Musical Culture of Polish Benedictine Nuns in the 17th and 18th Centuries

Eastern European Studies in Musicology

Edited by Maciej Gołąb

Editorial board

Mikuláš Bek (Brno)

Gražina Daunoravičienė (Vilnius)

Luba Kyjanovska (Lviv)

Mikhail Saponov (Moscow)

Adrian Thomas (Cardiff)

László Vikárius (Budapest)

Volume 12

Introduction

In 2007, while looking through the microfilms held at the National Library, among plainchant manuscripts from Pelplin I quite accidentally came across a partbook with mensural notation. The title, which claimed that the book was notated by a nun of the Rule of Saint Benedict in Toruń in 1632, provided the starting point of my adventure of discovering the musical culture of Polish Benedictine Sisters. The reading of numerous works by Małgorzata Borkowska OSB, a historian of female monasticism, made me aware of the exceptional status of that order in the history of the Church in Poland, and the special character of the period from the end of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries in its history. The extant chronicles, registers, ceremonials and other convent documents gradually allowed me to become better acquainted with the fascinating world of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century nuns, where music, as an ornament of the liturgy and an expression of religious feeling, played an important part. A search of the materials revealed the fact that the surviving music collection left by the Benedictine nuns was, alongside the Pauline, Cistercian and Jesuit collections, one of the richest within the legacy of Poland’s monastic orders. In my research, I was able to consider 858 compositions preserved in versions from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among them 465 in complete form, with only 92 given attribution or identified. I was greatly encouraged to proceed with my research by the fact that many of the sources I used had not previously been present in the musicological discourse on the subject of the music of past centuries, or the information they contained had not been fully utilised.

Scholars researching Western monasticism are in agreement that the period from the end of the Council of Trent until the final decades of the eighteenth century, when under the influence of the social climate of the Enlightenment convents began to be dissolved, was the last phase of its vigorous development. In the title of this book, the time period of the discussed material is described as encompassing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is an approximation since a few of the sources and some information also come from the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The use of the adjective “Polish” in the title of this volume was a deliberate decision based on the fact that, during the relevant period, recruitment to Benedictine nunneries involved almost exclusively persons of Polish extraction whose native tongue was Polish; Polish was also the language in which the Rule was published, and in which most of the information in the chronicles and documents was conveyed. ←11 | 12→Moreover, the post-Tridentine reform of the Chełmno branch of Benedictine Sisters and the school of spirituality, created at that time on the basis of various contemporary models, was the work of a Polish woman, Magdalena Mortęska, and had its own distinctive character. Although the attempt to create a uniform organisation of reformed Benedictine nunneries was unsuccessful, Borkowska introduced into the literature the term “Benedictine Sisters of the Chełmno congregation”, referring to the foundations with roots in Chełmno and Toruń. The nunnery at Staniątki, which had continuously existed since the Middle Ages, did not belong to this congregation and had few contacts with the other Benedictine convents. For this reason, the musical culture of that nunnery, which has its own literature,¹ was not the subject of my research and appears in the final chapter only for purposes of comparison. When investigating the extant musical sources, I concentrated on music created during the defined period, ignoring the repertory in the surviving liturgical books. Plainchant and plainchant books are discussed only as part of the musical and scribal practice of Benedictine nuns.

Sources document the fact that the nuns of the Chełmno reform cultivated various musical genres and styles, which for the purposes of the discussion undertaken here I have described as professional practice. The reason is that to pursue such practice the nuns not only had to be talented and have good voices, but they also had to have musical training in the skills of reading and transcribing music, performing polyphonic works, playing instruments, solo singing and realising basso continuo, the partially improvised organ accompaniment. In this kind of practice, the nuns used music repertory, probably obtained in various ways, which was created for professional music ensembles and as a rule required significant performance competence. During the seventeenth century, we can include vocal polyphony and organ play in the professional practice of the Benedictine nuns. The alternatim practice, involving the alternating use of vocal polyphony, chant and organ fragments, also played a part in giving the liturgy a musical setting. During the eighteenth century, the range of musical genres being practised was significantly extended and changed its character; the nuns cultivated vocal-instrumental religious music intended for the kinds of typical scoring at that time: from solo voice accompanied by the so-called ←12 | 13→Kirchentrio, to more extended scores for a number of vocal parts and differentiated instrumental parts². Moreover, they would perform instrumental chamber compositions, as well as solo works for keyboard instruments.

