Grażyna Bacewicz
(1909-1969)

ADRIAN T. THOMAS

Grażyna Bacewicz was one of the most-accomplished women composers of her generation, and, within her native Poland, she was highly regarded by her peers. Along with many of her generation, she studied not only at the Warsaw Conservatory but also in Paris, with Nadia Boulanger (1932-33). Being abroad also enabled her to further her violin studies—with André Touret and, in 1934, with Carl Flesch. Bacewicz spent the war years in Poland and withstood the successive pressures imposed on Polish culture by Nazi and by Stalinist ideology with fortitude and poise. She performed as a concert violinist until the early 1950s.

To describe her style as neoclassical is to utter a half-truth. Certainly, Bacewicz seems to have found the interwar Parisian blend of neobaroque and neoclassical gestures much to her taste. She admired clarity and directness, but equally she was no lover of formulae,- her ability to surprise the listener by deft twists and turns was entirely her own. Her heyday was during the 1940s and 1950s, when she wrote such works as the Third String Quartet (1947) and the Concerto for String Orchestra (1948). Bacewicz went on to embrace a greater degree of experimentation than might have been expected, as seen in the Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion (1958). Her music of the 1960s was unfortunately fraught with inconsistencies, as she struggled to accommodate the avant-garde trends sweeping through contemporary Polish music. The absence of clearly defined thematic hierarchies and an over-reliance within an atonal context of the very gestures that had so suited her tonally oriented music of the postwar decade suggest that it is her earlier music, rather than more-recent compositions, that will survive on the concert platform.

The Second Piano Sonata (1953) justly maintains its position in the repertoire. It is a rich blend of neoclassical style and a folk-derived idiom, and, like a number of Bacewicz’s works of the period, it refers to the music of Karol Szymanowski (cf. his Twelve Studies for piano, Opus 33, 1916, and the finale of his Symphonie Concertante for piano and orchestra, Opus 60, 1932).

The vigorous opening movement, Maestoso—Agitato, is typical of her style and methods. Bacewicz worked essentially as a rhapsodist, constantly reshaping her materials through the developmental association of motivic ideas. The simple and initially unimposing second theme of this movement (poco meno, m.44) gradually comes to dominate, leaving the distinct impression of the composer’s giving good ideas their head rather than forcing them into too strait a sonata jacket. This folklike theme is followed in the second movement, Largo, by an even more direct acknowledgment of the ever-present “socio-realist” requirement for musical relevance. Here, an un- mistakeably folk-derived theme in the Dorian mode now soothes, now hectors; its preeminence is threatened only briefly by the unexpected artifice of a fugato toward the end of the movement.

Bacewicz was no mean pianist (she gave the premiere of the Sonata), and the final Toccata is a brilliant piece of keyboard writing. It is cast in the mold of an oberek (a fast-moving cousin of the mazurka). As in the first movement, Bacewicz makes recourse to fourths (perfect and Lydian), modal folk themes, and swirling chromaticism to create this muscular folk dance, which is arguably her most successful finale.

Sonata II

Grażyna Bacewicz

Published by Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Krakow, n.d. [1953]. Reprinted by permission.