{"id":4161,"date":"2019-08-20T14:36:21","date_gmt":"2019-08-20T12:36:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/atorod.pl\/?p=4161"},"modified":"2019-08-20T14:36:21","modified_gmt":"2019-08-20T12:36:21","slug":"consider-how-beautiful-it-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/?p=4161","title":{"rendered":"Consider How Beautiful It Is"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018The past is today, just a little bit further away\u2019, wrote Cyprian Kamil Norwid, eulogist of a present shaped by past experiences, of history understood as a trove of human experiences and emotions, in one of the poems from his collection Vade-mecum<\/em>. Norwid was a poet of history, in which people often missed their purpose, thwarted by the irony of events. Yet in another poem, part of his speech on the freedom of expression (Rzecz o wolno\u015bci s\u0142owa<\/em>), he declared that he knew \u2018something worse than crooked smiles, \/ Than cynicism, than irony: I know false earnestness!\u2019 The fourth Polish national bard (after Mickiewicz, S\u0142owacki and Krasi\u0144ski) was aware that tragedy in everyday life is often intertwined with comedy. Although misunderstood by his contemporaries and posterity alike, in his work he answered many burning questions: how one can burst with laughter even in the darkest night, how drama is all the more gripping when accompanied by the grotesque and how one can survive mourning without losing grace and a sense of humour.<\/p>\n

When Moniuszko wrote Straszny dw\u00f3r <\/em>(\u2018The haunted manor\u2019), in the Kingdom of Poland, which was gradually being integrated into the Russian Empire, there were events grotesque in their monstrousness. In February 1861, during an anti-government protest on Krakowskie Przedmie\u015bcie in Warsaw, five marchers died in clashes with the army: a locksmith, a journeyman tailor, a sixteen-year-old grammar school pupil and two landowners. Their funeral, held a few days later, turned into a demonstration by a crowd of 100,000. The cortege wound its way from the site of the tragedy to Pow\u0105zki cemetery. Catholics walked arm-in-arm with Jews and Protestants. The patrols of Russian police and gendarmerie withdrew from the streets and allowed the mourners to march freely \u2013 only to unscrupulously crush another protest on Castle Square in April. This time, more than one hundred people lost their lives in the shooting.<\/p>\n

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Portrait of Stanis\u0142aw Moniuszko by Tytus Maleszewski, 1865.<\/p>\n

Less than two years later, the January Uprising broke out. Its fate was ultimately sealed by the catastrophic Battle of Opat\u00f3w, played out on 21 February 1864. At the beginning of April, the police arrested Romuald Traugutt, the dictator of the insurrection. After being interrogated for months, the indomitable commander was sentenced to death. He was hung on 5 August on the slopes of the Citadel, amid the unimaginable cacophony made by the crowd of praying Poles and the Russian military band that drowned them out.<\/p>\n

Over the period between the funeral of the five victims of the first march and the tsarist amnesty of 1866, Polish patriots wore mourning weeds. A circular issued in March 1861 (after that funeral) by Antoni Melchior Fija\u0142kowski, archbishop of Warsaw, included these memorable words: \u2018Today and for many years, our emblem is a crown of thorns, the same one with which we crowned the victims\u2019 coffins yesterday\u2019. In the fervour of the uprising, the authorities issued the following directive: \u2018a hat should be colourful, and if it is black, then it is to be adorned with colourful flowers or ribbons, not white under any circumstances. Black and white feathers with black hats are forbidden. [\u2026] For men, mourning is not allowed under any circumstances\u2019. In order to get around the tsarist edict, women began wearing grey and purple and attaching coloured frills to black crinolines. Under their mourning dresses, they smuggled leaflets, gunpowder and ammunition.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, at the Grand Theatre (Teatr Wielki) in Warsaw, the occupying forces were having the time of their lives. Outside the building, they erected a scaffold; inside, they installed modern gas lighting and revelled in Jacques Offenbach\u2019s Orph\u00e9e aux enfers<\/em>, interspersed with excerpts from Moniuszko\u2019s Halka<\/em>. Companies of Italian artists brought with them Verdi\u2019s La traviata <\/em>and Gounod\u2019s Faust<\/em>; Polish singers at the solemnities marking the tenth anniversary of Tsar Alexander II\u2019s coronation all but choked on the anthem of the Russian Empire. Moniuszko wrote in a letter to his friend, the organist Edward Ilcewicz, dated 24 August 1865: \u2018Meanwhile, I am urgently teaching The Haunted Manor<\/em>, in order to get it out there at least a couple of times before the Italians invade. They want my finest opera! I\u2019m of a different opinion. May I be wrong\u2019.<\/p>\n

