Miscellanea

On Saturday, 24 November, a four-part chamber cycle Life Without Christmas by Gia Kancheli will be performed on one long day, at times corresponding to the names of the individual „prayers” – as part of the Nostalgia Festival in Poznań. Below, you can read my essay, reposted by kind permission of the Festival (http://www.nostalgiafestival.pl/en/news/o-potrzebie-jakichkolwiek-swiatbrdorota-kozinska-2).

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What would life without Christmas be like? According to Christian theologians, it would be a gloomy existence, stripped of the hope for the coming of the Saviour who would wipe away the tears of sinners and show them the way to the Kingdom of Heaven. It would be a life in the constant turmoil of war, for if Christ would not be born, there would be no death on the cross, and thus no exoneration of humanity through faith and reconciliation with God. The darkness of a life without Christmas would not be brightened by any good news: neither the joyful news of sins being forgiven, nor even the consolation that someone would help us bear them beforehand.

What would such a world be from the point of view of children or the less attentive adults of simple faith? A world without gifts? Perhaps there would be another opportunity to give them. But what would the attraction be if our homes would never smell of Christmas trees, and in our kitchens, there would be no aroma of ripe gingerbread browned in the oven. Without Christmas, we would not be able to dream, even in our adult years, to at least once see the mechanical nativity scene at the Franciscan Fathers’ Church at Bernardyński Square in Poznań. There would be no point in hanging mistletoe over the Christmas table. We would not call our forgotten relatives and friends once a year. We would not leave an additional place setting for the stray wanderer. We would forget that people should never be alone.

Photo: Isabelle Francaix

Giya Kancheli grew up in a country where real Christmas no longer existed. Contrary to popular opinion, the Soviet authorities did not introduce an official ban on the winter festivities but made every effort to appropriate the earlier tradition. In the 1920s, still with the best-intended desire to fight superstition in mind, outstanding avant-garde artists joined the campaign. A few years before the onset of the great terror, members of the League of the Militant Godless went into action as one of the most effective Bolshevik instruments for fighting religion and religious organisations. Special patrols followed fellow citizens and reported on discovered instances of holding home-based sochelniks (Christmas Eve suppers). The activists demanded that the guilty be punished for these ‘embarrassing situations.’ Churches, both Orthodox and of other denominations, were closed down and used to accommodate the infamous museums of atheism. Objects of worship were destroyed. True repressions began after the liquidation of the New Economic Policy and the replacement of this hybrid doctrine with a command-and-distribution system. Combating the Church’s influence was supposed to facilitate the fight against peasants. The celebrators went underground.

The one to bring them back to the surface was Stalin, who commanded the celebration of a secular New Year. In 1935, the same year in which Giya Kancheli was born, he surrounded Moscow’s Manezhnaya Square and the Kremlin courtyard with Christmas trees. The victims of the propaganda machine were mainly children, showered with cheap gifts delivered to the most remote places in the USSR by the same activists as before, and fed with stories of kolkhoz farmers, brave heroes of the civil war and udarniks (shock workers). The victims of the coercive apparatus were mainly adults, among them prisoners of Stalinist gulags, who had to celebrate this terrible Non-Christmas to a strictly defined scenario under the knout of the communist party propaganda department.

Kancheli remembers that his mother and grandmother secretly took him to church primarily to drag the boy away from his passion for playing football. It helped in so far as little Giya never became a real militant atheist. Since then, he has been entering the space of the sacrum: in churches, mosques and synagogues, to enjoy the absence of worshipers, the faith-charged silence, and the emptiness, which, in his opinion, hold more prayers than a temple filled to the brim during a service.

New Year’s Eve in the Kashchenko Psychiatric Hospital in Moscow. Photo by Pavel Krivtsov (1988)

It was not until the glasnost policy and Gorbachev’s reforms that Western musicologists started to seek hidden meanings in the works of Soviet composers, to track signs of writing between the lines, giving a voice to others or hiding in the shadow of suppressed religion. The time arrived for a redefinition of the legacy of Shostakovich, whose brassy overtones turned out to be only the tip of an iceberg of emotions and never externalised yearnings immersed in the depths of an icy ocean. The time arrived to decipher the painful symbols contained in the music of Arvo Pärt, Sofia Gubaidulina and Vyacheslav Artiomov. People and their tragedies began to emerge from the mysterious clusters of sounds. A cry arose from the depths of Kancheli’s symphonies and operas, from his theatre and film music, voicing mourning, fear and solitude, a regret for what had been lost, his nonacceptance of violence and a simple childlike innocence.

