The Polish Musical Renaissance in Modern Times (A reflective personal essay by Michael Moran © Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina (NIFC) - Chopin and His Europe - Chopin i jego Europa 2024)

Portrait of Władysław Vasa 1595-1648, son of King Sigismund III of Poland, 1596

by

The Polish Renaissance artist Martin Kober (1550-1598)

20th International Chopin and his Europe Music Festival  

17th August – 8th September 2024

Introduction, Programme and Reviewer's Notebook

http://www.michael-moran.com/2024/08/chopin-and-his-europe-and-rest-of-world.html

Reviewer: https://gravatar.com/mjcmoran?utm_source=hovercard 

FESTIVAL PROGRAMME

https://festiwal.nifc.pl/en/2024/kalendarium/

The Polish Musical Renaissance 

in 

Modern Times

In March 1946, Winston Churchill delivered an observation in musical, rotund tones: From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.

The seemingly impossible dream of the independence of Poland as a sovereign nation and accession to the European Union has actually come to fruition. At last what one might term the 'Cultural Iron Curtain' has been split asunder to reveal to the wider European continent many formerly unknown artistic treasures of this valiant nation. In no domain has this been more obvious than in music, but also in art, architecture, theatre and literature.

Prologue

Mired in London ennui yet remaining musically passionate, I decided on impulse in 1992 to explore recently freed Poland. The curtain, a cultural as well as political and military barrier, had been jubilantly raised three years before. The 'tearing of the veil of the temple' indeed. My recollections of the last thirty or so years are unavoidably suffused with romantic nostalgia. I remain highly optimistic at the exponentially developing cultural future which is now in progress. The Chopin i jego Europa (Chopin and his Europe) Festival is an eloquent indicator of this development.

Many great artists of international fame, previously rarely heard or seen in Poland, have visited and performed since the iron curtain has been permanently furled in freedom - Martha Argerich, Mikhail Pletnev, Maria João Pires, Francesco Piemontesi, Federico Colli, Krystian Zimerman, Arcadi Volodos, Marc-André Hamelin, Nelson Freire, Garrick Ohlsson, Grigory Sokolov, Maurizio Pollini, Anne-Sophie Mutter and a host of young, promising European and Asian pianists.

Magnificent world orchestras such as the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle and the London Philharmonic now perform in Polish cities such as Warsaw, Katowice and Wrocław. Some cities have new concert halls that possess world class, tuned acoustics. The list comprising this Polish musical renaissance has become an endless ribbon of glorious sound. However, musical life was not always like this.

Chopin and Warsaw

My initial intimate exposure to Chopin in Warsaw remains an inestimable, timeless treasure. My first walk into the city in January 1992 began on the eastern bank of the Vistula. I strolled through the muddy and bleak Paderewski Park to the bustling Russian market in the Stadion Dziesięciolecia in the district known as Praga. The finest view of Warsaw is from this side of the river. Crossing the Vistula was cold and windy. This strange slow river of silent pulse and wide sandbars gives Warsaw a unique setting.

Following an irresistible directive from my heart I became lost in the labyrinth of socialist concrete that led to the elegant Ostrogski Castle, the seat of the then Fryderyk Chopin Society. The accumulated emotion of many years of familiarity with his music affected me deeply as I entered this small Palladian palace.

The museum was entirely devoted to Chopin, one of the greatest of composers, comparable only to those he most revered,  Mozart and Bach. ‘You are to play Mozart in my memory’ were his last words in Paris to his friends the cellist Auguste Franchomme and his renowned Polish pupil Princess Marcelina Czartoryska.

The lower floor was dedicated to Chopin's life in Poland, then under Russian domination. A feeling of sick longing for his native land emanated from these rooms., his music possessing all the yearning of the exile, his lost country a phantom limb that accompanied him through life. Glass cabinets displayed original letters, engravings, manuscripts and other memorabilia. The extreme delicacy of the autographs that do survive make one feel Chopin was barely a corporeal being. He likened his own writing to cobwebs.

Small cards informed me this was the saucer belonging to the white china cup with painted scene and gilded rim from which Chopin drank chocolate during his visits to his cultured Polish patrons the Prince and Princess Czartoryski at the Hôtel Lambert in Paris. A rose had been carelessly cast on the keyboard of his Pleyel piano, the tone and varied colours of the early instrument perfectly suiting the inherent intimacy of his music. ‘I merely indicate, the listeners must complete the picture.’

On a satin cushion lay an inscribed pocket watch given him by the famous Italian soprano Angelica Catalani following a recital given by the child prodigy at the age of 10. Displayed under glass were the letters tied with a velvet ribbon that had flowed from his blighted love affair with the beautiful sixteen year-old Maria Wodzińska. This package of joy and desolation was inscribed by the composer  Moja bieda (‘My misery’).

The demands of increased tourism to Warsaw since Polish accession to the European Union in May 2004, required the museum to be greatly extended and modernized. The echoes of the original furnishing and precious relics, the speaking shadows of thirty two years ago, have sadly faded in intensity. However, young music lovers can now welcome the greatly increased accessibility and quantity of materials and information 

The eloquent fourth Ballade in F-minor, a deep, narrative masterpiece of human destiny, was playing as I moved along the cases containing plaster casts of his hands, his death mask and bunches of faded violets cast aside as if in grief. Each year the Kościół Świętego Krzyża (Holy Cross Church) is the site for a concert and ceremony to celebrate Chopin’s birth on 1 March 1810. On my first visit, two beautiful children, one a tiny three year old in a red bobble hat, laid a single tulip. I laid my single red rose with intense emotion. This simple ceremony set the tone of nostalgia and melancholy for that day 

It was snowing heavily and -6C as I laboured up the Żoliborz Hill through the neoclassical ‘Execution Gate’  of the Russian Citadel near the site of the gallows that had stood under a broad chestnut tree. I wanted to immerse myself in the historical source of Chopin's anguished music.