Among Benedictine nunneries of the Chełmno reform to date, it has been mainly the convent in Sandomierz which has been known in the musicological literature for its musical activity³. However, even that excellent music collection has not as yet been subjected to a thorough study. Three M. A. students at the Lublin Catholic University undertook a study of an organ manuscript belonging to the legacy of Benedictine Sisters from Przemyśl⁴, while an initial study of the music collection as a whole was undertaken by Tadeusz Maciejewski⁵. Three partbooks of Toruń provenance were merely mentioned in publications by Edward Hinz⁶, Paweł Podejko⁷ and ←13 | 14→Barbara Przybyszewska-Jarmińska⁸. Manuscript 127 from the Gdańsk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences was known and catalogued⁹ for the RISM database together with the whole of that library’s collection, but it was only while I was researching this source that its Toruń provenance was established. Works from the organ book of a Sandomierz Benedictine nun, Jadwiga Dygulska, drew the attention of Jerzy Gołos¹⁰, while Roman Pelczar included in an article a few sentences about the musical life of Benedictine nuns from Jarosław¹¹. Relying on the achievements of the researchers listed here, as well as my own research into all accessible sources, I attempt in this volume to create a narrative picture of a bygone musical culture of Polish Benedictine nuns. That culture grew out of their need to adorn their worship, but also perhaps the need to achieve self-realisation through musical practice. The numerous works of Małgorzata Borkowska, as well as the earlier works by Karol Górski, were of fundamental importance in providing the context for the musical culture of Benedictine nuns of the Chełmno congregation. Extremely helpful were also the publications of Jolanta Gwioździk devoted to the library collection and the intellectual culture of the nuns, as well as the research of Anna Szylar, which concentrated on the history of the convent in Sandomierz. A wider European context was provided for this study by many interesting monographs devoted to the musical culture of nuns, mainly Italian¹², but also ←14 | 15→German¹³, Austrian¹⁴ and Spanish¹⁵, published mainly in English. Religious, social and cultural contexts relating to the functioning of the musical culture of Polish Benedictine nuns, as well as their European parallels, are discussed in the chapter 1.

The research presented here relied primarily on sources. Alongside sources containing musical compositions, I also tried to make use of all accessible texts of different kinds, such as convent chronicles, directoria, ceremonials, registers, menologia, correspondence, account books and even household documents. Not many of them have been published in our time, the majority of them are accessible in archives, also in the form of microfilms. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 present a picture of the musical culture of Polish Benedictine nuns of the Chełmno congregation, based on information taken from all these sources. In view of the significant differences in the musical style and the functioning of music in nunneries between the two consecutive centuries, as well as the period of decline of musical practice caused by wars in the second half of the seventeenth century, I discuss the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries separately. In the final, sixth, chapter I present, for purposes of comparison, the musical culture of the convent at Staniątki and the convent of Poor Clare Sisters in Stary Sącz. That chapter is based mainly on the literature of the subject.

While conducting my research into the musical culture of Polish Benedictine nuns I encountered much friendly interest, help and support from many people. Particularly inspiring were contacts with Professor Barbara Przybyszewska-Jarmińska, Rev. Sister Dr Małgorzata Borkowska, Professor Marek Derwich and Professor Ryszard Wieczorek. I owe a great deal to my Colleagues: Irena Bieńkowska, Jolanta Gwioździk, Tomasz Jeż, Alina Mądry, Agnieszka Leszczyńska, Aleksandra Patalas, Danuta Popinigis, Danuta Szlagowska and Anna Szylar. Conversations with them, their knowledge and experience have left their mark on this volume. I very much appreciate the help given freely by ←15 | 16→Professor Noel O’Reagan, Dr Coleen Baade, Irena Rybicka M. A., Dr Marcin Konik and Dr Maciej Jochymczyk. I remember with great gratitude my recently deceased colleague Elżbieta Wojnowska, who worked for many years at the RISM centre at the National Library in Warsaw and who patiently helped me find my way among the secrets of source and repertory research, willingly sharing her knowledge. I have grateful memories of the consecutive Directors of the Diocesan Library in Sandomierz, Rev. Dr Andrzej Barzycki and Rev. Dr Andrzej Jakóbczak, as well as of the Director of the Diocesan Archive in Pelplin, Rev. Professor Anastazy Nadolny. My thanks also go to the Benedictine Sisters at Krzeszów, Przemyśl and Żarnowiec for their hospitality.