Two Major Polish musical anniversaries coming up on the classical music calendar are Witold Lutoslawski this year and Andrezej Panufnik next year.

Musical commentator Norman Lebrecht writes: ‘Poland is defined by musical statements. The liberation cry was articulated by Frédéric Chopin, mostly in Paris. It misled many successors onto a trail of false nostalgia for a prelapsarian paradise that never was.

At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, newly independent Poland was represented by its first prime minister, the pre-eminent pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski.

“Vous-êtes Paderewski, le grand pianiste, n’est-ce pas?” cried Georges Clemenceau.

“Oui, Monsieur le President.”

“Alors, quelle chute!”

Paderewski may not have seen politics as a comedown, but he lived to see his dream soured by Polish strife and crushed by a second German invasion. His music, like Chopin’s, clung to 19th-century conventions of romantic nationalism. In the next generation, Karel Szymanowski’s complex individualised idiom was condemned for its lack of patriotic zeal. Music in Poland was supposed to conform to political expectations.

Read the full article in Standpoint by Norman Lebrecht.

© Suzie Maeder/Lebrecht Music & Arts

© George Newson/Lebrecht Music & Arts