Looking back, Vienna was a glorious place to grow up. We dug in sandpits under the shade of the city’s famous monuments, and when it rained we slipped into the side entrance of the Imperial Riding School to watch the white Lipizzaner stallions practise their moves. But once we were teenagers, we resented our closeted existence. The only pop music was Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 weekly radio show. Films released in Hollywood at Christmas rarely made it to Vienna before August. But the worst part for me was the fact that at 16 I had to learn to waltz.

It is a rite of passage that prepares young people for the annual dance season, the weeks between New Year and the start of Lent that are dominated by balls. In 2007, there were more than 400. Dancing is not just for the elite – there are balls for everyone: lawyers, military officers, estate agents, Russians, cafe owners, farmers, engineers, the homeless …

The school I attended was very traditional – and clearly geared towards helping me find someone “suitable” to marry. In my mid-teens, I was not about to co-operate. Instead of going to the school’s year-long dance course, I played basketball with my American friends, snubbing the Austrian boys whose white gloves had done little to disguise their sweaty palms as we awkwardly shimmied around the dance floor in the first and only class I took.

Nevertheless, I secretly assumed I would one day marry a well-bred Austrian who would lead me in the waltz – and most other aspects of my life. I was wrong. In June 2001, a little more than a decade after missing those classes, I found myself in a frozen embrace with a nice American boy from suburban Short Hills, New Jersey, unable to move as Johann Strauss II’s “Kaiser Walzer” (The Emperor Waltz) progressed, ruthlessly, three beats to the bar. A tent-full of wedding guests began to chant: “One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two three.” I should have insisted on a swing band.

My husband’s New England college bookshelves featured Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Betty Friedan, fierce feminists I hadn’t encountered in my old-European world. Andrew also came with a flawless jump shot, but neither a passport nor knowledge of the box step. The passport was easily arranged, but the box step had to wait until late last year.

My family wanted to celebrate my father’s 60th birthday at the Jägerball (Hunters’ Ball), at the end of January 2008, and we needed to waltz along with the rest of the crowd. So just before Christmas we found ourselves – now the parents of two small children – at the scene of my teenage rebellion. We were learning to dance at the Tanzschule Elmayer, one of Vienna’s oldest ballroom-dancing schools, founded in 1919 by Willy Elmayer von Vestenbrugg, a former officer of the Austrian Imperial Army. Now it’s run by his grandson, Thomas Schäfer-Elmayer.

By the end of our first session in the school’s small, mirrored ballroom I am dizzy and have a bruised instep. Disappointingly, we have failed to dance round corners – even though Strauss was slowed to 90 beats per minute, instead of the usual 180. I ask our teacher, Albrecht Mandl, whether it’s me or Andrew who is at fault. Looking down at his polished soft-leather dance shoes, without so much as slouching his shoulders a degree, Mandl says: “It is always the gentleman’s fault, I am afraid.” Ahh, I should never have left Vienna.

Balls may be plentiful in Vienna – and anyone can buy a ticket – but it is not easy to have an authentically Viennese experience. The US critics H.L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright were right when they wrote in a 1914 satirical travel guide Europe After 8:15: “Vienna is perhaps the one city in the world which maintains a consistent attitude of genuine indifference toward the outsider … The Viennese, resenting the intrusion of outsiders upon his midnight romances, holds out no encouragement for globe-trotting Don Juans. He refuses to be inspected and criticised by the inquisitive sensation hunters of other nations.”

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Entry to the Jägerball – held at the Hofburg Palace (Imperial Palace), on the last Monday of January each year – doesn’t depend on owning a rifle, hunting licence or a forest full of wild boar. But revellers do need to be dressed in traditional costume.

I squeeze into my mother’s floor-length dirndl, while Andrew gets away with grey trousers and a loden green jacket. Our outfits are far more comfortable than anything else that passes for black tie. And the country-dress code makes the Jägerball one of the most popular of the season. It is less stuffy than many other events, despite a large crowd of wealthy young landowners.

