Polonia (Wagner)

Polonia Overture: holograph first page of Wagner's arrangement for piano

Polonia (WWV 39) is a concert overture written by Richard Wagner. Wagner completed Polonia in 1836, although it may have been drafted as early as 1832.^[1] It was premiered in Magdeburg, with the composer conducting, on March 29, 1836.

Wagner's biographer Ernest Newman wrote that the overture was "shapeless and frothy...the oddest mixture of a pseudo-Polish idiom and the cheap assertive melody of Rienzi".^[2] The critic Adrian Courleonis has commented that "Polonia 's coarse-grained excitement, which may at first seem audacious, looms as merely clumsy ... well before its run halfway through its dozen-minute course, the curious compulsion to revisit lame material having something about it of the boorish, drunken frat boy imagining that he's the life of the party".^[3]

In contrast to this negative criticism, Wagner himself, who was very sympathetic to the Polish revolutionary attempt to reestablish Poland's political sovereignty, states that Polonia resulted from a "dreamlike evening" in which he heard uninterrupted Polish songs at a celebration of May_3rd_Constitution_Day (Wagner, My Life 1983, pp. 58-61). Similarly, Professor Halina Goldberg points out that Wagner was one of several foreign composers who were sympathetic to the Polish cause, namely the restoration of Poland, which had been eliminated from the map after a series of 3 partitions. According to her, Wagner wrote Polonia after hearing Polish patriotic songs for a May 3 Constitution Day celebration. (Halina Goldberg, The Age of Chopin, p. 92).

The composer's manuscript of his piano arrangement of the score is in the Stefan Zweig Collection at the British Library. Zweig acquired the manuscript from a dealer in Vienna in 1937.^[4]

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