Jaromir Weinberger
Jaromir Weinberger was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on January 8, 1896. After completing his music study at the Prague Conservatory, and privately with Max Reger in Berlin, he came to the United States in 1922, teaching for one season at the Ithaca Conservatory in Ithaca, New York. Following his return to Europe he held various posts as teacher and conductor. He achieved international renown as a composer with a Bohemian folk opera, Schwanda, der Dudelsackpfeifer first performed in Prague on April 27, 1927, then successfully heard throughout Europe and in the United States. Weinberger wrote many operas after that, and a considerable amount of orchestral music. Up to 1937 his home was in Prague, but since 1939 he has lived in the United States. One of his most successful works for orchestra was introduced in the United States soon after his arrival, Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree.
Among the numerous works by Weinberger are two that can be said to have a more popular appeal than the others. One is in an American idiom and manner which Weinberger assumed for many of his major works after coming to this country; the other is in the Bohemian style with which he first became famous.
That in the American style and spirit (but technically in a fugue idiom) is a delightful treatment of the popular American tune by Dan Emmett, “Dixie.” “Dixie” had originated as a minstrel-show tune, being written by Emmett as a “walk-around” (or closing number) for a minstrel-show production at the Bryant Theater in New York in November 1859. It became an immediate favorite with minstrel troupes throughout the country. During the Civil War it became the Southland’s favorite battle hymn, despite the fact that it was the work of a Northerner. The charge at Gettysburg by General George Pickett was made to the strains of this music. After the surrender at Appomattox, President Lincoln invited a band outside the White House to play the tune for him maintaining that since the North had conquered the Southern army it had also gained its favorite song as a spoils of war. In 1940 Weinberger wrote the Prelude and Fugue on Dixie for symphony orchestra. The prelude devotes itself to a simple statement of the melody, after which comes the lively fugal treatment of its main theme. The treatment is throughout so skilful and musical that we never feel any sense of contradiction in the use of a popular minstrel-show tune within a soundly classical structure and through soundly classical means.
Out of the composer’s most famous opera, Schwanda, der Dudelsackpfeifer (Schwanda, the Bagpipeplayer) comes a Polka and Fugue for orchestra that is undoubtedly the most familiar excerpt from the opera. The vivacious Polka—which has a lusty peasant vitality in its marked accentuations—comes from Act 2, Scene 2; the fugue (whose main theme is suggested in the polka) is used in the opera’s closing scene. Just before the end of the fugue, the polka melody is heard again, set contrapuntally against the fugue tune in a powerful climax in which the full orchestra, as well as an organ, is utilized.