Awangarda

Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music

Lisa Cooper Vest

• Editore: University of California Press
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520975422
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Music History & Criticism

In Awangarda, Lisa Cooper Vest explores how the Polish postwar musical avant-garde framed itself in contrast to its Western European counterparts. Rather than a rejection of the past, the Polish avant-garde movement emerged as a manifestation of national cultural traditions stretching back into the interwar years and even earlier into the nineteenth century. Polish composers, scholars, and political leaders wielded the promise of national progress to broker consensus across generational and ideological divides. Together, they established an avant-garde musical tradition that pushed against the limitations of strict chronological time and instrumentalized discourses of backwardness and forwardness to articulate a Polish road to modernity. This is a history that resists Cold War periodization, opening up new ways of thinking about nations and nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century.

1

Backwardness (Zaległość)

Defining Musical Modernity in Poland before and after World War II

BEING BACKWARD

In 1929, composer Karol Szymanowski granted an interview to the weekly paper Świat (The World), in which he complained that Polish contemporary music was underdeveloped in relation to other European nations. He laid blame on his nemeses, the “conservatives” (konserwatyści), whose plans for the future of Polish music reflected their investment in the aesthetic and formal signifiers of nineteenth-century German musical tradition. On the opposite side of the debate, Szymanowski’s adherents, the “progressives” (postępowscy), were more interested in exploring the available range of European modernisms. Ten years after achieving Polish national independence, it was time to start thinking forward instead of backward. “I have a sense,” Szymanowski explained, “that every artist in Poland is oriented today toward contemporaneity and the future, looking back to the past as little as possible. It is in this [orientation to the future] that I see a solution to the problem of Polish art, and especially music, in which . . . we have to make up for [our] enormous backwardness (zaległość).”¹

The struggle between the conservatives and progressives must have felt very real to Szymanowski in this moment. He had just agreed to leave his position as the head of the Conservatory in Warsaw, in part due to critique from the conservative group, led by composer-critic Piotr Rytel.² At stake was not only Szymanowski’s gainful employment (about which he felt rather ambivalent, even though he needed the money), but also the definition of Polishness in music and the authority to lead the next generation of composers in building a new national tradition. Instead of looking back to the nineteenth-century German example and attempting to create a derivative Polish version of that tradition, Szymanowski argued that Polish composers should be educating themselves about contemporary European music culture, and they should become active participants in the musical developments that were happening all around them. This was a definition of musical Polishness predicated on synthesis: like Chopin before them, Szymanowski argued, Polish composers should cultivate both their “Polishness” and their “Europeanness.”³ In combining national traditions with contemporary modernism, they would create something new and exciting.

Szymanowski pointed to the younger generation coming up behind him as the group of composers who were beginning to navigate this balance, and, in so doing, producing music “of a very Polish character, which also testifies to [their] thorough acquaintance with the high level of European music; that is to say, with [its] great sense of cultural responsibility.”⁴ The invocation of cultural responsibility here suggests that, for Szymanowski, the question of Polish cultural backwardness was not only a musical one. On the contrary, his push for modernism in music was closely bound up with Polish national progress writ large.

Poles in the interwar years shared a perception that modernity was a desirable goal, but members of the music community did not agree about the nature of that goal or about the role that they should play in pushing the nation forward. Some embraced the institutional mechanisms of modernization, which kept everything moving along a timeline toward an ever-vanishing point of “progress,” while others invested in modernism as a set of imperfect strategies for interpreting, critiquing, and exploiting that progress in an attempt to shore up some measure of (personal or national/collective) agency.⁵ Rytel’s conservative group adopted the modernizationist impulse: they wanted to strengthen Polish cultural institutions, to educate Polish audiences about the German canon, and to encourage Polish composers to build a contemporary Polish musical tradition in relation to that canon. Such acts of modernization would propel Polish artists and audiences in a straight line toward the desired goal, imagined as full participation in a Western art music tradition that had previously, with certain notable exceptions, left Poland out of its narrative.

