[78-L] A Croatian cylinder

[Nikola Zekić]

A Croatian cylinder, mystery finally solved!
Greetings,
I am writing this here, because the staff of the Cylinder preservation 
project seems to ignore most of my emails. After a long time, I think I 
have finally solved the mystery of a certain Croatian cylinder they have 
digitised. At first, they classified it as a home recording, possibly in 
Slavic language. Then I indicated to them that it is, in fact, in a 
Slavic language, specifically in Croatian, and that it is a song 
composed by Franjo Ksaver Kuhač, a Croatian musicologist and composer of 
German origin (his original surname was Koch). The singer, Rogač, could 
not be anyone else but Žiga Rogač, who recorded for Metafon, Gramophone, 
Pathé, and many other companies, including Edison, in Croatian, Serbian, 
Czech, German, and perhaps other languages. He worked for a while as an 
opera singer in Brno (now in Czech republic). According to dr. Tamara 
Jurkić-Sviben, he was, in fact, Jewish, named Sigmund Blauhorn, who 
slavicised his surname into Rogač, and used the common nickname for 
Sigmund, Žiga.
After my email, they misnamed it even more badly than previously, so I 
simply gave up emailing them any further information.
The announcement on the cylinder goes as follows:
"Ljubavni lied(?), narodna pjesma. Uglazbio Kuhač, pjeva Rogač"
Translation: "Love lied, a folk song. Set to music by Kuhač, sung by Rogač".
I have finally deciphered the end of the announcement. Rogač says: 
"VINDOBONA WALZE", that is, a cylinder produced by the Vienna based 
Vindobona company. Therefore, it is not a home recording, as the staff 
of the CPD project insist, but a commercially produced Croatian 
cylinder, one of the few of its kind that has survived. I don't know 
whether they will correct their information, but if they don't care, I do.



http://www.library.ucsb.edu/OBJID/Cylinder13171