MARIA IN MUSIC

In Poland MPJ’s  poetry has long inspired singers and composers to set her words to music. The most iconic performances have been by the great singer Ewa Demarczyk with music composed by Zygmunt Konieczny. In her 1967 studio album Pocałunki she blended verses from MPJ’s volume of the same name. It quickly sold over 100 000 copies and the recordings remained popular for decades.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DFTL6FG5RA

More recently her lyrics – even in English translation – have attracted new generations of composers:

 

Roxanna Panufnik (UK/Poland)

Faithful Journey: A Mass for Poland is a monumental composition written in 2017–2018, with which Roxanna Panufnik celebrated the centenary of Poland regaining independence. Her intention was to write a work in which she could highlight the bond between her and her country of origin. For this purpose she used, in addition to the traditional order of the mass, works by Polish poets, such as Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Bolesław Leśmian, Zbigniew Herbert, and Wisława Szymborska.

The UK premiere was performed by the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and took place in Birmingham Symphony Hall on 21 November 2018. It was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.

 

Here is the poem by Maria which Roxanna chose for her Oratorio:

 

NATIONAL COLOURS

Blanched and bloodied,

Bloodstained and white, linen

Wound dressing, you are proclaimed The Banner,

You have staunched the appalling gore.

The wind unfurls this testament to carnage,

It elevates the heroic bandage,

This memento,

This debt

And this moral.

 

(1935)

 

 

 

Ryan Latimer (UK)

Speaking of Letters and Dancing (Composed 2019, recorded 2021)

Here the composer chose two poems by MPJ, A Letter and Dancing and set them in conversation with Summer Night by the Japanese poet, Kobayashi Issa.

Link to the recordings:

https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/9247777--ryan-latimer-antiarkie?srsltid=AfmBOorNDZgtTkdrA1vrDvn_tJyt6Vzt9D9U7dtrox9yL33Tw38ai1qk

 

 

Griffin  Candey (USA)

Roses (2023)

In the words of the composer:

“Roses is the second song cycle I wrote for my good friend, Alexandra Nowakowski, and my introduction to the poetry of the amazing twentieth-century Polish poet, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska.

“Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska’s poetry, like her trailblazing contemporaries (poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sylvia Plath,) took on the assumptive gender roles codified into poetry and turned them on their head, rejecting the idea that women should only write blithe, lilting poetry about beauty or nature.

Here is a link to the world premiere performance  by Alexandra Nowakowski:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=XgvexUFb-C0&t=0s

 

YOUNG POLAND'S DAUGHTER

On the 130th anniversary of her birth, Maria features in the Young Poland (Młoda Polska) art exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in London.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlccnDgpEB4

An entire room is devoted to Maria’s paintings, including the Self-Portrait with Elf and the recently discovered “cosmic” portraits of Jan Pawlikowski.

The centrepiece of the whole exhibition is the model of the Villa Under the Firs, the Pawlikowski family home, where she lived in the 1920s. The model is surrounded by Maria’s previously unseen drawings of family members and even the chairs they sat in and the trousers they wore.

https://youngpolandartsandcrafts.org.uk/

Especially for the exhibition, we have produced the English language world premiere recording of her pioneering radio play A Portrait of Doom (1937) (Złowrogi portret).

YOU CAN LISTEN TO IT HERE:

https://youtu.be/XiUIz-jJmV0?si=eA3ooFoz6hGeyZ9X

You can visit the exhibition until 30 January 2022.

MARIA THE PAINTER

Poetry – that has been loved, anthologised, set to music, and even danced.

Plays – that were a commercial success in her lifetime and are re-emerging as daring, taboo-breaking, and highly relevant now.

And there is yet another side to Maria’s genius - -

The visual arts.

As her friend the poet Beata Obertyńska wrote, looking back at the 1920s, ‘Her talent for painting - and the fact that she discarded it completely, prodigally, for the sake of poetry - is hardly ever mentioned.’ 

‘I saw many of her compositions,’ Beata remembered, ‘Amazing, […] in between a blissful dream and a tormenting nightmare. The meaning? Often known only to her. But always testimony to a cool, unfailingly acute  observation of life, and with all the panache of a subtle, contemporary, feminine sensibility.’

Maria was a member of the famous Kossak family of painters, and she became a highly skilled and visionary painter even though training in the art schools was rarely available to women when she was young. But in the 1920s she was encouraged to focus on her writing. She was an instant success, and outside Poland her visual art has remained almost unkown.

Until now.