We start the night at a local tavern, with Tafelspitz, a dish of boiled beef, and Wiener Schnitzel, and arrive at 8.30pm ready to work off the hefty calories that come with almost every Austrian meal. We slip into the palace’s side entrance and pass a brass band in felt hats, lederhosen and blue wool stockings, whose notes echo as we stroll past the “craftsmanship” of Austria’s taxidermists, advertising the 2008 world taxidermy championships in Salzburg. My teenage self would have disapproved of the stuffed roebucks, marmots and chamois, but the years have made me more tolerant. Andrew despairs at our slow but steady slide into the establishment. Maybe we are a little like the Viennese waltz itself, I say.

This brand of waltz developed in the second half of the 18th century out of a country dance from Austria and Bavaria. Its fast movements and close public embrace made it risque at the time. “It was wild and immoral. The women behaved in a bacchanalian manner, all innocence fled from the place,” is how Count Johann Fekete described the dance, while the Duke of Devonshire bluntly stated: “I would never marry a woman who dances the waltz!”

Despite the prudishness, its popularity took off in aristocratic circles during the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815. At the time, Johann Strauss I, son of a Jewish innkeeper, was a young boy about to take his first violin lessons. As an adult, he joined Josef Lanner’s string quartet before going solo and popularising the waltz in Vienna and on tour around the world.

But it was his son, Johann Strauss II, who wrote the real hits, such as “An der schoenen blauen Donau” (The Blue Danube) and “Wiener Blut” (Viennese Blood). The two Strausses had a fierce rivalry – Strauss I refused to buy his son a violin, wanting him to go into banking instead. But together they ensured the waltz would reign supreme for more than a century.

Forty years after the death of Johann Strauss II, Hitler ordered that the Strauss family’s Jewish history be destroyed so that he could enjoy their music publicly. After the war ended, and the Allies occupied Austria, my grandfather remembers the Russian soldiers waltzing with their rifles slung over their shoulders, like balalaikas.

. . .

At the Jägerball the only gun in sight is the star prize in the raffle. Before we can dance, we watch a series of opening acts, including men snapping their long coach whips in time with traditional country tunes.

Then the debutants – some in their teens, others who look several years older – enter in colourful pairs, showing off the spins, curtsies and footwork they have learned over the past year. Eventually the call “Alles Walzer” (“everyone waltz”) – prompts everyone, including us, to head to the dance floor.

This is the moment I have been dreading. Children, work and a house without a ballroom now seem lame excuses for having practised so little. But Andrew nails it. I let him lead, and we find ourselves out-dancing many other couples – including several Austrian politicians who twirl past us. (Vienna must be one of very few world cities where you are able to attend a public event, without any requirement for identification, and quite literally rub shoulders with the country’s leaders.)

Much of the rest of the evening is a blur of foxtrots, sambas, and cha cha chas. We drink a few glasses of wine, point out Max Habsburg to a television reporter looking to interview the royal descendent, and watch teenagers turn the dance floor into a mosh pit during the midnight quadrille. Then we set off to explore the rest of the Hofburg Palace.

The Jägerball is so big that it occupies a good section of the maze-like building, and tonight there are bands, tables and dance floors in many of the rooms. It is easy to get lost. The palace is not a single building, it’s a monument that has expanded wing-by-wing under nearly every monarch from the 1500s to the early-20th century.

Many of the rooms are disappointingly bland. But at the top of the palace there’s an area that burned in a 1992 fire and has been spectacularly restored. We step into a minimalist, modern perch with a fabulous view through a large glass facade. Here, Andrew and I dance to “Bar Mitzvah music”, as he likes to call the medley of Kool & the Gang, Gloria Gaynor and The Human League.

It is getting late and the champagne has given way to traditional Viennese frankfurters. The ball has another three hours to go. At 5.00am those with more energy than us will go to one of the coffee houses that open to serve revellers heading straight from the dance floor to the office. For us, though, it is time to hotfoot it to bed.

Carola Hoyos is the FT’s chief energy correspondent.