Charles d’Albert and "The Sultan’s Polka"

In this richly textured essay, Emre Aracı retraces the forgotten legacy of Charles d’Albert, the 19th-century dance master and composer of "The Sultan’s Polka", whose music once graced the finest ballrooms of Victorian Britain. A serendipitous moment at the Château de Chantilly connects Aracı’s own orchestral recording of the polka—heard unexpectedly at a historic re-enactment ball—to an old sky-blue dance card discovered years before in London. Through historical vignettes, personal discoveries, and musical archaeology, Aracı revives the elegance of a vanished world, where polkas and waltzes whispered stories of empire, fashion, and forgotten joy.

Many years ago, at an ephemera fair in London, I came across an old dance card, oval in shape, sky-blue in colour, adorned with gold leaf and bearing a design reminiscent of Wedgwood china and the Jane Austen era. It depicted a graceful couple mid-dance, and on the reverse, pencilled notations listed the partner names beside each dance: waltz, quadrille, galop and polka. The event had taken place at the Princess’s Rooms, directly opposite the Princess’s Theatre on Oxford Street, under the instruction of a Monsieur Piaggio. One wonders in whose pocket this elegant card might have once resided on that long-ago evening.

Dance card from Monsieur Piaggio’s soirée (© Emre ARACI)

Judging by advertisements in London newspapers from the 1890s referencing Monsieur Piaggio’s soirées at the Princess’s Rooms, this was surely a relic from that period—a card now over a century old. Its refined contours seemed to conjure the vanished pleasures of a genteel age, much like the attire of those who danced that evening. As I held it, I found myself transported: the Princess’s Rooms materialised in my mind’s eye, conjured like a stage set by imagination alone.

Château de Chantilly (© Emre ARACI)

Years later, whilst gazing at an old postcard of the Château de Chantilly, some 50 kilometres north of Paris, I retrieved that same dance card from my drawer and placed it on my desk. The château, reconstructed between 1875 and 1882 for Henri d’Orléans, Duke of Aumale, following the ravages of the French Revolution, had recently hosted a ball on the evening of 22 September 2019, marking the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Suez Canal. The scene, straight from a Proustian tableau, featured guests in period costume dancing in the picture gallery—gentlemen in tails, ladies in evening dress—gracefully reviving the waltzes, galops and polkas of a bygone era. The aesthetic richness of the setting—the paintings, costumes, and architecture—played no small part in this historical re-enactment. The ball had been organised by a society named Aux Jardins du Roy, whose website asked, “Do you love history, are you moved by beautiful costumes, do you delight in music and dance? Aux Jardins du Roy offers you a magical journey through time”.

Whilst watching one of their online videos, I froze. For among the dances that evening was one I knew intimately: The Sultan’s Polka, composed by Charles d’Albert—a piece that had once reigned supreme at nineteenth-century British balls.

To my astonishment, the music playing in the background was none other than my own arrangement for string orchestra, recorded many years prior in London, under my baton, featuring Cihat Aşkın as concertmaster and produced by Ateş Orga. Originally issued in a CD compilation under the title European Music at the Ottoman Court by Kalan Music, it was later released by Warner Classics as Invitation to the Seraglio. I had no inkling it would one day echo through the picture gallery at Chantilly. As the strains of my arrangement reverberated through that opulent setting, I felt a deep and ineffable connection to the dancers and the fête. It was a moment that might have sprung from one of Proust’s most spellbinding passages—a spell cast across time and space. In an instant, I was whisked back to the damp, musty basement of an antiquarian bookshop in Cecil Court off Charing Cross Road, where I had first discovered the score to The Sultan’s Polka many years ago.

The picture gallery at Chantilly (© Emre ARACI)

Charles Louis Napoléon d’Albert was born on 25 February 1809 in Nienstedten, a village on the banks of the Elbe which today forms part of Hamburg. His father, a cavalry commander in the French army, was of French descent, while his mother, a gifted amateur musician, was of German origin. It was she who gave him his first lessons at the piano, allowing him to play only the works of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. Following his father’s death in 1816, the seven-year-old Charles emigrated with his mother to England. There, he studied with one of the era’s foremost pianists and pedagogues, Frédéric Kalkbrenner—a pupil of Salieri who had known Haydn, Beethoven and Hummel, and whose admirers included none other than Chopin, who once considered becoming his student and dedicated his First Piano Concerto to him. When Kalkbrenner moved to Paris in 1824, d’Albert followed, enrolling at the Académie Royale.

Charles Louis Napoléon d’Albert

His time in Paris would prove pivotal. In addition to studying music, he took lessons in ballet and dance. Upon returning to London, he became principal dancer and instructor at both the King’s Theatre and Covent Garden. Yet his true passion lay in composition. Unfulfilled in the capital, he moved north to Newcastle, where he opened a dance academy and, in 1835, published Ballroom Etiquette. Marrying his mastery of dance technique with his musical ambition, he began composing original works in the popular dance forms of the day—chiefly polkas. These pieces, published not as orchestral scores but as attractive chromolithographed piano editions, spread rapidly from household to household.

