(from Cz., pl. polky).
A lively couple-dance in 2/4 time. It originated in Bohemia as a round-dance, and became one of the most popular ballroom dances of the 19th century.
There is much dispute about the origins of the polka. Etymologically, the name suggests three Czech words: půl (‘half’), pole (‘field’) and polka (‘Polish woman’), all of which have given rise to various speculations. Accordingly it is a dance with a predominant ‘half-step’, a ‘field dance’ or a dance coming from or inspired by Poland. The earliest reference to the dance (J. Langer: ‘České krakowačky’, Časopis Českého musea, 1835, pp.90–91), in an article discussing the dancing of the krakowiak in Bohemia, mentions the admixture of local Czech dances such as the strašák and břitva and states that it was danced differently in Hradec Králové (eastern Bohemia), where they called it the ‘polka’. The earliest dictionary entry (J. Jungmann: Slownjk česko-německý, iii, 1837) defines the dance laconically as a ‘Polish dance’. Nejedlý, dismissing the tale (printed in Bohemia, 1844) of the dance’s invention by a high-spirited maidservant, suggested that the adoption and adaptation of a Polish dance was connected with the wave of sympathy that the Poles attracted after their aborted insurrection of 1830. What is clear is that it was not a folkdance, but a town-based social dance going no further back than the 1830s, though its similarities to genuine Czech folkdances such as the skočná facilitated its ready acceptance in Bohemia. Some German writers have questioned the Czech origins of the polka, suggesting that it was no more than the Schottische with a new name. Horak has demonstrated the confusion of names in Austria, Switzerland and southern Germany, where a round dance with alternating steps (his definition of the polka) is variously designated ‘Polka’, ‘Schottisch’, ‘Bairsch-Polka’, ‘Boarisch Schottisch’ or ‘Rheinländer’.
The polka was introduced to Prague in 1837 and appeared in print the same year in Berra’s collection Prager Lieblings-Galopen für Pianoforte. In the following years innumerable polkas were written by such composers as Hilmar, Joseph Labitzky and Josef Neruda, and were published in collections of dances or in special series with picturesque or topical titles. In 1839 the band of a Bohemian regiment took the polka to Vienna, and that year it also reached St Petersburg. The Prague dancing-master Jan Raab introduced it to Paris in 1840, though it was not until 1843–4 that it became the favourite dance of Parisian society. On 11 April 1844 the dance was first performed in London by Carlotta Grisi and Jules Perrot on the stage of Her Majesty’s Theatre. The next month it appeared in the USA, where it gave rise to numerous jokes about the presidential candidate J.K. Polk. In 1845 the polka was danced at Calcutta at a ball given by the governor-general in honour of Queen Victoria. It attained extraordinary popularity, and clothes, hats, streets and even puddings were named after it. Magazines and newspapers of the time were full of news items, descriptions, illustrations and advertisements referring to the dance (see illustration). From Paris the correspondent of The Times reported that ‘politics is for the moment suspended in public regard by the new and all-absorbing pursuit, the Polka’. Punch, in the year of the polka’s arrival in London, despaired of the constant allusions to the dance heard in society: ‘Can you dance the Polka? Do you like the Polka? Polka – Polka – Polka – Polka – it is enough to drive me mad’. In the early days of its triumphant round-the-world tour the polka was accompanied by related Bohemian dances, such as the třasák (‘trembling dance’), which became known in German-speaking countries as the Polka tremblante, the Skočná (‘leaping [dance]’) which became known in Vienna as the Zäpperlpolka, and the 3/4 time rejdovák, which became known in France and the USA as the Redowa. However, local dancing-masters introduced their own variants; during the 1840s the polka-mazurka was popular, combining polka steps with the 3/4 time of the mazurka; in Germany the Kreuzpolka was the most popular form, and in Viennese ballrooms during the 1850s two distinct forms evolved, the graceful Polka française and the livelier Schnell-Polka which was similar to the galop.
According to Cellarius’s La danse des salons (Paris, 1847) the tempo of the polka was that of a military march played rather slowly, at 52 bars (104 crotchets) per minute. The music was usually in ternary form with eight-bar sections, sometimes with a brief introduction and coda. Early characteristic rhythmic patterns are made of quavers and semiquavers, generally without an upbeat (ex.1). Polka rhythms after 1850, particularly outside the Czech lands, sometimes include upbeats (ex.2). Like many other Czech dances, early polkas are sometimes texted (ex.3).
The polka was cultivated by all the leading ballroom dance composers of the latter part of the 19th century, including the Strausses, Gungl, Lumbye and Waldteufel. It even affected popular song, as attested by George Grossmith’s See me dance the polka (1886). Along with the waltz it was a staple of military bands and mid-19th-century popular sheet music.
