A Commedia dell’Arte of Interwar Lviv: Lwów’s Merry Wave
It begins with a market stall, brimming with lilies and pansies. Behind, a gaggle of flat-cap-wearing men, and well-dressed ladies chatter away. And then there are a few reedy, folkish bleats of an accordion, and two singers strut into the frame; one with an accordion, the other – slightly shorter – strumming away on a ukulele.
This scene from the 1939 film Włóczęgi (The Vagabonds), one of the last films to be produced in Poland before the war, depicts a rendition of the now legendary Lvovian hit, Tylko we Lwowie (Only in Lviv) – a song extolling the benefits of the then Polish city in relation to other metropolises across the world. Written by Emanuel Schlechter and composed by Henryk Wars, Polish king of jazz, the song became a hit among the Polish population and is still much-remembered today. During the war, it would be translated in Russian (performed by Eugeniusz Bodo with Henryk Wars’s Tea-Jazz Orchestra in Lviv in 1941), and, later, into Ukrainian.
But it was the original version – and the singers, beaming comic duo Kazimierz Wajda and Henryk Vogelfänger – which in particular captured a unique facet of the Polish interwar cultural scene. The song might now be well-known for its evocation of everyday life in Lviv, and of the last days of the pre-war film industry, but more than that, it marked the crest of a jovial swell of Lvovian interwar art – the apogee of Lwow’s Merry Wave.
Polish Radio in Lviv
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A part of the Eastern Trade Fair central pavillion. In the background, the tower for Baczewski vodka, liquor and rum distillery, Lviv, 1930, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)
Wajda and Vogelfänger, who first performed Tylko we Lwowie, were actually better known by their stage names Szczepko and Tońko – which they used for their skits on the radio programme Wesoła Lwowska Fala (Lwow’s Merry Wave). Launched in 1933, broadcast every Sunday on Polish Radio Lviv, and featuring a blend of light music, simple comedy and sketches about Lvovian batiar subculture, the show was performed by mostly Lviv-born stars and became one of the most popular broadcasts of interwar Poland. At its peak, around one sixth of the Polish population tuned into the broadcast.
But Wesoła Lwowska Fala was by no means the first Lvovian – or Polish – radio success story. The history of Polish radio dates back to 1925, with regular broadcasting launched from Warsaw the following year. By 1939, Polish Radio operated one national channel, and nine regional stations across Poland.
The station in Lviv was launched in January 1930 during the Eastern Trade Fair. The central pavilion of the fair – which had been previously used to advertise Baczewski vodka – was turned over for use by broadcasters. By the end of that year, a new broadcasting station on Batory Street was in action, with programmes on the air for eight hours a day. The station increased its power steadily throughout the 1930s, from 2 kilowats initially to 50 kilowats by 1936, and with a reach as far south as Stanisławów (now Ivano-Frankivsk), as far east as Brody, and nearly as far north as Łuck (now Lutsk).
As well as classical and light music and news broadcasts, regular programmes included features on regional towns and the countryside, and transmissions of Sunday Mass from Roman Catholic, American and Greek Catholic cathedrals. There was also a Catholic editorial office, led by Father Michał Rękas – whose broadcast Radio for the Sick was the first ever broadcast specially designed for ill people in Poland. Rękas also spearheaded a campaign to raise money for the poor, with donations reaching an astronomical 50,000 złoty by 1934 (over 136,000 USD today). Reviewing the impact of the campaign, Michalina Grekowicz claimed the destitute...
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...no longer feel their loneliness, they forget about misery when their heads are embraced by the rim of radio headphones, like a loving arm.
Lviv’s station became one of the most popular radio stations in interwar Poland, second only to Warsaw.
The front cover of a Polish Radio Lviv programme from 1935, celebrating the five-year anniversary of the launch of the station, depicts a jaunty microphone, with a flat-cap and scarf in full batiar style. Inside, a suitably satiric beginning gave way to musings on the transient nature of radio broadcasting:
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A jubilee? A celebration? It has only just been launched and it is already celebrating five years… a mockery! Certainly, in literature, art, in theatre or on the silver screen, celebrating five years’ activity would rightly be considered the height of megalomania. […] There is a bit of a difference with us. The people of radio suffer from a mysterious disease, one unknown to other professions: work lacks any tangible shape. In our theatre of the imagination, we prepare almost 100 premieres annually […] we fill 6-8 hours a day with music of various shades. But all this seems only to touch the surface of the audience’s general interest, and after a short while it will sink again into some enveloping ethereal tissue paper. […] And that is why we are so eager to look for a mirror which could reflect the shape of our past work.
‘A wave-length of 385.1 metres…’
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The crew of the Polish Radio Lwów, photo: Wikimedia Commons
But the programme particularly celebrated the activities of Wesoła Lwowska Fala, which – it claimed – was a ‘commedia dell’arte’ which provided ‘a bit of joy’ against the disasters, crises and problems of contemporary life. It also drew attention to the fact that the programme was not designed as a malicious take on Lvovian subculture – but rather to get as close as possible to an authentic portrayal of batiar life.