Returning to the museum, I was to listen to my first Chopin recital in Warsaw given by the sublime Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov. It was possibly also his first recital in the capital. Anticipatory electricity was in the air. The audience was the customary group of elderly Central Europeans with the ravages of high culture etched into their faces. The instrument was placed near the serliana in the intimate salon under a blazing chandelier. Sokolov emerged from the artist's door and walked to the piano, a bearish Russian figure, most unprepossessing in appearance 

Within a few seconds of the impassioned opening bars of the patriotic Chopin C-sharp minor Polonaise Op.26 (1834-35), I knew I was in the presence of true greatness, playing of profound spiritual intensity and technical achievement. We passed through a programme of brooding mazurkas haunted by rural nostalgia and onto some nocturnes, redolent with the seductive perfumes of Sarmatia. As a friend of mine commented after a recital he gave in 2012 'He seems to love every single note he plays, every sound he makes.' His smile, charm and affability later in the artist's room was as if the sun had emerged from behind a cloud of profound seriousness of interpretation.

Sokolov recitals have now become for me the apotheosis of piano playing. After a recent recital in the National Philharmonic Hall I wrote:

Sokolov played the Schumann Arabeske with intense, penetrating lyricism and heart-breaking poignancy as we moved toward his towering presentation of the Fantasy in C major. What can I say that is meaningful about this deep soliloquy on the nature of love and its lyrical poetic heights and flights of ecstasy, the warmest of love's emotions, the haunting crevasses, the proud grandeur of overcoming .... Tears were drawn from me by the deepest introspection of my own past. I am still trembling with the emotion of this musical experience. An unrepeatable, visionary moment. Music is often beyond words, imbued with an ancient, magical power. 'A cabbalistic craft' as Thomas Mann referred to it in Dr. Faustus.

 

Sokolov is what in the time of Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoevsky was referred to as a 'Russian Soul'. It is said 'There are pianists and there is Sokolov.'

As these thirty years have passed he has often played courtesy of the Chopin i jego Europa festivals. His spontaneity, fire in the crucible of musical recreation continues, but possibly slightly different in conception now, one dimension deeper. With the passing of time, he has moved beyond the overt intensity of exuberant youthful temperatures and plumbed far more profound musical worlds with the warmth and wisdom of mature penetration. We are invited to absorb the more consoling and disturbing satisfactions that lie beyond youth and the glory of it.

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other wo 

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

 

John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn (autumn 1819) 

Dreaming in  Żelazowa Wola

In an unaccountably despondent frame of mind, it being late spring in the early 1990s, I decided to raise my spirits with a visit to Żelazowa Wola, a hamlet about fifty kilometres from Warsaw and the birthplace of Fryderyk Chopin. The flat Mazovian landscape was relieved by trembling birch and pine, forlorn willows with gnarled boles clustered around ponds or lined the deserted roads. This landscape is indispensible to an understanding of his music.

During the turbulent political period of the early nineteenth century, Chopin and his family often escaped the capital to the refuge of the Mazovian countryside at Żelazowa Wola. Here the fields are alive with birdsong, butterflies and wildflowers. On summer nights the piano was placed in the garden and Chopin would improvise eloquent melodies that floated through the orchards and across the river to the listening villagers gathered beyond.

Serpentine paths wound between hedges and over the little bridge above the Utrata river, the long-leaved aquatic plants flowing like Ophelia’s hair in the current. It was almost dusk as I made my way to the softly lit entrance of the dworek (small manor house). I leaned against one of the columns of the porch and looked into the depths of the park, over the still pond with the dim carp, leaves shifting nervously in the breeze as the eloquent music fitfully drifted on the currents of air.

I stooped to pick up a weathered chestnut and idly polished it on my coat. An old piano tuner I knew in Warsaw gave chestnuts from this park to piano students at the conservatorium telling them to hold them close to their hearts as they contained ‘the spirit of Chopin’. He assured me that late one night, after tuning the piano for a concert, he had seen the disembodied hand of the composer appear on a banister in the dworek.

This original atmosphere was partially recaptured in summer when the windows of the dworek were thrown open for recitals and the audience wandered in the elegant gardens listening to the dream, heard as if by chance. Poignant and romantic pastoral emotions arose. A brass candelabra with the crowned Polish eagle resting between the branches stood on a small grand piano. Warm yellow light flickered on the portrait of the composer and fitfully illuminated the painted beams of the dworek. A beautiful young French girl, had ambitiously chosen to play both sets of Chopin Études. Her little dog lay under the instrument fast asleep 

The pressure of increased tourism as the country has opened up following accession to the European Union, has led to the present irresistible development. Piano recitals now bloom through the gardens on concealed loudspeakers in the shrubbery. Lecture theatres, shop and restaurant. The Chopin birthday recital is given by a notable pianist, often on a period or modern piano and broadcast from the interior. The spring and summer season features accomplished Polish artists such as Szymon Nehring, Aleksandra Świgut, Janusz Olejniczak and Piotr Paleczny. International pianists such as Dimitry Ablogin, Tobias Koch, and Kate Liu increasingly give recitals.  

Music Festivals Opera

Competitions and festivals have proliferated in Poland in an unstoppable stream since the fall of the iron curtain in 1989. Chopin has almost become an industry. Many provincial centres have world class festivals in superb new concert halls attracting the greatest international artists as the Polish economy and personal middle class income expands. Katowice, Gdańsk, Wrocław, Poznań, the Bach Festival in the magnificent timber-framed Baroque church at Świdnica. Each have their own festivals ranging through all compositional epochs and styles.

I believe there is a true Renaissance in Polish music taking place at present as Poland celebrates 20 years of European Union membership and a return to the European cultural fold. Not all resuscitated works are 'undiscovered masterpieces', but many are musically extremely eloquent and deserve comparison with works in the conventionally performed Western musical canon.

