2018 marks the centenary of an independent Polish state. As hundredth birthdays go, it is not an occasion for boundless glee. Awe, perhaps – for those Poles who survived the first 70 years – but not glee. Deep sadness is my own gut feeling, but then that’s the case with many things. Poland had the profound misfortune of being situated, upon creation, between an industrial nation – Germany – bitter and humiliated in the aftermath of the “Great War” – and a deranged giant in improvisation mode – the USSR – intent on fomenting bloody world revolution. Each neighbor saw the newly-formed Poland as an obstacle in their respective paths. And by 1933, the two neighbors were headed by vicious psychopaths, perhaps the two most loathsome specimens our species ever vomited up. “Bad luck” doesn’t quite cover it. Both Hitler and Stalin considered mass slaughter of utterly innocent civilians – of all ages and genders – an efficient use of resources, and both went into Poland with genocide on their dockets. Poland was the epicenter of a bloodbath, the scale of which is impossible to fathom.
What got me started on listening to 20th century classical music was reading history books about the 20th century in Europe and listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcasts (the ones about the Western Front in WWI and about the Eastern Front in World War II in particular). After learning about Stalin’s repressive decrees regarding the arts – and putting them in the context of the terrors he’d inflicted on his own population – I began to make the connection between certain artists and the totalitarian regimes they worked under.
Two books I’ve read this year have revealed a lot I didn’t know about Poland. I confess that until reading Nicholas Stargardt’s The German War, which deals with the propoganda-shaped perceptions of the Germans on the home front, I didn’t understand that the Poles as an ethnicity were – somehow – reviled by the Nazis and the doltish German populace much almost as the Jews were – despite the fact that, naked and silent, they are indistinguishable from one another* and despite the fact that Poland’s cultural history was on a significantly higher level than Germany’s, or Russia’s for that matter – a fact German and Soviet soldiers picked up on immediately upon storming into cities like Warsaw and Cracow. And until reading Bloodlands, an account of the contiguous region (including all or parts of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states) by Timothy D. Snyder, I’d assumed that Poland had provoked Stalin or the USSR in some way, at some point, to be dealt the cudgel blow the Soviets leveled on it; in fact, Poland was unable to fathom what Stalin was about and so did not interfere with Russia in any remotely significant way. Poland, in fact, signed non-agression pacts with the Nazis and the Soviets and hoped for the best.
For whatever reason, we in the U.S. are not really taught about what happened next, after Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact which was, in reality, little more than an agreement to cleave Poland in half in order to slaughter or otherwise subdue its population. Most Americans (at least Americans a generation ago) learn a shorthand version of the plight of the Jews in WWII – most of whom were Polish or Russian by nationality – but hear nothing of the fate of the Poles and Russians – mostly Catholic – who were slaughtered in similar fashion and in similar numbers if not percentages. I think taking the Jewish Holocaust out of its context actually diminishes the crimes of Hitler as well as Stalin. To make a long story short, Poland – a tolerant society that only wanted peace – lost nearly 17% of its population (or 1 in 6), including almost the entirety of the largest Jewish population in any single nation, in the years between the Nazi and Soviet invasions in ’39 and the Soviet onslaught that chased the Nazis out in ’45. The population of Warsaw (pictured below, in 1945) went from 1.3 million pre-war to 150,000 in six years. Almost all of those killed were civilians. Nearly all of them were shot. Shot over ditches, through specially-built walls in “doctor’s offices”, and on the ground, collapsed from hunger during forced marches, shot with single bullets from a pistol at the base of the skull, shot by spraying machine guns, shot, shot, shot.
(My theory as to why history is not taught in U.S. schools much past the Civil War or Teddy Roosevelt is that it would require considering troubling facts – Hitler’s model in creating a civilization was based on the United States’, a model of genocide against one race (in “our” case Indians; in Hitler’s, Jews) and enslavement of another (in “our” case Africans; in his, Slavs); Hitler saw the Volga as the Mississippi of a new Germany.)
I should say that while I think it is crucial to consider and study the genocides in the “bloodlands” for what they say about human beings, I do not “get off” on the horror in the history of 20th C. Europe. People can become easily addicted to the sight of depravity – it is HBO’s programming model, a sort of softcore depravity – but I crossed the line a long while back. There are passages in both The German War and Bloodlands I really wish I hadn’t read, describing incidents blood-chilling, heinous and nauseating beyond my imagination.
