Juilliard Fest to Feature Contemporary Polish Concert Music

By Joel Sachs

Every January since 1985, Juilliard’s Focus! Festival has highlighted a different aspect of 20th- and 21st-century music. The spotlight this year (the festival begins January 22) is on Poland after World War II.

The festival’s theme originated in a conversation between President Joseph Polisi, Dean Ara Guzelimian, and me. While bouncing around various ideas, Dean Guzelimian proposed giving the masterful Witold Lutoslawski broader exposure here. The idea then evolved into a Lutoslawski concert as the conclusion of a survey of Polish composers since World War II.

The concept was greeted with delight at the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, a mission of Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that promotes cultural exchange. Thanks to the initiative of Anna Perzanowska, the institute’s music curator, I was able to spend 10 days in Poland, exploring the repertory and meeting composers and arts administrators.

It was an extraordinary revelation. While a few earlier Polish composers—such as Frederic Chopin and Karol Szymanowski—are known, more recent Polish composers have generally been under the radar in this country, with the conspicuous exceptions of Henryk Gorecki, Witold Lutoslawski, and Krzysztof Penderecki.

The few Polish composers known abroad are, in fact, the tip of the iceberg. The wealth of Polish concert music since World War II seems surprising, however, considering the steel boots of the 20th century that devastated the country. After the German Blitzkrieg of September 1, 1939, which launched that war, and the Soviet invasion of September 17, the country was divided into Soviet and German spheres of influence. Conditions were appalling everywhere. While the extermination of Poland’s three million Jews is the Nazis’ best-known crime, their treatment of Poles over all was not much better, and the Poles were to be next on the extermination list after the Jews and Gypsies were finished off. Poland lost 5.5 million people by the end of the war.

The Jews were first herded into ghettos and gradually liquidated by starvation, shootings, and deportation to the extermination camps. In Warsaw they staged a bloody, last-ditch revolt—amazing, considering their physical condition—that ended with the death of virtually everyone. Polish men, meanwhile, had been a limitless source of slave labor for Nazi industry. A year after the ghetto uprising, the Polish underground staged a second revolt, which also was brutally defeated after a long and heroic battle. The Nazis then systematically demolished Warsaw as the Red Army watched from across the river. When the Soviets finally drove out the Nazis, they took control of the country, annexing eastern lands that would become parts of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania.

In “compensation,” Poland received some western sections, from which all remaining ethnic Germans were expelled to make room for Poles given the opportunity to emigrate from what would become Soviet Ukraine. Over the following years, the Communists assumed control through a series of brutal political maneuvers.

In such an atmosphere, it is near miraculous that music for the concert stage survived at all. Countless talented musicians had been killed; some others emigrated. The nascent blooming of composition from before the war looked for a while like it had also been murdered. Yet some musicians had kept the tradition alive, largely in secret, and in the turbulent postwar decade, it began to revive, led by older composers such as Grazyna Bacewicz, Andrzej Panufnik, and Lutoslawski. Panufnik, however, fled to England during the brutal repression that only began to ease with Stalin’s death in 1953.

During those late Stalin years, all the arts were compelled to be “socialist realist,” that is, optimistic and easy to understand. Mass songs, cantatas, and socially inspiring operas, which had no roots in the Polish tradition, were de rigeur. Art that posed challenges was considered anti-Communist because not everyone could appreciate it. Fortunately, politically unacceptable music was not crushed with the same ruthlessness as in the USSR, and the situation slowly improved.

Paradoxically, the 1956 political turmoil in Eastern Europe that followed Stalin’s demise coincided with the debut of the Warsaw Autumn, one of the most astonishing new-music festivals in the world. The festival, especially in its early decades, not only brought Polish listeners the newest music by their countrymen and by foreign composers and performers, but it also filled them in on all that they had missed during the terrible times in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, such as the music of Webern and Schoenberg. Even Bartók and Stravinsky were little known until the Warsaw Autumn began to present its music.

Furthermore, for a few composers from the Soviet Union who were able to attend, the fairly tightly locked window was opened significantly. Throughout the Communist years, Poland was spared much of the extreme antimodernism of its Soviet neighbor, and Polish composers rose to the occasion by “being fruitful and multiplying,” musically speaking. When the oppressive conditions worsened under martial law, from 1981 to 1983, musical life miraculously kept going, and institutions like Warsaw Autumn, some orchestras, chamber groups, and soloists continued to provide composers with opportunities.

Ironically, when freedom really arrived, the situation for the arts, like everywhere else in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, became precarious. The festival’s current director, the composer and bassist Tadeusz Wielecki writes:

“Only recently has the new economic and social situation of a country working its way to prosperity threatened the financial stability of the ‘Warsaw Autumn.’ The festival still plays an essential role in shaping contemporary culture in Poland, but culture itself—even high culture—is given low priority. It is wanted neither by society, easily swayed by mass culture and mainly understanding culture as entertainment, nor by the subjects that shape social life: politicians, the media, or even the public patronage. These want, above all, to be seen and to be watched, and thus only need art as an emblem and celebratory decoration for various celebrations and anniversaries. Furthermore, they deem that for such a function, a work by Beethoven or Chopin will be better than a work by Spahlinger or Szalonek. It is necessary to remind people in Poland about a more contemporary approach to culture.”

The Warsaw Autumn was far from the only source of musical stimulation. Composers need publishers, and PWM (Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne), which was the official state music publisher during the Communist period, and Agencja Autorska, now part of the composers’ rights agency analogous to ASCAP, provided the immensely important outlet for their work. Now there are groups of younger composers, adventurous ensembles—some of them dating back to the Communist period—composers writing within innumerable aesthetics, active explorations of electro-acoustic music and installation art—in short, all the components of a lively artistic scene. Membership in the European Union has rewarded Polish artists with the freedom to travel and work throughout Europe, thereby constantly refreshing their spiritual and technical resources.

Thanks to the efforts of the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and interested American performers, more and more of this music is being heard here. If the forces of commercialization can be kept at bay—the same “if” that artistic communities worldwide have to keep in mind—future music-history texts will have a lot to say about Polish music since 1945.

Joel Sachs, pianist and conductor, is founding director and conductor of the New Juilliard Ensemble. A member of Juilliard’s music history faculty, he is writing a biography for Oxford University Press of the American composer Henry Cowell. As co-director of the new-music ensemble Continuum, and as a conductor, he has performed and held new-music residencies internationally. This essay is adapted from his program notes for the Focus! Festival.

For the Focus! 2011 Polish Modern festival schedule, visit Juilliard’s Web site.

(Video: Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, which will be played at the festival on January 28.)