Fidelio Fritz Finke (1891 - 1968)

Fidelio F. Finke, now almost forgotten, but highly respected in his early years, suffered, as happened to a few non-Jewish composers, from his own political unreliability: A Bohemian-German composer, during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, he showed pro-Nazi sympathies, so that, when the Russian troops freed the nation, he was imprisoned and brought to Moscow, where he attempted suicide in 1945. He was then sent to Dresden, where he remained for the rest of his life and career, now as a socialist composer, member of the communist party, and as prolific as ever. His Shimmy is more or less a foxtrot, from which it was musically almost undistinguishable, if not for the fact that the shimmy had some breaks where the music was suspended, or played sotto voce, to allow time for the dancers to shake their shoulders (a feature which is not evident in Finke’s piece).