TUESDAY FURTHER CONSIDERATION: On second and third thought, I think maybe the way to go is a little appendix-post in the next day or two [or maybe a tad longer -- Ed.] with, yes, some bits of Papa Johann, and also some stray polkas I've been thinking about from beyond the Strauss family orbit. Like I've been listenting to some orchestral Stravinsky and was reminded of his Circus Polka, and there's Rachmaninoff's Polka de W.R., and maybe another miscellaneous polka or two. Stay tuned.
Is there a rousinger polka than this?
It's the finale of Act I of Smetana's The Bartered Bride
VILLAGERS: Come on, girls, let's be merry,In this 1981 film directed by František Filip, Prague National Theater forces. including soprano Gabriela Beňačková (Mařenka), tenor Peter Dvorský (Jeník), and bass Richard Novák (Kecal), with the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Zdeněk Košler, dance and sing their way to the end of Act I.
while the band is playing polkas!
Hand in hand and eye to eye,
while the whole world swirls and dances!
The brasses are booming, cimbaloms clanking,
music's blaring all around us!
Everyone is on the move --
we can't stand still and watch!-- translation by Peter C. Sutro
Here it is again, first in a classic recording under a storied Czech composer-conductor, then -- as we've heard it before -- in higher-quality audio with a fine Czech conductor but in German (in which language the opera has an extensive performing history):
Prague National Opera Chorus and Orchestra, Otakar Ostrčil, cond. HMV, recorded in Vienna, June 6-23, 1933
[in German] Bavarian Radio Chorus, Munich Radio Orchestra, Jaroslav Krombholc, cond. Eurodisc, recorded April 1975
by Ken
Here's just the Bartered Bride Polka itself. The performance conducted by the late Jiří Bělohlávek (1946-2017) seems to me a special treat -- he just has the music in his bloodstream.
SMETANA: Polka from The Bartered Bride
New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded 1965
Vienna Philharmonic, James Levine, cond. DG, recorded June 1986
Prague Symphony Orchestra, Jiří Bělohlávek, cond. Supraphon, recorded c1980s
There's a fair amount more to say, and of course more to hear, with regard to the dances in Smetana's great comic opera The Bartered Bride, and we'll get to that. First, though, I should explain what we're doing today.
My friend Jocelyn, who's not a classical-music devotee but has heard way more than her share of my whining about the agonies of producing these silly little blogposts, called some days ago to say she'd checked out last week's post ("For the first time ever, this year I went into the Vienna New Year's Concert armed with a listing of the program contents!")
and enjoyed it, thanks principally to its abundance of polkas, which she'd never thought of as concert offerings. Whereas when I think of polka, and I do, a lot, it's almost always in the array of uses composers have put it to.
Mostly unrelated to the pandemic, Jocelyn had a rough week last week, in a rough month, in a rough year, and I was delighted to hear that that blogpost had provided some relief. So my next thought was, I'll bet we've got a pile of polkas sitting idle in the Sunday Classics archive. Maybe I could drag them out for Jocelyn. Maybe even get an easy post out of it.
Well, in my world there doesn't appear to be such a thing as an easy post. Nevertheless, that's basically what we're going to do. More polkas, mostly drawn from the archive.
And, um, stuff.
WHAT SETS -- AND KEEPS -- A BODY IN MOTION MORE
SURELY AND IRRESISTIBLY THAN A GOOD POLKA?
It seems to be Friends' Week here at Sunday Classics. This polka fixation, for want of a better word, was sort of a running thing my friend Jim Oestreich, late of the NY Times, a pal since he succeeded me as classical music editor of High Fidelity magazine (in some other lifetime, I think that was) and went on, both there and later at the Times Arts & Leisure section, went on to be by a whopping margin the best editor I've had as a writer. (I tell you, it could be positively eerie having an editor whose overriding concern was helping get said what I wanted to say! Jimo knew of my, er, susceptibility to polka, and brought to it the history of authentic polkacizing that came from his Wisconsin roots.