The real horror, for me, is that such incidents merely describe day-to-day operations for the Nazi and Soviet executioners in the years 1939-1945. Tens of thousands of regular German and Russian soldiers participated in slaughtering women and children. German soldiers wrote about it in letters home and many took photos. By 1940, everyone in Germany knew what was transpiring. And by the way, the U.S. and Britain knew all about these atrocities against Jews and gentiles alike by early 1942, because the Polish underground was getting messages out. Neither – no one – lifted a finger to protect the millions of innocent civilians that were massacred there. It just went on, Peter Breughal paintings come to life, with grey- and black-jacketed Germans in place of the skeleton army-of-the-dead as the invading army.
I have grown very attached to music of certain regions while listening to music. Hungary, the Czech regions and Russia most of all. But the music of the post-war Polish composers – particularly the two key proponents, Penderecki and Lutoslawski – always seemed forbidding somehow. I think it’s because if there was a sense of humor involved in any of it, I was not picking up on it. My favorite composers – Bartok, Shostakovich, Schnittke and Ligeti – all have a sense of humor, even if it’s infinitely black, and dormant for long stretches. I didn’t and still don’t detect a sense of play in Lutoslawski or Penderecki, and I noticed the coldness well before I knew enough about history to write the paragraphs above. Now that I know something of Poland’s history, it makes sense that there is a distinctly Polish character, and that that character is a dour one.
All but two of the composers on this mix managed to survive the Nazi and Soviet genocidal policies. How, exactly, is something I’d like to know. Of the two who didn’t, Jozef Koffler was shot down in a Krakow street along with his wife and child by Nazis in a roundup of Jews, while the other – Hanna Kulenty – was born in 1961. At least four of the composers who survived – Grasyna Bacewicz, Witold Lutoslawski, Andrzej Panufnik and Kazimierz Wikomirski – performed underground concerts during the 5-year Nazi occupation of Warsaw… somehow. Penderecki and Gorecki, both born in 1933, and Malecki (born in 1940) were children during the occupation, but children and infants were executed in droves by both Nazis and Stalinists. (One German soldier recounts, in a letter to his wife reproduced in Bloodlands, about tossing infants up in the air over the corpse pits and shooting them like skeet…) Perhaps most remarkably, Szymon Laks managed to live through Auschwitz as the camp’s musical director and managed to live longe enough for the Allies to liberate his camp, an experience he described in his book Mélodies d’Auschwitz (which I don’t want to read, but may.)
I think this is the best of the mixtapes to date in terms of start-to-finish genius, and I intend to do another Polish mix in short order because there’s far too much to choose from. In Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Gorecki, Panufnik, Bacewicz and Karol Szymanowski (a contemporary of Ravel and Bartok), Poland’s six best-known composers of the 20th and 21st centuries are represented on this mix; I have chosen favorite works by them, of course, though not “greatest hits” by any means. I will say it took me a long time to get into Lutoslawski but I kept trying and I finally got through. Recently – hence the mixtape. I get it – he’s a super-genius and his music is among the greatest work of his century, but there is a wandering, anxious sense in it. A lot of his compositions, like a lot of Polish music I’ve listened to, seem like journeys or narratives, uneasy ones. Restless and gloomy: you have to try to like it, but the effort pays enormous dividends. (I thank Miranda Cuckson for propping the door open with her rendition of Lutoslawski’s Partita for Violin and Piano from her ECM release last year.) I have continued to struggle with Penderecki (who was introduced to the wider world by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, along with Lutoslawski and Ligeti), but have come to really enjoy his second violin concerto, which he dedicated to Anne-Sophie Mutter. Gorecki is sort of like Arvo Part, in that the style for which he became famous was a transitory one, arrived at after all kinds of stylistic exploration that yielded decades’ worth of great music. Andrzej Panufnik, who moved to England in the late ’50s to get away from Social Realist thought police (after living through the Nazi occupation) is one of those guys, like Martinu, whose body of work is both vast and almost universally excellent and who was, again like Martinu, a master melodist. Grasyna Bacewicz, whom I play often on my radio show, was, I would argue eagerly, the first great woman composer, certainly in terms of her output, which included seven violin concertos (she was herself a concert violinist) and a like number of string quartets, nearly all of which reward repeated listening. Szymanowski was openly gay, suicidal, and for the second half of his life penniless (after the Bolsheviks repurposed his family’s estate) – none of which are required to write music that will survive forever but in his case may have helped. The other composers on this mix are ones I plan to investigate further, especially Kulenty, who has much of her work up on a Youtube station; she has written concertos for piano and viola that are immediately engaging and that I recommend checking out.
