Vertige, Boston Waltz for Piano

An uncommon fate overtook the autograph of the piano piece Vertige, Boston Waltz (in the original French Vertige, Valse-Boston) by Dora Pejačević. The composition is not placed on a single list of the works of this composer, nor is it to be found in her papers in the Croatian Music Institute, where all the manuscripts of her works are kept. From the testimony of Darko Vađić given to the author of this note, he found the original manuscript of the composition in a Zagreb second-hand bookseller, and bought it, as he said himself “for a few coppers”. It is an unassuming composition that stands apart from the rest of the composer’s oeuvre. All in all, Vertige, Boston-Waltz (a social dance in triple meter which appeared at the beginning of the 20th century and was danced little slower than the usual Viennese waltz) has no aspirations to being art and Dora Pejačević probably wrote it for a party or perhaps for some occasion on which there was to be dancing, as real accompaniment for a lively dance. Unfortunately, we have no information at first hand, from the composer herself, about the work, and at the moment we know of no other source in which it is mentioned. From the note on her hand on the front sheet of the autograph we learn that it was composed in Zagreb on May 24, 1906, when she was a young woman of 20. Although Vertige, Boston waltz has no pretensions to the achievement of the high artistic standards that the other piano works of Dora Pejačević undoubtedly possess, the work is a witness to the culture of music and dancing at the time in which she lived, as well as a document of her aristocratic class, in the salons of which, worldwide, the same tradition was cultivated. The composition thus is not only a part (too little known to date) of the musical and dance tradition with which Zagreb and Croatia can be inscribed on the map of Europe and of the world, but can be looked at as a kind of sociological phenomenon and as a fragment of our own undoubtedly too little explored rich cultural heritage.