‟New Romanticism” in the Works of Polish Composers After 1975

Introduction

The ‟new romanticism” trend is one of the most important phenomena in Polish music at the end of the second avant-garde. It appeared in the seventies, when there was a stylistic breakthrough consisting in turning to the broadly understood tradition, including the nineteenth century. The year 1976 brought three remarkable pieces by outstanding representatives of the ‟1933 generation:” Krzysztof Penderecki’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Symphony No. 3 (‟Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”) by Henryk Mikołaj Górecki and Kościelec 1909 by Wojciech Kilar. At the same time, it was the time of the start of a new generation of composers, both debuting at the festival ‟Young Musicians for a Young City” organized from 1975 to 1980 in Stalowa Wola – Eugeniusz Knapik, Aleksander Lasoń, Andrzej Krzanowski, and a large group of representatives of various centers in Poland. Young artists turned to musical qualities and values previously rejected by the post-war avant-garde, including such as singable melody, determined harmony and expressiveness of a romantic origin.

Composed in 1949 by Olivier Messiaen, the serial piano study Mode de valeurs et d’intensités, presented by him in Darmstadt, initiated a new and the dynamically developing trend of total serialism, which, being a projection of José Ortega y Gasset’s¹ predictions from the beginning of the twentieth century, turned out to be a fundamentally anti-romantic trend. John Cage’s aleatorism, combined with his vision of indeterminate music,² became an antidote to the dehumanized aesthetics and poetics of the Darmstadt school in the second half of the 1950s. Both of these trends reached Poland after the turn of October 1956 in order to become the subject of an accelerated and, what must be emphasized, selective reception, the excellent forum of which was the ‟Warsaw Autumn” festival. On this basis – as we know – the sonorism of the so-called ‟Polish school of composition” developed, which one of the Anglo-Saxon authors – John Rockwell – called ‟Klangfarbenschule.”³ Early works by Kilar, Penderecki and Górecki were read by some critics in romantic terms, evoking associations with the tension of music, especially of the nineteenth-century fin de siècle. In 1979, so from a considerable time perspective, Leszek Polony saw in the works of these artists ‟a specific emotionalism of romantic provenance,” ‟dynamism,” ‟eruptivity,” ‟sharpness … of ←13 | 14→expression” which his generation perceived as ‟par excellence romantic features, as the romanticism of our times, our youth.”⁴

The twilight of the second avant-garde was characterized by a pluralism of coexisting aesthetic propositions, among which there was also a tendency referring to the legacy of the nineteenth century. The revival of romantic ideas – also in the form of reminiscences of the nineteenth-century fin de siècle – was in the seventies one of the manifestations of the returning wave of the past that embraced both music and other fields of art (including poetry). Thanks to Maria Janion, the concept of ‟renewing meanings”⁵ appeared at that time. This breakthrough was to bring a refreshing aesthetic and an original synthesis of elements derived from the heritage of the past. ‟In our return – Leszek Polony wrote – to “forgotten values,” to the Romantic tradition, it was not about the pure restoration of the past, not about escaping from the present, but about a new synthesis and a new order.”⁶

The drive for reinterpretation of tradition made the artists face the need to justify their own choices. Krzysztof Penderecki explained the path he had chosen and a surprising – especially for music critics – turn to the past referring to the speech of the French poet – Guillaume Apollinaire. He wrote:

But is it really necessary to be afraid of returns? After all, it was Apollinaire himself who, in our youth, pointed out that however far the search for freedom will lead, it will only strengthen traditional rules and create new ones, which will be no less demanding than the old ones.⁷

The wave of romanticism, which returned in the 1970s during the twilight of the second avant-garde, was directly related to the political situation in Poland at that time. That period appears today as a time of patriotic uprisings, growing opposition to enslavement, which was accompanied by new creative challenges and a sense of artistic mission. Leszek Polony, describing the situation in the 1970s, identified ethical issues with it:

Never in the history of mankind – he wrote – has the reality inclined to such a sharpening of the problem of moral responsibility of man for the further fate of the world. One would like to say that this is a thoroughly romantic problem, if not that from today’s perspective, the nineteenth century seems to be only a theatrical stage.⁸

←14 | 15→Romantic individualism manifested through ‟personality affirmation” and ‟elevating the highest value and dignity of the human being,”⁹ was a feature that took on a new, updated meaning in the 1970s. When describing those times, Krzysztof Szwajgier stated: ‟From now on, no longer devotion to a social goal, but the realization of one’s own personal aspirations, was considered a vector on the way of life (self-creation, self-realization).”¹⁰

In 1976, in response to the changes that have become visible in contemporary music, Andrzej Chłopecki brought the term ‟new romanticism” to life.¹¹ This term quickly settled in the language of researchers of contemporary music, especially in the contemporary texts of Leszek Polony, who in numerous articles made the fullest interpretation of this key word. It covered both the works of the ‟Stalowa Wola generation” and the ‟generation of 1933.”