Kancheli emigrated from Georgia in 1991, shortly after the election of President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, overthrown on 22 December by the coup of the paramilitary organisation Mkhedrioni, most likely linked to the Russian secret service. He moved to Berlin as a beneficiary of a grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the German Centre for Academic Exchange, financed mainly from public funds of the Federal Republic of Germany. Four years later, he became a composer-in-residence for the Royal Flemish Philharmonic in Antwerp and settled permanently in Belgium. During the transitional period, even before leaving his homeland, he began composing the cycle Life without Christmas, consisting of four ‘prayers’ for the subsequent times of day: morning, daytime, evening and night-time. If these are prayers, they are so in a very broad, extra-liturgical sense. Within them, Kancheli does not refer directly to any religion, but calls for a spirituality that searches, does not submit to any creed, and wakes up at night with a scream, ‘Where is God (if He exists at all)?’ It is music echoing with the voices of angels that had never been heard. It is a song of innocence in an uneven struggle against aggression, violence and evil.

One can laugh at the repetitive structures, their shameless tonality and allegedly banal melodic phrases, until the listener realises that these are all prayers for a lost Georgia and, in a less obvious way, for a lost Soviet Union: for friends and colleagues escorted to the other bank of the Styx, for Avet Terterian, who is still unappreciated in the West, and for Alfred Schnittke, who is still not fully understood in Europe. For a multitude of composers who were banished, killed, stripped of their identity and condemned to a silence from which they can only be brought to the light by the cry: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ It is the musical prayer of the righteous person who is suffering. The listener must now decide individually whether suffering is a punishment for sins and proof of the superior being’s disfavour, or proof that someone, without really knowing who it is, is always next to us, even when hope has died.

What would life be without any festivities? What purpose do festivals actually serve? To celebrate something or, perhaps, to partake in some fine entertainment? Where does the need to hold cultural festivities come from? Is it just about strengthening our sense of community, and if so, what kind of community? An aesthetic or national one or, possibly, one that is rooted in a wider geographical context? One that is connected by the same model of sensitivity, a similar worldview, blood ties or a collective subconsciousness?

New Year celebration in the Tbilisi Palace of Sports. Photo: ITAR-TASS

Regardless of the reasons, festivals are associated with a kind of religious experience, even by agnostics and atheists. They have their own rite and order. They recur at the same times, like the first snow, the vernal equinox or the moment when the leaves on trees start turning yellow, as if they were marking a symbolic turning point, a time when a cycle concludes to be reborn soon afterwards. During a harvest of festivals, a sacrifice must be made to the deities: those of theatre, music or literature. And then we must dive into a whirlpool of intense experiences, to listen, watch and read up a stock to last until the time before the next harvest, to help survive the time of sowing and give us strength to gather fertile crops, for which we will give thanks again the following year. In the same temple, guided by equally dignified priests, together with an ever-increasing number of artistic followers.

It all sounds anachronistic, because the world is developing. A loud street party took place a few hundred meters from my home. I tried to separate myself from it in the comfort of my studio with windows facing the courtyard, but it attacked me unexpectedly with posts on one of the social media sites. The noise coming from the neighbourhood created a jarring sonic background for dozens of images on Instagram, photos taken using selfie sticks and videos shot with mobile phones. This made me all too aware that even if I cut myself off from the community, it will still sweep me into the arms of virtual friends. Could it be that the new technologies, and the subsequent growing pace of life, as well as the need for increasingly more powerful experiences, will soon transform our existence into a continuous, all-embracing festival where there is no longer any room for reflection or giving thanks?

The actual word ‘festival’ has a relatively short history and appeared in English only in the late 16^th century, borrowed from Old French where the adjective ‘festival’ referred to something joyous, closely related to the atmosphere of a major church holiday. But the predecessor of this form of art worship can be traced back to ancient Greece. In Delphi, a tribute was paid to Apollo during the Panhellenic Pythian Games, held since 582 BC in late August and early September, in the middle of the Olympic cycle, namely in the third year of the Olympiad. The tradition, however, goes even deeper to the rituals in honour of Apollo, organised every eight years and accompanied by the famous musical agons: competitions for the most accurate interpretation of a paean with the accompaniment of the kithara. Unlike the Olympic Games, the Pythian Games were, first and foremost, an arena for musicians and actors. With time, the set of competitions was extended with aulete contests, singing tournaments, and solo performances of kitharodes, as well drama, poetry and painting contests, to which the chariot races and wrestler battles provided only a picturesque backdrop. The winners were rewarded with wreaths of bay laurel branches, the holy tree of Apollo gathered in the Thessalian Tempe Valley.

Echoes of the ancient agons resounded later in medieval singing tournaments and were brought back to life in the collective European imagination by works such as Wagner’s Tannhäuser. From knightly manors, the contests gradually moved down the social ladder, turning into specific ‘tests of bravery’ for musicians belonging to specific communities. These were competitions where the participants could hope not only for the evaluation of their skills, but also for advice from the true masters of their respective professions and the spontaneous applause of the listeners gathered at the tournaments. The competitive element became secondary to the exuberant need to participate in a joyful musical celebration that fulfilled the role of some kind of catharsis and was also an integrative and educational event.

