A random film of the day lit up an adjacent topic — and it turned out better than the film. "Švanda the Bagpiper" by Jaromír Weinberger (1927) — the most performed opera of the interwar twentieth century: translated into 17 languages, over 2000 productions, in the 1929/30 season it ran more often in German-language theaters than "Carmen," "The Magic Flute," and Wagner's operas. And in its native Prague it wasn't performed for 89 years straight.
The composer who wrote the most joyful hit of the era died in poverty in Florida — the melody lived on without him and without royalties, and most of Weinberger's life is told with errors because after 1939 he refused to speak about his prewar life. The investigation assembled this puzzle piece by piece: European fame, Nazi blockade, American oblivion, and slow return.
Prague, National Theatre, April 27, 1927. Conductor Otakar Ostrčil, director Ferdinand Pujman, three acts with prologue and epilogue. Librettist Miloš Kareš took a tale from the national canon: Josef Kajetán Tyl's play "The Bagpiper of Strakonice" (1847), about the mythical bagpiper Švanda — the Czech Orpheus, whose pipes can melt anything, including ice and death itself. The show ran 14 times that season — decent, but hardly a triumph. Critics met the opera coolly, if not hostilely.
The problem was politico-musical. In interwar Czechoslovakia there was an intellectual war over whose music was "truly Czech" — Dvořák's or Smetana's, and against the backdrop of this quarrel any new piece of "folkiness" was examined under a microscope. Marxist critic Zdeněk Nejedlý trashed the opera in Rudé právo as derivative and insufficiently progressive. Composer Alois Hába, on the contrary, called the author "perhaps the first serious Czech-Jewish artist" — and this was the best review possible, because nearby in the Prague press there was a simpler argument at work: "Weinberger is a Jew, therefore he has no creative talent." An assimilated Jew with a German surname who wrote bagpipes, polka, and furiant into the score didn't fit into any column of the national ledger.
Tellingly, even 95 years later the answer to the question "why did its native country reject its most successful opera" sounds like an unsolved mystery in Czech criticism. But the solution is visible in the correspondence of the era: by the premiere Weinberger was a thirty-year-old professional who had returned from America (in 1922 he spent a year teaching composition at Ithaca College in New York State and fled back — America seemed "cold and mercantile" to him). He wrote the opera not as a national manifesto but as a folk tale with a huge orchestra, klezmer energy, and witty orchestration — and the local critical apparatus rejected it for failing to match the template.
Salvation came from the side that Prague itself considered an opponent. Literary figure Max Brod — yes, that one, friend and biographer of Kafka, first publisher of his manuscripts and passionate advocate for Janáček — made a German translation of the opera and reworked it to two acts. At the Breslau stage (now Wrocław) on December 16, 1928, "Schwanda, der Dudelsackpfeifer" exploded the German-language theatrical world. Then — an avalanche: Dresden, Berlin, Vienna, Ljubljana, Riga, Sofia, Buenos Aires. The Metropolitan Opera accepted the opera on November 7, 1931 — also in German, with baritone Friedrich Schorr in the title role. Time magazine calculated then: over a thousand performances, 14 languages, "Europe's best-selling modern show." By mid-decade the count was at two thousand productions and 17 languages.
Brod's edits are a separate story about how hit mechanics work: he removed the overwrought national note, tightened the plot, and balanced the style. Prague reacted sluggishly to an opera "too Czech," while the world swallowed it in German wrapping and demanded more. The irony is double: Czech critics considered the opera insufficiently Czech, while abroad it was received as the quintessence of Czechness — "an authentic Czech singing about bagpipes." At the Metropolitan premiere, American newspapers explained delays in some German productions... as mutual grievances between Czech and German nationalists.
The opera's plot — in two words — is "The Bagpiper of Strakonice" on fast-forward. Newlyweds Švanda and Dorotka; the robber Babinský, a cavalry officer of the popular imagination and almost the main character; a queen whose heart an evil magician has frozen; Švanda melting this ice by playing the bagpipes. The polka is the music to which the queen thaws and the court dances. Then genre classics: the queen's kiss, an oath to his wife "if I lied — may the devil take me," a thunderclap. In hell the Devil is bored — no one plays cards with him because he cheats — and asks Švanda to entertain him with music. Babinský descends after him, beats the Devil at cards (cheats more consistently), buys back his friend's soul. And as a farewell Švanda plays hell a solemn piece — this is the fugue, the music with which the master bids farewell to the underworld.
These two numbers quickly went to live their own life. The idea of gluing them into one concert piece was suggested by Erich Kleiber — conductor of the Berlin premiere — and from 1928 "Polka and Fugue" went through American concert halls as a separate track. At the 1939 New York World's Fair it was even staged as a ballet — in the composer's presence. In Glenn Bainum's arrangement for wind band it became a classic of American school bands: in the Wind Repertory Project it has a difficulty rating of V and a requirements list half an orchestra long, including organ and harp. Repertoire giants recorded it countless times: Eugene Ormandy as early as 1934 (Victor record), Fritz Reiner with the Chicago Symphony, Mitropoulos, Mackerras, Karajan — and the United States Marine Band in 2015.