The concept of ‟new romanticism” introduced by Andrzej Chłopecki was characterized by ambiguity manifested in the multiplicity of his references and evoking different meanings. On the one hand, the term could be understood in terms of a trend, direction or tendency in music, on the other – as a creative attitude. This term was understood differently by a musicologist describing reality and by a composer who – for fear of the final ‟labeling” of his own work – rejected his belonging to this category. The ambiguity of this term was also deepened by placing it in various contexts, especially in reference to the nineteenth-century neo-romanticism or the ambiguous and multidimensional phenomenon of ‟proper” romanticism. This concept – in terms of hic et nunc – was primarily a verbalization of the intuition of critics, in direct reaction to the observed, interpreted and assessed musical state of affairs of the 1970s.

Janusz Sławiński described the literary trend as ‟a set of tendencies coherent and internally hierarchical, viable within certain historical boundaries.”¹² He distinguished inside it four constitutive elements: the ideological foundation, poetics, a set of typical themes and ideas, and a set of artistic and literary means – linguistic-stylistic, compositional and genre means. Thus understood, ‟current” could be understood synchronously – as a period, as well as diachronically, evolutionarily – in three phases: birth, crystallization-stabilization and disintegration-decay.¹³

←15 | 16→Recognizing – in the light of Sławiński’s definition – ‟new romanticism” as a stylistic trend, manifested through a crystallized creative attitude, one can ask about its evolution. It is easiest to determine its starting point, as there is no doubt that it was marked in Poland by the three, mentioned in the introduction, groundbreaking works by Penderecki, Górecki and Kilar, and then the debuts of Krzanowski, Lasoń and Knapik in Stalowa Wola in 1976–1977 (to limit the examples to only those composers). The phase of crystallization and stabilization should be considered the period between the creation of Penderecki’s Polish Requiem and Knapik’s Up Into the Silence, that is approximately 1984–2000. The issue of the ‟declining stage” raises the most difficulties, mainly due to the fact that some eminent representatives of the ‟new romanticism” – headed by Eugeniusz Knapik – continue the style of this trend, which has undoubtedly been established in the spectrum of contemporary creative orientations, in the postmodern era.

It should be emphasized that the word ‟romanticism,” being an element of the concept of ‟new romanticism,” was supposed to refer to an attitude¹⁴ rather than to a specific stylistic epoch, although it did not deny references to certain properties of nineteenth-century music. Therefore, the category of ‟romance” should be understood rather in the context of a timeless¹⁵ aesthetic orientation,¹⁶ with its inherent primacy of the emotional sphere over the intellectual one.

←16 | 17→The aesthetics of the ‟new romanticism,” referring directly to the essence of the romantic creative act, recognized the humanistic factor as the dominant element. To some extent, it also restored the rank of such creative elements as inspiration and power of genius discredited by the avant-garde. Putting the adjective ‟new” before the word ‟romanticism” was supposed to emphasize the invigorating, refreshing and positive, therefore not secondary and pejorative sense of the phenomenon emerging in the seventies, oppositional to the second avant-garde. The current referring to the nineteenth-century aesthetics has at the same time become an expression of the newly ‟humanized” musical poetics. It turned out that to be music that authenticates the feelings of an individual entangled in a world full of contradictions at the end of the twentieth century, it could have been one that could convey the composer’s anxieties as in late-romantic music.

