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I liked to argue with Andrzej Chłopecki. Uncompromising and mischievous, but at the same time very insightful, the contemporary music critic would build his opinions on solid theoretical foundations. And once he had built them, there was no mercy: a true Monsieur Sans-Gêne, he was the male version of the outspoken laundress. When punching, he would punch you hard, when loving, he would love you more than life itself. Nobody dared dispute the value of works produced by his few chosen ones, for those by Paweł Mykietyn. Yet when Chłopecki heralded the birth of a new star in the composing firmament and likened it to Krzysztof Penderecki’s daring beginnings at the turn of the 1970s, his younger fellow critics felt defiant. Chłopecki discovered the “unusual flow of an artist extraordinary” in Aleksander Nowak’s music. This was a subject of fiery dispute with his opponents. They wrote that Nowak shamelessly reached for old composing techniques, that his music actually lacked flow and that the face the undeservedly praised epigone of the “Stalowa Wola generation” revealed in his pieces was not one of a postmodernist, but one of a common mountebank. I have once myself yielded to the suggestions coming from the “progressivists” and mistakenly stuffed Nowak’s compositions into a deep drawer labelled “even newer romanticism”.

What happened to the Gliwice-born composer’s work that made us all suddenly change our minds? Quite possibly nothing happened to it. It was us who changed, or maybe just grew to appreciate the musical “life-writing”, as his method was aptly described by Andrzej Chłopecki. Since the beginning, Nowak’s strategy has been about interweaving superficially banal fragments of everyday life with the universal mythical tissue of human existence. The composer refers to formative memories, listens to others, closely observes reality, cools down emotions and tries to establish a connection with the listener. As he has once himself stressed, he finds music to be “a form of communication which does have individual «senders» and «receivers», but its actual message is transferred rather on the level of collective than individual consciousness”. Every piece written by Nowak has a text behind it: the text, however, does not have to be a poem or a libretto assigning functions to particular voices in the score. Sometimes it is a song, a canticle recalled from the depths of memory, while at other times it might be somebody’s note or a superficially banal anecdote. There is no parody or pastiche here, only deeply moving dialogue with the past, sometimes not distant at all and sometimes lost in the darkness of myth.

Aleksander Nowak. Photo: Dorota Kozińska

Nowak’s composer’s path started at the State Music School in Gliwice. It was there that Uliana Biłan, a Lviv conservatoire graduate, working as an accompanist, was helping the young guitar student make up for his shortcomings in harmony and ear training. While doing that, she brought to his attention treasures of 20th-century musical literature, first and foremost Messiaen and Shostakovich. It was her who encouraged Nowak to undertake his first attempts at forging thoughts and emotions into a score. It was thanks to her that he became sure of his intent to create structures in which each element – from melody, through rhythm, to texture – would start to speak to the listener with its own voice, win them over completely and on every level of communication.  In 2001, Nowak started regular studies at the faculty of composition of the Academy of Music in Katowice, tutored by Aleksander Lasoń, a major representative of the aforementioned “Stalowa Wola generation”. Lasoń had always adored “pure” music and treated composition as a task of craftsmanship. He proved, however, a limitlessly patient professor for his, somewhat lost, new student. Lasoń let Nowak search – first as if blindfolded, then gradually more consciously – for a path leading to his individual idiom: one of music sounding naturally, but composed from a multitude of unconventionally joined building blocks. It is narration bursting with quotations, self-quotations and crypto quotations, sonically glittering charades, musical riddles, sometimes unsolvable.

Nowak’s first successful attempt at his “life-writing” opened up a path to cooperation with the PWM. It was the Sonata 'June-December’  for violin and piano (2005), the initial part of which is based on a quotation from a simple melody for a piece Nowak wrote as Biłan’s student at high school. Conversations with Andrzej Chłopecki and Eugeniusz Knapik made him realise how far-reaching the horizons of contemporary music can be. Marcin Trzęsiok enabled Nowak to sail out to the high seas of musical aesthetics and helped to locate his work within a context of philosophy and history of culture. In 2006, granted a Moritz von Bomhard Fellowship, Nowak began 2-year studies in composition at the University of Louisville, tutored by Steve Rouse.

