The Symphony and Symphonic Thinking in Polish Music Since 1956

Beata Boles?awska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317014461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

1956 was a year of transition in Poland, and an important year for Polish music. This year saw the beginning of a political thaw – sometimes called the Polish October – in communist Poland. It was also the year of the establishment of the 'Warsaw Autumn' International Festival of Contemporary Music. This was a time of great artistic ferment in Polish music, which also deeply influenced symphonic thinking. The year 1956 is thus an appropriate starting point for Beata Boles?awska's study of the contemporary Polish symphonic tradition. Boles?awska investigates the influential Polish avant-garde, illuminating the ways in which new musical means and ideas influenced symphonic music and the genre of the symphony in the music of such important composers as Witold Lutos?awski (1913–1994), Henryk Miko?aj Górecki (1933–2010) and Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933). Referring to the main elements of the European tradition, as well as examining briefly the symphonic activity in Poland before 1956, the book concentrates on the symphonic writing in the context of avant-garde trends, represented by the so-called 'Polish school of composers', as well as on its later redefinitions proposed by Polish composers up to the present day.

1 Towards the symphony and symphonic thinking

Twentieth-century composers cannot escape their past – it presses in on them in too many ways. […]. They know that the lost Eden of the tonal common practice can never be regained in its original fullness. In this postlapsarian world, composition becomes a struggle for priority, a struggle to avoid being overwhelmed by a tradition that seems to gain in strength as it ages.¹

Joseph Straus was thinking here of the various musical genres taken up by twentieth-century composers from their predecessors. In the case of the long and rich tradition of the symphony, however, the struggle that composers had to face was one of the hardest. It would scarcely be surprising then to find confirmation that during the twentieth century, symphonies were created of great importance and originality, written by composers from various countries and of a different musical orientation. In the second half of the century, for the first time in its history, Polish symphonic music found a worldwide resonance and recognition. How Polish composers with their individual ideas and developments managed to contribute to the genre in the context of both avant-garde (Chapter 3) and post-avant-garde (Chapters 4 and 5) trends and practices will be a matter of further discussion. But before going to the details connected with particular works and composers, some most important information and terms connected with the historical and theoretical aspects of the genre shall be recalled here, as they will create a terminological basis for the discussion on the subject presented in the later parts of this book.

1.1 Symphony: the nature and status of the genre

‘A term now normally taken to signify an extended work for orchestra’² – this general definition of the symphony, though recalling some of the first impressions the word ‘symphony’ immediately brings to people’s minds, does not at all explain the nature of the genre. In fact, there really is no easy definition of what is ‘the symphony’, especially considering long and rich tradition of the genre, with all its historical associations, as well as its twentieth-century transformations and most recent interpretations. However, there is no doubt that the very nature of the symphony is rooted in the orchestra and orchestral thinking. The other feature, crucial for understanding why the symphony gained and maintained its highly prestigious position in the hierarchy of musical genres, is its social, democratic aspect, connected closely with the very beginning of the genre.

It should not be forgotten that the end of the eighteenth century, therefore the period when the symphony had crystallised its style and character, was a time of deep social changes in Europe, symbolised by the French Revolution and the emergence of a new, democratic society.³ This process found its reflection in philosophy and the arts, and its best exemplification in music became the symphony, seen as the most sophisticated and most democratic of all orchestral genres. The public tone and greater human importance of the symphony were soon recognised as the representation of ‘the emotions or ideas not merely of the individual composer but of an entire community, be it a city, a state, or the whole of humanity’.⁴ Indeed, many authors emphasise the democratic aspect of the symphony. Christopher Ballantine not only considers it in his book on the twentieth-century symphony but also devotes a separate essay to this specific matter, analysing the connection between democracy, symphony and Hegel’s philosophical system.⁵ Also, the Polish musicologist Bohdan Pociej, while describing five main aspects of symphonism (the term will be analysed below), put the social one in first place, as the most ‘elementary’ and ‘archaic’.⁶ In his opinion, the symphony can be seen as a model of a highly developed society, while the symphony orchestra itself represents the tendency towards social integrity and organisation.⁷ The symphony’s ability to unite the wide range of instruments in a way in which no one predominates but all contribute to the whole was seen as its main value, exemplifying its democratic character.

As is commonly known, the symphony crystallised in the Classical period, with works by Haydn and Mozart particularly, but the composer who lifted it to the top of instrumental genres was Beethoven. He increased the orchestral forces, the temporal span of the symphony (with Eroica), explored alternative formal plans in the Fifth and Sixth symphonies and heightened his expressive potential in all relevant areas, using enriched harmonic vocabulary relying heavily on dissonance and an intensified application of motivic development. He also occasionally incorporated programmatic elements, but the truly ‘revolutionary procedures’ he used in his Ninth Symphony (1824) were connected with the fact that ‘he attacked the very basis of the genre: its abstract, instrumental, setting’.⁸ As a result, Beethoven’s nine symphonies have remained for following generations of composers a kind of elusive ideal of symphonic music. As Robert Layton pointed out, ‘Beethoven was to the symphony what Shakespeare was to the English theatre and language. No artist escaped his shadow’.⁹