On November 27th 2020, there will be an online book launch for what has already been welcomed as one of the ‘Best Art Books of the Year’:

Young Poland

 The Polish Arts and Crafts Movement:1890 – 1918

edited by Julia Griffin (William Morris Gallery) and Andrzej Szczerski  (National Museum, Kraków)

LINK TO THE BOOK:

https://www.lundhumphries.com/products/young-poland

As the publishers write, ‘This groundbreaking study is the first book in any language to explore the Young Poland (Młoda Polska) period in the context of the international Arts and Crafts movements at the end of the nineteenth century.’

‘Young Poland’ celebrates the extraordinarily beautiful art of Stanislaw Wyspianski, and it includes a chapter devoted to the visual art of a painter of the next generation, ‘Young Poland’s daughter’ - Maria herself: ‘A painter of bold and intimate watercolours, often incorporating fantastic and macabre elements inspired by Polish folk traditions; the book explores this important aspect of her oeuvre for the first time.’

‘For the first time’ – but definitely not the last.

---

‘Young Poland’ will be published by Lund Humphries on December 1st 2020, in advance of a major London exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in the autumn of 2021.

This week marks the 75th anniversary of Maria’s death in Manchester.

Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska is mostly remembered for her poetry, but she also painted and wrote plays. One of her pieces is a fusion of both those arts.

 A Portrait of Doom is a short radio play, first broadcast on Polish Radio on 18 February 1937. In this piece she looks back and gives us a uniquely witty sketch of Polish artistic life from the inside.

LINK TO THE PLAY:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiUIz-jJmV0

With its focus on an artist's family, A Portrait of Doom reflects MPJ's own experience as the daughter of Wojciech Kossak (1856 –1942) - growing up in a house stuffed with canvases, where there's no room even to sit down without getting paint on your dress. Her characters depend financially on portraits and commissions; they refer to the use of peasants as models in the countryside, and think about international fame (in America, which Wojciech Kossak visited in 1920, painting everything from farms to bankers). 

The idea of the play, a variation on Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, is that the father’s portraits literally drain life out of his sitters, causing them to die. Not surprisingly when people realise this, they cancel their commissions and the unfortunate maestro (and his family) become desperate for money. In their arguments the artist’s family question the causative effect between the individuals’ portraits and their demise. They’re modern people, they equate such rumours with superstition. But when their daughter’s fiancé asks her father to paint her portrait, the decision whether ‘to paint or not to paint’ becomes a matter of life and death…

Though it's written so lightly and with such humour, the play is a debate about art in the early twentieth century. The painter-father here sees himself as the enemy of tradition but is terrified by new forms (Kossak has been described as a radical conservative: is the young 'Triangulist' a joke about Witkacy, who incidentally painted the portrait of Maria with the tear in her eye?).

MPJ asks, is 'realism' a matter of photographic reproduction? Is 'talent' about 'genius' or the ability to pay the bills? And centrally, she interrogates the sexual politics of painting: in a patriarchal culture, who sacrifices what for Art? 

Last but not least, in this radio drama MPJ herself was embracing what was then the newest technology of all - playing with the paradox that here's a play about paintings that we cannot see, and experimenting with sound effects (a great deal is said about a 'spiral staircase' -  because she cues the sound of footsteps, retreating, returning, and retreating again, ascending, sinking). 

MPJ gives the key speech to the Mother, at the end. It’s focused on gender. In Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Grey aestheticism masked male moral corruption; in Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska's Portrait of Doom we can hear the life draining out of a young woman, as her father reproduces her as Art.

Here’s a taster, two excerpts from the play:

MPJ on Painting: Two Conversations

THE CAST: August (the artist), Ada (his wife), Valeria (their daughter), Janek (her fiancé)

ONE

Ada Oh! It looks alive!

August Pah! That’s not the point! The story about the grapes Apelles painted - the Greek artist - remember?

Ada I do, yes. Apparently some sparrows pecked his painting. They thought the fruit was real.

August Exactly! And the whole story tells me one thing only: that that painting - artistically – was worthless. Just a moronic replication of nature.

Ada I’m not the expert – but in this portrait I don’t only see a likeness - there’s also a lot of soul. And a lot of - - - perspective?

August Sweetheart: you can think whatever you like, but don’t ever say a word about art.

Ada I love beauty, don’t I?

August Painting is not about beauty.

Ada Then what is it about?

August If I only knew!

