The polka played a crucial role in the national movement in 19th-century Bohemia. The initial popularity of the dance was linked to the nationally-minded circles whose members promoted Slavic ideas to inform their cultural practices. Dance had become an important tool of national promotion as early as the 1830s; a genuine boom came in 1860s as the choreographic, musical, literary, and visual aspects of polka were consolidated.
The name of the dance in the early 1830 gained connotations of solidarity with the Polish revolutionary movements of that time. Its feminine gender echoes the widespread icon of Amazonia, a woman in arms, which gained fresh topicality in mid-19th-century Czech society. The motif ambivalently combined feminine attributes (modesty, tenderness, sensibility, charm) with masculine ones (defiance, pugnacity, courage, strength). In the 19th-century revival of Czech culture, this combination appealed to the reformist and revolutionary challenges to the established order.
From the late 1830s onwards, the polka became something of an entrance ticket into patriotic circles. Its national values were indicated less by its performative form or style than by the speculations, discussions and controversies over its Czech roots, which, revolving around the folk traditions of the Czech countryside, filled the pages of the magazines Květy and Česká včela in the 1840s. These magazines, prominent in national consciousness-raising, promoted the idea of the polka as a national heirloom. The dance became a national identity-affirming symbol, taking its place as such alongside the Czech language, which at the time was vying with German in the public sphere.
In the early 1840s, the polka was also promoted abroad, and, as it gained in international popularity, it also gained in national prestige within the Czech context. Květy and Česká včela reported on the polka’s enthusiastic acceptance in Paris. The reports particularly highlight the role of Johann Raab (1807-1888), a dancing master at the Prague Estates Theatre; a Paris correspondent of the Wiener Theater-Zeitung reports in 1840 on Raab performing the polka at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique. Raab and his partner danced the polka, much as in their first Prague performance in 1838, in Czech folk costume. Both in Prague and in Paris the audience responded with enthusiastic ovations, probably because of the dance’s folk allure and social symbolism. By the mid-1840s, Paris was in the grip of what was called “polkamania” and a special Almanach des polkeurs was published there.
The Habsburg Empire’s return to constitutional rule in the early 1860s favoured sociability and convivial activities, which had languished in the post-1848 decades. As Czech national associations were being established across the Bohemian Lands, a new dance was launched: a quadrille called Česká beseda. It was distributed in print in 1863, having been danced in the preceding year by the prominent poet Jan Neruda (1834–1891) at a public ball. Neruda, who aided the composer Ferdinand Heller (1824–1912) and the dance-master Karel Link (1832–1911) to establish the dance, was promoter of social events and saw the dance as a tool to revive and strengthen national consciousness. In the structure of the Beseda performance, the polka (which Neruda considered the principal Czech dance) features both in a lively, marching tempo, and in a slower version, with the couples using a peculiar tip-and-heel motif.
Neruda personified the polka as a national activist in his poetry; in his Balada o polce (“Polka ballad“, 1883) a vigorous and healthy village girl called Polka arrives in Prague to rouse its inhabitants to patriotism. In the mid-1880s, Neruda called for a revival of the polkamania of the 1840s in his article series O taneční hudbě (“On dance music”, 1885) in the daily Národní listy, venting his annoyance over the lack of national awareness. He argued that the nation could be roused to action only by the kind of enthusiasm that the polka had inspired when it first arrived.
In the 1860s the polka was elevated into a national symbol in the works of Bedřich Smetana. His opera Prodaná nevěsta (“The bartered bride”, 1866) involves a polka in 2/4 time (which for Smetana is a mark of differentiation from the “foreign” waltz with its 3/4 time), and which draws on the skočná (“jumpy”) melodies typical of Czech folk songs. Smetana's polka in this opera became the culmination of the quest for an ideally national-Czech polka form.
As depicted in late-19th-century folk music collections, the polka was a mixture of cultural elements that had been domesticated in the Bohemian countryside in the first half of the 19th century but had Russian, Hungarian, or other roots origin (as evident from the name of the dance or from the notes made by the informants). This, apparently, bothered no one; the multicultural dance motifs and diverse performance styles did not prevent the dance from becoming an unambiguous national symbol, thanks to its meeting certain expectations. The polka was the first dance that could – as a round dance – compete with the German/Austrian waltz, and for all its fashionable appeal could still inspire a sense of marking a difference from German dances.
While the polka manifested these nationally Czech values, it also helped to make a national frame of identification stand out between rustic regionalism on the one hand and wider Pan-Slavism on the other. The notion of Czech nationality was lifted out connotations of mere rustic popular tradition and at the same time was accorded a specific, countrywide status amidst neighbouring cultural communities. Both as a cultural expression and as a social, convivial pursuit, the polka aided this nation-formation process.
