On 1 November 1864 the 21-year-old 'Pretender' to the Waltz King's throne, Carl Michael Ziehrer (1843-1922), conducted the first performance of his waltz Tanz-Brüder (Dancing Brothers, op. 28) at a concert in Vienna's Dianabad-Saal. Ziehrer's publisher, Carl Haslinger - who was formerly the Strauss brothers' publisher before an altercation separated the parties - duly announced the piano edition of the work a month later, on 3 December 1864. Is it conceivable that the title of Ziehrer's waltz sparked an idea in the inventive mind of the ever-resourceful Johann Strauss, resulting in the startling announcement which appeared in the Neue Freie Presse on 19 December 1864: "The Strauss brothers are composing a 'Trifolien-Walzer' for the 'Hesperus Ball' on 13 February [1865] in the Dianasaal"?

All three Strauss brothers were members of the Vienna Artists' Association, 'Hesperlis', and although Johann and Josef had each separately contributed music to previous 'Hesperus' festivities, Trifolien marked the very first occasion on which Johann, Josef and Eduard had collaborated on a single work. On 15 February 1865, two days after the 'Hesperus Ball', the Fremden-Blatt remarked that the new Strauss waltz had received "lively applause" at its première, the conducting of which had fallen to the youngest brother, Eduard, at the head of the Strauss Orchestra. The first public performance of the Trifolien Walzer followed on Sunday 19 February 1865, when the Strauss Orchestra played it at a concert given by Johann, Josef and Eduard Strauss in the Vienna Volksgarten.

Trifolien did not find unanimous appeal, despite the "lively applause" reported by the Fremden-Blatt. Providing proof of the subjectivity of musical appreciation, the critic for the Wiener Zeitung (15.02.1865) drew attention to the three gnomes pictured on the 'Hesperus Ball' dance card and noted: "If this was a prophetic comment on the waltz 'Trifolien', newly composed by the three Strauss brothers, it was fulfilled by the lack of success of the united efforts of the brothers".

In composing the Trifolien Walzer, the brothers chose to divide the workload fairly equally amongst themselves: Johann (1825-99) provided Waltz No. 1, Josef (1827-70) Waltz No. 2 and Eduard (1835-1916) furnished not only Waltz No. 3 but also the Introduction and the cleverly-contrived Coda. The three-part waltz was probably short: as Johann Strauss recounted much later, the Trifolien Walzer presented to the publisher C.A. Spina was too short and the brothers were required to extend their own contributions. This would explain the untypical waltz form of Trifolien, with each of the three waltz sections possessing a trio. A particularly fascinating aspect of Trifolien is that it affords the listener the opportunity to judge the very different compositional style each brother stamped on his music, for example the 'floating' melody in the Trio of Waltz 2 which could only have been written by Josef. The title of the waltz derives from the Latin noun Trifolium, meaning 'a three-leafed herb', but here specifically referring to the three-leafed clover, Trifolium pratense. The allusion is therefore made between the trifoliate leaves of the clover and this tripartite collaboration by the Strauss brothers. It is to be regretted that Johann, Josef and Eduard subsequently undertook only one further collaboration, when they joined forces for the lively Schützen-Quadrille in summer 1868.