Are we taking part in joyous or, perhaps, a painful festivity? After all, the Nostalgia Festival is a celebration of musical memory: a thin albeit strong thread connecting us with what comes back to us, even though sometimes we would prefer to forget it. But we should not forget. I have just remembered that in the 1970s, my father was a guest at the Georgian Rustaveli National Theatre in Tbilisi, where Giya Kancheli was the music director. The guests from Poland were given a truly Georgian reception. Toasts were raised until dawn. The wives went to bed earlier. In the morning, my mother entered the bathroom to find the bathtub full of red roses. An apology for the drunkenness of the night before. An apology for a world where the lack of Christmas had to be offset with an attempt to provide some other festivity. A festivity which found its musical equivalent only after the death of the Soviet Union. The hated, enforced homeland of many great composers whose oeuvre we must – and should – discover many years after the fall of the ominous empire.

Translated by: Marta Walkowiak

Whenever high art ceases to be associated with high style and begins to be associated with high-handedness, it stumbles, tumbles down several storeys and becomes an object of ridicule. A few years ago a certain musical institution in Poland – an institution with otherwise beautiful traditions – decided to outsalzburg Salzburg and announced that “casual elegant” would be a mandatory dress code within its walls. Garments to be banned from that moment on included jeans and sweaters. The initiative was rightly mocked and the organisers quickly abandoned the “rules” they had so hastily formulated. The festival remained a democratic event, where we are more likely to meet true music lovers in freshly laundered jeans and tasteful sweaters than bored officials in suits smelling of mothballs.

This is not surprising: philharmonic halls and other concert venues have long been reaching out to their audiences with increasingly broad and varied repertoires – from medieval music to contemporary works, played and sung by various ensembles and artists cultivating very different performance styles. Listeners have a lot to choose from and can without any major difficulty expand their knowledge thanks to analyses of works in programme booklets, radio programmes, broadcasts and internet streams, meetings with musicians as well as comparisons of interpretations presented live with the rich and easily accessible discography.

Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice at the Wrocław Opera. Photo: Krzysztof Bieliński

Potential opera goers are in a far less comfortable situation. Putting on a full staging brings with it huge costs, incomparable to the costs of organising an “ordinary” concert. This is also why it is difficult to access complete opera recordings, not to mention video recordings of performances. Ordinary music lovers prefer to save up for a ticket to a concert hall rather than risk going to the theatre, where they will see their beloved Tosca in costumes and sets that have nothing to do with the musical concept. Ordinary theatre lovers prefer to see a performance of a play in which they will understand every word spoken on stage and will not have to wonder why the gentleman on stage is still singing a quarter of hour after he was mortally stabbed in the heart. Ordinary snobs will be bored for a much shorter time in a concert hall, from which they can escape between movements of a work, for example.

Opera as a theatre genre is in crisis all over the world, but there are very few countries where the crisis is as worrying as it is in Poland. Successive rumours about the death of opera, spread by philosophers and culture scholars for at least one hundred years, have turned out to be as exaggerated as the news of the death of Queen Bona from Tuwim and Słonimski’s unrivalled satire. The convulsions of the alleged agony only signalled a need for a through revamping of the convention. The process is painful everywhere, but is beginning to produce results: most “revitalisation” work is done in the purely theatrical layer, the approach to which increasingly varies, beginning with attempts at historical reconstruction of old productions, through references to the classics of modernist theatre and ending with progressive and often invasive practices of Regietheater. All over the world there are disputes– often fierce – over the validity of staging concepts, but no one mocks the theatrical nature of operas themselves. No one mocks librettos, in the logic of which “no one in their right mind will believe”, as one Polish director put it. No one remains indifferent to the practice of making cuts, changing the order of the various “numbers” in the score and introducing additional sound effects not provided for by the composer – some sing loud praises of such interventions, others protest until their last breath. No one thinks, as another Polish artist put it, that they are watching “a silly story”, no one feels “blackmailed by the very respectability of the operatic art”.

Despite various experiments and sheer iniquities committed by directors today against the living and lively body of this form, despite the demise of true stars and decline of the old art of singing – opera per se is doing better and better in the postmodern reality. It satisfies people’s longing for fairy tales, it allows them to escape into the land of magical thinking, provides a release for emotions unavailable in the dark, popcorn-smelling cinema room. For ordinary consumers of Western culture going to the opera is as important as element of spiritual nourishment as reading books and watching various shows on Netflix. Well-behaved Europeans will admit to not knowing Oscar-winning films rather than admit to not being familiar with the intrigue of Carmen or Un ballo in maschera.