Wesoła Lwowska Fala was the brainchild of Wiktor Budzyński, a trained lawyer, who later became a radio host and playwright. Inspired by the music and folk performances in Lvovian student cabarets, Budzyński decided to launch a show with cheer at its heart; with light wit instead of acerbic critiques, and popular song as an antidote to the gloominess of contemporary Polish and European politics.
Budzyński wrote much of the content for the broadcasts – including hundreds of songs, dialogues, comedies and sketches – with many performed in the pre-war bałak dialect, which was a blend of German, Ukrainian, Yiddish and street jargon. When the show was launched in 1932 – under the name Wesołej Niedziela Lwowska (Lwow’s Merry Sundays), and manned by amateur broadcasters – it was intended to run once a month. But its popularity surpassed all expectations. Lviv’s radio station was contacted by stations across Poland, and ultimately by Warsaw, who invited Budzyński to launch a nationwide broadcast, every Sunday, following the evening newspaper announcements.
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Every week, at nine o’clock in the evening on Sundays, all the then superheterodines, all the ‘Philips’ and ‘Telefunkens’, and all radio apparatuses playing here and there using Daimon batteries and anodes, were tuned to an average wave length of 385.1 metres, which was rented in the air by Polish Radio Lwów. The entire Lwow’s Merry Wave, a compilation of monologues and skits, was a kind of mirror reflecting the specific atmosphere of Lviv, this city-bouquet woven of multi-coloured languages, cultures and customs, with a raised nose due to its recent capital (the capital of Galicia, Lodomeria and the Grand Duchy of Krakow, that is – as our radio heroes used to say – the capital of Golicji [Nakedia], Głodomerii [Hungryia] i wielkiego świństwa krakowskiego (the Grand Dirtiness of Kraków)).
It might have looked carefree and light-hearted – but behind the scenes, tensions were high every week. A programme released for the hundredth show in 1935 described the anxious preparations for the live Sunday broadcasts:
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Sunday. Time: 20.45. Studio, one small lamp. It’s empty. The microphone is covered with a cover. The mood is like in a night bar before the first dancer arrives. […] The mood intensifies minute by minute […] Attention: here we go! The station signal from the loudspeaker, the announcement from the broadcaster, green light, red light and a lamp. – ‘Silence – active microphones’. Someone is making the sign of the cross... Out of the great silence a broadcast is born, first slowly, then more and more rhythmically and boldly. Sometimes in the studio, I have the impression that it’s a huge locomotive moving, which – swollen with steam – only waits for a sign to move rhythmically and having developed maximum speed, falls in the inertia of uncertainty after an hour’s run. […] I am not exaggerating by saying that in the three years of my work here, I have not seen a single smiling face after the broadcast. All performers, without exception, including the most outstanding actresses and theatre actors as well as popular figures from the Merry Wave, leave the studio… sad. Why? The simple answer: tiredness and the lack of immediate confirmation of the results of the feat performed in absolute silence, in the presence of an audience so enormous, and so… quiet
Nonetheless, each week saw hundreds of letters of praise for the broadcasts arrive at the station. And the broadcast later saw success on stage, too. In 1934, the troupe gave performances at the Nowości Theatre and the Grand Theatre in Lviv, and also at venues across Galicia and further afield, including in Lublin, Stanisławów (now Ivano-Frankivsk), Borysław, Drohobycz, Łódź, Poznań, Katowice and Gdynia.
Nonetheless, there were some tensions. In the mid-1930s, as censorship became more widespread, with crackdowns on oppositional publications, broadcasts were censored both on a local and national level – although some jokes aimed at the government still managed to slip through the net.
Szczepko & Tońko: troubadours of Lviv
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Lviv, 6 Batory Street (now ul. Kniazia Romana), former seat of Radio Lwów, photo: Wikimedia Commons
The main stars of Wesoła Lwowska Fala included:
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Włada Majewska – a singer, known as the ‘nightingale of Lviv’, and satirist, who lampooned contemporary film.
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Józef Wieszczek – who had a unique talent for imitating animal noises and producing strange sound effects with his voice
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Wilhelm Korabiowski – who parodied radio announcers, but became especially known for his role as the councillor Strońcia.
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Mieczysław Monderer and Adolf Fleischer – who performed szmonces, or humorous monologues about Jewish life, under the pseudonyms Aprikosenkranz and Untenbaum
But of all the stars, possibly the most well-known were Szczepko and Tońko. Szczepko (Wajda) and Tońko (Vogelfänger) were born in Lviv, but neither had trained in theatre – instead, Wajda was an engineer, and Vogelfänger a lawyer. But when Wesoła Lwowska Fala was launched, Vogelfänger showed Budzyński a sketch based on a recent film, and he immediately saw its potential. The duo took on names inspired by the places of their birth – Szczepko, from the Church of St. Elizabeth, which was designed to look like to St Stephen’s (Szczepan) Cathedral in Vienna; and Tońko, from the Church of St. Anthony.
