The only History of Polish Music on such a scale! The only such history available in English!

The publishing firm Sutkowski Edition Warsaw was founded in 1992, with the aim of publishing The History of Music in Poland – from the earliest times up to the year 2000. The authors of the volumes that make up the series are Polish musicologists specialising in the history of the musical output and musical life of our country. The publisherhouse is owned by the chair of the limited company, Lidia Juranek-Sutkowska, and the series editor is the musicologist Stefan Sutkowski. It should be stated here that the purpose of the firm is to publish, by 2012, a series of books on the history of music in Poland, in English and Polish, after which the publishing work of Sutkowski Edition Warsaw will be complete.

The history of music in Poland begins in the Middle Ages; more precisely, from the adoption of Christianity, in the year 966. The cultivation and, shortly afterwards, creation of art music – mainly sacred music during the first few centuries – took place at the royal court, and also in centres administered by princes and bishops. An important role for many years was played by the large number of monasteries, which introduced the new musical trends emerging in the countries of Western and Southern Europe.

Generally speaking, throughout its existence, Poland has belonged to the group of countries cultivating and creating Western European music. Along with the development of numerous important contacts in the field of art music, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there appeared in our country large numbers of highly qualified musicians, including composers, bringing with them the latest achievements in the music of their countries. This resulted in the emergence of highly trained composers and performers of Polish origins, to name but the most renowned: Wacław of Szamotuły, Mikołaj Gomółka, Mikołaj Zieleński (sixteenth century), Bartłomiej Pękiel, Marcin Mielczewski, Stanisław Sylwester Szarzyński, Damian Stachowicz (seventeenth century) and Grzegorz Gerwazy Gorczycki (eighteenth century). The crowning point was the training of Fryderyk Chopin – that genius of romanticism – by Józef Elsner, the composer of Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi (1838), a work on a par with that century’s other greatest oratorios, like Felix Mendelssohn’s Paulus.

The twentieth century brought a large group of outstanding Polish composers, such as Karol Szymanowski, Witold Lutosławski and Krzysztof Penderecki. Musical life in Poland has had its ups and its downs, occasioned by our history and our place in Europe. But there was also the magnificent royal chapel during the reign of Ladislas IV Vasa, when the operatic theatre at the royal castle in Warsaw was the fourth great opera house in history; naturally, in Italian style, with works composed and presented in shows by the royal maestro Marco Scacchi in the years 1636–48. The period from 1918 to the present day has seen a great rebirth of composition and performance; of course, with a break during and immediately after World War Two.

The series we present here conveys everything that could be discovered relating to the composition of the works that have survived till today and a description of musical life in the once mighty Poland, through the period of the country’s partitioning by Austria, Prussia and Russia (1794-1918) and following the huge shifting of our country to the West, as a result of World War Two.

Editor
Stefan Sutkowski

To produce The History of Music in Poland, the publishing house of Sutkowski Edition invited a group of pre-eminent specialist musicologists associated with Poland’s leading academic centres. Each of the authors is an outstanding expert in his or her area whose research has significantly increased our knowledge of Polish music. Thus the monographs take account of the most up-to-date knowledge, without repeating the errors of earlier studies; the latest findings and source discoveries are presented, often for the first time in the subject literature. The volumes devoted to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are the work of Jerzy Morawski and Katarzyna Morawska, a married couple of musicologists working at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) – Institute of Art. They have taken forward the pioneering research into the music of those eras initiated by Professor Hieronim Feicht. Jerzy Morawski’s academic career has included work as editor- in-chief of the most important source edition of early Polish repertoire: Monumenta Musicae in Polonia. The author of the first volume devoted to the music of the Baroque, Barbara Przybyszewska- Jarmińska, is also a professor at the PAN Institute of Art. Her research into the music of the seventeenth century in Poland may be called, without the shadow of a doubt, epoch-making. This extraordinary, fascinating period, when Warsaw was one of the leading centres for European opera and the court of kings from the Swedish Vasa dynasty employed the most brilliant Italian musicians (many of their compositions are known solely from Polish sources), had not previously been treated to a detailed monograph. In her book, Przybyszewska discusses many hitherto unfamiliar compositions and also brings to our attention a great deal of new information concerning musical life in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania during the seventeenth century. The volume devoted to eighteenth-century music (forthcoming, 2012) is being written by a younger-generation musicologist, Dr Alina Mšdry of Poznań University. The monograph of the Classical era in Polish music was written by Alina Nowak-Romanowicz; access to repertoire of that period is particularly hindered, with most works not yet published, but the author, a professor of the Jagiellonian University of Cracow (the oldest university in Poland), was the scholar best acquainted with its sources and published a number of articles and monographs devoted to particular figures from that period (including a book about Józef Elsner – Chopin’s teacher). In the awareness of foreign music lovers, knowledge of Polish music of the Romantic era is often limited to the great figure of Fryderyk Chopin, but it is worth becoming better acquainted with the context of his brilliant work. The music of the early Polish romanticism is dealt with by Dr hab. Zofia Chechlińska, associated with the PAN Institute of Art and the Jagiellonian University. One of the leading Polish Chopin scholars, in her work she analyses such phenomena as the origins of the ‘national style’ that exerted such a great influence over the composer’s creative personality. Musical life during the extremely arduous period of the Partitions, when Poles were deprived of their statehood, was rich and varied. Warsaw in particular, although it was at that time only a provincial city of the Russian empire, could boast a rich array of musical activity. That is the subject of the volume by Elżbieta Szczepańska-Lange, whilst the repertoire of that period is discussed by Irena Poniatowska, a professor of the University of Warsaw and one of the leading figures in twentieth-century Polish musicology – a scholar orientated perhaps primarily towards the music of the first half of the nineteenth century, and Chopin in particular. In her monograph, she draws attention to the work of Chopin’s less familiar contemporaries, many of whom were also pupils of Elsner, such as the excellent composer Ignacy F. Dobrzyński. Highly esteemed on the concert halls of Europe, Dobrzyński was a misfortunate (on account of the economic and political realities of the day) reformer of Polish opera and author of marvellous chamber works that are currently enjoying a renaissance. The greatest Polish composer since Chopin, Karol Szymanowski, also set out on his creative path under the spell of Chopin, before becoming engrossed in German neo-romanticism. During the period of the First World War, Szymanowski elaborated his own highly subtle musical language, and he then went on to seek new forms of expression for national style. This fascinating figure and his equally fascinating epoch – a real melting-pot of new ideas arising in a Poland that had newly regained her independence – are described by Zofia Helman, a professor of the University of Warsaw and author of highly respected studies on such subjects as the work of Szymanowski and neo-classicism in Polish music. Finally, the contemporary era, in which a great deal has occurred: only to a limited extent did Polish music succumb to the imposed ‘socialist realist’ aesthetic during communist times, and the Warsaw Autumn festival became for Polish composers a true window on the world, inspiring a multitude of new ideas, from the bold avant-garde to ‘new romanticism’. This period is described by the experienced connoisseur and astute commentator Krzysztof Baculewski, a professor at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw who has chronicled new music in Poland for many years.


THE TRANSLATOR

A translator specialising in music, John Comber works principally for the Warsaw Chamber Opera. Also associated for many years with the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, he has translated and edited many books, articles and academic papers on many different aspects of the music of all eras.