survived among keen dancers ... in Australia for at least another century.

I know that a Tasmanian band I talked to in the mid 1980s said they needed to have a few varsos up their sleeves when playing in the rural districts around Devonport/Deloraine. I might also mention the my wife Patricia's grandmother, born in Tasmania in 1876, knew the dance ... and recognised piano pieces Pat played as being Varsos ... so she may have learnt it at the end of its fashionable period. She had an almost untouched memory of 19th century dancing, as she married a non-dancer, in 1910, and never danced again.

It certainly does not surprise me that there is a Norwegian version. Various European nationalities have the dance lurking in their local folklore - often with interesting localisations of the name: Italian - Vesuviana in Naples contexts ... but Varsoviana in musical compositions; One of the oddest is the Germanic settlers in Queensland (Australia) calling it Vater Weisskopf ... more or less "Santa Claus" ("Father Whitehead").

A lot of mis-reading come from trying to term the French for 'woman from Warsaw' into something more local or comprehensible. One shift goes: Varsovienne / Varsovienna / Valse Vienna / Waltz of Vienna /... Viennese Waltz ... ?. Interestingly, several of the tunes collected as Valse Vienna or Waltz of Vienna are attached to dances using the second and third parts of the Swedish Varsovienne - the Mazurka step and the round waltz, rather then the first two, as in the form most danced in Australia.

Regards,

Bob Bolton