Cherry on top: Disney Studios in the late nineties seriously considered "Polka and Fugue" as the basis for a segment of "Fantasia 2000." In the end they chose Shostakovich with his Piano Concerto No. 2 in the staging of "The Steadfast Tin Soldier." Even a dead opera could have beaten a living Shostakovich — at least, Disney artists thought so until internal discussion decided otherwise.
Weinberger's happiness broke along dates that are easier to show than describe. January 19, 1933, at Berlin's Admiralspalast his operetta "Spring Storms" opens — on stage are stars: Jarmila Novotná and Richard Tauber, records with numbers already in stores. A few days later Hitler becomes chancellor, and the show is shut down. Weinberger is a Jew; the librettist is a Jew; the main performers are Jews. By 1933 German stages, concerts, and radio are closed to him; after the 1938 Anschluss — Austrian ones too; occupied Czechoslovakia became the worst possible place.
Then the typical and yet terrible route of an exile: Paris, London (music for the BBC and advertising jingles for money), Canada, USA. His mother and sister Beda perished in Theresienstadt. Money evaporated on three levels simultaneously: production income (stages closed), publishing income (German and Viennese publishers nationalized, Universal Edition sold rights to many of his works to Boosey & Hawkes — royalties didn't reach him under wartime conditions), and publicity (1940s America was collectively fascinated by something else). He wrote on commission for American orchestras — "Lincoln Symphony," Czech Rhapsody, saxophone concerto, variations on the English melody "Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree" with a premiere under Barbirolli's baton at Carnegie Hall — but this was all echo, not a second wind.
Biographer Tristan Willems, who has been assembling Weinberger's legacy for the last fifteen years, found an explanation for the gaping holes in the biography: after breaking with Europe the composer never spoke or wrote about his prewar life. No letters, no interviews, no hint of what came before 1939. Not only the man broke, but memory of the man broke — and so until the 21st century most biographical data about him contained errors.
The final chapter is the quietest. In 1948 Weinberger received American citizenship, in 1949 moved with his wife Hansi to Florida, to St. Petersburg — a typical "retiree town," warm, cheap, indifferent to music. He tried photography, self-publishing of his scores, summer trips to Europe where no one staged "Švanda" anymore. Commissioned work became rarer and duller. He suffered from bipolar disorder, and by the 1960s brain cancer was added to the depression. Testimonies from the final years paint an almost unbearable picture: nearly deaf to the world, he sat at the piano all day and played, played, played — in a small house in Florida his most famous music, which the world remembered but not the author.
On August 8, 1967, seventy-one-year-old Weinberger took a lethal dose of sedatives. His wife Hansi died a year later. In 2004 they were reburied in Israel, at Kibbutz Gezer between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: a Prague Jew whose biggest hit was a polka ended his journey in his people's historical homeland. Today "Polka and Fugue" is played by thousands of American school orchestras, and almost none of the young musicians know either the author's name or that the melody to which he made hell dance was written by a man who died in poverty from the same pain it healed in everyone else.
The finale of this story is the best. Since 2007 musicologist and conductor Tristan Willems took up Weinberger's saxophone concerto score and discovered that orchestral materials exist in a single copy — in a basement in South Dakota. Then — like a detective story: letters, telegrams, traces of publishers, trips between Jerusalem, Prague, Bratislava, Berlin, and the USA. In 2011 he found five boxes of manuscripts, sketches, and letters — by his estimate, over 70% of the entire creative legacy, the largest single musical archaeological find of the century.
The fate of the boxes is itself a scene from a novel: when the Nazis occupied Prague and confiscated Weinberger's house, one of the "culturally sensible" officers instead of destroying packed the manuscripts in boxes and sent them to a warehouse. Then the Soviet Army came — and again didn't burn them. In 1962 the boxes settled in an archive without accompanying documents and waited. By one of Willems' estimates, part of the materials lay in sealed form with a Nazi seal — and waited for the musician who tracked them down. So music that is nearly a hundred years old continues to return: fresh recordings on Toccata Classics, concerts in Prague, revived "Švanda" on the stages of Graz, Berlin, Prague, and Wexford.
Weinberger's story is not a story about a "one-hit wonder," though critics hung that label on him for decades. It's a story about how music sometimes lives longer and happier than its author, and the author's biography is shorter than the melody. Weinberger gave the world a couple of lines to which school orchestras in Ohio still dance; the world answered him with polite silence the length of a lifetime — and only half a century later began to think through what the music knew from the very beginning.