Five Wedding Songs for soprano and piano to words by Bruno Jasieński (1934)
Wyk. Joanna Freszel – sopran, Mariusz Rutkowski – fortepian
Dokumentacja 31. festiwalu „Warszawskie Spotkania Muzyczne”
Studio Koncertowe Polskiego Radia im. Witolda Lutosławskiego Poniedziałek, 8 maja 2017, godz. 19.00
Organizatorzy koncertu: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich i Program 2 Polskiego Radia
Producent nagrania koncertu: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich
Nagranie z zasobów Związku Kompozytorów Polskich
Zygmunt Mycielski:
Przed wojną napisałem Pięć pieśni weselnych. Te Pieśni weselne to są właściwie może jedynym kawałkiem, który trochę jakoś funkcjonuje i bywa tu i ówdzie grany. To jest cykl do słów Brunona Jasieńskiego, napisany w roku [1]931, wykonała go po raz pierwszy Modrakowska w Paryżu z Nadią Boulanger przy fortepianie. Te wiersze, które były wtedy bardzo nowoczesne, ja z tych wierszy wybrałem to, co dotyczy chłopskiego wesela, i to wesele w pięciu pieśniach jest ujęte – tak, jak to wtedy potrafiłem, i to było wydane przed wojną u Gebethnera i Wolffa. W 39 roku cały nakład się zniszczył, spalił czy zgubił w czasie wojny.
Staying in the Vilnius region, at the Orniany estate belonging to Michał Count Tyszkiewicz (and his wife Hanka Ordonówna, born Anna Maria Pietruszyńska) in the second half of May 1934, Zygmunt Mycielski wrote to his mother:
A disaster struck. I found brilliant texts by Bruno Jasieński – and I already have a song cycle.
(letter to his mother Maria written in the second half of May 1934).
Czeslaw Miłosz expressed his surprise, bordering on indignation, over the excerpting of the poetic fragments in his para-journal A Year of the Hunter: “That a count from Galicia chose this…” (Czesław Miłosz, Rok myśliwego, Znak, Kraków 2001, p. 83). The amazement of the future Nobel laureate, who first encountered Zygmunt Mycielski in January 1935 in Paris, was caused by the fact that these “brilliant texts by [...] Jasieński” came from Słowo o Jakóbie Szeli [A Note on Jakób Szela]. The selection must have also worried Mycielski’s mother Maria, née Szembek, if in his letter of 30 May 1934 the composer explained his fascination, trying at the same time to reassure her:
When it comes to the texts – there is no need to be alarmed. [...] Jasieński wrote a brilliant poem, from which I’ve selected five pieces to my music. [...] That it’s about that thug Szela, no one will find out, because Jasieński’s poem is no longer available. And if they do find out in a decade or so, it will be part of the history of music and not something current and living. [...] Aren’t these wonderful texts for songs? Is there anything to be found about Szela here?
(Mycielski’s letter to his mother of 30 May 1934).
In Michał Tyszkiewicz’s library Zygmunt Mycielski came across a poem by Wiktor Zysman, who in 1926 published, as Bruno Jasieński, Słowo o Jakóbie Szeli, “using folk song poetics”. From the entire poem Mycielski chose fragments of Song I referring to a folk wedding (the eponymous hero, 35-year-old Jakób Szela, marries 15-year-old Salomea Niewiarowska, who becomes his fourth spouse), opening and closing the cycle with a unique tune, in which, contrary to common sense, people dance in a trance together with animated nature and furnishings of a peasant’s house.
Work on this song cycle, which began in May 1934, must have been finished by the end of August that year, as on 6 September 1934, Mycielski, writing from the Atma villa, where he was visiting Karol Szymanowski reported to his mother on the moments of concentration on the score:
Today Sz. [Szymanowski] read my ‘wedding’ [songs] – he liked them so much: he gave me several phenomenally valuable pieces of advice, absolutely lovely, detailed, fiendishly difficult trouivaille, which I immediately began to apply. He likes all of them, just wants me to move the piano plinking from the quavers to crotchets in the second song (‘Padał deszcz’). He is wrong, but I can’t tell him that, because he is too established a master.
(letter to his mother of 6 September 1934).
A similar opinion about the cycle was expressed by Nadia Boulanger, who wanted to talk about several vocal devices.
Five Wedding Songs, title page with dedication, Gebethner and Wolff 1939
Zygmunt Mycielski’s Five Wedding Songs was premiered on 31 January 1935 at a concert organised by the Association of Young Polish Musicians in Paris. With Nadia Boulanger on the piano, the verses of Słowo o Jakóbie Szeli were sung by Maria Modrakowska, who received a lot of praise for the performance (for example, “the magic of her art equals her charm”). French critics, referring in very general terms to the works presented at the concert, paid particular attention to Zygmunt Mycielski’s cycle, describing his pieces as those that “made the best impression”, being cheerful, inspiring, expressive, moving, full of vigour, rhythmically restless, overflowing with imaginative thought and, finally, constituting a guarantee of his success.
The songs that make up Mycielski’s cycle can be interpreted as five musical sketches or images recording various scene from a folk wedding. The successive elements of the cycle are put together primarily on the basis of the principle of agogic contrast. Although the last three songs seem to be kept at a fast tempo, the composer breaks the penultimate song into two sections – a sweeping mazurka is followed by a quiet section serving as an extended coda, the lyrical expression of which, accentuated by a restrained, lowered dynamic level and a thinned down texture, brings reassurance before the dizzying, lively final song.
Wedding Songs features stylisations of the dance and song idioms present in Polish musical folklore – the outer parts can be read as a collective, lively dance, the second part as a lyrical song, the third as a lively wedding tune, and the fourth as a mazurka complemented by lyrical sing-song. Mycielski did not introduce here any in crudo quotations or melodies stylised as folk melodies. The melodies of the songs, which make use of chromatic steps and leaps, in addition to diatonic runs, sometimes featuring veiled references to Lydianisms from the Podhale region, can at best be interpreted in terms of distant references, reminiscences of melodic elements of traditional musical culture. Moreover, their tonal wavering is accentuated by a variety of harmonic solutions – ostinatos, the centralising effect of individuals notes, figures, chords, parallelisms, the saturation of the sound fabric with dissonances (seconds in low registers, chords made of sevenths or ninths). Thanks to such devices the songs retain, even today, a remarkable textural as well as tonal-harmonic freshness.