As I hope I made clear last week, a good polka has the power to plug directly into a person's central nervous system, and set the body in irresistible motion. And a great polka . . . well, fuhgeddaboutit!
It doesn't take much prodding to get me in a polka frame of mind, and since it happens that our recent subject has been the strange doings in the telecast of this year's Vienna New Year's Concert, namely the curious gap between that precious program list I was clutching in my hand going into the annual PBS telecast and the program we actually saw, it was hardly surprising that the subject of polka-ing came up. You can't do a Vienna New Year without polkas.
If we're talking about the Strausses of Vienna, not to mention the composers who preceded, surrounded, and followed them, it has to be undrstood that this can't be done without polkas. We may think of the three music-making sons of Johann Strauss Sr. -- Johann Jr. (aka the Waltz King), Josef, and Eduard -- as masters of the waltz, as indeed they were. Of course they practiced in many other forms. And always we come back to the essential point that you couldn't cut it in the Strauss family business unless you could knock out a body-churning polka. All three brothers could.
Going back to my phone conversation with Jocelyn, as I burbled on about my polkamania, she grew brave enough to say, perhaps a little hesitantly, that she knew I'd be horrified, but she'd used those polkas to get herself up and working on some long-ongoing projects she's been plugging away at in her apartment. At the risk of disappointing her, I explained that not only wasn't I horrified, but I understood completely.
THAT'S THE POWER OF POLKA!
Like so much great music, it's physical. Polka sets the body in motion, whether it's the recklessly abandoned motion induced by a Polka-schnell, or fast polka, or the less headlong but more grindingly momentum-driven, even lumbering type of polka, which the Strausses often called, for reasons I don't understand, a Polka française. Why a "French polka"? I just looked it up, and according to Wikipedia: "The feminine and graceful 'French polka' (polka française) is slower in tempo and is more measured in its gaiety." I have no problem with "slower in tempo" or "more measured in its gaiety," but "feminine"? "Graceful"? Listen to, say, brother Josef's Feuerfest!, and then talk to me. In these slower and more measured kinds of polkas, I sometimes think of a hippopotamus polka-ing.
AS WITH ALL THINGS "STRAUSS FAMILY," THE POLKA CHAMP
WAS JOHANN JR., BUT THE OTHERS GOT THEIR LICKS IN
I somehow didn't find a place last week -- or this week, actually -- for the famous quote in which Johann Jr. insisted that his next-younger brother, Josef, was the more talented of the two, he himself being merely the more popular. I don't think he was being altogether disingenuous. There was a quality in Josef's waltzes that's, I don't know, "other." Farther-seeing? Deeper-touching? If you haven't taken in last week's impromptu tribute to him, I'd encourage you to take a listen to the little assortment of Josef Strauss walzes we had.
But that's the waltzes. When Josef rolled up his sleeves to roll out a polka, that isn't what he was aiming for. So why don't we just (mostly) reprise the polkas we've heard, with some additions, starting reasonably enough with --
JOSEF STRAUSS (1827-1870)
Feuerfest! (Fireproof!), Polka, Op. 269
Vienna Philharmonic, Mariss Jansons, cond. Sony, recorded live at the 2012 Vienna New Year's Concert
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Peter Guth, cond. RPO-Intersound, recorded May 1994
London Symphony Orchestra, John Georgiadis, violin and cond. Sanctuary Classics, recorded c1978
Johann Strauss Orchestra of Vienna, Willi Boskovsky, cond. EMI, recorded 1980-85
London Symphony Orchestra, Stanley Black, cond. Decca Phase-4, recorded in the 1960s
Vienna Philharmonic, Willi Boskovsky, cond. Decca, recorded in the 1960s
BBC Symphony Orchestra, John Pritchard, cond. BBC Classics, recorded live at "Viennese Night at the Proms," Royal Albert Hall, Aug. 12, 1972
Ohne Sorgen (Without Cares), Polka-schnell, Op. 271
Johann Strauss Orchestra of Vienna, Willi Boskovsky, cond. EMI, recorded 1980-85
Vienna Philharmonic, Mariss Jansons, cond. DG, recorded live at the 2006 Vienna New Year's Concert
London Symphony Orchestra, John Georgiadis, violin and cond. Sanctuary Classics, recorded c1978
EDUARD STRAUSS (1835-1916)
Bahn frei! (Clear Track!), Polka-schell, Op. 45
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Peter Guth, cond. RPO-Intersound, recorded May 1994
(arr. for woodwinds, brass, and percussion by Anton Othmar Sollfelner) Ensemble "11" (members of the Vienna Philharmonic). Camerata, recorded May 30-June 4, 1999
And, of course, JOHANN STRAUSS JR. (1825-1899)
(For the record, I don't think we've heard Tritsch-Tratsch before. Anyway, these ar new clips. And there are a couple of other additions along the way.)