The word ‟impressionism,” he wrote, first appeared in relation to Debussy’s music in a report by the secretary of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in late 1887. Used in a pejorative sense, it referred to Debussy’s second ‟Roman shipment,” namely – a two-movement suite for female choir (à bouche fermée) and orchestra Printemps.¹⁷

The very ‟forging” of new concepts also raised the reservations of Konstanty Regamey, who warned against the appearance of even some intellectual abuses and artistic activities due to the introduction of new radical theoretical slogans very often in his time. In his article Slogans and living creativity in contemporary music, he questioned the ‟learnedness” of some new concepts, which in fact did not correspond to the musical empiricism attributed to them, which led to a distortion of the actual state of affairs. According to Regamey, great works could defend themselves without any artificial ideological constructs. He stated:

←17 | 18→However, it is striking that in most cases the most extensive theoretical slogans accompany very non-creative art, and vice versa, creative art not only does without these theories, but it cannot be crammed into the frames of any ‟ism” at all.¹⁸

The previously indicated ambiguity of the term ‟new romanticism” resulted from a wide range of meaning, and even a certain vagueness of the very term ‟romanticism.” The name of ‟romantics” originally assigned to writers – incl. the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Hugo, Musset, Pushkin and Lermontov – over time it also covered painters – incl. Delacroix and Friedrich, sculptors – incl. d’Angers, as well as musicians – e.g. Weber, Berlioz, Chopin and Schumann. Such a great variety of nineteenth-century artistic trends included in one direction was associated with a wide range of meaning defining them, because – as Władysław Tatarkiewicz wrote – ‟the name of the romantics had a multiple, non-uniform designate, it was a name for many similar, but not identical groups.”¹⁹

Later, the notion of ‟romance” was identified with another, timeless category of ‟classic,” the opposite and interchangeable with the first one throughout the epochs. As a consequence, the word ‟romanticism,” which had become a ‟general concept,”²⁰ could mean both the epoch specifically set in history in which the artists called by its name operated, and it could also refer to all those artists who – regardless of the historical moment – they took up the ideas of the nineteenth century trend:

These extensions – wrote Tatarkiewicz – had far-reaching consequences, they made the word ‟romantic” to the ground ambiguous: if, on the one hand, it is the proper name of certain literary groups from 1800–1850, then, on the other hand, it is today the name of a general concept embracing writers and artists of any time … similarly to other words used by historians of art and literature, such as ‟classic” and ‟baroque.”²¹

According to Władysław Tatarkiewicz, artists adopting similar aesthetic and program assumptions, acting both earlier and later than in the contractual period 1800–1850, could be described as ‟romantics”

The concept that moved the continuation of Romanticism far beyond the commonly accepted framework was represented by Józef M. Chomiński, as evidenced by one of the subchapters of his History of Music, entitled Romanticizing directions.²² Assuming that the overriding tendency of the modernist transformations after World War I was the programmatic opposition to all manifestations of ←18 | 19→Romanticism, he drew attention to the fact that, despite these aspirations, elements of the nineteenth-century trend still remained viable.

Although Chomiński described the reference to the Romantic tradition as a ‟traditional, conservative attitude,” he stated that composers who identified themselves with this attitude based their actions on ‟the achievements of modern music.”²³ Among the features of this orientation, which to some extent (with all proportions preserved) anticipated the ‟new romanticism,” he included ‟increased expression and considerable activity of melody.”²⁴ Chomiński also emphasized that this tendency intensified especially in the second half of the twentieth century, when ‟program music” was experiencing its renaissance, as well as genres with ‟themes characteristic of dramas and romantic poetry.”²⁵

As in the case of neoclassicism, a variety of tendencies comprised on this ‟modernized” Romanticism. According to Chomiński, this was due to the fact that after the collapse of the major-minor system, composers – depending on their cultural affiliation, interests and degree of openness to technical innovations – created their own musical idioms. In the West, the representatives of the current defined in this way – that is, all those who were interested in the renaissance of Romanticism enriched by the means of twentieth-century music, included, among others: Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968), Ernst Toch (1887–1964), Arthur Benjamin (1893– 1960), Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895–1968), Virgil Thomson (1896–1989), Howard Hanson (1896–1981), Samuel Barber (1910–1981) and Norman Dello Joio (b 1913). In Poland, the ‟conservative romanticizing trend” was represented, in his opinion, by: Stanisław Niewiadomski (1859–1936), Eugeniusz Morawski (1876–1948), Feliks Nowowiejski (1877–1946), Stanisław Kazuro (1881–1961), Piotr Rytel (1884–1970), Witold Friemann (1889–1977) and Tomasz Kiesewetter (1911–1992).