A most remarkable Polish classical music festival is the international Chopin i jego Europa Festival (Chopin and his Europe), which initially took place in 2004 and is now held annually in Warsaw. This year is the 20th anniversary. The festival is organised by National Fryderyk Chopin Institute under the artistic direction of the visionary Stanisław Leszczyński, in cooperation with the National Philharmonic. Each festival has a theme such as From Mozart to Bellini or more enigmatically, Not For the First Time ! It has now developed an unassailable reputation to become one of the most important annual international music festivals in Europe.           

This festival, in its significant contribution to the Polish musical renaissance of both performance and recording, has introduced me to many unknown Polish composers of significant European musical stature. I have heard some of the finest of all performances of the Chopin concertos with eminent international pianists and the Orchestra of the XVIIIth Century under the inspired direction of the now sadly departed Franz Brüggen. In the immense gold Ballroom of the Royal Castle, I heard the first performance for two hundred years of a festive piano concerto in the Russian style by Ferdinand Ries, a close friend and pupil of Beethoven.

The music of Chopin had been the overriding reason for my coming to Poland but I had also seriously studied the harpsichord and its repertoire in London in the early 1970s. It was with surprise and delight that I discovered in 1992 the beginnings of a renaissance taking place in early music.

I learned this was closely associated with the remarkable activities of the almost forgotten figure of Kazimierz Piwkowski (1925 - 2012). The renaissance of early music in Poland really began with him. Unfortunately few now remember the situation of early music under the Polish People's Republic.

Born in the small ancient town of Żnin in Pomerania, his passion for music was genetic. His grandfather was an organist in Gorzyce, and his father, Paweł Piwkowski, was the organist in St. Florian's Church in Żnin for over thirty years,  Kazimierz began looking for old instruments in Western museums, possible due to a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and Art covering a stay in Paris. He constructed ancient instruments according to ancient drawings and even learned to play them. His early career is reminiscent of the world famous Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940), the French-born musician and instrument maker who spent much of his working life in England and established an instrument-making workshop in Haslemere, Surrey. He was one of the leading figures in the 20th-century revival of early music.

In the mid-sixties, Piwkowski founded the band Fistulatores et Tubicinatores Varsovienses (Warsaw Pipers and Trumpeters). Their first concert took place on November 24, 1965. The group became famous in Europe and the world giving almost five hundred concerts, even in Australia. He became an authority on early music culminating in a concert in Paris at the Sainte-Chapelle,  a royal chapel in the Palais de la Cité, the residence of the Kings of France until the 14th century.

In addition to instrumental music, the development of baroque and classical opera after the fall of the iron curtain predictably turned to historically informed performance practice on period instruments

Warsaw is no great distance from Vienna and Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) was produced in May 1783 by a touring German company for the birthday of King Stanisław Augustus Poniatowski, just nine months after the Vienna premiere. Don Giovanni arrived in the capital to play at the National Theatre before the king in October 1789 with the same Italian Domenico Guardasoni company that had premièred the opera just two years before in Prague with Mozart conducting. His operas were performed in Warsaw well in advance of Berlin, Paris or London.

The city has had a distinguished operatic heritage since the early baroque period when it was the only capital other than Rome to have had an opera theatre that hosted famous Italian soloists. Many works were especially written for the Warsaw stage during the Jagiełłonian and Vasa dynasties of the seventeenth century

Stanisław Moniuszko (1819-1872)

The National Fryderyk Chopin Institute period instrument recordings of performances given at many Chopin i jego Europa Festivals have done much to extend the universe of forgotten Moniuszko operas abroad. Operas such as Halka (1847) are increasingly known. The libretto of this opera was translated into Italian and performed in a concert version by Europa Galante under Fabio Biondi at the 2018 Chopin i jego Europa Festival. The faith in Moniuszko's genius by this distinguished period instrument ensemble is reflected in their recordings of Flis (The Raftsman 1858), Hrabina (The Countess 1860) and the world première of the one act opera Verbum nobile composed in 1861. 

Stanisław Moniuszko was born into a family of Polish landowners settled in Belarus and showed the customary precociousness of genius. He traveled often to St. Petersburg where he met the great composers of the day  (Glinka, Balakirev, and Mussorgsky), to Weimar where he met Liszt and to Prague where he made the acquaintance of Smetana. His first recently discovered (2015) comic opera in two acts, composed in Berlin, was entitled Der Schweizerhütte (the Swiss Cottage)

In 1848 he visited Warsaw and met the writer, actor and director Jan Chęciński who became the librettist of arguably Moniuszko’s greatest operas, Halka and  Straszny Dwór (The Haunted Manor, 1865). Both are infused with the fertile but cleverly, even humorously, concealed themes of Polish nationalism. Halka was premiered with great success in Warsaw in 1858 (10 years after the concert version performance in Vilnius). Later staged in Prague, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Moniuszko became an oversight success in the manner of Lord Byron after the publication of Childe Harold. He then began to concentrate on operas that eschewed Polish themes. His work is increasingly known internationally through performances and recordings.

For some time he had been fascinated with the class system in France and also the caste system in India as depicted in the play Le Paria (The Pariah, 1821) by Casimir Delavigne (1793-1843). He had translated it from the French into Polish. Gaetano Donizetti had also written an opera Il Paria (premiered 1829) of which he was particularly proud, set in 16th century India based on this play. Moniuszko desperately wanted an operatic success on the stages of Paris, spurred on by the successful operas of Meyerbeer. He had toyed with the idea of his opera Paria (Pariah) for some ten years before it was finally premiered in 1868. 

Undervalued at conception, this ornate tale would not have been considered a minor composition in Great Britain, India being under the hegemony of the British Raj. The English literary masterpiece, the novel A Passage to India (1924) by E.M. Forster, deals precisely with the idea of two characters who by their actions and behaviour become pariahs within their own societies in colonial India. The Overture is a magnificent evocative piece of 19th century orchestral writing. The opera has been often successfully staged in Poland in modern times.

