Grażyna Bacewicz

• Born: February 5, 1909, Łódź, Poland
• Died: January 17, 1969, Warsaw, Poland
  
  

Uwertura (“Overture”)

• Composed: 1943
• Premiere: September 1, 1945 in Kraków by the Kraków Philharmonic, conducted by Mieczysław Mierzejewski  
• Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, glockenspiel, suspended cymbals, triangle, strings
• CSO notable performances: These performances are the work’s CSO premiere.
• Duration: approx. 6 minutes

Composer, violinist, pianist and writer Grażyna Bacewicz (Grah-ZHEE-nah baht-SEV-ich) was among Poland’s leading musicians during the early 20th century and the country’s first female musician to gain international prominence since Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831), who toured widely throughout Europe as a virtuoso before being engaged as pianist at the Russian court and whose compositions influenced those of Frédéric Chopin. Bacewicz was born in 1909 into a musical family in Łódź, 75 miles southwest of Warsaw, and her father gave Grażyna her first instruction in piano, violin and music theory. She had her early professional training at the local music school before entering the Warsaw Conservatory in 1928, where her talents as violinist, composer and pianist developed in parallel. After graduating in 1932, she received a grant to study composition with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique in Paris; the grant was given by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the famed composer, pianist and Poland’s Prime Minister in 1919, who used his fortune to aid, among many other causes, the country’s most promising young musicians. Bacewicz also studied violin in Paris with the Hungarian virtuoso and teacher Carl Flesch, and she gained her first notice as a soloist in 1935 at the Wieniawski International Violin Competition in Warsaw. The following year, she was appointed principal violinist of the Polish Radio Orchestra in Warsaw and began touring as soloist in Europe, occasionally appearing with her brother Kiejstut, a concert pianist. (The University of Music in Łódź is named jointly in their honor.) Bacewicz composed and gave clandestine concerts during World War II, after which she resumed her touring career and joined the faculty of the Academy of Music in Łódź. In 1953, she retired as a violinist to devote herself to composition and teaching. For the three years before her death from a heart attack in 1969, three weeks short of her 60th birthday, Bacewicz taught composition at the Academy of Music in Warsaw. She received numerous honors throughout her career, including awards for lifetime achievement from the City of Warsaw, Polish Composers’ Union and People’s Republic of Poland; served twice as Vice-Chair of the Polish Composers’ Union; and was an accomplished writer of short stories, novels and autobiographical anecdotes.

Bacewicz’s many compositions, rooted in early-20th-century Neo-Classicism, include ballets, a comic opera, incidental music for theater and radio, four symphonies, seven violin concertos and others for one and two pianos, viola and cello, two dozen orchestral works, seven string quartets, and additional chamber scores, songs and piano compositions. (She occasionally appeared publicly playing her Sonata No. 2 and other of her own piano works.)

“The premise of Bacewicz’s Overture for Orchestra,” wrote Polish composer and conductor Artur Malawski, “is rhythm and motoric movement.” Bacewicz composed the Overture seemingly in defiance of the time of its creation—1943, at the depth of the Nazi occupation and the year of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that presaged the final transport of the city’s Jews to the extermination camps. The Overture begins with four soft, quick strokes on the timpani that may have been borrowed from the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—short–short–short–long—which the BBC broadcast throughout the war as a hopeful symbol for Allied victory (i.e., Morse code for the letter “V”: dot–dot–dot–dash). The Overture, whose muscularity and orchestral brilliance are cast into relief by a lyrical central episode, was perfectly suited to the time of its premiere, at a Contemporary Polish Music Festival in Kraków on September 1, 1945, four months after Germany had surrendered.

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda