Music in the Polish-Jewish theatre in the first decades of the 20th century in the light of surviving sources

The article presents the few surviving documents concerning the incidental music to Polish-Jewish plays performed on the Polish stages in the first decades of the 20th century (until 1939). This theatre was to constitute a space for the dialogue between the Jewish and Polish communities. The idea of its creators was to reject the existing, usually negative, way of presenting Jews in Polish theatre as well as to show authentic Jewish life — customs, rituals, music and dances — on stage. A breakthrough in both of these areas came with the so-called Jewish plays of Gabriela Zapolska — Małka Szwarcenkopf and Jojne Firułkes. The idea of the Polish-Jewish theatre was then developed by Marek Arnsztajn (Andrzej Marek). Referring to the surviving sources (scores as well as press reviews and notes in directors’ copies of the scripts), the author analyses music to two performances of Małka Szwarcenkopf, and presents the musical appendix to the Polish version of An-ski’s Dybbuk published in 1922. The analysis seeks to capture the composers’ specific ideas of Jewish music and to discover the sources of their inspiration. The second objective of the article was to present the cultural background against which the Polish-Jewish theatre evolved.

Chopin, Polish national culture and the question of “racial Purity”: Zofia Lissa’s voice in the debate over racial issues in the 1930s

The question of racial “purity” or “identity” was part of the fashionable discussion on human races in the 1930s. In 1938 a debate over Chopin’s “racial identity” took place in the Warsaw press, triggered by the publication a book entitled Polacy-chrześcijanie pochodzenia żydowskiego (Poles — Christians of Jewish Origin) by Mateusz Mieses, an outstanding Judaist and representative of one of Poland’s Jewish communities. Mieses’ aim was to familiarise the Polish reader with the very little-known scale on which the ethnically Jewish element had penetrated over the many centuries into the families of the Polish landed gentry, intelligentsia and even aristocracy. As a result, Mieses claimed, many eminent Poles known in Polish history had some Jewish blood in their veins. In addition to the more or less convincing examples of such assimilation, Mieses also quotes some rather dubious ones, including the genealogy of Chopin. On the basis of unconfirmed rumours and the composer’s facial features in some unidentified portrait he claims that Chopin was half Jewish through his mother Justyna Krzyżanowska. Mieses’ conclusions — as well as his entire methodology — were sharply criticised by the reviewer of Wiadomości Literackie as well as by Zofia Lissa, at that time a young scholar at the threshold of a brilliant musicological career. Lissa pointed out that establishing Chopin’s “racial affiliation” is difficult for a lack of reliable and objective sources. For a long time all images of Chopin available to researchers had been either portraits or sculptures, which — as artistic creations — used to deform his face. However, Lissa argued that most of his portraits point to his Dinaric characteristics, which were also confirmed by the two surviving real-life likenesses of the composer (referred to by the author as “racially unprejudiced” sources) — namely, his death mask and the only surviving daguerreotype. Taking into account the findings of contemporary (mainly German) anthropology, Lissa concluded that Chopin was a typical Dinaric with some Nordic features, and it was from his mother that Fryderyk inherited his few physical traits characteristic of that type. On the other hand, Lissa denied that there was any connection between Chopin’s music and his “racial identity”. It seems a paradoxical that Lissa — a scholar of Jewish descent — drew on Nazi theories formulated by German anthropologists to show that Chopin had no demonstrable Jewish ancestors. But if we place this debate in the context of its time, and of one specific period in the ideological and scholarly evolution of Zofia Lissa herself — things do not look so simple any more. Her emphasis on the role of the social environment and her rejection of Einchenauer’s theses concerning the impact of “race” on the character of music testify to Lissa’s intensifying links to the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which she most likely began to absorb in that very period.