Moniuszko remains central to a full understanding of Polish culture which is finally reaching its deserved place in the musical European world picture.  He also wrote beguiling and entertaining miniature salon works and operatic song transcriptions for piano. These were performed during the Chopin i jego Europa Festival and recorded for the National Fryderyk Chopin Institute collection by the French-Cypriot virtuoso pianist Cyprien Katsaris.

Until at least 1989, the 'cultural iron curtain' effectively concealed the existence of Stanisław Moniuszko for directors, producers and audiences in the West. However, I feel sure that more imaginative, fully costumed, opulent staged production of his forgotten operas with fine soloists of world renown would at least partially fulfill and validate Moniuszko's own immense and deserved hopes for an international reputation. 

The history of another opera company, the Opera Kameralna Warszawska (Warsaw Chamber Opera) and its managing and artistic director Stefan Sutkowski is a remarkable tale of courageous survival and musical exploration under the Polish People's Republic. For years the company wandered Warsaw in search of a permanent stage. The authorities finally allocated them the use of the former Calvinist or Dissident Church, a fine neo-classical building by the Saxon architect Szymon Bogumił Zug. The venue opened in 1986 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the opera company. The small, intimate auditorium is perfect for operas originally conceived for a court theatre.

In the early 1990s, in the space of six weeks, I was unexpectedly presented with all twenty-one works that Mozart wrote for the stage. In 1991, the bicentenary year of the composer’s death, the first Mozart Festival took place. This was long before a similar Mozart cycle was staged in Salzburg. Although the orchestral playing and voices could be somewhat variable, it should be remembered these were the earliest days of the Polish early music revival and musical training on period instruments. He set up the Musicae Antiquae Collegium Varsoviense, now a highly developed musical ensemble. Finely staged Monteverdi and baroque opera cycles followed Mozart.  

On an opera night, the audience might sit in the small conservatory among paintings of operatic composers and ornamental fig trees drinking coffee from tiny porcelain cups. The young singers could be heard warming their voices with fragments of scales, popular tunes or the arias to come. A moment’s inattention might inadvertently allow a window to drift slightly open to reveal a costumed singer adjusting his wig or a soprano applying makeup or adjusting her breasts in a corset before a lighted mirror. The intimate atmosphere was perfectly eighteenth century, an almost Commedia del Arte prelude of youthful exuberance in anticipation of the opera to come.

My first experience of this theatre was with Lucio Silla, an opera seria composed in 1772 when Mozart was 16 for the carnival season at the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan. The libretto for this unlikely triumph of virtue was by Giovanni di Gamerra, a writer fond of tombs and lugubrious plots, allegedly drawn towards necrophilia in private life !

In Lucio Silla, the role of Cecilio, was composed by Mozart for a castrato. Here it was performed as intended by the brilliant Polish sopranist Dariusz Paradowski with a voice as close to a Farinelli castrato as is possible today. This ultra-rare voice had an almost shocking affect when first encountered but Paradowski is a consummate actor with the male stage presence of a Nureyev and duly received the flowers and ovations of a true operatic star. In many way his mantle of voice and acting ability has been inherited by the outstanding Polish contemporary countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński.

‘Brother Mozart’ had been involved with Masonic ritual from an early age when he set a Masonic poem to music dedicated to the doctor who had cured him of smallpox. In 1773 Mozart  was asked to supply  the incidental music to the play Thamos, König in Ägypten  (Thamos, King of Egypt) by Tobias Philipp Baron von Gebler. The play deals with the Masonic conflict between light and darkness. 

At Łazienki Park in Warsaw, at the Theatre on the Island the Warszawska Opera Kameralna, created a staged version of Thamos fused with the music of two later Masonic cantatas. The experience of Thamos in the park has remained one of the great experiences of  my musical life 

Shortly before midnight fluttering  funeral candles were lit along the sinuous  paths  leading to the theatre  from  the entrance  to the park. The orchestra pit lay before a strip of water which isolated the Theatre on the Island (inspired by the ruins of the Temple of Jove at Baalbek in Syria), where the actors performed, from the amphitheater (modeled on ruins at Herculaneum) where the audience was seated. Trees were silhouetted against a fading summer sky and the leaves rustled  in the light breeze moving over the shattered  columns  and pediments, the lake a dull mirror reflecting statues of the dying Gaul and Cleopatra. Together with the cry of peacocks on the balustrades of the palace, one was lifted onto a plane of rare classical beauty 

Another Warsaw opera company, the Polska Opera Królewska (Polish Royal Opera) was formed in 2017 and performs baroque and classical works in the magnificent Royal Theatre in Łazienki Park. This theater is one of only two surviving authentic, eighteenth-century court theaters in Europe. Miraculously this 18th century building escaped the systematic destruction of the city by the Nazis. A wonderful feature is the trompe l'oeil paintings à la Veronese above the cornice which give one the impression of boxes filled with happy and festive spectators looking down at the stage and auditorium. Their period instrument ensemble, the Capella Regia Polona, paint an authentic historical soundscape for the revival of the numerous, often forgotten, Polish repertoire of vocal and instrumental pieces.

Rare, normally inaccessible and forgotten works of art are being produced on an increasing scale in Warsaw. This company staged a small chamber opera Aleksander i Apelles by the eminent Polish composer Karol Kazimierz Kurpiński (1785-1857) that had not been performed in repertory for some two hundred years.  It is an early work from 1815 and scored for small forces and minimal cast.

The renowned Beethoven Easter Festival in Warsaw features Beethoven works and many overlooked compositions of the modern composer Krzysztof Penderecki, works dedicated to celebrated artists such as Anne-Sophie Mutter who perform in Warsaw.

Duszniki Zdrój (Bad Reinerz) International Chopin Festival

The year 2005 was also the first occasion that I attended the Duszniki Zdrój (Bad Reinerz) International Chopin Festival.