Originating in Bohemia, polka had swept across Europe by the 1840s—reaching Paris in 1840 and London in 1843. D’Albert was among its principal champions in England. On 16 September 1843, the Newcastle Journal announced that Monsieur d’Albert, having returned from the London season, would be introducing the new 2/4-time “La Polka” at his Newcastle academy.

Long vanished Turk’s Head Hotel in Newcastle (© Emre ARACI)

D'Albert's classes were held in the ballrooms of the historic Turk’s Head Hotel—a name popularised in England following the introduction of coffee houses by Ottoman traders in the 17th century. Though long since closed, I came upon the original building on Grey Street during a visit to Newcastle in June 2022, and photographed the commemorative plaque—placed not in memory of d’Albert’s academy, but to mark its role as a meeting place of the Suffragette Movement.

(photo © Emre ARACI)

At the time, I had no inkling that d’Albert’s academy had once flourished there. In the same newspaper, just beneath his advertisement, a list of the latest wax candles imported from London appeared, and I found myself imagining Monsieur d’Albert’s pupils whirling under their flickering light.

By 27 September 1848, when the new season commenced, the academy was under the patronage of the Marchioness of Londonderry, Frances Vane. Her portrait by Alexandre-Jean Dubois-Drahonet, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, gives a glimpse into the refined circles d’Albert frequented. He would go on to organise numerous glittering balls in Newcastle’s historic Assembly Rooms—now faded into history but once the site of much gaiety and grace.

Marchioness of Londonderry by Alexandre-Jean Dubois-Drahonet (© Victoria and Albert Museum) 

It was in such a milieu that The Sultan’s Polka emerged in 1854. Among the year’s freshest compositions, it soon gained enormous popularity and remains d’Albert’s best-known work among his over 300 compositions. The title was no mere fancy: that same year, Britain entered the Crimean War on the side of the Ottomans against Russia, and Sultan Abdülmecid’s engraved likeness adorned the illustrated journals. Popular composers of dance music, ever attuned to the zeitgeist, transformed current events into musical vignettes. D’Albert followed suit with not only The Sultan’s Polka but also The War Galop and The Constantinople Quadrille. In total, his output included 81 quadrilles, 76 waltzes, 64 polkas, and 48 galops, with many issued in elegant lithographed editions. Each Christmas, he would publish an album of the year’s dances—finely bound and embellished with the chromolithographs of John Brandard. The 1856 edition even featured a new waltz entitled The Sultana, dedicated to the Valide Sultan.

Each Christmas, d'Albert would publish an album of the year’s dances (© Emre ARACI)

In 1863, Charles d’Albert married Annie Rowell, a fellow dance instructor, in Paris. The following year, their son Eugen was born in Glasgow. Eugen d’Albert would become one of Franz Liszt’s most accomplished pupils and later Kapellmeister at Weimar. Turkish musicologist Cevad Memduh Altar, having heard Eugen perform during his Leipzig years, would later recall in his memoir 78 Years in the Light of Art, “An extraordinary technique, matched by the most delicate refinement—he interprets with such grace that he is not only a great composer, but a virtuoso”, (See: Emre Aracı, ‘Seyahatname-i Cevad Çelebi’, Andante, December 2019, Issue 158). After some years in Newcastle, the d’Alberts moved to Glasgow, continuing to offer dance instruction to society’s upper crust. In 1876, they returned to London, settling in Kensington. Charles d’Albert passed away on 26 May 1886, aged 77. His death was widely reported in the press. Three years later, on 26 October 1889, the Newcastle Chronicle wrote of him: 

“Charles d'Albert followed his own road, all strewn with clover, smiles, and bravos, because, while charming one half of human nature, he could not fail to amuse the other half. He thus arrived at an aristocratic popularity, without being served by the fracas of large orchestras. His waltzes and polkas were played in drawing-room after drawing-room and circulated from family to family until they were known in the whole world of elegance”.

I am glad that, in my own way, I was able to carry his music into the 21st century, allowing The Sultan’s Polka to be heard at the Château de Chantilly. Like the 1856 Christmas album that rests in my library, filled with floral flourishes and cries of ‘bravo’, he followed his own path, and gave us hope. And though I had no foreknowledge of that ball at Chantilly—and dearly wish I had—I am certain that my spirit drifted amongst them that evening, weaving through candlelight and shadow, dancing silently through the picture gallery to the strains of The Sultan's Polka.

Emre Aracı's article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Charles d'Albert ve Sultan'ın Polkası’ in the November 2023 issue (No. 205) of Andante.

Link to the original article in Turkish

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