It was, however, earlier that a breakthrough happened. In 2005, shortly before receiving his diploma from the Katowice Academy, Nowak realised a dream of his youth. He participated in a high-seas sail to Svalbard. A year later, a hundred years after Roald Amundsen’s conquest of the Northwest Passage, the composer embarked on the Polish yacht “Stary” and sailed by Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Shetlands, and the Faroes to reach Iceland. He financed the enterprise with the first installment of the „Förderpreise für Polen” scholarship from the Munich-based Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung. The second installment was promised to him for completing a serious composing commission – a musical journal of the journey to the North Sea. After his return, having already begun his studies in Louisville, Nowak embarked on composing Fiddler’s Green and White Savannas Never More for male voices and chamber orchestra. The piece’s premiere, at the Lviv Velvet Curtain festival in October 2006, was received with an ovation. Founded on irony and anxiety, the longing for Fiddler’s Green – sailors’ legendary realm, a land of perpetual gaiety, never-quiet fiddle and unwearying dancers – resounded also with a longing for a renewal of the form of the symphonic poem: in a coherent, yet multi-threaded shape, skillfully highlighted with a masterful layering of texture in the orchestra. It was also in the United States that Nowak wrote the Last Days of Wanda B. (2006), “a record of emotions accompanying the farewell and a set of still-frame memories, interwoven with remnant quotations from her favourite melodies” dedicated to his recently deceased grandmother. The personal thread started to play an ever more significant part in the composer’s work, at the same time quite unexpectedly intertwining with his new fascination, one with the form of opera, which continues until now.

Sudden Rain. Photo: Bartłomiej Sowa

The chamber opera Sudden Rain was Nowak’s diploma piece crowning his studies with Rouse. It premiered in 2009, at the The Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera in Warsaw. It was there that She, He and Something else – tropes accompanying all Nowak’s subsequent stage works – appeared for the first time. The composer and the librettist, Anna Konieczna, put fragments of letters and notes written by a person with Asperger’s syndrome together with a conversation of a married couple on the day of their wedding anniversary. She had been waiting for a proof of love, He gave her freedom, which She interpreted as a prophecy of parting. Something stood in their way: the Something was unawareness of one’s own emotions and inability to express the heart of the matter beyond words and silence. It proved, for the first time, that Nowak was not in the least an epigone of the “Stalowa Wola generation”, that he could juggle both tradition and the sound of the avant-garde, the latter being what his teachers had once rebelled against.

At the next stage of his career, Nowak started composing what might be classified as exercises before a large, full-scale opera. These include: the Dark Haired Girl in a Black Sports Car for chamber orchestra (2009), based on an anecdote about a woman seen in the traffic who “drove away after a moment, never looking in my direction”; King of the Cosmos Disappears for orchestra, threads and piano (2010) – about a schoolmate who called himself the master of the Cosmos and disappeared without a trace; Concerto for Guitar in Peculiar Tuning and Chamber Orchestra (2012); and the Half-filled Diary (2013) presented in this recording.

After a year of cooperation with Georgi Gospodinov, a Bulgarian poet, prose writer and playwright, the Space Opera (2015) was born. It is a story of the first manned journey to Mars, told from points of view including that of a stowaway accompanying the two astronauts – a fly who had wandered into the spaceship’s capsule. The music Nowak built around this narrative is difficult, woven from heterogenous and fascinating chords, rich in its orchestral layer, sensual in the vocal parts, with clever references to the legacy of 20th-century titans, primarily that of the not-so-obvious-anymore Stravinsky. Nowak set out to construct his own mythical universe: in his first “true” opera, he created a vision of an apocalypse of disregarded beings, reaching beyond the anthropomorphic way of representing nature.

Working on Ahat-Ili – Sister of Gods (2018) with libretto by Olga Tokarczuk, based on her novel Anna In in the Tombs of the World, Nowak persuaded the writer to make Ninszubur, Inanna’s mortal confidant, the primary character of the story. Each of the five main characters was assigned a separate element, while each of the elements was assigned its own microharmonic structure. The world-governing rule was rendered with a mysterious twelve-tone chord, which appears at the onset of the composition and later reappears like a leitmotif. Ninszubur, the confidant’s monologues correlate with a cello melody referencing a Sumerian hymn, which survived to this day in the Persian dastgah-e nava melodic pattern and in a related Arabic maqam. The flawlessly written music in this opera, planned with a great sense of dramaturgy, seduces us with a subtle and unobvious beauty, supported with an uncommon sonic imagination – proved in fragments such as the duet of the countertenor Dumuzi and the contralto Ereszkigal, where Nowak juxtaposed two voices of similar ranges and tessituras, yet a completely different timbre.

Marek Moś and AUKSO during rehearsal of Ahat Ilī in Gdańsk, 2020. Photo: Dorota Koperska

Nominating Nowak for the prestigious “Paszport Polityki” award, I wrote that I was doing it because of his “creative independence and an original musical perspective on the world”. I added that he was most worthy of the award for Ahat Ilī, which “restores faith in the future of the opera”. Nowak won the award, which is all the more important, as he emphasises himself, in light of the fact that he had not won any composition competition before. A few months later, he announced the premiere of another piece, Drach, a fruit of his cooperation with Szczepan Twardoch, the author of the novel by the same title. The first performance took place over the three evenings of the Auksodrone festival at the Mediateka in Tychy, in October 2019. Nowak called his new piece for soloists, strings and looper dramma per musica, thus reaching for the roots of the operatic form. Twardoch distilled the essence out of his Drach, making personified emotions the protagonists and leaving but very few remnants of the plot and dramaturgy of the original in place. Nowak framed the composition into three short “chapters”, set on a few parallel planes. The narrative – as the ever-reborn Drach – develops in a circular manner, from a prologue using the harpsichord tuned to a meantone temperament, where the first musical suggestions of a “perpetual return” appear, through singing supported by a harmonically distorted accompaniment, to “romanticising” culminations and returning to the baroque part symbolising the primeval beginning.