Part of the way through his studies, Chopin's second and most serious teacher, Józef Elsner, recommended that he ‘take the waters’ or in modern jargon 'go into rehab' not far from where Elsner was born in the small Silesian spa of Bad Reinerz (now Duszniki Zdrój). Frycek’s studies, his intense partying and playing into the small hours during his third and final year at the Liceum had begun to affect his health. He was a bit of a 'party animal' was young Frycek!

He arrived at Duszniki Zdrój on 3 August 1826 after spending a day en route at Antonin in the honey-coloured timber hunting lodge of the cellist, composer and singer Prince Antoni Radziwiłł, a respected scion of one of the wealthiest Polish magnate families. Of the daughter, Wanda Radziwiłł, Chopin wrote   ‘She was young, 17 years old, and truly pretty, and it was so nice to put her little fingers on the right notes.’ He had agreed in August 1826 to give two benefit concerts for a 'girl of the spring' whose father had died in an industrial accident.

In 1946, Ignacy Potocki proposed that a music festival named after Fryderyk Chopin be held in Duszniki-Zdrój. Since then this event has been celebrated every August in a week-long International Chopin Piano Festival, the oldest piano music festival in Poland and indeed the world.

In the past I have experienced many remarkable musical moments in the Elysian surroundings of the Dworek Chopina, the intimate concert hall. The soulful young Russian Igor Levit is deeply involved with the music of Schumann. He movingly reminded the audience of the genesis of the tormented Geistervariationen (Ghost Variations) written when the composer was on the brink of suicide in a mental institution. Daniil Trifonov was utterly possessed by the spirit of Mephistopheles in the greatest performance of the Liszt Mephisto Waltz No:1 I have ever heard. The moments continue with Grigory Sokolov, Francesco Piemontesi, Eugen Indjic - an endless list

One remarkable late evening event is called Nokturn and takes place by candlelight. The audience in evening dress are seated at candlelit tables with wine. A learned Polish professor might draw our attention to this or that ‘deep’ musical aspect of the Chopin Preludes or perhaps the influence of Mozart on the composer.  The pianists ‘illustrate’ and perform on Steinways atmospherically lit by flickering candelabra 

Many pianists have made their debut in Duszniki-Zdrój, where they afterwards embarked on their international careers.

'It is very often the centre of the world piano art, a place where aesthetical canons in music are built, performance trends are created and artistic careers are launched' wrote the musicologist Stanisław Dybowski. Since 1993 the artistic supervision over the event is exercised by Professor Piotr Paleczny, who himself comes from a profound Chopin tradition. 

Piano Competitions held in Warsaw

The foundation of the Chopin i jego Europa Festival was coincident with the 15th International Fryderyk Chopin Competition in 2005, organised by the National Fryderyk Chopin Institute. Rafał Blechacz was the name that resounded uninterrupted in the mind's ear from his very first notes. I often heard the remark 'It is as if Chopin himself were playing'.

I was irresistibly drawn into the psyche of Chopin, the tendrils of fascination grasping my musical soul tighter the more I learned and heard. One of my better-judged life decisions was to come to Poland to cultivate this esoteric obsession. I determined to attend every subsequent competition and write my reflections.

To anyone who is not Polish, the idea of a competition devoted to a single composer is a unique idea. Chopin offers exceptionally difficult temperamental and interpretative challenges to all pianists. Many great pianists avoid performing his music in public. Playing Chopin in competition to a discriminating international and Polish audience, before a distinguished jury of pianists of international renown, is a daunting prospect indeed for any young pianist. It requires great courage, stamina, memory, talent and self-confidence. That the enterprise is not for the faint-hearted is made clear in the recent documentary film Pianoforte directed by Jakub Piątek.

The treasured artist Maria João Pires once said, rather controversially, in conversation with the music critic David Patrick Stearns:

'People care about careers and themselves and all the business that is around music. And that is, for me, somehow, nonsense. Art has nothing to do with that. Competitions take the soul out of the musicians. And the first moments you want to make music in your life it’s for reasons other than business.

Inevitably musicological interest and concern with authentic instrumentation has now begun to focus on the Romantic piano repertoire and the wide variety of pianos on which these works were performed. Under the inspired artistic direction of Stanisław Leszczyński, the Chopin i jego Europa Festival and many priceless and unique Institute recordings taken during it, have expanded our knowledge in many welcome musical directions.

The ground-breaking and fascinating 1st International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments in Warsaw in September 2018, won by the brilliant Pole Tomasz Ritter, was the first such competition in the world, the result of years of discussion and consideration. The 2nd International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments took place in Warsaw from 5-15 October 2023, won by the Canadian Eric Guo. A different virtuosity is now being explored.

The authentic sound of Chopin's music

Beginning in 2005, the National Fryderyk Chopin Institute pioneered a series of award-winning recordings of familiar and unfamiliar works performed on their collection of period pianos by world-famous pianists with the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées under Phillipe Herreweghe or the Orchestra of the XVIIIth Century under the late Franz Brüggen. Artists include Fou Ts'ong, Martha Argerich, Maria Joao Pires, Dimitry Ablogin, Vadym Kholodenko, Alena Baeva, Nelson Goerner, Tatiana Shebanova, Dang Thai Son, and Dina Yoffe. This invaluable recording initiative of performances often given during the Chopin i jego Europa festival, are known as The Real Chopin and continue to expand exponentially.

In an historical context, restoring the authentic sound of music by Fryderyk Chopin and the composers contemporary with him is particularly challenging. Approximating the original color and mechanics of the instruments the composer had at his disposal may, with study and practice, assist us to grasp the unique, specific character of Chopin’s music and open another parameter of interpretation, dislocated as we now are in time from the historical source.

The period piano collection of The National Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw contains Erards from 1838, 1849 and 1858; Pleyels from 1830, 1848 (Chopin's last piano) and 1854; a Broadwood from 1843; Paul McNulty copies of an 1819 Graf and a Pleyel including an 1825 Buchholtz with a slightly extended compass and extra moderator pedal.