Verdi’s Nabucco, the open-air superproduction at the Wrocław Opera. Photo: Maciej Suchorabski

In Poland, on the other hand, opera goers are getting increasingly polarised. On one extreme we have fans of opera stars and the commotion which usually accompanies their performances, and on the other – enthusiasts of spectacular, Hollywood-style productions by fashionable directors. Interestingly, representatives of both extremes care little about the phenomenon of operatic music as such. The former are quite satisfied with the celebrities showing up and singing, while the latter treat the musical layer of a production as a kind of soundtrack to a non-existent film. Between these two extremes wanders an increasingly small, increasingly lonely and often ridiculed group of fans who really cry over the fate of the wretched Halka, really know Nabucco inside out and really can appreciate the quality of a performance – sometimes in comparison with many forgotten archive recordings and in the context of changing interpretation practices.

What has brought this on? After all, the parents of my mates from primary school – even if they did not want to or were ashamed to go to the opera – knew who Callas, Chaliapin and Caruso were. After all, we all laughed in front of our television sets when the “famous Siamese tenor” sang Jontek’s aria in Stanisław Bareja’s comedy series and we heard a translation back into Polish (“My life, though young, is sad, for there is a grudge in my heart, I don’t accuse anyone in particular except for my girl…” etc.).  After all, the post-war premiere of Lohengrin at the Warsaw Opera must have also been a great social event, if Jeremi Przybora alluded to it in Kabaret Starszych Panów (Elderly Gentlemen’s Cabaret).

I will not repeat the clichés about long term effects of the decline of music education in schools. But I will weigh in with my opinion about the unreasonable policy of the directors of many opera companies in Poland, who during the transformation period looked up to the West, without taking into account the distinct determinants of our culture. Having concluded that we could not afford the German-Austrian repertoire model, in which productions – created by soloists, chorus members and orchestra musicians working well together on a daily basis – were added to the repertoire for many seasons, they opted for the Italian stagione system. Yet putting on an expensive production featuring singers contracted especially for the purpose and then presenting just three or four performances has little in common with a genuine stagione, in which a production is presented even a dozen or so times, is preceded by months of intense rehearsals and after a while is revived at home or moves to another opera house.

Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Wrocław Opera. Photo: Krzysztof Zatycki

The Wrocław Opera is one of the last companies in Poland still trying to stick to the repertoire system – which is beneficial to both connoisseurs and novices taking their first steps in the magical world of opera. Over the last two seasons things have sped up: the company has added Italian bel canto works, neglected in Poland, to its repertoire; there have also been more contemporary works; young directors previously not allowed on the big stage have been given a chance; works which cannot yet hope to attract crowds have been given meticulously prepared concert performances. The Wrocław Opera is building its repertoire wisely, respecting the audience’s varied tastes: it alternates “traditional” productions with examples of well thought out although sometimes controversial Regietheater. It invests in the education of children and adults. It invites the curious among them backstage and to various technical rooms. It goes out with music into the urban space.

In the upcoming season it will transfer to the opera house two of its open-air superproductions: Verdi’s Nabucco directed by Krystian Lada and Gounod’s Faust directed by Beata Redo-Dobber. It will present a new staging of Moniuszko’s Halka. It will tackle Phantoms in a production entrusted to Jarosław Fret, the founder of Teatr ZAR and director of the Grotowski Institute. It will present Mozart’s Don Giovanni after a concept by André Heller Lopes, one of the most interesting opera directors in Latin America, who for several years has been successfully presenting Janáček’s operas in Brazil. Bel canto enthusiasts will be served a concert performance of Donizetti’s La fille du régiment, fans of superproductions – a new production of Traviata, advocates of intergenerational education – Zygmunt Krauze’s family opera Yemaya, lovers of the Terpsichorean art – classical Giselle choreographed by Zofia Rudnicka and Ewa Głowacka as well as two modernist ballets by Stravinsky, Card Game and The Rite of Spring, to be presented by Jacek Przybyłowicz and the Swedish dancer Sigge Modigh.

There will be a lot to choose from, especially given the fact that the company’s repertoire will also feature productions premiered in its extremely busy last season, alternating with the best productions from previous seasons. Soon Wrocław opera lovers will start exchanging jokes like those of the Opera North patrons who regularly compile lists of New Year’s resolutions for the protagonists of operas presented in Leeds. Last season Fiordiligi and Dorabella made an appointment with an ophthalmologist, while Siegfried promised Brünnhilde he would spend more time with her at home. Opera can teach, entertain and move to tears – provided you are in touch with it on a daily basis.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

My short essay from the CD booklet of Russian Album (Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky / Agata Schmidt, Bartłomiej Wezner) – just released by Academy of Music Feliks Nowowiejski in Bydgoszcz.

