Szymanowska

A modern Polish-language biography of the celebrated pianist and composer Maria Szymanowska has long been overdue. The current volume is part of a series of mini-biographies of Polish composers addressed to the general public, a praiseworthy initiative recently undertaken by the Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne (Polish Music Publishing, PWM). Although the size of individual biographies in this series is extremely limited, the fact that the task to write Szymanowska's biography was given to the eminent Polish musicologist Danuta Gwizdalanka indicates that PWM understood Szymanowska's monumental standing and her unique position in the history of western music.In a publication barely 184 pages long, Gwizdalanka masterfully manages the material. She discusses Szymanowska's Jewish-Frankist ancestry, her early musical education, musical and pedagogical activities in Warsaw, her family, relatives, children, and the circumstances behind her divorce, as well as her extensive concert tours, along with her repertoire and concert reviews. The author sheds a new light on the composer's extensive social network in Warsaw and abroad, and analyzes in depth her relationships with Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Michał Kleofas Ogiński, Adam Mickiewicz, and Bertel Thorvaldsen. Although the book contains no illustrations, contemporary portraits and sculptures of the pianist are also part of the discussion.According to Gwizdalanka, Szymanowska did not concertize outside of Warsaw prior to 1822, which challenges previously published research. Some of the theses put forward do not seem to find confirmation in available sources. For example, Gwizdalanka speculates that Szymanowska's decision to concertize in Italy was made on the basis of her interests in purely touristic, leisurely pursuits. Similarly, we find no proof to confirm her speculation that the composer John Field was instrumental in arranging a multivolume publication of Szymanowska's compositions by Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig. In spite of such minor issues, it is obvious that this seemingly modest new publication will likely inspire an entirely new direction to future research. The sheer amount of newly found biographical data contained in this slim volume is truly remarkable.It is not a surprise that the limited space did not allow for an in-depth discussion of Szymanowska's compositional output. But a total surprise is the fact that the author summarily dismisses Szymanowska's contributions as a composer, assigning to her a totally negligible role in the “salon music” world. Gwizdalanka remains indifferent to the fact that while Szymanowska indeed contributed many charming piano miniatures suitable for amateurs, her main works, such as the Vingt Exercises et Preludes, or the Caprice sur la Gioconde, testify to her rare compositional gifts, including a certain free, unconstrained, and often visionary treatment of the piano, resulting in compositions which were often more advanced than the conventional style of her male contemporaries. She was the only Polish composer who directly influenced Fryderyk Chopin's early musical style, a topic much discussed today throughout the world.Szymanowska remains one of the most misrepresented women composers in the history of western music. For several decades, on both sides of the Atlantic, in the East and in the West, it was believed that a publication of a handful of conventional miniatures was representative enough of women composers, including Szymanowska, Clara Wieck-Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Louise Farrenc and others. The unfortunate trend of portraying women composers as negligible amateurs ran out its course only recently.In the case of Szymanowska, during the last twenty years, her discography was enriched by several recordings by pianists from around the globe (e.g., Bart van Oort, Tobias Koch, Maria Gabryś-Heyke, Slawomir Dobrzanski, and others). In addition, in 2021, just two years before Gwizdalanka's biography was published, the same publishing house PWM issued an urtext edition of Szymanowska's revolutionary set of Vingt Exercises et Preludes, beginning a series of modern editions of her scores. Yet in spite of what clearly is Szymanowska's renaissance in performing circles, and a worldwide movement to address historical issues of gender inequality and discrimination, Gwizdalanka remains unmoved by Szymanowska's talents as a composer. In its sharp critical tone, her opinion aims to discourage any serious incursions into this topic, whether as a performing musician or a musicologist. During our current era of enthusiastic reevaluation of cultural contributions of historically underrepresented minorities, Gwizdalanka's opinion seems dissonant, antiquated, and out of place.One more aspect of Gwizdalanka's biography deserves a special note. The author offers the following description of Szymanowska in the opening section of the book: “In the eyes of Mickiewicz and his contemporaries, she was the ‘Queen of Tones’; from the perspective of the twenty-first century, she shows herself as a manager who has masterful control of the technique of public relations, a virtuoso in the art of building and using her social network, and thus a person successfully managing a spectacular but short career” (p. 7).1 While the statement contains a rather uncalled for allusion to Szymanowska's imagined personal traits, it also provides readers with the main focus of Gwizdalanka's work. In the author's understanding, economic reasons, and particularly the need to provide for her three children after her divorce, were the propellers behind Szymanowska's entire musical career. The author notices the constant presence of pecuniary matters in Szymanowska's correspondence with her family. It seems that the pianist, surrounded and worshipped by aristocrats and the landed gentry, lived in perpetual worry about her finances. The reader is left with a difficult dilemma—the question which came first, Szymanowska's dream to become a concert pianist, or the economic reality of a divorced mother with children who was forced to invent a new profession—the first ever female concert pianist.