John Allison explores how the Poland’s turbulent history has left an exceptional musical heritage

By johnallison

Published: Wednesday, 01 February 2023 at 12:00 am


It is hardly surprising that interwar Poland was such an artistic hothouse. For almost a century and a half, following the First Partition of 1772, the history of Poland had been one of artistic ideas rather than material substance.

After the Third Partition in 1795, Poland had ceased to exist as a state — Russia, Prussia and Austria had joined forces in dividing up the land of the mazurka and polonaise.

Political activity was suppressed, but it found artistic expression and the arts became not just a reflection of events but a replacement for them.

Great Polish composers

It was in this climate that the musical genius of Chopin flourished, both before and after he went into exile in Paris.

He was not alone, and other important Polish composers of the 19th century included;

But to understand the depth of Polish musical culture in the 20th century and beyond, it’s necessary to remember not only Chopin’s direct predecessors – Maria Szymanowska, Karol Lipiński, Franciszek Lessel, Józef Elsner and Karol Kurpiński – but the much earlier figures who are only now beginning to gain recognition in the wider world. Indeed, through a line of such figures as Mikołaj of Radom (born around 1400) to Mikołaj Gomólka and Bartłomiej Pękiel, Poland can claim some of the greatest Renaissance and Baroque composers.

Of special significance are Mikołaj Gomołka’s settings of Jan Kochanowski’s Psałterz Dawidów (Psalms of David). Kochanowski was the greatest poet of the entire Slavonic world before the 19th century, and (as the historian Norman Davies puts it) ‘his Psalter did for Polish what Luther’s Bible did for German’.

Ignacy Paderewski

Born in Kursk in 1860, Ignacy Paderewski was plunged into a dual life of music and political activism. Largely self-taught, he started to grab attention as an exceptional pianist and improviser, though his career didn’t really take off until he was in his mid-20s. After a breakthrough in Paris in 1888, he toured widely, gaining something of a cult reputation as audiences were wowed by his stage presence and thrilling virtuosity. 

During World War One, he saw concert tours as an opportunity to champion and raise funds for the burgeoning Polish independence movement, and when Poland achieved its desired political status at war’s end, Paderewski had become too influential a voice to ignore – he was soon appointed both Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

As the political sands shifted around him, Paderewski did not stay long in post, but he did remain a respected elder statesman as he revived in earnest his career as a pianist. When he died in 1941, aged 80, it was, appropriately, while on a tour in the US in order to drum up support for his homeland’s cause in the Second World War.

Szymanowski

In any ranking of more recent Polish composers, Szymanowski must be regarded as second greatest after Chopin. An almost exact contemporary of Bartók, Kodály, Enescu and Stravinsky, he occupies a similar place to them on the cusp of modern music.

The heady opulence of some of his biggest, middle-period works has led to him being viewed as even perhaps ‘the last Romantic’, but his late style – an attempt to summon up the primitivism of traditional Polish music that coincided with the emergence of an independent Poland – is of greater significance.