In the near future, about which Nowak – very aptly – says “it is difficult to foresee, but possible, with a certain probability, to assume”, we are in for at least two important premieres of his compositions: „Prawda?”  [Truth?] Symphony No. 1 and Syreny [Sirens] – „melodramma aeterna”, yet again with libretto by Szczepan Twardoch. It is probably high time we agreed with Chłopecki, even if it is in the afterworld. Nowak’s music seduces with a quality that our ireful and distrustful generation has scorned for long years – it is simply beautiful.

Translated by: Mikołaj Witkowski

Instead of a teaser – the CD is already available all over Europe: stay at home and go to the PWM’s online shop: https://pwm.com.pl/en/sklep/publikacja/drach-dramma-per-musica,aleksander-nowak,24030,ksiegarnia.htm. The LP on vinyl is ready for purchase here: https://pwm.com.pl/en/sklep/publikacja/drach-dramma-per-musica,aleksander-nowak,23931,ksiegarnia.htm.

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The action of the second chapter of Szczepan Twardoch’s novel Drach is set in the years 1241, 1906, and 1918. As in the whole book, events take place on all the temporal levels at once. The chapter opens with the words: “A tree, a human, a roe deer, a stone. All the same.” A moment later, we hear the same words spoken in Silesian by old Pindur, who is a village philosopher and at the same time a village fool, derided by everyone around, but penetrating deep into the past with his instinct. For a brief moment we find ourselves in 1906 and sit on a fallen trunk with Pindur and eight-year-old Josef, called Zeflik by some. The libretto of the opera Drach, written by Twardoch himself, starts with similar words, but in Silesian: Czowiek, chop i baba, sŏrnik, hazŏk, kot a pies, a strōm, wszyjsko to samo (“A human, man and woman, roe deer, hare, cat and dog, and the tree, all the same”), sung this time by Drach, who is Pindur at the same time. He is a doubly omniscient narrator; not only a holy fool whom little Zeflik listened to, swinging his legs shod in shapely bootees; not only the dragon of Silesian legends, but the serpent of old, the gnostic Ouroboros, god of fertility and the dead, symbol of all things being one. He is everything: taste and smell, light and darkness, pure sunshine, tree and stone, a sacrificial offering and the barking of dogs, the earth damaged by tanks’ caterpillar tracks and furrowed by trenches, the soil that devours dead bodies and spits new life out of its entrails in the spring. He is a creature that sees, feels and hears everything, has a part in everything, is everyone, and is inferior to none.

When Aleksander Nowak told me of his intention to compose Drach and later sent me Twardoch’s complete libretto, I was afraid even to look at the text. True enough, I had already had the chance to see how Nowak takes advantage of his extraordinary sense of operatic potential inherent in contemporary literature, and of his equally uncommon ability to persuade writers that they should grapple with a form seemingly alien to their own sensitivity. The scripts of his successive operas have emerged as a result of painstaking negotiations and of equally laborious effort to educate the authors, who, though inexperienced in this field, under the composer’s guidance came up, to their own surprise, with clear and coherent narrations unfolding simultaneously on several levels and suited to the conventions of the music theatre. The libretto of Space Opera, written by Georgi Gospodinov, the Bulgarian master of ‘private apocalypse’, tells the story of the first manned flight to Mars from the perspective of an astronaut (married) couple, a stowaway fly that travels with them, the cynical flight manager, and a Chorus of Souls, made up of all the creatures ever sent by humans into the outer space. Its masterly construction in sixteen scenes (including prologue and epilogue) brings to mind associations with Britten’s Death in Venice. During his work on Ahat-ilī – Sister of Gods, based on Olga Tokarczuk’s Anna In in Tombs of the World, the composer managed to persuade the writer to shift the accents in her narration, confuse the protagonists’ tongues, and make the tale theatrical using all the means available. Both these projects undeniably proved a success. As for Drach, the idea was initiated in October 2018 by Filip Berkowicz, originator and curator of Auksodrone festival in Tychy, who wanted a ‘Silesian’ opera based on a Silesian topic and featuring a Silesian orchestra – AUKSO, under the baton of another Silesian, Marek Moś; an opera emerging as the joint work of a composer and a writer from that region. Still, I could hardly imagine how a vast and multi-layered saga of two families could possibly be condensed into a music work for three soloists and chamber orchestra with harpsichord, taking a bit more than an hour to perform.

