Search

The paper is a survey of research on music in territories of occupied Poland conducted by the author in recent years, as well as a review of selected existing literature on this topic. A case study illustrates a principal thesis of this essay according to which music was used by the German Nazis in the General Government as a key elements of propaganda and in appropriation of conquered territories as both physical and symbolic spaces.

The article is an attempt to present important categories of composer Paweł Szymański’s musical language, based on his self-analytical statements, which were in major part answers to musicologists’ questions. Luciano Berio pointed out why the situation of a composer who would like to address questions about his or her music is difficult - a lack of necessary detachment would be one of the reasons. A musicologist, on the other hand, is tempted to construct their own supposedly objective analytical view of a composer’s musical language. The dialogistic approach proposed by anthropological musicology may be a solution to these dilemmas. Other main topics mentioned in the article are related to the role of meta-concepts in Szymański’s musical language.

The German-Soviet occupation of Poland touched Witold Lutoslawski and his family in a considerable way. Lutoslawski was twenty-six years old when the war began; instead of pursuing his musical studies in Paris as planned, he was enlisted into the Polish army and worked as a radio operator with the ‘Krakow’ Army Headquarters. Taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht on 20 September 1939, he managed to escape and returned to Warsaw near the end of October. There he joined his mother, Maria Lutoslawska, and his elder brother Jerzy. His second brother, Henryk, had been arrested by the Soviets while attempting to cross the border; deported to work camps in the Soviet Union, Henryk died of exhaustion and typhoid fever in Kolyma in October 1940. He thus became the third member of the Lutoslawski family to fall victim to the Soviet system in the span of just over twenty years: Witold's father and uncle had been executed near Moscow on 5 September 1918 on ‘contra-revolutionary’ charges. These facts of Lutoslawski's biography and family history are now well known. Many of these details, however, had to be kept secret immediately after the war ended and Poland came under Soviet control. Whereas Poland's postwar communist regime generally accepted acts of mourning in remembrance of the losses inflicted by Nazi Germany, it was dangerous – if not impossible – to speak openly of the victims of the Soviet Union, which denied that it had persecuted Polish civilians and executed Polish officers in Katyn. Furthermore, the Polish security forces ( Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa , SB) persecuted those who had been involved with the Home Army ( Armia Krajowa , AK) or other clandestine organisations. Wartime survivors therefore typically minimised or hid their involvement with these organisations. In a private letter to her brother on 20 October 1975, Eugenia Uminska, a friend of Lutoslawski and an outstanding violinist, expressed her regret that this silence had been necessary: ’It is a pity that 30 or 25 years ago we had neither the possibility nor the time to preserve some memories – facts, names. But, one still lived then in partial conspiracy , which was accompanied by the fear of endangering someone by writing his name down next to someone else's, etc.