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Wonderful to see this, because no footage of the original Korps Wielrijders band appears to have survived.

The Korps was disbanded early in 1940, just before the German invasion. The Dutch High Command simply hadn't the heart to send the poor sods out on bicycles to face tanks and dive-bombers.

Yes, the voice-overs man does sound a bit listless. But that's probably because he's one of the four or so people who do voice-overs for every single foreign-language film shown on Polish TV, and must do hundreds of them each year.

When I taught English there I was forever telling them that the ...

Good film - but I agree with pixi3dixi about the lugubrious music. Pre-war Warsaw seems in fact to have been a lively and optimistic place; turning itself back into a national capital again after a century of partition and bursting with artistic creativity. Even the looming war appears not to ha...

"Es ist nicht identisch mit dem Operettenlibretto."

The operetta was first staged in Vienna in March 1918 and wasn't a great success - as you might expect with Austria-Hungary falling apart and the city near starvation. It didn't do well in London and New York either after the war. So Lehar pu...

Someone once observed that the difference between a German and an Austro-Hungarian military band was that whereas the Germans played the notes, the Austrians also played what was between the notes.

The title "Deutschmeisters" for Austrian infantry regiment No.4 has nothing to do with it being German. When the Knights of the Teutonic Order were secularised in East Prussia in 1525 the Order migrated to Vienna, where the office of Grand Master ("Hoch-und-Deutschmeister") became hereditary in a...

This piece is also known as the "Piavemarsch", after the Italian river of that name where Austria-Hungary's last offensive of WW1 was launched in June 1918.

I could never work out why Lehar wrote this march, because the war saddened him immensely and apart from the operetta "Wo die Lerche sin...

Many thanks, Elolinona, for the transcript and the English translation. A friend here in England who is starting to learn Swedish has copied out the words and is now learning them by heart. She has also listened to the Ulla Billquist version - and says that good as it is, she prefers yours!

I de...

"Schön ist die Welt" was in fact a reworking of an earlier operetta "Endlich Allein" which opened in Vienna in January 1914 - and sank like a paving slab by all accounts. After "Eva" in 1911 Lehar had in fact begun to go out of fashion somewhat in Austria, and remained so until 1925 when he rest...

Actually, Vienna wasn't too badly knocked around by WW2, being out of range for the RAF until very near the end. Compared with Warsaw and Berlin it got off very lightly.

I don't quite see the connection between Hitler and Vienna: he only lived there for about five years and always hated the pl...

Delightful! Many thanks 240252.

Oui, je connais la musique: I knew quite a number of Polish ladies from that generation, in Warsaw in the 1970s and in London later on, and some of them were indeed as sweetly poisonous as in Mira Zimińska's interpretation. The Lucienne Boyer "Si Petite" model of ...

Oh, by the way, Benda's illustrations are very apposite here. Lucienne Boyer was herself a model for the artist Foujita in the early 1920s.

Her career was a varied one: lost her father killed in action in the first days of WW1 and had to go and work in a munitions factory where she discovered he...

A beautiful, haunting song which brought tears to my eyes with its evocation of 1930s Poland; so proud, so fragile; doomed to be torn apart by two of the most brutal tyrannies the world has ever seen. And poor "Ordonka": arrested by the Gestapo then the NKVD; surviving the Gulag only to die of tu...