A wealth of unfamiliar, fascinating music, contemporaneously composed for these instruments, is being uncovered in ancient libraries and dusty caverns throughout Poland. For most audiences, their first acquaintance with the music of Chopin is through the medium of a modern piano and almost never through an historical instrument of his time. Ill-informed opinions of his music can easily be formed on a piano he would never have contemplated in size or listened to at an inflated dynamic that would have certainly disconcerted him.

The sensual, refined, intimate and elegant French character of a period Pleyel is a significant contrast.  The sound world and emotional connotations produced in the heart and mind are substantially different and more subtle to those evoked by modern instruments. On a period piano the musical narrative can be more coherent and may unfold like the wings of a moth preparing to fly at dusk.

Antoine François Marmontel (1816–1898), a renowned French pianist, composer, teacher and musicographer, observed of Chopin's playing:

‘I heard Chopin during his first year in Paris, and his playing already had an exquisite beauty, a natural sensitivity, a suave, hazy sonority based essentially on the delicacy of his touch and his quite individual use of the pedals.’

Chopin himself wrote: ‘Fortepiany Pleyelowskie est non plus ultra’

One rare, remarkably perceptive account of a Chopin concert at the Pleyel salon in Rue Cadet on 21 February 1842 was written by the critic Léon Escudier and published in La France musicale. Chopin performed with Pauline Viardot (the French dramatic mezzo-soprano of Spanish descent, composer, pedagogue and friend of Chopin) and the renowned cellist Auguste Franchomme. I feel this description alone justifies the creation of such a competition on period instruments.

‘A poet, a tender poet above all, Chopin makes poetry predominate. […] M. Pleyel’s magnificent instruments lend themselves admirably to these various shadings. Listening to all these sounds, all these nuances – which follow each other, intermingle, separate and reunite to arrive at the same goal, melody – one might well believe one is hearing small fairy voices sighing under silver bells, or a rain of pearls falling on crystal tables. […]

Do not ask Chopin to simulate grand orchestral effects on the piano. This type of playing suits neither his constitution nor his ideas. He wishes rather to astonish you with his light swiftness, with mazurkes [sic] with their novel forms and not give you nervous attacks and make you swoon. His inspiration is all of tender and naïve poetry; do not ask him for big gestures or diabolic variations; he wishes to speak to the heart, not to the eyes; he wishes to love you not to devour you. See how the public is in ecstasy...’

A different virtuosity and musical character is required for convincing performance on the period piano. The cultivation of it requires a special sensibility, historical imagination, acute ear, and love. 

Memorable Moments with Martha Argerich 

Martha Argerich is adored in Poland and has a very close musical relationship with the country ever since winning, with 'electric fingers', the 7th International Fryderyk Chopin Competition in 1965 at the age of 24. Subsequently she has served a number of times on the jury of the competition, most recently during the controversial 16th competition in 2010. She has become a legend in her own time.

One musical occasion in 2012 is etched in my memory. Many of the musicians performing in the Chopin i jego Europa Festival were associated with the Progetto Martha Argerich (Martha Argerich Project) in Lugano, originally established in the summer of 2002. On the tenth anniversary she appeared in Warsaw with her daughter the Swiss viola player Lyda Chen amid tumultuous applause and shouts. This was at the late hour of 22.00 at the Lutosławski Concert Studio of Polish Radio.

They performed  a rarely heard work by Schumann, the Marchenbilder Op. 113 for piano and viola. The work is in the nature of literary fantasies or as the composer put it 'fairy-tale illustrations' (Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin and Sleeping Beauty from Grimm's fairy tales). Argerich has always played Schumann brilliantly, her own temperament capturing perfectly that elusive mercurial, passionate and whimsical nature of the composer.

What an extraordinary programme of music had been compiled on this enchanted evening! Time had drifted on to 00.30. The rare Suite in G minor Op. 71 by Maurycy (Moritz) Moszkowski (1854-1925) for two violins and piano was performed by the prize winning Canadian Lucia Hall and the great Austrian pedagogue and player Dora Schwarzberg with the Russian-Armenian pianist Elena Lisitsian. The music they produced was civilised, charmant and spoke of an elegant past far from our century.

After the interval a delight was in store. We were to hear five of a group of twelve transcriptions of tango dances for piano solo entitled PIANO solo, solo TANGO. This infectious Argentinean dance, perhaps one of the most sexually explicit and alluring of all ballroom or private dances, raged in Europe as joyful compensation following the horrors of the Great War.

Alejandro Petrasso is an Argentinean  pianist, composer, improviser and arranger of remarkable and unique talents. On stage he wears a colourful bandana and trousers reminiscent of the pampas.  He performed transcriptions of rural songs or tangos by lyricists or bandoneon players (a type of concertina indispensable in tango ensembles in Argentina). They were absolutely splendid and foot tapping. But why were there two grand pianos on the stage I wondered ? The artist had finished his selection, had received his flowers and was bowing. Martha Argerich suddenly appeared, in that disarming informal way of hers, to play more tangos arranged by Petrasso for two pianos. Cheers and shouts of anticipation!

It was quite fantastic to watch the then seventy-one year old piano legend, long grey hair in wild disarray, ethnic bracelets on wrists vibrating with her phenomenal technique, muscular fingers belting out Argentinean traditional tango dance music with Petrasso in his bandana and pampas kit. Terrific rhythm and drive - joyous and brilliant. A scene and sound I shall never forget. Bear in mind this Dionysian tango revel was taking place at 1.30 am in a Warsaw radio studio!

Wild scenes. Standing ovation. Flowers. Encores and exhausted farewells. What a great night and such fun!

Another once in a lifetime 'renaissance' musical experience I shall never forget courtesy of Chopin i jego Europa and Martha Argerich, was one of the first public performances of the Juliusz Zarębski Piano Quintet in G minor Op. 34. This masterpiece has now entered the established international chamber music repertoire.

