Johann Strauss II’s popular orchestral piece “By the Beautiful Blue Danube” has been inextricably linked to space since it was used in the 1968 classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The waltz played as a fictional spaceship docks with a space station, with expansive views of the Earth and the distant stars.
This week, the piece will take a more literal place among the stars when the European Space Agency broadcasts it into space.
On Saturday, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra will perform the piece live, while a radio antenna in Spain beams the music out.
The waltz was notably absent when NASA launched 27 pieces of music, as well as other sounds and images, on matching “Golden Records” on the Voyager 1 and 2 missions in 1977. The Voyager 1 probe is the first human-made object to leave the solar system. Both probes are still flying out into deep space today.
The ESA says it aims to rectify that historical overlook.
“The absence of the most famous of all waltzes from the 1977 Voyager Golden Record is a cosmic mistake,” Norbert Kettner, the director of the Vienna Tourist Board, said in a statement.
Strauss was from Austria, and the Vienna Tourist Board is helping the space agency arrange the broadcast.
A piece by another famous Austrian composer, Mozart, was included on the Voyager Golden Record.