Gleiwitz, Germaniaplatz, ca. 1915

Nowak warned his audience in advance that the unusual libretto replaces the traditional protagonists with personified emotions, whereas of the original plots and dramatic concepts only some vestigial traces have been preserved. As the composer had predicted, Szczepan Twardoch had rejected this proposal at first. Though they had Silesian roots in common, and shared memories of secondary school, artistically speaking they seemed to be poles apart. Twardoch later admitted that the idea appeared to him just as absurd as if he had been asked to dance in a ballet. He changed his mind, though, during a wintertime walk in the waterlogged fields near Pilchowice. He spotted roe deer, and when the beautiful creatures bolted away, he recalled that they also lived in Jakobswalde, had no names, and left their faeces in the fields. He recalled that he remembered it all, like Drach and Pindur, and so he decided he would start with the deer. He thus got down to writing, or rather – to distilling Drach into a myth about Silesia’s arché, the cyclic nature of time, and the inseparable link between humans and nature. The work took him less than a year. Nowak indefatigably supported his new librettist and patiently introduced him to the secrets of contemporary opera.

Nowak labelled his new piece with the old-fashioned term dramma per musica, thus referring to the origins of the operatic form and to the historical characteristics of late 16^th / early 17^th-century ‘music drama’, such as: declamatory recitatives resembling human speech; the use of the instrumental layer to emphasise the message and meaning of each situation; intense interplay of affections, supported by the introduction of selected rhetorical figures. The whole opens with a prologue, featuring a harpsichord in meantone temperament, which affords a highly expressive use of chromatic progressions. Already this extensive introduction comprises musical suggestions of the ‘eternal return’, from incessant repetitions of one and the same note to a rhetorical katabasis in the form of a descending melodic line. From the very beginning, the harpsichord produces disturbing and false-sounding ‘patterns’ centred around a few stable tonal centres.

Pig slaughter near Pilchowice at the beginning of 1920th

The drama proper, told in three languages (Polish, Silesian, and German), takes on a curious, seductively beautiful musical form, meandering (or rather circularly reverting) from the Baroque beginnings to the extremes of modernism and back. This music curls in on itself like the immortal Drach – from expressive solo parts supported by a harmonically distorted accompaniment, to an interplay of tensions, brought to a halt and then relaxed in the ensemble sections, to truly Strauss-like tutti culminations. Nowak subdivided his work into three brief chapters, in which, as in Space Opera, the action takes place on several parallel planes. There is ‘realistic’ narration, in the form of He’s flashes of memories from his childhood and from the Great War; the story of his marriage to the girl who owned six acres in Żernica; as well as the episode of infidelity, which led him to murder and eventually madness. This interweaves with the ‘expressive’ narration, which represents pure emotions, both human and animal: the anxiety of a chased doe and her lost fawn; the mortal fear of a pig being slaughtered; the longing of a mother; the hunger of dogs; the pain of a neglected wife, and the lust of an unfaithful husband who does not have the courage to tell his spouse about “yonder German lass from Gliwice.” The vehicle of both these narrations is He’s baritone and She’s soprano, who stand for the male and all his women – the mother, the wife, and the lover. Both also symbolise the eternal ‘voice of all things’ – of the hare, the cat, the dog, the stone, and the tree. Of those creatures that live on Drach’s body and those that rot inside it after their death; also those that are born of the soil fertilised with the mortal remains. The human voice imperceptibly transforms into a pig’s squealing or a fawn’s grunting. All the same. Drach comments on all this from a distance, with the ambivalent voice of a countertenor, closing each ‘chapter’ of the drama with a prayer to himself, multiplied by a looper, which sounds now like a medieval lament, now – like a luminous Lutheran chorale.

Drach is not an opera about Silesia, just as the original novel is not about the writer’s Heimat. The operatic and the literary Drach is a soul that informs all living creatures. By paying homage to this soul, Nowak and Twardoch ennoble their Silesian homeland and elevate it into the sphere of myth, as the ultimate cause of all being and the fundamental component of reality; of a world governed by deterministic chance and by the ruthless laws of nature, in which everything is one, everything has its end, and everything returns. Thus all things are in Drach and are from Drach; Drach is dirt, coal, flesh, and sunshine.

The First Holy Communion of my uncle Henryk. Kattowitz, Königshütter Straße in the first half of 1940th

Time gets even denser in the last chapter of Twardoch’s novel, whose action takes place in 1915–1918, 1921, 1925, 1938, 1939, 1945, 1986, and 2014. This chapter ends with the sentence: “Frozen bare-calved corpses in the snowbound fields in front of the hospital; the January wind tears at their hospital gowns.” In the third chapter of Nowak’s opera, a soldier shoots at his own brother near Gliwice; a pack of dogs hunts down a doe between Pilchowice and Stanica, and Josef tightens the deadly grip around Caroline’s neck. Everything dies. “The light shineth not in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it.” And yet, catharsis will come, for it is only through death that the secret can be found out. Death lets one fathom the mystery of Silesia, get reconciled to its tragic history, refer to the collective wisdom and experience of the Silesian population. Curled in on himself, trampled by humans and deer, riddled with mineshafts, Drach watches from aside and prophesies: “Whoever is born shall die, and who dies must be born again.” This is the order of every world, even the smallest one.