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On the surface, they had nothing in common. Modest Mussorgsky came from the unruly boyar aristocracy, descendants of the Rurik dynasty whose knyazes (princes) gave birth to Kievian Rus’ and ruled the Grand Duchy of Moscow until the beginning of the 17th century. In keeping with the family tradition, Modest took up military career in the famous Preobrazhensky Regiment, a breeding ground for the command elite of the tsar’s army. He was excellent on the piano (he began to learn at the age of six, under his mother’s guidance), but as a composer he was self-taught. He got his first experience in the field in the cadet school, where he would entertain his peers by playing at dances – mixing lively polkas and sweeping waltzes with his own piano improvisations. While serving at the St. Petersburg military hospital, the seventeen-year-old Mussorgsky met Alexander Borodin, five years his senior. Thus began his association with the Mighty Handful, a group of composers inspired by the operatic heritage of Glinka and Dargomyzhsky, who with time would contribute to the consolidation of the Russian national school in music. Mussorgsky quit the army, joined the civil service, made some extra money as an improviser and accompanist, but, above all, he composed. He wrote music which his contemporaries found strange – seemingly romantic in spirit and seemingly deeply rooted in Russian folklore, yet shocking in its innovative use of technical devices which in many respects were ahead of the achievements of the French composers from the turn of the 20th century. Over the years Mussorgsky’s chaotic oeuvre turned out to be the most complete embodiment of the ideas of the Handful, although its other members – including Rimsky-Korsakov – regarded him as somewhat of a dilettante.

Tchaikovsky photographed probably by Władysław Pachulski in 1890.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky was born in a family of well-to-do, though still modest, tsarist officials. Ever since his great-grandfather, the Cossack Fyodor Chaika, distinguished himself in the Battle of Poltava, successive generations of Tchaikovskys had dutifully entered into the service of the Empire. Pyotr’s education followed a well-established model of the day: first piano lessons at the age of five, boarding school started at the age of eight and then law school at the university. Tchaikovsky began to study music regularly, under Anton Rubinstein, only after he turned twenty, enrolling in the newly opened St. Petersburg Conservatory one year later. Soon after he made the brave decision to commit himself wholly to music. He graduated with honours and practically right away started teaching at the conservatory. He was in touch with members of the Mighty Handful, although their ideals were completely alien to him. He felt stifled in Russia and travelled extensively, also overseas. It was his ambition to write music that would preserve the features of the Russian style, yet so perfect technically that it would be appreciated by the fastidious Western audiences. Essentially, he was an academic – in contrast to the composers of the Handful, none of whom received regular conservatory education. He referred to Mussorgsky as a “hopeless case”, a man whose great talent was equal only to his narrow mind, completely devoid of aspiration and a desire to develop. He failed to see Modest’s work as an expression of rebellion against the fossilized status quo. Mussorgsky, on the other hand, could not understand that Tchaikovsky’s cosmopolitanism was a sign that he did not belong to any group.

And yet the West would come to love both of them and consider their oeuvres as a distinct reflection of the mythical “Russian soul”. Where does this strange affinity between two extremely different personalities come from? These omnipresent folk melodies, scales and rhythms – in Tchaikovsky’s case filtered through the Western sensibility, and raw, awkward and painfully real in Mussorgsky’s works? Perhaps this is because every child of 19th-century Russian landowners would take their first steps and learn about the world under the care of a nanny – usually an illiterate serf woman who would put the young masters to sleep, singing folk lullabies, and when they were bad, frighten them with monsters from Russian fairy tales. No one referred to this tradition with more emotion and understanding than Mussorgsky: at first directly, in the song cycle The Nursery (1868–71) set to his own lyrics, and then in a less direct manner – identifying the nanny with the ominous figure of Death – in the Songs and Dances of Death to poems by Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov (1875–77). Both these cycles, as well as the songs from the Sunless cycle, written between them, make up a striking picture of human life – from the cradle to the grave. Both represent a “vocal theatre” of sorts, with a masterful dramatic structure and stage directions provided by the composer. The Nursery begins with a short scene in which the little boy Mishenka is begging his nanny for a fairy tale. He then proceeds to mess with her knitting, for which she makes him stand in the corner; he finds a large beetle and, with a flushed face, tells the nanny his adventure; for a while he lets a little girl lulling her doll to sleep take his place, only to come back on a wooden horse and prevent the cat from hunting the canary; he then daydreams a bit, and finally quarrels with his sister. In the Songs and Dances the nanny turns into Death: at first as a caring figure, rocking a dying baby in her bony arms, then as a seductive lover, tempting a young woman to follow him into the underworld; then, cunning and deceitful, luring a drunk freezing in the snow with a vision of fields filled with flowers, and finally, cruel and triumphant over the world, as a regiment commander leading his soldiers to die on the battlefield.

Photograph of Mussorgsky, taken in 1880 or 1881, a few months before his death.

