The dancing world is eager to find out if this dance will perhaps be fashionable during the next Carnival season.

Johann Strauss I brings the polka to Vienna

According to one legend the polka was invented in 1830 by a serving maid called Anna Sležák in a small town on the River Elbe in Bohemia and written down by Joseph Neruda, a schoolteacher, and by František Matĕj Hilmar according to another legend. In 1834 the dance reached Prague and was orchestrated by Peter Pergler, the bandmaster of a corps of marksmen. It was there that it was first given the name ‘polka’, derived from Czech word ‘půlka’, meaning ‘half’, with reference to the ‘half-step’ of the dance.

The next stage in the spread of the dance is referred to laconically in the biographical lexicon of the Austrian Empire: “In the year 1839 the polka came to Vienna.” What is not mentioned there is that it was nobody less important than Johann Strauss I who is to be thanked for this. For 29 July 1839, on the second day of the traditional name day festivity in the Brigittenau district, he planned a special celebration with a ball in the Sperl establishment, and he had engaged Pergler and his band to play in the Fortuna hall. This was to be called Rübezahl’s Magic Lands Decorated for the Festivity, after the spirit of the Sudeten Mountains.

Unfortunately the weather did not play its part, and the ball had to be postponed for a week until 5 August. Despite the weather not being suitable again the event was held this time. However, as was reported in the newspaper Der Wanderer, “strong winds, which had already been raging in the morning, destroyed the whole purpose of the illuminations, and the rain also had to get its greedy nose into the matter and provided a small pond in the middle of the decorated lands.” This upset made Strauss and Johann Georg Scherzer, the Sperl proprietor, put the festivity on again a week later, on 12 August. A correspondent reported in Ost und West, a periodical published in Prague:

I went there with my friend D. and had the pleasure of finding fellow countrymen and strangers, all very much interested. They were actually the Prague corps of marksmen, who received tumultuous applause for their performances. The polka which they played even pushed the gitana dance off the hurdy-gurdy. Wherever you listen they are playing the polka, and the dancing world is eager to find out if this dance will perhaps be fashionable during the next Carnival season.

The polka’s victorious progress was taken care of by Johann Raab, for whom Joseph Lanner had composed the music for the pantomime Policinellos Entstehung (Policinello’s Origin) in 1833. For his second guest performance in Paris in 1840 Raab performed his Prague Polka in the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique together with the dancer Mademoiselle Valentine. But Vienna was in the lead – thanks to the completely right intuition of Johann Strauss I.

Thomas Aigner

English translation: Leigh Bailey

One Sunday afternoon, at the beginning of the fourth decade of the previous century, a serving maid in Elbeteinitz, in a high-spirited mood and for her own entertainment, danced a dance that she had thought of herself to a suitable melody that she trilled. The river of time has washed away the girl’s name, but the name of the local schoolmaster survived for the future, a certain Josef Neruda, who happened to be on the dance floor and wrote down the melody. He thus made it possible that shortly afterwards the new dance was being performed in Elbeteinitz by several couples and soon by all the young people in the village. In the year 1835 it made its way into the ballrooms of the capital of Bohemia, where it was named the ‘polka’ on the basis of the Czech word ‘pulka’ (half). Some years later, around 1839, the dance was performed by some of the choir of the Prague corps of marksmen on a tour in Vienna, and both the dance and the music enjoyed the warmest applause and rapid popularity. One year later the professional dancing master Raab danced the Bohemian polka on the stage of the Odéon in Paris. There it was exceptionally successful, and with amazing speed this opened up the elegant salons and ballrooms of Paris and thus the whole artistic world for the new dance.

Heinrich Glücksmann, ‘Böhmische Tänze’ (Bohemian Dances), article in the Neues Wiener Journal, 13 March 1924, p. 3 f., for extract see p. 4.

English translation: Leigh Bailey