Dance aficionados know this as the score for Michel Fokine's Le spectre de la rose using Hector Berlioz's orchestration of Weber's piano score. (Interestingly, the dance piece is inspired by Théophile Gautier's poem of the same name, which Berlioz had set as part of his song cycle Les nuits d'été, but Berlioz himself made no connection between his song and Weber's score.) In the ballet, a girl dreams that the rose she'd worn to the ball comes to her in the form of a man, waltzing with her through the wee hours. The program, such as it is, for Weber's piano piece is similar but more straightforward: A young man approaches a young woman and graciously asks her to dance; they do so through a series of waltzes, and then, in slow music mirroring the introduction, they bid each other adieu. Weber's score requires great dexterity from the pianist, but its sequence of generous, hummable waltz tunes makes no demands on the audience (except that they must refrain from applauding over the beginning of the quiet coda). The introduction/conclusion is delicate and poetic, a gently rising and then wandering motif answered by a few gracefully falling phrases. The main waltz-rondo sequence begins and keeps returning to an exuberant little tune that leaps up, swirls down, and repeats (Weber's liberal use of repeats can make this piece sound tedious in the hands of a dull pianist). Most of the rest of the material keeps the pianist's hands whirling up and down the keyboard in 3/4 time, creating music even more effervescent than that of Josef Lanner and Johann Strauss I, who hadn't even begun to popularize the waltz when Weber wrote this piece.

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