A date in Central Park – early recordings give a taste of Czech life in New York over a century ago
Several hundred sound recordings going back to the beginning of the last century have been discovered in American archives, opening a window onto the world of the Czech immigrant community at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Before the advent of sound recording, Czech immigrants to the United States would bring nothing but memories of the songs and voices of their homeland. With the advent of the phonograph cylinder at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, this changed. A Czech entrepreneur in New York realised that there was a market for recordings that would give homesick Czechs a flavour of their native language, and of the songs and music they knew from home. His name was Ed Jedlička and many of his remarkable cylinders survive.
The recordings give us insights into a thriving Czech cultural life in New York, including musicians like Bohumír Kryl, known as “the Wizard of the Cornet”, or the celebrated pianist Rudolf Průša, who were household names at the time.
Filip Šír from the National Museum in Prague has spent nearly a decade scouring the American archives, and has found literally hundreds of recordings, which he has been mapping with painstaking care. In the programme he tells us about his detective work, and we get to hear recordings which have not been aired for well over a century.
It was a time when Bohemia and Moravia were still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and thousands of Czechs were coming to the New World in search of a better life. Cities like New York, Chicago and Cleveland came to have sizeable Czech communities who contributed to the cities’ cultural life and brought something of their old world with them. On the recordings we hear not only classical musicians, but also popular Czech songs, sometimes adapted to the new context. A young couple arrange to meet not in the woods of the Bohemian or Moravian countryside, but in New York's Central Park. Their date comes to nothing, and the young man has no more luck when they meet at the Bohemian National Hall – which to this day can be found in East 73rd Street.
"The next day you wrote me a love letter,/ That I should come to Central Park for a little date./ I ran at the speed of light, as if a messenger had sent me.// Oh Barbora, Oh Barbora, I stood there like a donkey.// The last time we met, we were drawn straight to each other./ I begged for a kiss at the National Hall./ She spurned me and sent me away./ Oh Barbora, Oh Barbora, why do you make an ox of me?"
Ed Jedlička’s life is as fascinating as the recordings he made. He must have been hugely versatile and enterprising. Many of the songs feature his own voice and he also mastered all technical aspects of recording for phonograph cylinder. On top of that he was an accomplished photographer. One of his most remarkable surviving photographs shows the New York studio of the famous Czech artist Alfons Mucha.
In many ways Ed Jedlička’s life story embodies the American dream. He was born in rural Moravia in 1867, and he trained as a jeweller, settling in the North Bohemian town of Varnsdorf. Filip Šír’s research suggests that he had to leave the country in a hurry in 1895, faced with the prospect of being charged with fraud. We shall probably never know whether the charges were justified. His wife and four children joined him a few months later.
In New York he soon found his feet and he became a prominent figure in the Czech emigré community, organising the visits of prominent Czech classical musicians and opera singers to the United States. He even found time for amateur theatricals, in the thriving New York Czech theatre scene. And his phonograph business began to thrive.
Filip Šír’s research continues. Ed Jedlička had eleven children, seven of them born after his arrival in the US, and Filip has managed to find several of his descendants, who have helped him to piece together the family story. I will not be at all surprised if he comes across some more long forgotten phonograph cylinders, taking us back to a distant world that is not quite forgotten.