Indeed, Beethoven’s inventions in the form and content of the symphony opened the door for many later transformations of the genre. One of the most important Romantic traces of the genre is connected with initiating the two different practices in symphonic writing. First one, referred to as Classical, pursued the symphony as a purely musical, ‘absolute’ genre,¹⁰ while the second, considered Romantic, treated the symphony as a genre involving extra-musical elements, feelings and emotions. They both took Beethoven’s ideas as their ideals but the latter was regarded as more innovative and more suitable for Romantic developments in both the form and musical content. It also brought to live new symphonic genres, such as symphonic poem and orchestral overture, and was more open for various generic crossbreeding. Nevertheless, both tendencies remained fruitful and with no doubt this dual tradition, seeing the symphony in the context of either Classical or Romantic approaches, not only designed the development of the genre in the nineteenth century but deeply influenced a twentieth-century symphonic thinking as well.

The prestigious status of the symphony, which also included its high ethical position, as seen in Beethoven’s works, lost nothing throughout the next century. On the contrary, the special place of the genre was confirmed at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century by Mahler, whose symphonic output might be seen both as a second peak in the history of the genre and as a culmination of many Romantic and late-Romantic innovations on the field. This contains also the perspective of interpreting the symphony as an exemplification of cosmic and mystical ideas, best described in Mahler’s much-quoted statement, that ‘the symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing’.¹¹ Referring to this view, Mark Evan Bonds comments further:

A symphony, according to Mahler at the end of the century, must have something cosmic within itself, must be inexhaustible like the world and life, if it is not to make a mockery of its name.¹²

This attitude to the symphony as a genre of a very special significance was adopted by many twentieth-century composers. David Fanning pointed out that ‘high ethical aspirations in the symphony did survive the death of Mahler in 1911’¹³ and many composers still treated the genre as the best place for expressing the deepest feelings of humanity, as well as carrying a substantial weight of argument. For example, Alexander Ivashkin in his analysis of Shostakovich’s symphonies has pointed out the composer’s connection with ‘the great Romantic tradition, according to which the symphony, like the new-age novel, becomes not simply music but the process of solving particular problems by musical means’.¹⁴ Following this view, Ivashkin observes that

[…] the symphony cannot exist as just a musical composition, but becomes a sort of ‘meta-symphony’ and is therefore deprived of any basis as it were, outgrowing its own logical framework. All the composers are actually ‘opening’ the symphony to the world, destroying its seemingly unshakeable foundations, demolishing them in any case conventional boundaries between the music which exists primordially in Nature and what for many centuries was usually called ‘the work of art’.¹⁵

In his opinion, especially in the Russian tradition, ‘pure art’ or ‘art for art’ have simply not existed, and the musical work was always connected with some symbolic meaning, encoded in music for centuries of its existence.¹⁶ This is clearly present in the twentieth-century Russian music, as the great symphonies of Shostakovich or Schnittke may confirm.

The similar attitude to the genre is also clearly visible in Polish music of the previous century. The important role of the symphony was stressed by Mieczysław Tomaszewski in his essay devoted to the Polish symphony in the years 1944–94.¹⁷ According to him, in the twentieth century in Poland, and especially after the Second World War, the symphony became an important and representative genre because ‘if one talks about Lutosławski’s Third, Palester’s Fifth, Penderecki’s Second, about Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs or Panufnik’s Sinfonia Sacra, it is clear that it concerns pieces of particular weight and significance’.¹⁸ The similar view of the symphony seemed to be confirmed by the composers themselves, including Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933), who – according to his own essays in the genre – stated that he turned to the symphony ‘in order to absorb and process the experience of our century’ and saw the genre as ‘that musical ark which would make it possible to convey to coming generations what is best in our twentieth-century tradition of the composing of sounds’.¹⁹

1.2 Symphony in the twentieth century: terms and ideas

The twentieth century, with its multiplicity of new stylistic trends, brought also the previously unseen diversity of the symphony and symphonic music. However, only few of them seem to be fully significant for the development of the genre. They include post-Romanticism, seen as a natural continuation of late-Romantic tendencies; neo-Classicism, which stood against Romantic and post-Romantic values; and dodecaphony with its new organisation of sound system. Although they were actively developed in the first half of the century, their impact on the later symphonic writing cannot be denied.

What should also be emphasised is the role of vocal symphony, which after Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony assured itself a firm position in the genre. In the twentieth century, the tradition of the vocal symphony was further developed by composers with various stylistic attitudes. They included the symphonies of a highly intense expressive power, although their formal structures hardly fitted into the tradition of the genre. Usually, their expression was connected with some kind of spirituality, whether of Christian provenance or influenced by other (usually Eastern) religions. One of the best examples of such atypical vocal symphonies, not fitting any traditional formal outlines, but deeply spiritual in character and of an extremely high expressive power, remains Henryk Mikołaj Górecki’s Symphony of Sor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of music examples
• Permissions
• Preface
• 1. Towards the symphony and symphonic thinking
• 2. The symphonic tradition in Polish music before 1956
• 3. The symphony and symphonic thinking in the musical avant-garde: 1956–1974
• 4. The symphony in post-avant-garde times: 1974–1994
• 5. The symphony at the turn of the centuries: 1994–2017
• Index