Polish Music since Szymanowski

In more ways than one, Lutosławski's death in February 1994 marked the end of an era. He symbolised for many the travails and triumphs of Polish music since the death of Szymanowski fifty-seven years earlier. He had lived through Nazi occupation, Stalinist socialist realism, the vibrancy of the early years of the ‘Warsaw Autumn’, the increasing international profile of Polish music, the periodic waves of political insurgency and repression, the rise and fall of Solidarity, and, finally, the establishment of a truly democratic state. A new cultural future beckoned and it fell to new, younger figures to secure it. And, as has already been implied, the compositional initiative has largely passed to those born after the war.

With the melting away of regular state subsidies, all institutions have struggled financially – including PWM (still managing to maintain a high profile and beating off takeover bids from venture capitalists) and Polish Radio 2, which faces commercial competition. The shift from state monopoly to private enterprise is nowhere more apparent than in the recording industry, which has capitalised on CD technology to expand enormously the recorded repertoire of Polish music. This has been only partly beneficial to contemporary music, the dissemination of which is as likely to take place via privately burned CD-Rs as by the annual chronicle of the ‘Warsaw Autumn’.

Since the dark days of the early 1980s (the 1982 festival was cancelled during the first year of martial law), the finances of the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ have seemed especially precarious.