Translated by: Tomasz Zymer

I am happy to announce that the new album Romuald Twardowski. Songs & Sonnets – the part of the series Portraits under the label of Anaklasis, launched by PWM Editions – was published at the end of October. The CD is already available to purchase all over Europe: stay at home and go to the PWM’s online shop: https://pwm.com.pl/en/sklep/publikacja/songs–sonnets,romuald-twardowski,23970,ksiegarnia.htm. Instead of a teaser, I post my text from the album booklet here. Enjoy!

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Three coincidences in succession can no longer be called a coincidence, someone said. The first working of fate is that Romuald Twardowski’s birthplace, Vilnius, was also the cradle of the Polish Romanticism, the city “one can never truly leave,” if I may paraphrase Czesław Miłosz’s poem. Before the war Twardowski spent his childhood days in the eastern part of the Old Town, in what was then Metropolitarna Street, half way between Writers’ Lane, packed full of first- and second-hand bookshops (where Adam Mickiewicz had lived following his return from Kaunas, and where he had been arrested in the autumn of 1823), and the 19^th-century Georgian-style Cathedral of the Theotokos. The second ‘chance event’ took place one winter afternoon during the war, in Zamkowa Street, the main road of the medieval Vilnius. The little Romek was gazing at the window display of a music instruments shop when he was approached by a kind gentleman, who, as it turned out, was an ex-member of one of Petersburg’s orchestras. His name was Władysław Gelard. He discovered the passion for playing music in the boy, made  him a gift of a violin, and gave him free lessons throughout the war. The third coincidence made Romek put his violin aside. After the war, the Holy Cross Church, abandoned by the Knights Hospitallers, was also lacking an organist. In the hope of filling this vacancy, a monk who knew Twardowski recommended him to the piano teacher Maria Zgirska, who quickly prepared the young man for further apprenticeship with organist and choirmaster Jan Żebrowski. It was also the latter who awakened Twardowski’s latent gift for composition.

Vilnius, Zamkowa Street at the beginning of the 20th century

The combination of these rather curious circumstances undoubtedly determined the life decisions of the boy from Vilnius Old Town. He studied composition with, among others, Julius Juzeliūnas at the Lithuanian State Conservatory. It is possibly to the latter that Twardowski owes his predilection for stylistic diversity, ranging from late Romantic aesthetic to dodecaphony to minimalism, and combined with an openness to the worlds of folk and traditional music. After moving to postwar Poland, he continued his music education under the guidance of one of Poland’s most eminent neo-Classicists, Bolesław Woytowicz, whose music betrays a strong influence of the French impressionism. With Nadia Boulanger in Paris he studied, first and foremost, plainchant and medieval polyphony. Twardowski frequently derived inspiration from tradition, daringly juxtaposing classical with modernist elements. He emphatically stressed his opposition to “those who preach novelty at any cost.” He created his own musical language, to which he referred, a bit provocatively, as “neo-archaism”. At the same time, though, he did not impose limitations on himself, and skilfully adjusted the character of each piece to the semantic and emotional content which it was meant to convey. His love of literature, originating in his early Vilnius years, made him highly sensitive to the word, and therefore the human voice became a nearly indispensable element of his musical language.

Choral music is undoubtedly central to Twardowski’s output. He took this genre up on a major scale in the 1950s. To him it was, as he admits himself, a way of mapping out the uncharted territories and ‘neglected areas’ in Polish music. The other wasteland which most of our avant-garde composers have failed to cultivate, but which Twardowski once entered on a similarly grand scale, was music theatre, from his ‘romantic’ opera Cyrano de Bergerac (1962) to the morality play The Life of St Catherine (1981). His solo songs are less known but equally individual in style, highly expressive and filled with internal drama, at the same time – amazingly communicative. He wrote them throughout his career. For various reasons, together they add up to a kind of highly personal, in some cases almost intimate biography of the composer.