Finally, I was going to illustrate this playlist with war photos but that would not be life-affirming, so I chose instead works by one of Poland’s best-known painters of the mid-20th century, Wojciech Fangor. He was a contemporary of most of the composers on this mix and lived through it. There is a fascinating interview – one which relates first-hand what it was like for an artist in Poland during the Nazi and Soviet times – with Fangor here: http://www.martagnyp.com/interviews/wojciech-fangor.php
0:00:49
Andrzej Panufnik (1914-1991): Polish Suite, “Hommage a Chopin”, I.
Mariusz Smolij: Polish Chamber Orchestra
Panufnik: Homage to Polish Music (Naxos)
0:04:04
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (1933-2010): Three Pieces in the Old Style, III.
Amadeus Chamber Orchestra
Gorecki/Bacewicz/Kilar/Shostakovich (Conifer)
0:08:14
Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937): Nocturne & Tarantella, Op. 28; Tarantella
Piotr Tarcholik (violin) & Monika Wilinska-Tarcholik
Gems of Eastern Europe (CD Accord, 2017)
0:13:12
Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969): Piano Quintet
Krystian Zimerman (p) w/ Ryszard Groblewski (viola)/Kaja Danczowska & Agata Szymczewska
(violins)/Rafal Kwiatkowski (cello)
Bacewicz: Piano Sonata No. 2/Piano Quintets 1 & 2 (Deutsche Grammophon)
0:21:32
Szymon Laks (1901-1983): Concertino, II. Andante Medative
ARC Ensemble
Laks: Chamber Music; Music in Exile, v. 3 (Chandos, 2017)
0:24:59
Kazimierz Wiłkomirski (1900-95): Ballade and Rhapsody; Rhapsody
Polish Cello Quartet
Polish Cello Quartet: Discoveries (CD Accord, 2017)
0:33:40
Panufnik: Jagiellonian Triptych; II. Cantio; Adagietto
Mariusz Smolij: Polish Chamber Orchestra
Panufnik: Homage to Polish Music (Naxos)
Jozef Koffler (1896-1954): String Trio, Op. 10; III. Allegro molto vivace
Zebra Trio
Koffler: Piano Works/String Trio (CPO)
0:42:15
Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994): Concerto for Oboe, Harp and Orchestra
Heinz (oboe) and Ursula (harp) Holliger w/ Michael Gielen: Cincinnati SO
R. Straus and Lutoslawski Oboe Concertos (Moss Music Group)
1:01:39
Krzysztof Penderecki (1933- ): Violin Concerto No. 2, VI. Andante con moto
Anne-Sophie Mutter w/ Penderecki: London SO
Metamorphosen (Deutsche Grammophon)
1:10:20
Górecki: Lerchenmusik (Andante Moderato Tranquillo Cantabile)
Reinbert De Leeuw: Schönberg Ensemble
Górecki: Kleines Requiem für Eine Polka, Op. 66 – Lerchenmusik, Op. 53 (Philips)
1:25:26
Maciej Malecki (1940- ): Polish Suite; I. Capriccio
OPiUM Quartet
Back to Melody (CD Accord, 2011)
1:31:18
Hanna Kulenty (1961- ): A Cradle Song
BMF Trio
Landscape of Memories (CD Accord)
Panufnik: Polish Suite, “Hommage a Chopin”, II-V
Mariusz Smolij: Polish Chamber Orchestra
Panufnik: Homage to Polish Music (Naxos)
1:50:00
Lutoslawski: Three Poems by Henri Michaux, I. Pensees
Antoni Wit: Polish National Radio SO w/ Anna Szostak: Camerata Silesia
Lutoslawski: Orchestral Works, v. 5 (Naxos, 1998)
*As I age and wither, I probably think more of Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches than I do any other book, except maybe The Master and Margarita. Both are essential fables that bear multiple re-reads…
Concentration Camp 