The Ländler had just passed the heyday of its vogue as Austria's premiere dance during the last years of the nineteenth century's second decade, and would shortly be brought to the brink of extinction by its quicker-tempoed sister-dance, the waltz. Franz Schubert was most likely to have written the more-or-less undateable 17 Ländler, along with the 12 waltzes and 9 ecossaises of his Op. 18 (D. 145) during that time. Schubert's 17 Op. 18 Ländler capture the once-rustic dance at its healthiest and most good-natured, and it is not at all difficult, listening to them, to appreciate the wistful nostalgia that some late German Romantic composers (Mahler key among them, Bruckner not far behind), many years later, would feel for the dance.

The 17 Ländler of Op. 18 are written to be played as one extended dance—one follows immediately after another, and the changes of key are made to follow a very ordinary tonal plan (the only potential shocker of the bunch is a move from D flat to A between No. 12 and No. 13, and it is made using so seamless a common tone—D flat/ C sharp—that there is hardly a jitter). The opening number is playfully ornamented and has an attractive cross-rhythm. With No. 4 we begin a long expanse of D flat major that lasts all the way through No. 12. Within this middle group are the wonderfully rich, high-register parallel thirds of No. 9 and the no less delightful forzando dissonances of No. 10. Schubert moves to the relative minor for the first half of No. 8, but quickly abandons this new key in favor of a return to D flat major in the second half. The final dance, No. 17, is no less unassuming than any of the others—it too is of modest dimensions and has none of the dance-finale bombast that marks, say, the last of the 12 waltzes in the same opus.

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