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The Haunted Manor<\/em>, piano reduction. Warsaw, 1937<\/p>\n

The composer began work on The Haunted Manor <\/em>in 1861, together with the actor and director Jan Ch\u0119ci\u0144ski, librettist of his earlier work Verbum nobile<\/em>. From the outset, the two men had in mind a comic opera with Polish accents, and they turned to the same anthology of Stare gaw\u0119dy i obrazy <\/em>(\u2018Old tales and tableaux\u2019) by Kazimierz W\u00f3ycicki from which W\u0142odzimierz Wolski had previously drawn inspiration for Halka<\/em>. They based the plot on the \u2018tale of the courtiers in the portcullis tower\u2019, then supplemented it with allusions to Aleksander Fredro\u2019s \u015aluby panie\u0144skie <\/em>(\u2018A maiden\u2019s vows\u2019, with Aniela and Klara\u2019s resolution turned into Zbigniew and Stefan\u2019s bachelors\u2019 vow) and Zemsta <\/em>(\u2018Vengeance\u2019, with Papkin now Damazy) and to Adam Mickiewicz\u2019s Pan Tadeusz<\/em> (specifically, to Mickiewicz\u2019s technique of blending the action with numerous scenes from everyday life and customs, but also to individual characters, with Maciej bringing to mind Gerwazy and the upright Miecznik as the alter ego of Judge Soplica), and also with sentimental excursions in the direction of Moniuszko\u2019s first opera, led by the new mazur, the \u2018little brother\u2019 of the mazur from Halka<\/em>. As initially conceived, this work was to have been a sort of development and continuation of Verbum nobile<\/em>, about which J\u00f3zef Sikorski wrote, after the premiere, on 1 January 1861, that it was \u2018a splendidly dramatised genre scene. The principal idea that \u201ca nobleman\u2019s word is a sacred thing\u201d is beautifully represented. [\u2026] music full of verity, and not infrequently inspired [\u2026]\u2019.<\/p>\n