'My music must be be an artistic reproduction of human speech,’ Mussorgsky himself wrote. In all the songs the musical material is condensed to the utmost; there are no empty digressions, each structure represents a particular emotion. The composer does not use long phrases but much shorter sections, at times consisting of just a few words, at other times framed by a single word or even a single vowel-exclamation. The accompaniment merges with the vocal line into an inseparable, organic whole. The metre changes all the time, the accents shift, the intonation fluctuates like in a real-life exchange in a conversation between people. A masterful performance of Mussorgsky’s songs requires immaculate voice projection, perfect enunciation, and ability to handle dynamics and colouring, not to mention great acting skills.

It is no wonder that artists, both during recitals as well as on records, frequently intersperse this dense narrative with Tchaikovsky’s songs – with their equally obvious references to folklore distilled in the composer’s retort down to a drawing-room romance – a uniquely Russian answer to the German art song. It is also a one singing actor show, only slightly gentler, more organized, devoid of any features of cruel grotesque, shying away from realistic representation. Which does not mean that underneath this mask of refinement no muted emotions are brewing. Finally, it would be difficult to find a better song to bring a recital programme to a close than Where art Thou, Little Star?, written by Mussorgsky when he was barely eighteen – on the one hand, a still stanzaic piece based on the strict rules of functional harmony, and on the other a work heralding the innovation of the composer’s future cycles with its complicated chromatics, bitter fatality of the lyrics and despair lurking among the notes.

A melancholic cosmopolitan and a descendant of Russian boyars drinking himself into a stupor in sleazy joints. At first glance, they had nothing in common. In reality, they shared a longing for a lost childhood and a caring nanny who imperceptibly, too early for both of them, turned into death.

Translated by: Maciej Wacław

Congratulations to Agata Zubel, who got awarded Europäischer Komponistenpreis (European Composer Award) 2018 for her recent work Fireworks. To celebrate the occasion, I am reposting my essay from six years ago, written before her monograph concert given as part of the Sacrum Profanum Festival in Cracow.

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In Warsaw, newborn girls are dressed in pink and boys in blue. In Kraków, a blue layette is prepared for girls, for this is the colour of Our Lady. Agata Zubel is from Wrocław, I don’t know what the local customs are there. From a very young age, girls focus on the faces around them and listen more carefully to what is being said to them. This would fit Zubel. Boys like to fiddle around with everything they can lay their hands on. As a rule, they are more active, display greater interest in their surroundings and like experimenting. This also fits her. Girls at play enjoy the company of other children, while boys prefer to play with objects. Zubel was moping around in the yard poking the ground with a stick, so Mom sent her to school to study violin, even though musical traditions were not nurtured at home. At school, there were other children and many more interesting subjects than the violin – for example, percussion, to which Agata devoted herself unreservedly at primary school after two years of training with the violinists. But that is such a boyish instrument…

Boys most often receive a dressing-down at school for bad behavior, while girls have their substantive shortcomings pointed out to them. I don’t know if Zubel was a little rascal, but when her future husband – then ten years of age – averred that she could become a composer, she reportedly replied that it couldn’t be done, as there were no women in this profession. Well, maybe apart from Grażyna Bacewicz (patron of their school) and Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil (lecturer at the State Music College in Wrocław). Yet when a composing competition was organized at the school, she won it with the piece Wirówka for percussion ensemble. And when asked where the title came from, she told a tall tale about a migraine and a big load of washing (thereby letting them think she had a spin dryer in mind). Even though it is of course boys who tell lies twice as much as girls. (Evidently that wirówka was really supposed to be a centrifuge – but no one else had to know that, now, did they?)

Between at the TW-ON, 2010. Anna Sąsiadek and Mikołaj Mikołajczyk. Photo: Bartłomiej Sowa.

Agata Zubel is undoubtedly a woman and undoubtedly a composer. Attempts to place her œuvre in a context of feminist discourse are most often the expression of a gradual retreat from the masculine archetype, from collective conceptions men have about women and their œuvre. Interest in women’s issues in musicology – sparked by Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault – was not well-received in Poland, unless we count the efforts of Danuta Gwizdalanka, who took up the gender studies thread already in the mid-1990s while working at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The main focus of investigations in feminist musicology – since the dawn of this discipline – has been the differences between male and female œuvres. Some researchers contend that there are essentially no differences. The rest argue that the narrative in the female œuvre is more communicative, less self-absorbed and based more often on collective than on individual experience. And that female composers devote more care and attention to the emotional layer of their compositions, using subtler means to build tension, but have problems with grasping larger forms and multilayered, expansive sound structures. Zubel’s œuvre gives the lie to both theses. It is as forthright and powerful as the most truly masculine music. It is as delicate and translucent as the most truly feminine music. In social discourse, it functions as effectively as the boldest feminist manifesto.

