WEINBERGER -Polka and Fugue from Schwanda - Spotify Playlist

The Polka and Fugue from the Opera "Schwanda the Bagpiper" by Weinberger, is  perhaps the best 9 minutes of romantic, lush symphonic music ever written - the last few minutes even include an organ. It captivated me when I first heard it 50 years ago as an LP and the 2008 Penguin guide to Classical music gave it 3 stars and called it "brilliant".  The recording includes several other pieces also in fantastic performances; New World Symphony and Carnival Overture and The Bartered Bride by Smetana.  As vinyl (RCA Vics 1424) it is highly valued by audiophiles to show off their stereo equipment. 

If you never heard of the Czech composer Jaromir Weinberger it is because he is a "one piece" composer famous for a short segment of an Opera that is never performed anymore. In the 1930's Schwanda swept the world’s Opera stages but alas, Jaromir never wrote another successful composition and died of suicide in Florida in the 1960’s.  His opera on the theme of Faust (a man who sold his soul to the devil) made him a one-work composer eerily like Charles Gounod in the 1860's s who also wrote the Opera called Faust with similar roman candle-like worldwide success and subsequent inability to again reach that acclaim. If you like Schwanda you will probably also like the other pieces on this CD which are all spectacular pieces with the famous fat, lush "Reiner sound". 

 




Shown starting clockwise top left are the CD, Stereo Vinyl and Mono Vinyl covers.