In the stage musical, Resi, the baker's daughter, decides that her father's apprentice, Leopold, will make a more suitable husband than the composer, Schani (Johann Strauss II).

At the same time, Schani's music attracts the attention of the Countess Helga von Stahl, who is shopping in the dressmaker's store next door.

Strauss Sr. then ridicules his son's waltz and tells him he could never have a career as a composer, inciting Schani to quit the orchestra.

Excited by his newfound freedom and the commission from the Countess, Schani visits Resi at her father's bakery to tell her his news.

However, when she reads the Countess's lyrics, she is drawn into the music, singing the opening of The Blue Danube waltz to Schani.

Two men throwing bread back and forth inspire the second phrase of the melody; a man tossing croissants into a box creates the offbeat rhythm of the waltz.

As he tells the begrudging Leopold to go faster, this second theme turns into the beginning of the second large section of piece, at which point Schani runs upstairs, exclaiming to Resi that he has finished the composition.

The duplicitous dedication is discovered when Resi hears Schani and the Countess playing the waltz for the publisher, Anton Drexler.

However, Schani is clearly miserable in his new job and he fights with Resi when he receives an invitation from the Countess to attend St. Stephen's Festival.

Meanwhile, the Countess plots a ruse that will cause Strauss Sr. to be late for the festival so that Schani can take his father's place to conduct his new waltz.

[3] In "Family Plots: Hitchcock and Melodrama," Richard Ness positions Waltzes from Vienna as the beginning of a series of films dealing with public performances, including the Royal Albert Hall scenes in the two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956) and the ballet performance in Torn Curtain (1966).

All the men are lapdogs, save for the bull-headed senior Strauss, and even his vanity renders him putty in the hands of the ladies".

[5] Aside from the influence this film had on Hitchcock's other films, Waltzes from Vienna set the stage for Julien Duvivier’s Strauss biopic The Great Waltz (1938), which maintains the character of the baker's daughter from the original stage musical while focusing on Johann Strauss II's revolutionary inclinations and the creation of his popular operetta, Die Fledermaus.