Filip Lech
Polish Jewish Music
Jewish settlement on Polish lands has an over 1000-year history that has made a deep mark on our culture. In 2014, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw published a dictionary entitled Żydzi w kulturze muzycznej ziem polskich w XIX i XX wieku [Jews in the Musical Culture of Polish Lands in the 19 th and 20 th Centuries], written by Leon Tadeusz Błaszczyk. It included over 1500 entries concerning musicians and composers; also discussed were music schools, orchestras, choirs, chamber ensembles, music theaters and the role of individual synagogues in Polish musical life. It also talked about professions associated with Polish-Jewish musical life: from cantors to military bandmasters, to music critics, luthiers, music producers, publishers of gramophone recordings and music bookstore owners.
The Beginnings, or, The Roots
Where to begin the narrative of Jewish threads in Polish music? One could go back to the roots. Let us look into the literature. In one book of Pan Tadeusz, a poem by Adam Mickiewicz (in the history of Polish culture, this is a book equally as important as Goethe’s Faust in Germany, Milton’s Paradise Lost in England or Lönnrot’s Kalevala in Finland), we shall find a description of a concert given by Jankiel: an innkeeper, assistant rabbi and emissary of Napoleon, ‘an old Jew known by all for his good nature’, he improvises on the dulcimer. His performance is a commentary on the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in which the Jewish musician quotes from, among other things, a 16 th -century soldiers’ song and the Song of the Polish Legions in Italy, known today as Dąbrowski’s Mazurka – the Polish national anthem. This is one of the fragments of Pan Tadeusz that Polish schoolchildren learn by heart.
Interestingly, almost no one has attempted a musical interpretation of this topos of Polish literature. Wojciech Kilar composed the music for the film adaptation of Pan Tadeusz directed by Andrzej Wajda. Wajda left Jankiel’s concert out of his script, explaining that it is the material for a whole other film. A literal musical adaptation of this fragment was undertaken by another film music composer, Jan A. P. Kaczmarek. The Oscar winner wrote his piece for orchestra and an ensemble of Belarusian dulcimerists, attempting to tell as literally as possible in the score what he had read in Mickiewicz’s work.
How Folklore Sounds after World War II
Polish composers were inspired by Jewish folklore; Jewish artists often alluded to Polish folk music. In his String Quartet no.3 (1945), which is simultaneously the only one we know because the previous two have disappeared, Szymon Laks develops seven traditional motifs originating from Greater Poland, Mazovia and Podhale. To each melody, we can match words known from ethnographic sources. Musicologist Antoni Buchner, a student of Carl Dahlhaus, contends that in this way, Laks created a narrative parallel to the musical one. The first movement of the quartet sparkles with an energetic oberek rhythm (to the words ‘W polu lipeńka, listeczki opuściła ’ [‘In the field the linden tree has dropped its leaves’]). In the second movement, the dance element dies down, and sorrow and melancholy are revived (‘Idzie żołnierz borem, lasem, przymierając z głodu czasem’ [‘Through the woods and forests goes a soldier, starving now and then of hunger’). The third movement revives with the triple meter of a mazurka which merges in the fourth movement into a Podhale song in duple meter, celebrating the arrival of spring (‘Gaiczek zielony, pięknie wystrojony’ [‘The pretty green tree branch, with its decorations’]).
Krzysztof Penderecki – who grew up in Dębica, a small city in southern Poland where the majority of the inhabitants were Chassidim – remembers Jewish music from his childhood.
‘It is odd that after so many ears the music I had in my ears is coming back to me. In two of my works, klezmer music has returned consciously: in the Sextet (2000) and even in the Concerto grosso (2001); I probably heard such motifs as a child,’ said the composer on Polish Radio. In the Sextet, the instrument responsible for the disturbing, though almost dance-like klezmer motifs is the clarinet. In the ensemble, we shall also hear a horn: perhaps it is an echo of the instrument used for special moments in the Jewish liturgical year – that is, the shofar? Penderecki does not allude to any folkloric idyll. This is music written by a witness of the Holocaust, a person who observed the unimaginable crimes of the Nazis.
In the Shadow of History
Szymon Laks wrote String Quartet no.3 in Paris right after the end of World War II. From 1942 to 1944, he was imprisoned in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where he held the post of Kapellmeister, musician and copyist for the men’s orchestra. He wrote down his experiences in several books, the most famous of which is Jeux Auschwitziens (1979). He never did explain why the first work he wrote after the unimaginable experience of the death camps was a quartet on folk themes.
Mieczysław Wajnberg, a Polish-Jewish composer born in 1919 in Warsaw, escaped the hell of the Holocaust by leaving Poland on 6 September 1939. He fled to Minsk, then to Tashkent, and spent the rest of his life in the Soviet Union. After the war, his works were criticized for pessimism and formalism; in February 1953, on a wave of Stalinist anti-Semitic purges, he was arrested and accused of ‘bourgeois Jewish nationalism’ – probably he would have been shot to death, had it not been for the amnesty that ensued after Stalin’s death.
In 1968, having to his credit nearly 100 chamber and symphonic works, as well as the music to several films, including the anti-war melodrama The Cranes Are Flying that won awards at Cannes, Wajnberg decided to write an opera. As a libretto, he used The Passenger by Zofia Posmysz, a former Auschwitz prisoner. After the first rehearsals at the Bolshoi Theater, it was removed from the repertoire because of its – as was explained – ‘abstract humanism’, which could have meant a fear that the audience would associate the camp scenes with the Soviet forced-labor camps; but equally well, an unwillingness to present an opera by a Jewish artist in a period of tension between the USSR and Israel.
The Margins
Echoes of history are also reflected in the œuvre of Eugeniusz Rudnik. In his work entitled Lesson II (1965), this composer associated with the Polish Radio Experimental Studio created a collage-like narrative in which samples from radio programs are mixed with electronic modulations.
Recordings of children playing army games are interrupted by real sounds of explosions and machine-gun shots – though they could just as well be recordings of special effects for some film or radio drama. Words from a soldier’s funeral (‘they fell on the field of glory’) are mixed with a children’s counting rhyme. The several hundred samples used by Rudnik also include the heartbreaking song of a cantor drowned out by terrifying laughter that is simultaneously a scream.
‘This is the most important acoustic signal for us as people, because it is our first sound: crying about how cold we are when we leave our mother’s womb; and our last: our final breath as we commend our spirits to God, going beyond the river into the shadows of the trees,’ says composer-engineer Rudnik.
The stream of consciousness that Rudnik sends to our ears in cut-up samples evades intellectual analysis. We will not reconstruct his thought process, we will not retell this story. We can only feel it, translate it into our own sensibility.
Of course, not every Polish-Jewish composer has alluded to folklore and the Holocaust (though the latter subject, there is no way to escape). André Tchaikowsky was a composer and a splendid pianist (8 th Prize at the 5 th Chopin Competition, 3 rd Prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels). He was born in 1935 in Warsaw; during World War II, his family ended up in the Warsaw ghetto, which he miraculously escaped together with his grandmother. He did not leave behind a large compositional legacy; he devoted most of his time to his concert career. One of his most interesting works is the opera The Merchant of Venice (1968–82). The author of the libretto, based on William Shakespeare’s text, was a good friend of the composer’s, John O’Brien.
‘It is a riveting thought that a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto chose to spend his last years composing an opera based on a Shakespeare play in which we are never quite sure if hatred of the Jews is being condoned or condemned,’ commented David Pountney.