Szymanowski, on the other hand, used the aesthetic and stylistic languages of contemporary European modernism to disrupt modernizationist definitions of progress. In his early career, Szymanowski had cultivated a Straussian style, but in the 1910s his travels put him in contact with a host of modernisms, especially those in the French and Russian orbits. His music reflected his interest in Stravinsky, Bartók, Debussy, Ravel, North African musical traditions, and many more influences. His was not a vision of one singular Polish modernism; rather he recognized a kaleidoscopic array of responses to the modern world, and he believed that it was his task, as a composer, to filter those responses through his own creative vision in each new work. When he returned to Poland in 1919, Szymanowski embarked on the so-called “nationalist” stage in his musical output, but this did not indicate a change in his approach to modernism and to modernity; it simply meant that his efforts in synthesis shifted focus from the personal to the national.

In the remainder of this chapter, I will trace the debates between the conservatives and progressives—the modernizationists and modernists—across the interwar, wartime, and immediate postwar periods. Although these two decades contained undeniable ruptures, it is crucial to note the lines of continuity, maintained by the people who lived through the ruptures and brought their experiences and convictions with them. The durability of the conservative-modernizationist and progressive-modernist visions for Polish modernity depended on their perpetuation by the post-Szymanowski generation of composers and critics, who came of age before the war and took on leadership of the Polish cultural sphere afterward. Despite the trauma of the war and the subsequent imposition of new Soviet ideological frameworks, representatives of this oft-forgotten “middle generation” clung tenaciously to the same goals they held in the 1930s: they wanted to usher Poland into a state of modernity. The old conservative-modernizationist and progressive-modernist divisions were not immediately evident after the war; cultural actors with competing commitments found themselves working together toward a shared goal of rebuilding Polish musical life. When party-state power consolidated in the later 1940s, that tenuous consensus shattered. The modernizationist position became aligned with Stalinist Marxism, thus achieving official sanction as the legitimate path to the Polish musical future, but modernist-minded artists and intellectuals drew on twenty years of experience in instrumentalizing language about backwardness to defend their vision for an outward- and forward-facing Polish musical tradition.

NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE AND NEW POSSIBILITIES

The interwar years in Poland were politically volatile, and the question of national identity was a fraught one. After finally regaining national independence in 1918, Poles worked to reclaim and reunify their long-divided territories and to assert authority against encroaching Soviet power in the east. Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s assumption of power via a military coup in 1926 lent a new stability to the political landscape, but under the surface of this stability, divergent regional experiences and competing political affiliations fueled debate about Polish national identity.⁶ During Piłsudski’s so-called “healing” (“sanacja”) period (1926–1935), the liberal left built a coalition with centrists to govern the Second Polish Republic, which they generally modeled upon the federalist precedent of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795). The greatest challenge to Piłsudski’s rule, which combined both democratic and authoritarian measures, came from the National Democrats on the right. Led by Roman Dmowski, this group envisioned an ethnically homogenous Poland, bound by religious, national, and conservative political tradition.

Piotr Rytel, the leader of the conservative group in the Polish music community, was aligned with the protectionist-xenophobic agenda of Dmowski’s National Democrats; in fact, Rytel was the regular music critic for that group’s press organ, the Gazeta Warszawska (Warsaw Gazette). Members of the “progressive” group, by contrast, were much more diffuse and difficult to pin down in terms of political affiliations. As a rule, following Szymanowski’s example, members of this group were oriented toward the liberal values of cultural cosmopolitanism. However, while some members of this group wrote for press organs on the liberal left, some of them also wrote for organs associated with the right. In some cases, critics contributed to journals from both sides; for instance, Szymanowski’s student Zygmunt Mycielski contributed in the later 1930s to both the liberal Kurier Poranny (Morning Courier) and the cultural journal Prosto z mostu (Straight from the Bridge), which tended toward the right.

Given this flexibility of political affiliation, then, it is more fruitful to characterize the two groups according to their definitions of progress and their convictions about the shape that Polish music should take in the future. As mentioned above, the conservatives located the future of Polish music in a rediscovery of the nation’s past, and in forging a connection between national tradition and the Beethoven-Wagner trajectory. It might seem counterintuitive that these nationalist critics desperately wanted Polish composers to tap into the cultural capital associated with German musical tradition, but, as Richard Taruskin has argued, the German canon has often been framed as a universal tradition, stripped of its specific national context.⁷ Proximity to this tradition therefore served as a marker of prestige and mastery, both highly desired qualities within the conservative group.