The phenomenon that is Zubel is all the more difficult to explain because she does not allow herself to be constrained by the limitations of a single field of artistic life. Agata Zubel was born in 1978 in Wrocław, and it is here that she finished both primary and secondary music school, before landing in the composition department at conservatory as a solidly-trained percussionist. Her choice of major field was determined by the aforementioned Wirówka, highly rated by Jan Wichrowski, who accepted the young neophyte into his studio. The peculiar evolution of Zubel’s musical imagination was determined by her years of experience with percussion – an instrument that sensitized her to rhythm and timbre, shielding her from the Modernist temptation to develop texture from melodic motifs woven into the harmonic fabric. When she became fascinated with the voice as an expressive tool, Zubel decided to take singing lessons with Danuta Paziuk-Zipser – yet she knew that what she wanted, above all, was to experiment, diversify, completely restack the building blocks and search for unexpected dramaturgy in her voice.

After her first ‘serious’ works, in which she employed an instrumental medium that she knew inside out (e.g. Variations for snare drum quintet from 1995 and, from two years later, Lumière for percussion, awarded 1^st prize at the Andrzej Panufnik National Composers’ Competition, as well as the PWM Edition prize), the time came for compositions featuring the human voice. A Song on the End of The World for voice, reciter and instrumental ensemble, to words by Czesław Miłosz (1998) won two prizes –1^st prize and the Polish Radio special prize – at the Adam Didur National Composers’ Competition in 2000. When American mezzo-soprano Christina Ascher – a splendid performer of microtonal music, graphic scores and live electronics who also collaborates with dancers and drama artists – came to Wrocław, the young composer wrote what became a career landmark for her, Parlando for voice and computer (2000). In this work, it is already possible to discern the most important elements in Zubel’s later vocal style: sonoristic use of the voice, building of drama from tensions and contrasts based on timbre, rhythmic latitude in measureless fragments, fluid changes in manner of sound production. Zubel, who has always thought that a composer should also be involved in performance and vice versa, shortly afterwards began to interpret Parlando herself with Cezary Duchnowski.

Between. Mirosław Woźniak, Agata Zubel, and Mikołaj Mikołajczyk. Photo: Bartłomiej Sowa.

Such were the beginnings of Elettrovoce – a duo composed of two Wrocław composers in which she seeks new ways of vocal expression, while he seeks novel contexts for traditional sounds, employing the latest computer technology to this end. Sometimes a piano also appears in this configuration, but always used in an unconventional manner – as a kind of sound building material for an intimate time-space in which the voice plays, the computer sings and the collaboration between the two composers assumes all the features of a compositional symbiosis. Elettrovoce do not content themselves with their own compositions: also appearing in their repertoire are compositions by Kaija Saariaho, Sławomir Kupczak and Michał Talma-Sutt; Zygmunt Krauze’s Star, in a version for voice and computer-generated sound; and songs by Derwid – i.e. Witold Lutosławski – for voice, cello, piano and computer. Sharp-tongued critics are beginning to grumble that there is more and more of Duchnowski in Zubel’s music, and more and more of Zubel in Duchnowski’s. Delighted admirers invite them to perform at concerts all over Europe and honour them with prizes at such events as the Dutch Gaudeamus competition for performers of contemporary music (2005).

Agata Zubel graduated from the Wrocław Academy with a Primus Inter Pares commendation and continued her education at the Conservatorium Hogeschool Enschede in Holland, before gaining a Doctorate of Musical Arts in 2004 from her alma mater. The very same year, she became involved in a venture which was initially beyond her imagination, but then turned out to be right on target: an experimental improvisation project at a concert during the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt. In 2005, she received Polityka magazine’s prestigious Passport award. This was the beginning of a triumphal procession of her works through festivals in Poland and abroad: Warsaw Autumn, Wrocław’s Musica Polonica Nova, Poznań’s Musical Spring, Musikhøst in Odense (Denmark), Alternativa in Moscow, Beethovenfest in Bonn (Symphony no. 2 for 77 performers, commissioned in 2005 by Deutsche Welle).

Zubel is increasingly distancing herself from a harmonic way of thinking – she emphasizes the primacy of expression achieved through her own means: a distinctive timbral polyphony, organization of chaos into colouristic groupings and controlled aleatoricism in the spirit of Lutosławski’s legacy. She dislikes speaking about her own music and doesn’t want to provide it with author’s commentary. She forces the listener to think. On occasion she admits to her inspirations. From Paweł Szymański, she has drawn her peculiar use of musical time – rejecting, however, the games with convention that he so favours. She owes her masterful juggling of rhythms not only to her percussion experiences, but also to her fascination with the œuvre of Stravinsky. Her experiments with timbre incline her sometimes toward Ligeti, sometimes toward the French Spectralists. She is continually searching and stresses that the distinctiveness of her works is actually rooted in that quest.

