THE RETURN OF THE BALL

The Form

A ball is not a party with an orchestra. It is an evening with an order, and the order is the thing that is kept.

At The Vienna Opera Ball the order is held as closely as an evening for five thousand people allows. The ball begins at ten, opened by the Austrian president. Some hundred and fifty couples of the committee come down a staircase built for the night, dance a polonaise and finish on the Blue Danube. Then two words are called across the house, “Alles Walzer”, the ropes come away, and the whole room goes onto the floor at once. Quadrilles follow at midnight, at two and at four.

The Piarist Debutante Ball, at the University Club in New York, keeps an order that “has not changed in decades and is followed to the minute”: the colours at a quarter to nine, the committee and the opening Csárdás at nine, the debutantes presented one at a time, by name, at five past, then the opening waltz, and at half past ten the Grand Palotás.

The parts recur from one ball to the next. There is an arrival, a presentation, an opening dance that belongs to a few, and then a floor that belongs to everyone. A ball is a room that moves from ceremony to freedom in a known sequence, and everyone in it knows where in the sequence they stand.

That is why the form outlasts changes of taste. Le Bal de la Rose was created in Monte-Carlo in 1954, at “the height of the Latin craze”, with the mambo and the cha-cha everywhere, and Henry Astric put the waltz at the centre of the evening. “It was out of fashion, and he chose it for that reason.” His three decisions that year, the waltz, the roses and the hundred violinists, have survived seventy years.

Stopped, and Started Again

The history of the ball on the Court’s calendar is a history of interruption.

The German charity balls of nineteenth-century New York stopped in 1917, when the two countries went to war. They resumed in the thirties as the Snow Balls, and the second war stopped them again. In 1960 five people met in a lawyer’s office and decided to start it once more, and the first Quadrille Ball was held in January 1961.

Bal des Débutantes in Paris was first held in the Orangery of the Château de Versailles on 10 July 1958. It was not held in 1968, and the series was given up. Ophélie Renouard revived it in 1992, at first as a showing of couture, and in 1994 it became a ball again, with cavaliers.

The Piarist ball has been held for more than sixty years, “with a gap in the middle of them, and the New York Hungarians brought it back.” The Vienna Opera Ball was cancelled in 1991, over the fighting in the Gulf, and again in 2021 and 2022; in 2027 it is held on 4 February.

The longest absence is Venice’s. Napoleon took the city in 1797, and masks and public festivity were banned. “What survived was the private party in the palace and a single ball at La Fenice.” In 1979 The Venice Carnival was formally revived, and the mask-makers went back to work.

None of these returns required anything to be invented. The form was waiting. The quadrille, a square dance for four couples, “went out of fashion almost everywhere”, and New York dances it at the Plaza because a committee decided it should. A ball can be stopped by war, by politics or by a pandemic, and restarted by five people in an office, because what is being restarted is a set of steps.

A Reason to Dance

A ball comes back when somebody needs one. Almost every ball on the calendar is attached to a purpose, and the purpose is usually older than the ball.

The Conservatory Ball began in the spring of 1975 inside the New York Botanical Garden’s glasshouse, whose demolition had seemed inevitable five years before: four hundred and fifty guests, in the hope of raising twenty-five thousand dollars towards its repair. The Quadrille Ball is paid out in scholarships, to some two dozen students a year. The Piarist ball pays for schools in Hungary that have taught poor children without charging them for four hundred years.

In Vienna the purpose is belonging. The season holds more than four hundred balls, and “The balls are thrown by trades”: the coffee brewers and the confectioners, doctors, lawyers, engineers, hunters, gardeners and the press, and each is “that profession’s own night rather than a themed evening.”

The Swiss Ball carries its origin in its name. For its first forty years the Swiss Society’s evening was a banquet, and a banquet for men. In 1920 the president moved that ladies should henceforth be invited; the minutes record “a heated discussion”, and the motion carried. From that year it was the Banquet and Ball, and in time simply the Ball.

A purpose gives a ball a host who will still be there when the fashion has passed. The glasshouse needed mending in 1975 and needs keeping now. The schools in Hungary still teach. The trades of Vienna still have a night to fill. That is the ground a ball is rebuilt on.

The Young Come to It

A plain sign of a return is who buys the tickets. The Young Fellows Ball at the Frick has been given since 2000 by the museum’s supporters under forty-five, about five hundred of them, and “Tickets have gone within a day of opening.” The New York Scottish Ball sold out in 2025 with what the Caledonian Club called “a record turnout”, and it sells a junior ticket to those twenty-nine and under.

What the young are offered at a ball is not only a room but something to learn. The Scottish Ball requires beginners to attend at least two rehearsals before the night. The quadrille at the Plaza is danced by volunteers, “generally in their twenties”, rehearsed for months. In Vienna the Elmayer school “has taught Vienna to move properly since 1919”, and the Philharmonic asks its debutantes to dance a Viennese waltz in both directions and to attend every rehearsal in the week before.

An evening that must be prepared for matters before it begins. Most evenings ask nothing of a guest but arrival. A ball asks for a skill, a set of clothes, and a willingness to be seen getting it slightly wrong. At the Opera Ball the steps of the quadrilles are called aloud, “and a great many people do not manage them, which is understood to be part of it.”

The Case Against

The strongest objection is that what has returned is not the ball but its photograph. The Costume Institute Benefit is a dinner of “some four hundred guests, one staircase, and a broadcast of every step”, and the climb past the photographers “is the part of the evening that is public.” On this view the modern ball is a stage for being seen, the cause is its licence, and the dancing is incidental.

There is evidence for it. The Sailors Ball is “less a ball than a building full of parties”, and the Young Fellows Ball is “the New York evening where costume and black tie meet, and the people who commit are the ones photographed.” A charity needs money, and a photograph raises it.

But the evidence divides along a line. The evenings built around a staircase change with each year’s theme, and the carpet changes colour with them. The evenings built around an order keep it: the Piarist sequence unchanged in decades, the three quadrilles in Vienna, Astric’s waltz. And the balls that stopped and started again were those with an order to restart. A photograph cannot be revived; a sequence of steps can.

What the Court Keeps

The Court’s own calendar holds two balls, and both are built on the form rather than the spectacle.

The Vernal Ball, at the end of April, has eighty places, because “a ball needs the number: fewer and the floor looks empty, more and nobody can be found.” A colour is called in the invitation, which does what a dress code cannot: it “tells it how to look together, and turns eighty separate decisions into a single picture.” Dinner comes first, at round tables, and then the dancing, to an orchestra, until late.

The Masquerade Ball, at the end of February, turns an old rule of the form on its head. “Every formal ball ever given has announced its arrivals”, and a name called at the door is how rank is published. At the Court’s masquerade no member is announced, the dancing begins at nine, and the masks come off at midnight.

Each keeps the order of the old ball: something asked of everyone in advance, a moment of ceremony, and then the floor. The Court sits down at eight whether or not everyone is there.