With such goals, it was not surprising that Rytel and his colleagues had strong feelings about the music conservatory in Warsaw, as they envisioned this institution as a site for inculcating the next generation with an appreciation for Western art music.⁸ And it was equally unsurprising that the conservatives reacted with horror at the appointment of Szymanowski to the leadership of that conservatory in February 1927. As Alistair Wightman has noted, an anonymous notice (probably written by Rytel) appeared in Gazeta Warszawska on the same day as the announcement of Szymanowski’s appointment, reminding readers that Szymanowski had no experience as a composition teacher and that he had not completed his own conservatory training.⁹ The conservatives’ narrative was already in place: Szymanowski lacked a grounding in tradition, and he would lead Polish musicians and composers away from the true national path.

In response, Szymanowski laid out his vision for modernist music education in an interview for Kurier Czerwony (The Red Courier). He would shift the conservatory’s focus to the current moment: “After all, our aim is not ‘yesterday,’ but ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’: creativity is the word, and not a retreat to achievements already exhausted.”¹⁰ Szymanowski’s compositions from this period translate these goals into sound. For example, his Stabat Mater, op. 53, completed the year before he accepted the conservatory post, exemplifies his notion of synthesis as the foundation for a contemporary Polish musical language. Szymanowski joined a long musical tradition when he decided to write a Stabat Mater, but he signaled his intention to depart somewhat from that tradition by adopting Józef Jankowski’s early twentieth-century Polish translation of the text, which he prized for its “unusually primitive, almost ‘folk-like’ simplicity and naivety.”¹¹ In a 1926 interview, Szymanowski explained that using the Polish-language text had allowed him to break from convention and to reconsider its dramatic content, and therefore to build a musical narrative that revealed the urgent “psychological intonation of the words.”¹²

The musical narrative of Stabat Mater synthesized influences from Polish early music, Polish folk music, and contemporary European modernism. Richard Zielinski has identified motivic connections to plainchant and to the Polish hymns Święty Boże (Holy God) and Gorzkie żale (Lenten Psalms) in the Stabat Mater, alongside Górale (Highland) textural and modal inflections.¹³ In building the long-range musical and dramatic structure, Szymanowski employed organic motivic development that resonated with nineteenth-century tradition, but he deployed such techniques in conjunction with Debussyian planing and nonfunctional harmonies, Stravinskian ostinatos, and his own predilection for bitonality and textural accretion. The Stabat Mater could not have been a clearer statement of Szymanowski’s belief that to generate progress in Polish music, composers would need to turn simultaneously inward and outward, backward and forward. They could not find the solution to their current backwardness if they barricaded themselves within the nation, ignoring modernist aesthetics and compositional techniques.

The premiere of Stabat Mater took place in Warsaw in January 1929, at a moment when the controversy surrounding Szymanowski’s leadership of the Conservatory was coming to a head. Rytel wrote about both of these topics in Gazeta Warszawska, using the opportunity to attack modernism in Polish culture. He opened his review of Stabat Mater in a pose of admiration for the other composer’s talent, but he quickly professed himself to have been unmoved by its expressive content. Szymanowski’s embrace of “primitivism” in the piece, and his rejection of functional harmony, meant that the composition suffered from a “lack of line, of breath.” The overarching effect, he argued, was of “a sketch, a group of [different] ideas thrown onto a piece of paper, rather than of a powerfully constructed composition, [intended] to endure through the ages.”¹⁴ For Rytel, meaning emerged from logical, linear progressions and careful development, from organicism. Szymanowski’s synthesis of styles, time periods, and influences was not, in his estimation, an acceptable image of Polishness in music. Although the anti-Semitic, xenophobic implications of Rytel’s anti-cosmopolitanism, anti-synthesis stance would become more explicit in t...

Indice dei contenuti

• Subvention
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1.   Backwardness (Zaległość): Defining Musical Modernity in Poland before and after World War II
• 2.   Lack (Brak): The Shifting Status of the Artist-Intellectual Class during the Thaw
• 3.   The Dissemination of Culture (Upowszechnienie kultury): Rebuilding Elite Institutions and Educating Elite Audiences
• 4.   Lag (Opóźnienie): Genius Construction and Looking Back to Move Forward
• 5.   Modernity (Nowoczesność): Bogusław Schäffer and the Cult of the New
• 6.   Awangarda: The Polish Avant-Garde as Tradition
• 7.   Backward and Forward: The Polish Avant-Garde as Progress
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index