Also, Jerzy Erdman, describing the organ music of the Romantic era, put forward the thesis that the elements characteristic of this era survived in the achievements of some composers active in the first half of the twentieth century:

Regarding organ music, the date of Reger’s death (1916) cannot be taken as the ending of the Romantic era. After 1916, organists belonging to the symphonic school were still active in France, in Poland, incl. Feliks Nowowiejski and Mieczysław Surzyński, in Germany Siegfried Karg-Elert.²⁶

He also emphasized that these artists represented the ‟neo-romantic” trend, the main message of which was to draw the deepest consequences from the nineteenth-century era. He wrote:

←19 | 20→… the term ‟neo-romantic” should also be introduced to denote a powerful trend existing in the first half of the twentieth century, composers belonging to which in their works made the final summary of the achievements of the Romantic era.²⁷

The extraordinary breadth of meaning of the term ‟romanticism” resulted in a wide range of semantic nuances defining its essence. Describing ‟romantic beauty” in The history of six notions, Władysław Tatarkiewicz presented as many as twenty-five selected aspects of it.²⁸ First of all, he drew attention to the importance of the emotional and expressive element in relation to purely intellectual elements, writing:

… romantic is art that depends entirely or mainly on feeling, gut, drive, enthusiasm, faith, and thus on the irrational functions of the mind. … romance is subjecting art to especially tender feelings.²⁹

Moving towards later expressionism, nineteenth-century aesthetics also emphasized the power of artistic experience:

It is romantic creativity that strives not for harmonious beauty, but for strong acting, for hitting people strongly, shaking them up. It is more important that the piece is interesting, stimulating, shocking than that it is beautiful.³⁰

The effect of strong catharsis was to be achieved by building extreme and conflict states:

… not harmony is the supreme category of art, but conflict itself. It is so in art, because it is so in the human soul, and not otherwise in human society.³¹

According to Tatarkiewicz, other important aspects of ‟romance” were also such features as:

• – an extensive sphere of imagination;
• – poetizing;
• – spirituality;
• – the primacy of material over technique;
• – transcendentalism;
• – symbolism;
• – creative freedom based on exuberant individualism, breaking the existing order and reaching even to the rejected artistic values;
• – domination of moral issues over artistic ones;
• – a sense of isolation, alienation of the individual.³²

←20 | 21→All the above-mentioned features of ‟romance” were to be completed by such categories as: ‟greatness, depth, loftiness, grandeur, panache.”³³ Tatarkiewicz also presented a clear distinction between two types of beauty – classical and romantic:

Romantic beauty, he wrote, is completely different from classical beauty, that what was here called beauty in a strict sense; it is different from the beauty of proportions, harmonious arrangement of parts. According to the above expressions, it can be said that it is the beauty of strong feelings and enthusiasm, the beauty of imagination, the beauty of poetry, lyricism, spiritual, amorphous beauty, not subject to form or rules, the beauty of strangeness, limitlessness, depth, mystery, symbol, multiplicity, the beauty of delusion, distance, picturesque, also the beauty of strength, conflict, suffering, the beauty of a strong blow.³⁴

The reason for the broad understanding of such concepts as ‟romanticism,” ‟romance,” ‟romantic” or ‟romantic work” was, among others, reading them in a psychological spirit. Szymanowski, who once realized the ambiguity that resulted from this, pointed out the weakness of attempts to define the essence of ‟romanticism” in such vague terms. ‟They cannot – he wrote – be this formula, more or less vague psychological investigations, which, moreover, transfer the focus of the issue beyond the historical framework.”³⁵

It is worth emphasizing that the meaning of the term ‟new romanticism” in relation to the phenomena in the newest Polish music was not stable and was changing. At the time of its creation, its quintessence was a synthesis of the nineteenth-century and fin de siècle past with the present. Focused on romanticism – especially towards the idioms between the works of late Beethoven and the works of Mahler, Strauss, Sibelius, Scriabin and Berg – the aspirations of composers, aware of the crisis of contemporary music, manifested themselves in a trend that was a synthesis of the experiences of both twentieth-century avant-gardes filtered through the late Romantic tradition. Attempts were made to give this term a pejorative meaning, linking the trend it marked with eclecticism.

In this connection, it is worth paying attention once again to the characteristic aspect of the situation that became clear during the twilight of the second avant-garde. Representatives of the so-called ‟new romanticism,” referring to tradition in their works, also recognized the achievements of twentieth-century new music as it. In this way, they conducted a wide dialogue both with the past from over a hundred years ago and with the present. The meaning of the concept of ‟new romanticism” therefore also included the synthesis of the nineteenth-century tradition with the technical achievements of the avant-garde.