Unter Donner und Blitz (Amid Thunder and Lightning), Op. 324
Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded December 1966
Vienna Philharmonic, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded c1972
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, cond. RCA, recorded 4/25-26, 1960
Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka (Chit-Chat Polka), Polka-schnell, Op. 214
Vienna Philharmonic, Mariss Jansons, cond. Sony, recorded live at the 2012 Vienna New Year's Concert
Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded December 1966
Vienna Philharmonic, Lorin Maazel, cond. RCA, recorded live at the 1999 Vienna New Year's Concert
One of the most utterly delectable polkas seems to have required the labors of not one but two Strauss brothers.
JOHANN STRAUSS Jr. and JOSEF STRAUSS: Pizzicato Polka
Vienna Philharmonic, Carlos Kleiber, cond. Sony, recorded live at the 1989 Vienna New Year's Concert
Vienna Philharmonic, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded c1972
Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded April 1969
OF COURSE POLKAMANIA WASN'T UNIQUE TO THE STRAUSSES
Polkas flowed from the pens of all sorts of composers, but there are two in particular that we've heard before -- no doubt because they're little pieces I treasure -- and we're now going to hear again. The first, extracted from what is widely thought of as "the Czech national opera," has a special polka resonance, coming as it does from the polka's homeland in an opera that is making a particular effort to express its spirit. The second takes as its jumping-off point the the layer of irony we already here in the concert polkas of the Viennese masters, and despite -- or perhaps because of? -- carries that irony to an undreamt-of place.
(1) FROM THE POLKA HOMELAND, THE BARTERED BRIDE POLKA
And we've already heard one of the rollickingest, the polka with which Bedrich Smetana brought Act I of his great comic opera The Bartered Bride to a close.
Back in 1978 when the Met had one of its rare "go"s at The Bartered Bride, Andrew Porter in his New Yorker review, leading readers laboriously through the opera's difficult creation, noted that the famous dances (a polka to conclude Act I, a Furiant in Act II, and the "Dance of the Comedians" in Act III) were added at added at just about the last stage of composition. I found this fascinating, though not in the way Andrew seemed to -- he seemed to be suggesting that they're an afterthought, a superficial veneer not to be thought of as a really integral part of the piece.
It's true that the three dances lift easily out of the opera, filling out an immensely crowd-pleasing suite with the opera's Overture, as we'll hear again in a moment.
But my first thought at learning that the dances were such a late addition to The Bartered Bride was kind of the opposite of what I take to have been Andrew's: that they were added at a time when the composer knew more about the opera he toiled so hard over and what he wanted it to be than he had known at any point in that arduous creation process. In other words, far from being a cosmetic overlay, maybe they embody his fullest vision of the opera.
When we were first listening to the Bartered Bride suite, I thought my choice of the mono Kubelik version was one of convenience: that I happened to have it on CD. Now after poking around a bit, I'm wondering if Kubelik ever did rerecord this music, notably during the long exile from his homeland during which he recorded so much Czech repertory. Maybe this recording is the best we can do.