Of all Czech dances the polka is the one that most commonly denotes notions of Czechness, and as such has been incorporated by Czech composers into their works, sometimes as named dances and suites (comparable to the way Chopin transformed Polish folkdances into art music), as designated movements (such as the scherzo equivalents in Smetana’s string quartets), or simply as polka-like sections in larger works (such as in the folk festivities depicted in the ‘Vltava’ movment of Smetana’s Má vlast). One explanation for this is that the rhythms of this duple-time dance with strong downbeats provides an exact parallel to the Czech language, whose defining characteristic (almost unique among European languages) is that all words have a first-syllable stress. Although iambic verse was what most Czech poets and librettists attempted to produce in the 19th century, Czech is essentially a trochaic/dactyllic language. The easiest verse to write in Czech is trochaic; set artlessly to music it generates a type of polka music. Unlike many of the ‘high-style’ iambic Czech librettos of the time, Sabina’s libretto for Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1866) is mostly in trochees; the result is that polka rhythms lie behind much of the opera’s faster duple-time music and made it sound unconsciously ‘Czech’ to an emerging nationalist population, anxious for artistic endorsement of its national identity. Smetana’s next opera Dalibor (1868), written to a much more high-minded libretto with few trochees, was at first rejected for sounding too ‘German’. Smetana’s later operas were either written with trochaic librettos to facilitate polka-type music (The Two Widows, 1874) or at least took care to incorporate polka sections (The Kiss, 1876; The Devil’s Wall, 1882). Few Czech composers after Smetana (though mainly from Bohemia rather Moravia) could avoid the embrace of the polka. Later examples include named polkas for piano such as Suk’s Ella Polka (1909), Novák’s ‘Čertovská polka’ (‘Devil’s Polka’, from Youth, 1920), Martinů’s Etudy a polky (1945) and Dobiáš’s Tři poetické polky (1950) and many more polka-type movements or sections in orchestral music, for example in Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances (first ser., 1878), Česká suita (1879) and in Fibich’s Vesna (1881), in Suk’s Fairy Tale (1899–1900), or in Ostrčil’s melodrama for voice and piano Ballad of the Dead Cobbler and the Young Dancer (1904). Non-Czech examples of polkas can be found in Walton’s Façade (1922–9), Shostakovich’s ballet The Age of Gold (1931) and Stravinsky’s Circus Polka (1942).
The polka continued as a dance or popular-music genre. Jaromír Vejvoda’s Modřanská polka (‘Modřany Polka’, 1934) became popular during World War II as Škoda lásky (‘A Waste of Love’), in Germany as the Rosamunde-Polka and among the allied armies as the Beer-Barrel Polka (‘Roll out the Barrel’). Later Czech examples, reflecting prevailing political circumstances, include Dobiáš’s Polka míru (‘Peace Polka’) and Kubín’s Údernická polka (‘Shock-Workers’ Polka’). In the USA polkas are still performed in areas with a large central-European population, particularly by the Polish community (see United States of America, §II, 1(iii)(h)). The Polish urban polka, known as ‘Eastern style’, was popular until the mid-1960s. The Polish rural polka persisted in relative isolation in Chicago until the late 1940s, when it was revitalized by Walter ‘Li’l Wally’ Wallace Jagiello, who combined it with elements of Polish folksong and krakowiak. Klemann distinguishes this type of polka, known as ‘honky’, from the more dynamic rock-influenced ‘dyno’ polka.
MGG2 (A. Blöchl, P. Novák) [incl. further bibliography]
SČHK (V. Gregor, H. Laudová) [incl. further bibliography]
Z. Nejedlý: ‘Polka’, Bedřich Smetana, iv (Prague, 2/1951), 336–466
C.R. Halski: ‘The Polish Origin of the Polka’, The Works of Frederick Chopin: Warsaw 1960, 530–37 [incl. extensive bibliography and Eng. trans. of original sources]
L. Trkovská-Volkmerová: ‘Proces stylizace ve Smetanových klavírních polkách do roku 1860’ [The process of stylization in Smetana’s polkas for piano up to 1860], HV, xi (1974), 169–75 [with Ger. summary]
J.E. Kleeman: The Origins and Stylistic Development of Polish-American Polka Music (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1982)
J. Tyrrell: Czech Opera (Cambridge, 1988)
K. Horak: ‘Schottische oder Polka: die vollkommene Verwirrung der Tanznamen’, Jb der Österreichisches Volksliederwerkes, xxxviii (1989), 124–40
V.R. Greene: A Passion for Polka: Old-Time Ethnic Music in America (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1992)
K. Horak: ‘Schottisch und Polka: Probleme der Interpretation gedruckter und handschriftlicher Quellen’, Tanz und Tanzmusik: Bamberg 1990, 101–13
GRACIAN ČERNUŠÁK/ANDREW LAMB/JOHN TYRRELL