The Polka Craze

In the 1840s a Bohemian dance became sheet music, then a quotation inside art music

Related

RomanticPolkaWaltzQuadrille

In the 1840s a two-beat dance from Bohemia spread through European cities within a few years. It was danced first, printed second, and quoted inside art music third.

Time and place

Prague, Paris, Vienna and London in the 1840s. The polka moved from Bohemian village dances into city ballrooms, and around 1844 the London ballrooms and press treated it as a fashion. Piano scores, dance manuals and band arrangements appeared together, and publishers turned the dance into a series of products.

What happened

The polka is in two time, fairly fast, with square four-bar phrases. That makes it easy to learn, easy to score and easy to print as piano music. It met a specific market of city ballrooms, home pianos and cheap sheet music. Composers wrote salon polkas for domestic playing, and the dance moved from public ballroom to parlour to concert encore. Its spread depended on printing, railways and ballrooms rather than on a particular first performance. The origin of the name has several explanations, none reliable enough to repeat as fact. The word appeared constantly in the press, with ballroom advertisements and sheet-music covers feeding each other.

What changed

Dance music became both a commodity and a quotable style. Composers began to use the polka as a character: Liszt made it diabolical, Tchaikovsky made it a salon miniature, Shostakovich used it in ballet to mock bureaucracy. Within a century the village dance had travelled from ballroom to parlour to concert hall to satire.

Listen for the turn

Begin with Tchaikovsky's Polka peu dansante, its square phrases and light staccato. Then Liszt's Mephisto Polka, the same rhythm made faster and sharper. Finally the polka from Shostakovich's The Golden Age, where the dance becomes mockery. The catalogue holds no 1840s ballroom band recordings; these three show the genre's later life.

Related

This turn belongs to Romantic; the genre is at Polka, alongside the Waltz and Quadrille as urban dance music.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Polka" — the 1840s spread checked, not quoted
• Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2005) — dance music as commodity checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.