The works selected for this CD were written over the period of two decades, in 1970–1990. All of them represent Twardowski’s fully developed, individual style, and a masterful command of musical form. In Twardowski’s songs music plays a subordinate role to the text. Sometimes it hides ‘in the shadow’ of the words in order to highlight their meanings; on other occasions it actively reinforces the text, and brings out the emotions inherent in the lines of verse. Such an approach comes as no surprise if we consider the high calibre of the poetry taken up by Twardowski. Sonnets by Michelangelo (1988) are settings of three late poems by one of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance, in congenial Polish translations by Leopold Staff. Twardowski speaks here with his own language, albeit strictly subordinated to the moods of the aging Michelangelo, fascinated with the beauty and sensitivity of the nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri, affected by the inevitable passage of time, and torn between “fear and the phantoms of love and death.” Three Sonnets to Don Quixote, written two years later, constitute a similar homage to another Renaissance master, this time – a Spanish one. The title is a bit misleading, since in fact they are two sonnets plus a verse epitaph in honour of the knight errant. Nevertheless, all of them were written by Miguel de Cervantes and incorporated into his famous novel. Twardowski makes effective use of Anna Ludwika Czerny’s first postwar translation of Don Quixote, turning these three poems into a bitter-sweet musical portrait of a certain nobleman whose “brain got so dry” for lack of sleep and too much reading that “he finally lost his sense.” These provocatively ‘Woytowicz-like’ songs, rooted in the spirit of French music, attracting the ear with the freshness and wealth of various shades of sound – could well serve as a complement for Ravel’s last unfinished masterpiece, the cycle of three songs Don Quichotte à Dulcinée.

Composed a little earlier, in 1987, Three Songs to words by Stanisław Ryszard Dobrowolski may seem to be ‘lighter weight’, but they conceal a secret hinted at in their very sequence, which represents a progression from lyrical reflections on the departure of the beloved to the playful experience of reality in The Warsaw Sparrows, to the broad and familiar humour of Non è vero, sung ‘straight into the ear’. The other three cycles, despite variable atmosphere, are quite serious and can be read as miniature treatises on nostalgia, longing, and the sorrows of parting.

From the Viliya (1990) to words by Helena Massalska-Kołaczkowska, co-founder of Polish Radio Song Theatre and author of the lyrics of Alfred Gradstein’s late 1940s hit A Bridge to the Left, a Bridge to the Right as well as of several children’s fables set to music by Ryszard Sielicki, is a cycle dedicated by Twardowski to his mother Paulina. In these three brief songs, filled with references to Lithuanian folklore, the composer returns to the city of his childhood; to the Green Lakes near Vilnius, whose water owes its unusual colour to minerals washed off the chalk bottom; to the Łukiski (now Lukiškės) Square, where the famous Kaziuki fair has been held annually on St Casimir’s Day, complete with jugglers and people in fancy dress; and, finally, to the shore of the icebound Viliya, where sleigh rides with torches were held in the winter.

The five-part Face of the Sea (1979) to poems by Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Jacek Łukasiewicz, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and Kazimierz Sowiński, can be considered, in some ways, as an echo of Twardowski’s earlier opera Lord Jim, where the composer employed the wistful motif of undulating sea waves. On the other hand, this cycle is part of the wider ‘seafaring’ trend known from that period.

The profoundly moving Trois sonnets d’adieu to words by three French poets of the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries (a mannerist, a libertine, and a member of La Pléiade) were composed in 1970, directly after the tragic and still unexplained death of composer Elisabeth Tramsen, Twardowski’s fiancée, the eldest daughter of a Danish surgeon who in 1943, as a member of an international committee, had conducted the autopsies of Polish officers, victims of the Katyn Massacre. Originally composed for bass-baritone and chamber orchestra, this cycle, and especially its last element, the sonnet by Pontus de Tyard in Wisława Szymborska’s phenomenal translation – serves as an excellent conclusion for the entire tale told on this album. “Come, much craved Sleep, wrap around my flesh / since I sincerely accept your cherished nightshade and poppy.” The end turns out to be a beginning. Sleep has come at last, and has dispelled anxiety, bringing genuine solace. Now everything could start over again.

Jan Kaczmarkiewicz: Portrait of a young composer (Romuald Twardowski)

The album has been programmed and the songs performed by Tomasz Konieczny, who is a great fan of Romuald Twardowski’s songs and a sincere enthusiast of the poetry set by this composer. It is thanks to Konieczny’s initiative that we can see how also in this field, much depleted after the war, Twardowski proved to be a skilful gardener. This may be why he never truly left Vilnius, either mentally or in his heart. It was in that city that Stanisław Moniuszko had settled for good in 1840 after his wedding to beloved Aleksandra née Müller, met several years earlier at a noblemen’s inn situated in Niemiecka Street. From Vilnius, Twardowski recalls the scattered pages of Moniuszko’s Songbook for Home Use, left behind in the turmoil of war and kicked around in the streets. Someone had to pick those pages up, and reassemble them into his own, quite separate songbook of life.

Translated by: Tomasz Zymer

I am happy to announce that the first CD from the series Heritage under the label of Anaklasis, launched by PWM Editions, was published at the end of last year. This remastered archival recording of Flis (The Raftsman), one of the lesser-known operas by Moniuszko, is a solid contribution to the discography of Polish music. The CD is available at the PWM’s online shop (https://pwm.com.pl/en/sklep/publikacja/flis,stanislaw-moniuszko,22187,shop.htm). Instead of a teaser, I post my text from the CD booklet, where I explain the whole story and give some information about the artists involved. Enjoy!