Their sketches consisted of a blend of song and comic dialogues. The characters were never malicious or lawbreaking, but rather soft-hearted scallywags, who took Poland by storm. On the 45th anniversary of the creation of the show, composer Alfred Schütz – best-known as the man behind the military song Czerwone Maki na Monte Cassino (Red Poppies on Monte Cassino) – recalled that:
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When the self-confident Szczepko and the naive and defiant Tońko released the pearls of their humour into the world, not only were all the loudspeakers of Poland bursting with laughter, but all of us in the studio, together with the invited guests, burst into tears.
The pair were so popular that, in the late 1930s, they starred in a trilogy of feature films about batiar life. The first, a 90-minute comedy called Będzie Lepiej (It Will Be Better), created by acclaimed director Michał Waszyński, about the exploits of the duo in a doll-factory was praised in the press, including by Bolesław Lewicki, in Gazeta Lwowska:
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What used to be only the echo of conversations from the loudspeakers on Sundays in the evening, has become a reality. […] The film was awarded with applause, which is rare in cinema theatres.
However, Lewicki added that Szczepko and Tońko’s act was about earthy comedy – and not something which should be translated onto the big screen, and into global celebrity stardom:
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Waszyński could make a Polish Laurel and Hardy out of them, but that is not what the favourites of Lviv – and of the whole of Poland – are about.
Their other films included the aforementioned Włóczęgi – which depicted Szczepko and Tońko as accidental guardians for their neighbour – as well as the final part of the trilogy, Serce Batiara (Batiar’s heart). Serce Batiara was advertised in August 1939, but the reels were sadly lost during the bombing of Warsaw in September. Only a few shots and the soundtrack still exist today.
A wave, ebbing & returning…
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The photo shows the team behind the broadcast. Row I (from the left): Adolf Fleischer, Mieczysław Monderer, MA, Włada Majewska, Józef Wieszczek, Ewa Stojowska. Row II: Stanisław Estecz, Alfred Kowalski, Teodozja Lisiewicz, Czesław Halski, MA, Teodor Akrzyński, PhD. Row III: Love Short, Kazimierz Nabielec, Wilhelm Korabiowski, Ignacy Dąb, Stefania Zielińska, photo: Polish Radio Archives, fb.com/ArchiwumPolskiegoRadia/
With censorship of Wesoła Lwowska Fala increasing in the later 1930s, broadcasting of the programme became sporadic. The name was changed to ‘Ta Joj’ – one of Szczepko and Tońko’s best-loved sayings in 1938 – and with a different character; the satire less clear-cut. There were plans to restart the show under its original name, and with its original flavour, in mid-September 1939 – though this, of course, did not happen due to the outbreak of war.
But surprisingly, that was not the end of the story. In September 1939, the employees of Polish Radio Lviv who were linked to Wesoła Lwowska Fala were instructed to leave the city for Tatariv, further south, where they could continue broadcasts remotely. But following the Soviet invasion, the troupe decided to cross the border into Romania, supported by Lvovian pilots. There, they began transmissions again, under a revised name, ‘Lwowska Fala’ – dropping the ‘Merry’ due to the dire circumstances of war. After helping with charity work, the troupe joined forces with the director of the Polish YMCA, to create regular shows to boost the spirits of Poles in the country. In March 1940, the group relocated to France; and then, in June, to Scotland. Their first performances in the UK were in the open air, with no decorations – and accompanied only by accordions. The artists wrote that:
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The Scots are laughing, although they understand little, the thirst for entertainment in this remote area meaning they accept the programme very cordially.
Later, the group moved to Bradford, before touring several English cities, from Bedford to Liverpool, Nottingham to Faversham. They also began to produce dual-language shows, or shows specifically aimed at British audiences. Some stars broadcast programmes on the BBC, whilst Wiktor Budzyński also created shows about Polish history. A performance was also given at Westminster Cathedral Hall in 1941. The Lwowska Fala become the longest-operating Polish artistic group on foreign soil in the war, in existence from 14th November 1939 to 17th November 1946.
Both Wajda and Vogelfänger survived the war. Wajda decided to return to Warsaw and continued broadcasting. Vogelfänger settled in Great Britain, where he adopted the name Henry Barker. Although he performed occasionally on stage at Ognisko Polskie in London, he also pursued a career as a lawyer. But whilst neither artist returned to Lviv, the place where they had become household stars, and whilst, post-war, Central European border-changes meant Lviv became part of Ukrainian territorial boundaries, their Lviv lives on in their sketches, dialogues, and – of course – in their standout hit, Tylko we Lwowie:
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Because where else are people as good as here? Only in Lviv!
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