TWO

August If you really want one, any other portrait painter will do it for you. One of the young ones, let them make a bit of cash! Kaszak for instance! Józef Marian Kaszak, the Triangulist. The one who sees the world as triangles. And calls me a philistine!

Janek You’re joking. I insist that only you can execute Val’s portrait. Val! Say something, back me up!

Valeria Daddy, why won’t you?

August Why? Because I don’t - - I’ve got no time.

Janek Only a second ago I heard something different. Please, I’m begging you! Only you can - - render her faithfully.

August (mockingly) ‘Render’,’ faithfully’! What an expression! Bravo!

Janek (enthusiastically) Full-length in a ball gown, with roses – no, even better - with a car! An ENTIRE car!

You can listen to the recording of this play here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiUIz-jJmV0

images.jpg

MARIA ON THE RADIO AND ON STAGE

You can hear Maria’s poems being read in English and discussed on Radio 3’s poetry programme, The Verb, with Ian McMillan and his guests: Kate Fox, Nick Makoha, Patrick McGuinness and Basia Bogoczek-Howard. To listen to the full podcast, please go to:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002sbs

 

Meanwhile in Poland, Maria’s play Baba-Dziwo (Weird Sister), directed by Dominika Knapik,  has opened  at Teatr Dramatyczny in Wałbrzych. The play, written in 1938, a pastiche on totalitarianism and its effects on women, has recently seen a revival and resurgence in Poland due to its eerie resonance with current political trends. You can read more here:

http://teatr.walbrzych.pl/spektakle/spektakle-na-afiszu/baba-dziwo/

Baba-Dziwo plakat.jpg

THE JOY OF WRITING

When we first visited Maria’s grave, we saw lying there a small piece of slate with these words inscribed: “It’s boring here…”.

Intrigued, we searched for the phrase in her poems and found it here:


WITHOUT YOU


It’s boring here without you. Boring as hell!

I’m still with my squirrel, and my lapdog too,  

I write, I read and smoke, my eyes are still blue,

But this is all momentum rolling downhill.

 

The dawn is still grey, the dusk blue and gold,

The day rises here, the night falls over there

And habitually rose petals unfold:

So used to it, they don’t really care.

 

Yet the world ended. Can’t you all get it into your head?

The world is gone and I won’t recreate it.

Time is still and quiet. Perhaps I … but wait -

Perhaps I am already in the world of the dead?

 (1927)


Tomorrow we are going to join the Manchester Polish Poetry Festival, called “Sharing the Joy of Writing”, organised by Manchester Metropolitan University and the British Council, where we’ll be celebrating MP-J with a tour of the Southern Cemetery, where she is buried.

http://www.manchesterwritingschool.co.uk/events/the-rado-pisania-manchester-polish-poetry-festival

akwarela-mpj_w-rc499kach-wrc3b3c5bcki.jpg

 

MP-J on International Women's Day

MP-J was part of a circle who actively championed women's rights in early 20th century Poland.

They worked towards social and political changes aimed at women's enfranchisement and empowerment.

To find out more about the historical background to this aspect of her life, go to this article, published on International Women's Day 2016 by Polish Culture:

http://culture.pl/en/article/saying-no-to-children-kitchen-church-the-pioneers-of-womens-rights-in-poland 

emancypantki_east_news_[1].jpg

MP-J at Cambridge: John Hughes Arts Festival, Jesus College, Sunday 7 February 2016

The Sound Of A Heartbeat –
a poetry reading and workshop.

Coleridge Room, Jesus College, 7 February 2016 at 5.00

https://www.evensi.uk/jhaf-maria-pawlikowska-jasnorzewska-poetry-reading-jesus/169408114

http://www.polishculture.org.uk/nc/news/article/maria-pawlikowska-jasnorzewska-at-john-hughes-arts-festival-2915//nbp/1.html

Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska (1891-1945) is one of Poland’s greatest poets.

She is known as ‘the Polish Sappho’.

In her poetry and her life she set out to defy convention and to explore and express the many facets of love – lyrical, romantic, tragic, satiric, compassionate...

She was a playwright too: her last play, written in 1939, parodied Hitler and his Nazi regime. When Germany invaded Poland she escaped and ended up in England as a war refugee. As her wartime poetry shows, she was a brilliant observer of the English.

Today her work and the music she has inspired will be presented by her translator in a bilingual session including audience participation.
 

As the world spurned Sappho,
As her creations burned,
Rosy smoke blossomed;
A wild, heavy cloud turned
And flowed down time.

My lungs draw it in with the wind:
No waste of rhyme…