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No, Moniuszko didn’t like it in Paris at all. Possibly he was worn out by his journey to France via Germany, which took more than a month and abounded in artistic disappointments as well as “draining his pockets thoroughly.” He may also have felt uncomfortable in the busy metropolis, vibrant with life, or he simply couldn’t afford the city’s numerous pleasures. The unbearable heatwave didn’t help, either. Whatever the reasons, he was disgusted, and vented his frustration in a letter to his daughter written in mid-June 1858, where he wrote that the Parisian theatres were “splendid, but very untidily maintained; the foyers are extremely narrow, very much as in the Vilnius dress circle. […] The change of sets makes as much whistling noise as a locomotive […] The singers at Le grand opéra are the worst, but at the Opéra Comique they are exquisite […] the ballet is better in Warsaw. The orchestra and choirs are excellent, but lower standard than in Germany. The sets are dirty because they are worn out. […] All in all, the theatres have not satisfied me at all, and since I arrived in Paris, I only once managed to sit through an entire play.” It was most likely all these circumstances that gave rise to the legend of how the composer hid in a hotel in Rue de Gramont, closed all the shutters, lit the candelabra, set up his portable desk, and completed the score of his new opera The Raftsman, to a libretto by Stanisław Bogusławski, in a mere four days. But in reality, if he indeed wrote anything in Paris, it was no more than a general outline of his ‘one-act piece from the Vistula valley’. That it wasn’t much more becomes evident when we read his later correspondence with his wife, in which he complains that, the more he works on Flis, “the more work appears ahead of him.”

All this work notwithstanding, the opera does bear the mark of haste. Moniuszko was eager to exploit the recent success of his Halka; especially so since General Ignacy Abramowicz, President of Warsaw’s Government Theatres, was planning to entrust the post of opera conductor to Moniuszko and so was impatiently looking forward to more scores. Most problematic for Moniuszko was the libretto, which, despite the great potential of the theme, proved stylistically inconsistent and rather clumsy in terms of literary form, especially if we compare it with Wolski’s masterfully constructed Halka. Stanisław Bogusławski, son (born out of wedlock) of the more famous Wojciech, was a reasonably good comedy writer, a columnist known for his jovial sense of humour, and a solid supporting actor. His experience as a librettist, however, was limited to collaboration with Józef Damse on the latter’s opera The Sea Smuggler after Walter Scott. The composer did his best to cover up the shortcomings of the narrative structure by adding graceful choruses, a number of tuneful, frequently virtuosic arias, and skilfully constructed ensemble scenes. He also prefaced the whole with an atmospheric and brilliantly instrumented overture. The Raftsman, conceived as an unpretentious ‘scene of country life’ (as clearly suggested by the references to folk dances in the choruses “O come young raftsman” and “The rafts sail along the Vistula”), demonstrates surprisingly many affinities with the Italian opera, as well as with the works of Auber, Meyerbeer and Halévy, with which Moniuszko familiarised himself, among others, during his “boring” stay in Paris, whose theatres “did not satisfy him at all.”

All the same, Moniuszko’s one-act opera drew the admiration of the audience on the night of the premiere (24^th September 1858) and was received rather favourably by the contemporary critics. “Kurier Warszawski” reported (in issue no. 253) that “the music [was] lovely, some numbers received an encore, and an undying applause continued throughout the spectacle.” What certainly contributed to this success was the composer himself as conductor, as well as perfectly selected soloists: Paulina Rivoli and Julian Dobrski, who had sung the parts of the unfortunate highland girl and of Jontek in the recent Warsaw production of Halka, and now returned as Zosia and Franek. Also excellent was the singing actor Alojzy Żółkowski, portraying the troublesome Warsaw salon hairdresser and barber Jakub – a great comedian and “an extraordinary phenomenon, hitherto unparalleled on any stage,” as Władysław Bogusławski later described him.

The Raftsman became a repertoire staple at Polish opera houses, and was frequently staged together with Verbum nobile on the same night. Two years after World War II came to its close, The Raftsman was also presented in the open air on the river cruise route from Warsaw to Gdynia by the Polish Rivers Opera, consisting of musicians from Cracow Opera and Philharmonic. Its postwar comeback to the stage took place in 1949 at Poznań Opera. The most recent staging, prepared in 2003 by the Szczecin Castle Opera (Opera na Zamku), was the last of the ten postwar productions of the work which, as Moniuszko hoped, would quite “preoccupy the minds” of the audience.