For some time, one could have gotten the impression that the critical establishment rated her vocal art more highly than her composing accomplishments. When she won Polityka’s Passport, the justification for the verdict emphasized that it is an ‘award for her extraordinary vocal performances and stage personality, as well as her ability to harmoniously reconcile the creativity of composition with the re-creativity of performance’. Music lovers associated her first and foremost with performances of contemporary music. The value of this marvelous performer was also confirmed in subsequent years. In 2006, she delighted audiences at the Musica Polonica Nova festival with her interpretation of Lutosławski’s Chantefleurs et Chantefables, which was witty, dazzling and different from both Solveig Kringlebotn’s ‘canonical’ interpretation and Olga Pasichnyk’s charm-laden version. Three years later, she captivated listeners at Warsaw Autumn with a virtuosic performance of Bernhard Lang’s DW9. She has successfully taken on leading roles in new operas (La Malaspina in Salvatore Sciarrino’s Luci mie traditrici, the title role in Dobromiła Jaskot’s opera Phaedra and Madeline in Philip Glass’ The Fall of the House of Usher, as well as a creation in Cezary Duchnowski’s opera Martha’s Garden, honoured in 2009 by the Association of Polish Musicians with an Orpheus prize).

Between. Photo: Bartłomiej Sowa.

Her voice, supple and vibrant, indeed amazes the listener by reason of its versatile expressive qualities, skill in highlighting the moods contained in the music and masterful weaving of timbral effects into their texture. Zubel employs it in an equally varied manner in her own works – from intimate dialogues with computer and traditional instruments (Unisono I for voice, percussion and computer and Unisono II for voice, accordion and computer from 2003, as well as Stories for voice and prepared piano from 2004), through sparkling, sonoristically sophisticated compositions for larger vocal-instrumental ensembles (of Songs to Biblical texts, for voice, cello, choir and orchestra, written and performed on commission from the Wratislavia Cantans festival in 2007), to extensive experiments featuring electronica, in which the voice expresses pure primal energy evoked by varied means: singing, whispering, murmuring, laughing and shouting (the opera-ballet Between for voice, electronica and dancers, staged in 2010 at the Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera in Warsaw).

Fate likes to play tricks on music critics as well. Although the Polityka Passport jurors spoke of Zubel’s œuvre in quite a condescending tone and only mentioned it third when justifying their verdict, it was this award that enabled the young composer to sail out onto broad and sometimes restless waters. After the aforementioned Symphony no. 2, she was showered with commissions for other works, includingString Quartet no. 1 for four celli and computer for the Ultraschall Festival in Berlin (2006); Cascando for the Central Europe Music Festival in Seattle (2007); Symphony no. 3, written thanks to a Rockefeller Foundation grant (2009); Aphorisms on Miłosz for the Sacrum Profanum Festival (2011); The Streets of a Human City, commissioned by Deutschlandfunk (2011); Shades of Ice for the London Sinfonietta (2011); Labyrinth, commissioned by the Polish Institute in Tel Aviv (2011) and What is the word for Klangforum Wien and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (2012). Not I for voice, chamber ensemble and electronica (2010) is to be heard for the first time at today’s concert. In 2011, Zubel became composer-in-residence at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco; and for the past two seasons, she has also been a beneficiary of the Kraków Philharmonic’s residence program.

The opera-ballet Between defined the second phase of a close collaboration with stage director Maja Kleczewska – after her excellently-received musical setting for Peter Weiss’ play Marat/Sade at Warsaw’s National Theater. The music for a production of Babel (based on Elfriede Jelinek’s play) at the Polish Theater in Bydgoszcz went basically unnoticed – although single voices appeared stating that the highly expressive and expansive musical narrative did not suit Kleczewska’s obscene yet, paradoxically, overly aestheticized conception. A genuine storm broke out, however, after the première of Oresteia, a coproduction of the National Opera and National Theater in Warsaw. Some were tearing their hair out that Zubel’s composing potential had been wasted and instead of the anticipated ‘drama-opera’, we saw dreadful theater with a trimmed-down musical layer. Others were moaning that the music of Zubel – who works on abstract sound material and thinks in terms of timbre, structure and sonoristic effects – does not always work well in dramatic theater. Yet others claimed that if it were actually worth going to Oresteia at all, this was only due to the Wrocław composer’s predatory, suggestive music. One thing is for sure: the penultimate item of the Territories series left no one unmoved, while Zubel – unlike Kleczewska – emerged from this storm completely unscathed.

Agata Zubel is a touch-sensitized percussionist. She is a singer attuned to every dimension of the human voice. She is a composer sensitive to the build-up and discharge of tensions using sonoristic devices in isolation from traditionally-understood harmonic centers of gravity and tempo proportions. Someone once claimed that Zubel wrote Between in a language which does not yet exist or which we don’t understand. This is not true. Zubel writes in the language of women. For girls are more sensitive to touch and sound – they hear everything twice as loudly as boys. This is precisely how the feminism of this music manifests itself.

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski