• WL100/23: 9-10 March 1957

Saturday, 9 March 2013 Leave a comment

Lutosławski Speaks Out (1957)

Lutosławski chose his moment to make statements of a political-artistic nature.  He stayed noticeably silent during the discussions at Łagów on 5-8 August 1949, when politicians, composers and performers tried to determine what constituted socialist realism in music.  On 9 March 1957, however, he opened the 9th General Assembly of the Polish Composers’ Union (9-10 March) with a short speech.  At a pivotal moment in Polish culture, six months after the first ‘Warsaw Autumn’ festival and before any music from the Western avant-garde had been played in Poland, Lutosławski reflected on both the creative trauma of the past seven and a half years and the creative opportunities that lay ahead of Polish composers.

Our Assembly, for the first time in a very long while, is taking place in an atmosphere of true creative freedom.  No one here will persecute anyone for so-called formalism, no one will prevent anyone from expressing his aesthetic opinions, regardless of what individual composers represent.

Zjazd nasz po raz pierwszy od dłuższego już czasu odbywa się w atmosferze prawdziwej wolności twórczej. Nikt tu nikogo nie będzie prześladował z tzw. formalizm, nikt nikomu nie przeszkodzi wypowiedzieć swych poglądów estetycznych niezależnie od tego, co reprezentują poszczególni kompozytorzy.

When today, from the perspective of eight [sic] and a half years, I look back on the notorious conference in Łagów in 1949, when the frontal attack on Polish musical creativity began, I go cold just remembering that dreadful experience.   In fact, it is hard [to find] a more absurd argument than this – that one should erase the output of recent decades and return to the musical language of the nineteenth century.  But they still tried to make us believe this argument.  What is more, they frequently tried to promote works that were imitative and bland, simultaneously closing off the route to the concert platform for works that were original and creative.  We all know that this was the work of people to whom the very idea of beauty is totally foreign, people for whom music is of no interest unless there is some tale or legend attached.

Gdy dziś, z perspektywy ośmiu i pół lat, patrze na sławetny Zjazd w Łagowie w 1949 roku, kiedy to zapoczątkowano frontalny atak na polską twórczość muzyczną – zimno mi się robi na wspomnienie tego okropnego przeżycia.  W istocie trudno o bardziej absurdalną tezę niż ta, że należy przekreślić dorobek ostatnich kilkudziesięciu lat i powrócić do języka muzycznego XIX stulecia.  A jednak starano się tę tezę nam wmówić.  Mało tego – starano się nieraz lansować utwory epigońskie i jałowe, zamykając jednocześnie drogę do estrady dziełom oryginalnym i twórczym.  Wszyscy wiemy, że działo się to za sprawa ludzi, którym obce jest najzupełniej samo pojęcie piękna – ludzi, których nic nie obchodzi muzyka, jeśli nie można do niej doczepić jakiejś historyjki, jakiejś legendy.

The period of which I speak may not have lasted long, because it actually passed a couple of years ago, but it was nevertheless long enough to have visited tremendous damage on our music.  The psyche of a creative artist is an extremely delicate and precise instrument.  So the attack on that instrument and the attempt to subdue it caused not a few of us moments of severe depression.  Being completely cut off from what was happening in the arts in the West likewise played no small role in that dismal experiment to which we were subjected.

Okres, o którym mówię, trwał może niedługo, bo faktycznie minął już parę lat temu, dość jednak długo na to, aby wyrządzić naszej muzyce olbrzymie szkody.  Psychika artysty twórczego jest instrumentem niezmiernie delikatnym i precyzyjnym.  Toteż zamach na ten instrument i próba zawładnięcia nim przyprawiły niejednego z nas o momenty ciężkiej depresji.  Całkowite odcięcie od tego, co działo się w sztuce na Zachodzie, odegrało również niemała rolę w tym ponurym eksperymencie, jakiemu nas poddano.

Have we shaken ourselves free of this state of dejection?  Do we have enough enthusiasm for new, creative explorations?  Certainly yes.  But even so our situation is far from easy.  Before each of us stands the problem of finding our place in the tumult represented by the arts of our time.  This problem is sharply drawn particularly for those of us who, after a gap of some years, have established contact with Western European music.  Not all of us have a clear view on what is happening in this music, where it is going.  I believe, however, that it is only a question of time, that not only will we reach a clear view on the situation but also that we will play a positive and not insignificant role in it.  This optimistic feeling allows me above all to cherish the fact that today we are breathing an atmosphere of true creative freedom.  And that is the first and indispensable requirement for the development of every art.

Czy otrząsnęliśmy się ze stanu przygnębienia?  Czy mamy dość zapału do nowych, twórczych poszukiwań? Na pewno tak.  Ale mimo to sytuacja nasza nie jest bynajmniej łatwa.  Przed każdym z nas staje problem znalezienia swego miejsca w tym zamęcie, jaki przedstawia sobą sztuka naszej epoki.  Szczególnie ostro rysuje się ten problem przed tymi z nas, którzy po kilkuletniej przerwie nawiązali kontakt z muzyką zachodnioeuropejską.  Nie mamy tu wszyscy jasnego poglądu na to, co się w tej muzyce dzieje, ku czemu ona zmierza.  Wierzę jednak, że jest to tylko kwestią czasu, że nie tylko zdobędziemy jasny pogląd na sytuację, ale że odegramy w niej pozytywną i wcale nie najmniejszą rolę.  To optymistyczne uczucie pozwala mi żywić przede wszystkim fakt, że oddychamy dziś atmosferą prawdziwej wolności twórczości.  A to jest pierwszym i nieodzownym warunkiem rozwoju wszelkiej sztuki.

Lutosławski’s opening address was printed in Ruch Muzyczny no.1 (1 May, 1957), pp.2-3.  Ruch Muzyczny resumed publication with this number, having been ‘liquidated’ by the authorities late in 1949 for being too independent.  My translation above appeared in a slightly shorter form in Polish Music since Szymanowski (Cambridge, 2005), p.92. Steven Stucky provided his own translation in Lutosławski and His Music (Oxford, 1981), pp. 63-4, and Zbigniew Skowron reproduced it in Lutosławski on Music (Scarecrow, 2007), 231-2.

Filed under Lutosławski, Music 1945-1955, Music post-1937, Politics, WL100 Tagged with , , ,

• Do Historians Hate Music?

Saturday, 6 October 2012 1 Comment

I’m a peaceable sort of chap, but occasionally my musical hackles are raised. Today, they’re up again, occasioned by the arrival in the post of Anne Applebaum’s just-published tome Iron Curtain. The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Allen Lane).  Anyone who knows me also knows that I’ve spent a good few years of my life exploring Polish music in this very period.  So for me to head straight for chapters such as ‘Homo sovieticus‘, ‘Socialist realism’, ‘Ideal cities’, ‘Reluctant collaborators’ and ‘Passive opponents’ is a totally predictable action, one undertaken I’m afraid more in hope than expectation.

The plain fact is that most historians seem not to like music.  Or, rather, they avoid writing about it if they possibly can.  Literature and the visual arts – fine, although even they are often poorly attached appendages.  Is it therefore a case of such historians believing that music has no place in social, political or cultural history?  Or is it that they have no analytical or descriptive vocabulary with which to discuss it?  There have been occasional exceptions that bridge this gaping hole, one of them being in the writings of Norman Davies.  Davies not only makes the effort but also understands cultural contexts and has the writing skills to convey the significance of music and the other arts to his readers.  Another exception is the historian Toby Thacker, whose Music after Hitler, 1945-1955 (Ashgate, 2007) is a searching enquiry that covers both East and West Germany.  (Applebaum does quote from a 2002 article by Thacker, but his book is not in her bibliography.)  There are also historians whose brief is cultural history, such as Frances Stonor Saunders and her perspective from outside the Soviet bloc in Who Paid the Piper?  The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Granta, 1999).

I have been poring over Applebaum’s book this morning.  It’s a weighty volume, focusing on three countries: East Germany, Hungary and Poland.  In major respects, it promises to be a fascinating read, a work of breadth and synthesis which I hope will help me in placing Polish music of the post-war decade within a wider context.  In fact, Iron Curtain barely acknowledges that there was such a thing as music, let alone its crucial role in socialist-realist propaganda.  And propaganda, not least that involving music and the visual arts, was at the heart of the ‘crushing’ communist machine.

There is mention of the prohibition of jazz and dance music as part of early 50s rebellious youth culture in Poland; elsewhere there is a quotation of the text of an East German mass song.  As for the music intended to promote socialist realism through mass songs or cantatas – or the concert music of the period – there’s almost nothing, except an incomplete recollection of one incident from Andrzej Panufnik, which Applebaum misleadingly glosses. Chopin Year (1949) is discussed, but not the two Festivals of Polish Music (1951, 1955).  Władysław Szpilman gets a mention for his radio broadcasts at the start and end of World War II, but then casually to remark that he ‘continued to work for the radio until 1963′ totally ignores his principal role in writing mass songs – some of them extremely popular – in the 1950s.  Applebaum has a few easily-reached quotes from Panufnik’s autobiography Composing Myself (Methuen, 1987), but these hardly count as a measured response to the issue.  The gaps are yawning.

I have not yet read Iron Curtain through from start to finish, so it is possible that its focus does not require the sort of essential details whose omission is so glaring to me.  Its attention to literature and film, for example, is a little greater, but any book on the period that fails to engage with Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind (1953) – although it is in the bibliography – or a literary figure like Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, who was forced into ‘internal exile’ in the early 1950s for not fitting in with Poland’s socialist-realist drive, cannot fail to raise serious questions.  The visual arts are as notable for their absence as is music (a couple of illustrations do not make up for the dearth of discussion of painting, sculpture and poster art).  The general level of interest is summed up by a sentence towards the end of the chapter on ‘Socialist realism’:

In due course, the most obviously Stalinist films became embarrassments to their directors, some of whom denounced or disavowed them after his death in 1953.  The crudest High Stalinist paintings, sculpture, poetry, fiction and architecture met the same fate.

Why is music excluded there?

Readers who are curious in any way about the role of music in history are normally compelled to look elsewhere for enlightenment, to the work of music historians.  There are several recent books, by dedicated writers on music, which engage meaningfully with the cultural, historical and political contexts of post-war Eastern Europe.  (None of these authors is referenced by Applebaum, and it looks as if no music historians were consulted.  I can’t tell if specialist historians in the other arts were consulted.)  But no-one can pretend that any of these music-oriented books reaches the ‘broad masses’ who might pick up history books like this one.  There is something deeply wrong about this state of affairs.  Why is there so little reciprocity on the part of historians?  Do they not recognise what they – and consequently the reader – are missing?

Don’t get me wrong: Applebaum’s book looks as if it will, in other respects, be an engaging read, not least for its interviews with ‘time witnesses’.  And I promise to read it for what it aims to be, despite my disappointment at the failure of yet another historian to incorporate musical and other cultural aspects closer to the centre of the argument.

Filed under Film, Literature, Music 1945-1955, Music post-1937, Politics, Visual Arts Tagged with , , ,

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