• WL100/68: Nie oczekuję dziś nikogo (1959)

While I was in Warsaw last week, I popped into an antykwariat which specialises in journals and periodicals of all types.  It also has a comparatively desultory music section, but occasionally there are interesting things to find.  This time, among large-format song sheets (mainly inter-war German popular songs), I found a much flimsier and tinier item (it measured just 15cm x 21cm): the first publication (February 1963) of one of Lutosławski’s dance songs published under his pseudonym, ‘Derwid’.

Nie oczekuję dziś nikogo (I’m not expecting anyone today, 1959, words by Zbigniew Kaszkur and Zbirniew Zapert) was Derwid’s most popular song (he wrote some three dozen c.1957-64).  Its melody first appeared on 3 January 1960 in Radio i Świat (Radio and the World), the Polish equivalent of the British Radio Times.  The cover of this mini song sheet features the singer Rena Rolska, then in her late twenties.  I did quite a bit of research on the Derwid songs in 1994 (‘Your Song is Mine’, The Musical Times, 1830 (August 1995), 403-10) and discovered that the refrain of this ‘slowfox’ (with its C minor walking bass and sharpened 4th) bore a striking resemblance to the opening of one of Lutosławski’s politicised mass songs, Najpiękniejszy sen (The most beautiful dream, 1950).  I’m sure the similarities were coincidental!

Rolska recorded Nie oczekuję dziś nikogo in 1960, with the Polish Radio Dance Orchestra conducted by Ryszard Damrosz: