The Foxtrot born "On the Corner" (Foxtrot narozený „Na růžku“, H 123bis) would probably have been completely forgotten if it had not been successfully arranged for wind instruments by the Polička bandmaster Josef Vintra and performed in Polička in summer 1926. The event is actually described by Martinů himself in a letter to his close friend Fina Tausiková dated 31 August 1926: “We had that legionaries’ feast here [...]. It was altogether very nice and a fine day. [...] There were lots of people here, and the children sang 'Ošiřelo dítě’ (The Orphaned Child) and it was very touching and nice. The municipal band played here on Saturday, and their concert in the town square included my foxtrot, which I wrote one time atthe smallish binge in the pub, and the boys had it copied out and arranged, and now they play it publicly to big success, so there you have it, there’s the makings of something in me after all." Martinů supposedly sketched a draft of the foxtrot for amateur musicians on the edge of a sheet of newspaper during a friendly get-together at Na růžku (On the Corner) Pub, which has since ceased to exist. However, this original draft has been lost. The piano version of the foxtrot was reconstructed according to Josef Vintr’s arrangement by musicologist Iša Popelka and published in 1973 in the popular volume Skladby pro Poličku (Compositions for Polička; Editio Supraphon). The exact date of the composition’s origin cannot be determined; Bohuslav Martinů’s biographer Miloš Šafránek dates it to the year 1919.
Lucie Harasim Berná, Snadné klavírní skladby a tance. Praha: Bärenreiter Praha, 2016, s. 4.
[...] The piece testifies to the certainty with which Martinů moved on the ground of the then brand new dance music, at a time when even the Prague centre was still exploring – sometimes rather awkwardly – new terrain. Although this is a piece intended for amateur musicians and for dancing, Martinů did not allow himself to slip, at least in a few bars, out of the stereotype of the time, which even then – as today – must have seemed too easy and transparent to him. In fact, he transposes the first movement of the Trio into a minor dominant key and chooses a similar procedure at the end, where it has only the function of a tonal excursion, cancelled by the return to the initial key of the first movement. Otherwise, however, the piece respects the conventions of the early, ragtime-inflected foxtrot.
Iša Popelka, Bohuslav Martinů: skladby pro Poličku. Praha: Supraphon, 1973, s. 23.