Zofia Kulisiewicz - Laks, Rozycki, Tansman & Weinberg: Depths - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Four composers, four fates. The stories of the four composers and their work are exemplary for the fate of Polish music in the first half of the 20th century, exemplary for a promising new beginning after the First World War following 123 years of political and cultural oppression and foreign domination by the Russian, Prussian and Austrian empires, exemplary for the unimaginable suffering and indescribable destruction that befell Poland with the Nazi terror on 1 September 1939, exemplary, however, also for the tremendous vigor and vitality that is so typical of Polish music as an expression of an indomitable will to live and survive. The biographies of Szymon Laks (1901-1983), Aleksander Tansman (1897-1986) and Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) also confront us with questions about the InchidentityInch of music, about the perspectives of cultural historiography, about the mechanisms of repression, forgetting and rediscovery. Even though we are dealing with composers who never questioned their Polish identity, the centrifugal forces that affected their biographies through persecution, expulsion and exile were so strong that their national InchadhesionInch was lost. For decades, they found themselves in a kind of limbo from which only a transnational perspective on cultural history could free them. The fate of Ludomir Rozycki (1883-1953) was just as difficult. In 1904 he left Poland for Berlin to perfect his craft with Engelbert Humperdinck at the Royal Academy. During the 19th century and even at the beginning of the 20th century, Polish music was overshadowed by the Russian and, above all, the German InchschoolsInch. For decades, training at a German academy was a must, with the Berlin institutions being of particular importance. Stanislaw Moniuszko studied at the Berlin Academy of Arts, Mieczyslaw Karlowicz at the New Academy of Music, and Zygmunt Noskowski, Feliks No