At the time we first hearing the Bartered Bride dances, all we heard from Leonard Bernstein was the Polka, as we heard it again at the top of this post. I thought it might be fun to hear the whole of the "suite" (more about the quotation marks in a monent), which both from the characteristic impetuosity of this younger Bernstein but more importantly from his strong theatrical temperament. Even though opera hadn't yet figured much in his performing activities (his triumphant Met debut conducting Falstaff didn't happen till March 1964), it's a good bet that his knowledge of the repertory, as of most things musical, was already considerable, and of course as a composer he was already a grizzled theatrical veteran.
Note that we're hearing Lenny at an interesting career point. The Bartered Bride Overture was recorded a little more than a year before that first Met Falstaff, the dances less than a year after.
SMETANA: The Bartered Bride: Overture, Polka, Furiant, and Dance of the Comedians
Philharmonia Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. EMI, recorded 1951
[Polka at 6:30, Furiant at 11:27, Dance of the Comedians at 13:38] New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Philharmonic Hall, Jan. 28, 1963 (Overture) and Manhattan Center, Feb. 1, 1965 (dances)
(2) POLKA GOES KIND OF NUTS: MEET DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
This is polka like those villagers in The Bartered Bride never would have imagined, but polka it is, or perhaps we should say is it ever! Maybe it's polka on some sort of hallucinogen.
I love both versions. The orchestral version, the third movement of the four-movement suite Shostakovich drew from his 1930 ballet The Age of Gold (or just The Golden Age), of which Wikipedia offers this synopsis:
The ballet is a satirical take on the political and cultural change in 1920s' Europe. It follows a Soviet football (soccer) team in a Western city where they come into contact with many politically incorrect bad characters such as the Diva, the Fascist, the Agent Provocateur, the Negro and others. The team falls victim to match rigging, police harassment, and unjust imprisonment by the evil bourgeoisie. The team is freed from jail when the local workers overthrow their capitalist overlords. The ballet ends with a dance of solidarity between the workers and the football team.So let's listen first to the original version for orchestra.
SHOSTAKOVICH: Polka from The Age of Gold (ballet), Op. 22
Original version for orchestra (from the ballet suite, Op. 22a)
London Symphony Orchestra, Jean Martinon, cond. RCA-Decca, recorded December 1957
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernard Haitink, cond. Decca, recorded November 1979
Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi, cond. DG, recorded December 1989
USSR State Symphony Orchestra, Maxim Shostakovich, cond. Melodiya-RCA, recorded in the late 1970s
Now for the other version
The orchestral version has the obvious advantage of the, shall we say, piquant orchestration, and is pretty much surefire. The string-quartet version, much-loved by string quartets as an encore piece, is actually harder to bring off, but is potentially mroe soul-satisfying in a special way.
I still have vivid memories of a New York concert that must be some decades past at which the Borodin Quartet of that time (not its happiest, in my estimation, in the period following founding first violinist Rostislav Dubinsky's flight from the Soviet Union) played the Polka as an encore, and founding cellist Valentin Berlinsky (1925-2008), apparently quite a character but also a superb musician, who remained with the quartet from its origin at the Moscow Conservatory in 1945, before it had a name, to his retirement in 2007), looking ever so serious, dug with particular vehemence into the bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-da-da-da-bum-bum-bum and then again at its second appearance, when he was barely able to keep a straight face in the face of the charmed chuckle the audience gave.