Yet matters became more complicated after the January Uprising. Although the first sketch of the score was ready on Moniuszko\u2019s return from Paris in 1862, the composer decided to shift the accents \u2013 in accordance with a motto that he had expressed in a letter to his first biographer, Aleksander Walicki, of 15 September: \u2018if I love my work, then I love it as an honest means of contributing to the country\u2026\u2019 The Haunted Manor <\/em>was transformed from a Norwidian \u2018song of nature\u2019, expressing a primal energy, into a moralistic song of weighty historical situations, a song of the nation\u2019s social and political obligations. Stefan and Zbigniew manifest their patriotism in simple, soldierly words, backed by suitable illustrative music (\u2018Let\u2019s preserve our hearts and resources \/ For our nation, as patriots should\u2019). Miecznik\u2019s aria sounds at times like a positivist manifesto of the post-uprising Polish intelligentsia (\u2018So the world sees from the start \/ His confidence and honesty. \/ Proud in bearing, pure of heart, \/ All-embracing he must be, \/ all-embracing he must be!\u2019). Its complement of sorts, Hanna\u2019s aria from Act 4, steers the listener\u2019s thoughts towards female patriots dressed in black, about which the fashion magazine Magazyn M\u00f3d i Nowo\u015bci<\/em> wrote: \u2018There are sacred things that must not be abused \u2013 mourning is among their number. Anyone who makes light of them or who uses them as simple instruments of vanity, who turns them into playthings, is truly guilty of sacrilege\u2019 (10 March 1861). The opera culminates with Stefan\u2019s phenomenal aria from Act 3, in which Moniuszko referred not only to his own childhood memories from \u015ami\u0142owicze (now Smilavichy, Belarus) near Minsk, sold to his grandfather by the Grand Hetman of Lithuania Micha\u0142 Kazimierz Ogi\u0144ski, but also to the scene of Tadeusz\u2019s arrival at Soplica in Pan Tadeusz<\/em>; above all, however, to the epilogue of Mickiewicz\u2019s epic. One can hardly overlook the analogy between Mother Poland, which \u2018in this hour \/ Art laid within the grave\u2019 and the \u2018My mother dear! \/ When you departed \/ Broken-hearted \/ With you died his simple air!\u2019. The Haunted Manor<\/em>, which preserved on one hand the qualities of the noble comedy with a dash of Romantic menace and on the other a musical equivalent of J\u0119drzej Kitowicz\u2019s Opisanie obyczaj\u00f3w <\/em>(\u2018Description of customs\u2019), acquired a priceless extra dimension: that of an opera for the fortification of hearts bereft, a work about which an anonymous reviewer for the Gazeta Muzyczna i Teatralna<\/em> wrote with unconcealed emotion: \u2018some inner warmth, if I may put it like that, swept over us when we heard this music \u2013 so native, so very much ours that we felt involuntarily a certain solidarity with the composer, who seems to have extracted from the breasts of us, the listeners, some portion of our soul and adorned it, embellished it, arranged it in a wonderful whole and held it all up for us to admire. [\u2026] We would then advise that each [listener] in turn be stirred and reminded: \u2018consider how beautiful it is\u201d\u2019 (13 October 1965).<\/p>\n

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Bronis\u0142awa Dowiakowska, first performer of the role of Hanna. Karoli<\/span> & Pusch <\/span>Photography Studio, Warsaw, ca. 1885<\/p>\n

Moniuszko made it before that \u2018Italian invasion\u2019. The premiere \u2013 under his baton \u2013 was held on 28 September 1865, four months after the execution of Stanis\u0142aw Brz\u00f3ska, commander of the last unit of January insurgents. On 7 October, in a letter to Ilcewicz, Moniuszko reported, like a general from the battlefield: \u2018So the third performance of The Haunted Manor <\/em>is over, and the victory is resounding\u2019. Yet that victory proved Pyrrhic: \u2018But for dessert I kept back, like the dervish from the Arabian nights, cream tart with pepper. The Haunted Manor <\/em>has been suspended by our mother censor. No one can guess why\u2019. Although it may sound strange, there is no irony in the composer\u2019s words. The tsarist censors were perfectly aware what they were letting onto the stage, they weighed up the risk under martial law and occasionally managed to turn a blind eye to an allusion smuggled into the text. \u2018Our mother censor\u2019 unerringly sensed when to take the work off the bill: after precisely three performances, received with such tumultuous applause that another might have ended in a riot.<\/p>\n

The Haunted Manor <\/em>did not return to the Warsaw stage until two years after Moniuszko\u2019s death. This time, the Russian censor took a hard line with the libretto and the score. The opera travelled in an equally mutilated version to theatres in the Austrian and Prussian partitions. It only enjoyed a true renaissance after Poland regained its independence. And it still makes us laugh, it still grips us, although the night is somehow not so dark.<\/p>\n

Translated by: John Comber<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018The past is today, just a little bit further away\u2019, wrote Cyprian Kamil Norwid, eulogist of a present shaped by past experiences, of history understood as a trove of human experiences and emotions, in one of the poems from his collection Vade-mecum. Norwid was a poet of history, in which people often missed their purpose, … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-mangusta","4":"post-4161","6":"format-standard","7":"category-miscellanea","8":"category-posts-in-english","9":"category-prasowka"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4165,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4161\/revisions\/4165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}