The Zarębski night was unique. In what other country in Europe would a concert in the capital city's major concert hall with a great artist such as Martha Argerich begin at 11.15pm and end at 01.30am! Only in Poland could such an extreme thing happen where art and culture wing far above the shackles of mere trade unions and administrative considerations! 

Juliusz Zarębski (1854-1885) was born in Zhitomir in Ukraine. He became an outstanding pianist studying with Liszt in Rome who became his friend. Zarębski was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1883 and this great musical genius died at the appallingly young age of 31.

The outstanding musicologist Józef W. Reiss wrote:

A Romantic by nature, Juliusz Zarębski became a representative of radicalism in music.

The editor of The Chamber Music Journal, reviewing Zarębski's great quintet masterpiece, wrote as follows:

'The Quintet for Piano and Strings in G minor was composed in the year of his death. It is a work on a grand scale. Zarębski knew that he was dying and almost certainly felt that this quintet would be an important part his musical testament. [...] Certainly, it is a work of great originality and deserves to join the foremost rank of piano quintets and be heard in concert.'

Discoveries in Polish Music

In the socially transitional early 1990s, many extraordinarily rare musical works were performed in Warsaw. This movement has developed into a veritable Polish Musical Renaissance by 2024.

The Chopin i jego Europa Festival has introduced me to many unknown Polish composers and given me profound and unrepeatable musical experiences. The Chopin musicological conferences have also widened my historical detailed view of the composer and his work.

Chopin's first teacher, Adalbert Żywny (1756-1842) was an excellent music pedagogue. He acquainted ‘Frycek’ with basic harmony and counterpoint as well as introducing him to the world of Bach and Mozart, works that accompanied him throughout life as models of the greatest achievements in music.

Żywny was an aged ‘dusty’ Bohemian violinist quite brown from his addiction to the snuff he carried in a pouch decorated with portraits of Haydn and Mozart. He was a superb eccentric who seemed to have stepped straight from the Commedia del’Arte. He had a large purple nose and few teeth, wore waistcoats cut from the auctioned trousers of the last king of Poland, an ill-fitting yellow wig and massive Hungarian boots. He rarely bathed restricting himself to a brisk vodka scrub in the heat of summer.

 ‘Chopinek’ composed his first polonaise at the age of 7. I have discovered many early, previously neglected compositions, early mazurkas and polonaises, written under Żywny's influence that are now being resuscitated.

There was more unknown music for me to hear, such as compositions by the Wieniawski brothers, the violinist Henryk (1835-1880) and his neglected pianist brother Józef (1837-1912). Rare modern works by internationally familiar or unfamiliar Polish composers are now often programmed and recorded. Compositions by Krzysztof Penderecki, Karol Szymanowski, Feliks Nowowiejski, Andrzej Tchaikovsky, Andrzej Panufnik, Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutosławski, Wojciech Kilar, Grażyna Bacewicz, Mieczysław Karłowicz, Alexander Tansman (1897 - 1986) an underrated pianist and conductor and Henryk Górecki are regularly featured. 

Chopin's second teacher was the still neglected (outside of Poland) Silesian composer Józef Elsner (1769–1854), one of the seminal figures in Polish music who taught him advanced composition, harmony and counterpoint. Elsner was  not  a frail  little  man  living  in  a grubby  Warsaw  tenement. He was an immensely influential composer who transformed the Warsaw Music School for singers and theatre actors founded in 1810 by Wojciech Bogusławski into the Institute of Music and Declamation. Besides  symphonies, piano works, quartets,  cantatas and a number of masses, Elsner wrote Polish operas and ballets.

An orchestral precursor to Verdi of great musical imagination, he introduced Chopin to the art of bel canto song. 'Frycek' developed a passion for Italian opera, in particular Bellini and Rossini.Elsner constantly pressed Chopin to compose  a ‘patriotic  opera’ but failed despite the  composer’s enthusiasm  for this art. 

Józef Elsner’s Oratorio,  his greatest composition, is the vast and extraordinary Passio Domini  Nostri Jesu Christi Op.65 of 1837. The work is scored for huge forces of musicians including 14 solo voices, three 4-voice choirs, a piano, harp and large orchestra, military brass band and an enlarged percussion section with tympani.

The first performance of the complete work took place on January 20, 1838 in the Holy Trinity Evangelical Church in Warsaw (Kościół Ewangelicko-Augsburski Świętej Trójcy). This first performance was under the direction of another rather unknown Polish composer and conductor, Karol Kurpiński. Over 400 musicians took part !

The first complete  modern  performance was given in September 1998 in the selfsame church in Warsaw  by  the soloists, choir and Warsaw Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jacek Kapszyk under the managing and artistic direction of Stefan Sutkowski. The forces were distributed spatially around the circular church in the manner of a Giovanni Gabrieli composition at St. Mark's Basilica, Venice. The work had an overwhelming impact on me. The 'lost' autograph of the piece was only discovered  in 1994 in the Berlin State Library.  

Ignacy Feliks Dobrzynski (1807-1867) laboured under the shadow of Chopin. He was a child prodigy and also a pupil of Józef Elsner. The Silesian wrote in his final report on Chopin 'Genius etc.,' and of Dobrzyński that he possessed 'uncommon abilities'. Both were influenced by the piano concertos of Hummel, especially Chopin in his utilisation of the style brillante. Dobrzyński was a wider formal composer than Chopin and his symphonic music deserves attention.

Franciszek Lessel (1780-1838) was intensely musical and subsequently became the second of Haydn's Polish lifetime students. Karol Lipiński (1790-1861) was a supreme virtuoso violinist admired by Paganini (who gave him an Amati violin) and who wrote significant symphonies of world stature. The symphonies of the pianist and composer Józef Nowakowski (1800–1865) and his renowned mature work, the Piano Quintet in E flat major Op. 17 (c. 1841), remain outstanding. Jakub Gołąbek (1739-1789) also wrote arresting symphonies once popular but only recently rediscovered in the twentieth century. The violin concerto of Mieczysław Karłowicz (1876-1909) has become immensely popular. The already mentioned Piano Quintet and other works by Juliusz Zarębski (1854-1885) have already entered the mainstream European canon. The chamber works of Władysław Żeleński (1837-1921) are remarkable, deeply musical compositions.