Arranged for string quartet (from Two Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 36: ii. Polka: Allegretto)
Shostakovich Quartet (Andrei Shishlov and Sergei Pishchugin, violins; Alexander Galkovsky, viola; Alexander Korchagin, cello). Melodiya-Olympia, recorded 1985
Emerson Quartet (Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violins; Lawrence Dutton, viola; David Finckel, cello). DG, recorded July 1998
Medici Quartet (Paul Robertson and Ivo-Jan van der Werff, violins; David Matthews, viola; Anthony Lewis, cello). Nimbus, recorded May 9-11, 1988
Borodin Quartet (Mikhail Kopelman and Andrei Abramenkov, violins; Dmitri Shebalin, viola; Valentin Berlinsky, cello). Teldec, recorded November 1994
Eleonora Quartet (Eleonora Yakubova and Irina Pavlikhina, violins; Anton Yaroshenko, viola; Mikhail Shumsky, cello). Etcetera, recorded in the early 1990s
Rasumowsky Quartet (Dora Bratchkova and Ewgenia Grandjean, violins; Gerhard Müller, viola; Alina Kudelevic, cello). Oehms Classics, recorded 2005
A COUPLE OF ADDENDA RE. SHOSTAKOVICH THE POLKA-MAKER
• The Age of Gold Polka's string-quartet "other half""
If the Age of Gold Polka is "pure Shostakovich," possibly purer Shostakovich is the new setting he found for it in the aforementioned Two Pieces [sometimes cited as "Two Movements"] for String Quartet. The Polka was, as we've noted, the second of the two pieces. The first was also an arrangement, from the composer's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. If you've never heard the Two Pieces, I wonder what you're imagining the first would be like.
Why don't we find out? Since we've got all these performances reposing in the SC archive, we might as well drag 'em all out. (I'm going to see if I can get them in the same order as the Polka performances. It's hard, though, because as I write this, I still haven't figured out what order to put them in. I may wind up just leaving them all in the order in which I plucked them out of the archive.)
SHOSTAKOVICH: Two Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 36: i. Elegy: Adagio (from the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District)
Shostakovich Quartet (Andrei Shishlov and Sergei Pishchugin, violins; Alexander Galkovsky, viola; Alexander Korchagin, cello). Melodiya/Olympia, recorded 1985
Borodin Quartet (Mikhail Kopelman and Andrei Abramenkov, violins; Dmitri Shebalin, viola; Valentin Berlinsky, cello). Teldec, recorded November 1994
Rasumowsky Quartet (Dora Bratchkova and Ewgenia Grandjean, violins; Gerhard Müller, viola; Alina Kudelevic, cello). Oehms Classics, recorded 2005
Eleonora Quartet (Eleonora Yakubova and Irina Pavlikhina, violins; Anton Yaroshenko, viola; Mikhail Shumsky, cello). Etcetera, recorded in the early 1990s
Emerson Quartet (Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violins; Lawrence Dutton, viola; David Finckel, cello). DG, recorded July 1998
Medici Quartet (Paul Robertson and Ivo-Jan van der Werff, violins; David Matthews, viola; Anthony Lewis, cello). Nimbus, recorded May 9-11, 1988
• Polka suited Shostakovich's sardonic side so well . . .
. . . that naturally he wrote a heap of polkas -- not to mention waltzes and foxtrots, etc. Here's a polka we've heard before, embedded in one of Shostakovich's many delectable little (3 movements, 8½ minutes!) suites or orchestra or other instrumental ensemble.
SHOSTAKOVICH: Suite No. 1 for Jazz Band:
i. Waltz, ii. Polka [at 2:43], iii. Foxtrot (Blues) [at 4:37]
Instumental ensemble, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, cond. Melodiya, recorded 1984
MAYBE JUST ONE MORE POLKA? C'MON, IT'S A DOOZY!
The opera Schwanda the Bagpiper, by the Czech composer Jaromír Weinberger, keeps threatening to slip into the repertory. For reasons that I think will be obvious, this orchestral excerpt has found a toehold in the concert repertory. In 1956 annotator Fred Grunfeld wrote, referring back to The Bartered Bride:
Jaromír Weinberger's opera Schwanda the Bagpiper is fashioned very much in the image of Smetana's cheerful peasants. The hero, Schwanda, manages to work himself in and out of incredible predicaments: his bagpiped Polka charms away the curse of a gloom-struck court; his Fugue gives him safe-conduct through the portals of Hell itself.
WEINBERGER: Schwanda the Bagpiper: Polka and Fugue
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, cond. RCA, recorded Jan. 7, 1956
NEXT UP --
We still have to finish up with the Vienna New Year's Concert, including some music that PBS viewers, at least, didn't get to see. And then we've got to get back to whatever it is we were diverted from by that. Patience!
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