The Raftsman at the Opera Śląska in Bytom (1954). Antoni Majak (Antoni the Fisherman) and Maria Kunińska (Zosia). Photo: Bronisław Stapiński

The archive recording of The Raftsman that we present here, made in 1962, deserves to be recalled first and foremost as a priceless document of the great abilities of Polish opera singers in that era. The enamoured Zosia was sung by Halina Słonicka, who came from the Polish Eastern frontier (she was born in Charniany near Kobryn, now in Belarus), who had taken up secondary music education following her success in the ‘Looking for Young Talents’ competition, dropping her architecture studies at the Warsaw University of Technology. A year later she became a pupil of Magdalena Halfterowa, who remained her tutor until graduation. In 1957, still as a student at Warsaw’s State Higher School of Music, Słonicka was engaged as a singer at Warsaw Opera. An extremely versatile artist, blessed with a warm soprano of beautiful timbre, she demonstrated extraordinary musicality and sense of style. Her interpretation of the famous dumka “Ah! Perhaps amid this storm” delights with the masterful legato, while in duets with Szóstak she displays her impeccable coloratura technique.

Her partner is Bogdan Paprocki as Franek. This perhaps the most outstanding of lirico-spinto tenors in the entire postwar history of Polish opera made his debut still before the war, in a barbershop quartet during an evening show held in April 1939 by cadets from the Zamość Reserve Officer Cadet School. He took singing lessons from, among others, Ignacy Dygas, one of Poland’s best Wagnerian tenors. His professional career began at the Silesian Opera in Bytom, with the role of Alfredo in Verdi’s Traviata. He soon gained fame as a Moniuszko soloist nonpareil, especially with his interpretations of the parts of Jontek in Halka and Stefan in The Haunted Manor. Notably, in the role of Franek he appeared on the stage only once in his life, at the Silesian Opera, virtually directly after the studio recording of The Raftsman. Until an old age Paprocki continued to impress audiences with his brilliantly controlled tenor voice, distinguished by a recognisable golden-tinged timbre and impeccable intonation.

Bogdan Paprocki. Photo: Edward Hartwig

Jakub the Hairdresser sings with the unforgettable, velvety and melancholy baritone of Andrzej Hiolski, considered one of the most beautiful of its kind, not only in Poland. He made his debut during World War II at Cracow’s Stary Theatre as Janusz in Moniuszko’s Halka. Later he was a soloist of the Silesian Opera in Bytom and sang for many years at Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki. He went down in history as the phenomenal Sword Bearer in Moniuszko’s The Haunted Manor, the terrifying Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca, and the unequalled model of Szymanowski’s King Roger. He won the audiences’ hearts with his extraordinary vocal culture and intelligent interpretations, especially of the song repertoire. Famed for his versatility, he was one of the few opera singers in that period who did not shun contemporary music; this preoccupation bore fruit, among others, in the form of excellent interpretations of parts in Penderecki’s St Luke Passion and The Devils of Loudun.

At the premiere performances of both these latter works, Hiolski shared the stage with Bernard Ładysz, the living legend of Polish vocal art. Ładysz and Hiolski were of the same age and for many years they sang together in Warsaw, where Ładysz is remembered first and foremost for his unsettling Boris Godunov in Mussorgsky’s eponymous opera. Endowed with an extremely strong, dark but warm bass-baritone, in The Raftsman Ładysz gives a very convincing portrayal of the old campaigner Szóstak, most notably – in his exquisite duet with Jakub (“Good sir, why such haste?” / “I’m a salon hairdresser”).

Antoni Majak, who sang the part of Antoni the Fisherman, deserves a separate mention. This now unjustly forgotten bass debuted before the war as a Warsaw Opera soloist. From the early 1950s onward, he successfully directed opera productions on Poland’s best stages. The oldest habitués of the Silesian Opera recall (with much nostalgia) his appearances as Kecal in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, a role that calls not only for excellent vocal technique, but also for considerable acting skills and a sense of humour.

The cast also includes Zdzisław Nikodem in the minor part of Feliks. This excellent leggiero tenor, a soloist of Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki, also performed from its very beginnings at Warsaw Chamber Opera.

The soloists, Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir are conducted in this studio recording by Zdzisław Górzyński, possibly the most successful interpreter of the composer’s specific style in the history of Moniuszko recordings in Poland. Górzyński was born into a Jewish family that boasted fine musical traditions. His father, Józef Grünberg, played the violin in the orchestra of Johann Strauss the Younger. Górzyński studied conducting with Franz Schalk, the would-be director of Vienna’s Staatsoper. He felt equally at ease in the core operatic repertoire and in operettas by Lehár or Offenbach. His interpretations were full of internal dynamism, wonderfully nuanced in terms of dynamics, rhythms and tempi. He maintained a perfect balance between the soloists and the orchestra, which together formed one living, pulsating organism. The 1965 recording of (excerpts from) Halka under his baton, featuring choice soloists and the ensembles of Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki, still remains unrivalled after all the years. As for his interpretation of The Raftsman, we have rather little to compare it with.

This is a shame since, as Zdzisław Jachimecki reluctantly admitted, “this music has its assets after all.” In Górzyński’s interpretation, those assets become fully manifest.

Translated by: Tomasz Zymer