As we move through the decades, the impressive piano compositions of Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831) command attention as do the famous polonaises of Michał Kleofas Ogiński (1765-1833), the mazurkas Chopin's pupil Karol Mikuli (1819-1897) and those of Karol Załuski (1834-1919). We know insufficient of the remarkable life and violin concertos of the polymath and superb virtuoso Polish violinist Feliks Janiewicz (Felix Yaniewicz) (1762-1848), who lived in Edinburgh, played a Stradivarius violin and laid the seeds of what has become the Edinburgh Festival - but that was in 1815!

Despite my London piano studies, I was never introduced to the rarely performed piano and chamber works of that commanding twentieth century figure, Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941). The works of Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) certainly but not Paderewski. He is an underestimated composer of affecting lyrical and poetic piano music which speaks directly to the heart and sensibility rather than burdening the intellect with high seriousness A true renaissance of his reputation as a composer, as well as pianist and statesman, has taken place in Poland in recent years. An important piano competition devoted to him, the International Paderewski Competition, is held in Bydgoszcz every three years.

Naturally, being a great patriot, he wrote many Polish mazurkas and polonaises. His Polish Fantasy in G sharp minor Op.19 (1893) and the Piano Concerto in A minor Op. 17 (1888) are lyrical and grand works full of piano pyrotechnics, noble harmonies, dance idioms and infectious charm.

He was only 28 when he composed the concerto and was scarcely known as a musical figure. The Andante reminds me of a superb film score for an intensely romantic French love affair set in Provence, directed by say Francois Truffaut. In our imaginations we could be bowling along a poplar-lined route secondaire past hills of vineyards with Catherine Deneuve or Stephane Audran in the passenger seat of a Chapron Citroen cabriolet. Sensual bliss, days of cultivated tastes, food and wine. The music of Paderewski wears its learning lightly with poetry, charm, elegance and refinement of the highest degree. The sweet film Moonlight Sonata (1937) starring him distills such poetry.

The poet Jan Lechoń wrote:

‘For Paderewski to appear on stage with his distant look, lion-like hair, a legendary white tie and a modest, almost humble demeanor, more reminiscent of some  village bard than a great virtuoso, to make the public stand up and worship in him art itself, all that is unselfish, noble and generous in life. Paderewski’s star rose in those sad times when Poland was absent from the map of Europe.

Professor Władysław Żeleński (1837–1921) gave the following assessment of his personality:

‘A young eagle, of a noble breed, proud, courageous, ambitious, a bit aggressive and self-willed but, most of all, independent […]. He had an innate sense of what is right, rebelling against the existing state of affairs if he considered it wrong.’

Over the course of the last 20 years, I have made two significant modern discoveries during the present Polish musical renaissance. The compositions of Mieczysław Weinberg (1919–1996) which was a previously locked jewel box of Polish 20th century musical treasures. Weinberg emigrated to Russia in dangerous circumstances, where he lived uncomfortably marooned between fame and unjustified neglect.

He is being rediscovered as a genius of immense significance in the landscape of post-modern Polish classical music. His prolific output includes some 17 string quartets, over 20 large-scale symphonies, numerous sonatas for solo stringed instruments and piano as well as operas and film-scores. The pianist Yulianna Avdeeva, who won the 2010 International Chopin Competition, has done much to revivify his spirit with her brilliant performances of his piano sonatas during the Chopin i jego Europa Festival.

Another fertile and impressive modern discovery has been the music of Grażyna Bacewicz (1909–1969). This remarkable Polish composer and violinist was born on February 5th, 1909, in Łódź. She is the second Polish female composer to have achieved national and international recognition, the first being Maria Szymanowska in the early 19th century. Thanks to the generosity of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, she received a grant to study composition at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris under Nadia Boulanger from 1932 to 1933.

During the occupation she played clandestine concerts. Throughout the 1950s she devoted herself almost exclusively to composing and teaching. From 1966 till her death in 1969 she worked at the National Higher School of Music (now the Academy of Music) in Warsaw, where she led a composition class. In the 1960s, Bacewicz took up writing in addition to her music, completing several unpublished novels and short stories.

Her musical stature and remarkable compositions such as the Krakowiak koncertowy ('Concert Krakowiak') of 1949 are undergoing something of a renaissance at present. More of those works hidden for years behind the impenetrable cultural and social fabric of the Iron Curtain.

I was profoundly shocked at the scarcely credible remark quoted by the composer, pianist and organist Felicity Mazur-Park in her paper of February 2023 entitled The Liberation of Women Composers: Overcoming a History of Sexism in the Classical Musical World at the Research, Art and Writing Conference 2023 organized by the University of Texas. She writes:

"In 1882 a critic in the Musical Times wrote :

'A woman who, on taking a pencil, pen or music-sheet, forgets what are the character and obligations of her sex, is a monster who excites disgust and repulsion .... they are neither men nor women, but something which has no name and no part in life.' "

I shall leave this essay of joyful rediscovery, indeed renaissance of Polish music with an observation on Chopin, a composer of profound contemporary relevance in our time of war, exile and population displacement. His music once again offers one rare moments of resistance, courage, bliss and oblivion to escape the unhinged, economically fraught and increasingly brutal violence of our contemporary world.

The composer Adrian Leverkühn in Doctor Faustus (1947) by Thomas Mann remarks of Chopin:

'I love the angelic in his figure, which reminds me of Shelly: the peculiarly and very mysteriously veiled, unapproachable, withdrawing, unadventurous flavour of his being, that not wanting to know, that rejection of material experience, the sublime incest of his fantastically delicate and seductive art.'

And to conclude some timely advice to all readers from Leonardo da Vinci:

'I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.'