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The Warsaw Autumn (Warszawska
Jesień) is a festival with a long history, an
enormous tradition, and can be called a witness to
history. It is the only festival in Poland on an
international scale and with an international status,
dedicated to contemporary music. For many years, it was
the only event of this kind in Central and Eastern
Europe. It is still, however, a living organism: it
develops and thrives to the extent that the Polish
cultural budget (0.33 %) and the general state of music
allow it to. The Festival is organized by the Polish
Composers' Union (Związek Kompozytorów Polskich).
The Repertoire Committee, which is in turn appointed by
the Board of the Union, determines the program of each
particular festival. This year, the festival will take
place for the 44th time.
The Festival was created in 1956,
during the thaw that followed years of Stalinist
dictatorship. Even though the government quickly left
the democratization course, the Festival continued
without interruption (with two exceptions) during the
entire communist era - its finances were secured by the
state (up to this day, its main source of funding comes
from public funds). Only recently has the new economic
and social situation of a country working its way to
prosperity threatened the financial stability of the
"Warsaw Autumn". The Festival still plays an
essential role in shaping contemporary culture in Poland,
but culture itself - even high culture - is given low
priority. It is wanted neither by society, easily swayed
by mass culture and mainly understanding culture as
entertainment, nor by the subjects that shape social
life: politicians, the media or even the public
patronage. These want, above all, to be seen and to be
watched, and thus only need art as an emblem and
celebratory decoration for various celebrations and
anniversaries. Furthermore, they deem that for such a
function, a work by Beethoven or Chopin will be better
than a work by Spahlinger or Szalonek. It is necessary
to remind people in Poland about a more contemporary
approach to culture.
Paradoxically, the communist era was
a period in which the "Warsaw Autumn" thrived.
It constituted an evident crack in the Iron Curtain, it
was an island of creative freedom. Socialist Realism was
not obligatory here: the most varied forms of artistic
invention were possible. These created a sense of
freedom of expression in general, and were viewed as a
form of political protest. The government tolerated this
situation, wanting to present itself as a liberal patron
of the arts.
And anyway, art itself back then - I
am thinking of the first two decases of the festival's
existence - was a site of incredibly interesting and new
phenomena, which roused the interest of the general
public. Thus, after a period of being cut off from new
musical currents and phenomena in Western Europe caused
by the war and later by Stalinist isolationist politics,
Poles were now doubly driven to make up for lost time,
and got to know the works of Schönberg, Berg, Webern,
Varese, or even Bartok or Stravinski through the
festival. At the same time, they followed the current
avant-garde experiments of those years: Boulez, Nono,
Dallapiccola, Maderna, Cage. On the other side,
composers, performers, critics and musicologists from
the West were eager to come to Warsaw: on one hand, out
of curiosity about the countries that were on the other
side of the curtain, but soon enough also simply because
the "Warsaw Autumn" gained world-wide
recognition as one of the most important places where
new music is performed. The modernist image of the
Festival formed itself almost from the very beginning:
conservative music definitely stays on the margins of
the festival. The "Autumn" has an open formula,
and tries to present a variety of phenomena and
tendencies typical for the music of our times: from the
sonic radicalism derived from the Webernean tradition (Lachenman,
Ferneyhough, Hollinger), though the currents that make
reference to the music of the past or traditional
cultures, all the way to audio-art or sound
installations. It is said - appropriately - that the
"Warsaw Autumn" is positively eclectic. That
is the way it has to be, if the festival wants to inform
its Polish audience about what is going on in the
musical world as fully as possible - which is what it
wants to do and what it should do. The program books for
the "Warsaw Autumn" are the Polish
musicologist's or journalist's first source of knowledge
about the newest music. The Sonic Chronicle
("Kronika Dźwiękowa") the full set of
recordings that appears after every festival, performs a
similar function (up until recently, these only included
Polish music; the record Aimard plays Ligeti,
published as part of last year's Chronicle, began
the broadening of the series to include music from
abroad as well).
Today, one of the organizers' main
goals - to familiarize the Polish listener with the
classic works of the 20th century (i.e. with works that
were seen as such already at the beginning of the
festival) - has been fulfilled, of course. At the same
time, new gaping holes in terms of the classic works
from the second half of the XX century have appeared.
For example, Stockhausen's Gruppen was performed
for the first time in Poland only at last year's
festival. The two other goals, however, remain timeless:
to present new music from Poland and abroad.
Contemporary music in Poland works on
somewhat crazy terms; in general this kind of music is
considered hermetic, made only for a narrow group of
specialists, unrelated to reality. It is thus important
to abolish this stereotype and these efforts have been
partially successful. For several years, new groups of
listeners have been attending the "Warsaw Autumn's"
concerts; the auditoriums are full, sometimes even
overflowing. And what is important - the majority of the
listeners are young. It seems that after a long pause,
the interest in more refined, complicated music is
growing. An elite group of young people is being formed
- they are not afraid of "difficult" things,
they want to set themselves apart from the consumers of
popular culture that is made for young people. These
people are looking for the "other", for the
"new", for the exotic in the broad sense of
the word. But simultaneously they are looking for a
music that is enriching for the listener. This was shown
by the aforementioned performance of Gruppen - a
sports hall was filled to the brim, mainly by an
audience of young listeners; this was also visible at
other concerts at the previous festivals.
Despite all of the resistance, and
all of its difficulties, the Festival is seen as a
creative event, with an enormous amount of work to its
credit, and great prestige. Traditionally, numerous
other Polish cultural institutions, such as the National
Philharmonic, the Polish Radio and Polish Television
cooperate with the "Warsaw Autumn"
What is also very important is that
many embassies, cultural institutes, as well as
foundations in countries whose music is presented at the
festival, work together with the festival. This kind of
cooperation can be very tight, especially in the case
when the music of a given country or region is being
broadly exposed at the festival (the Scandinavian theme
in 1998 was a memorable case of this kind of cooperation:
the festival happened with the support of the Nordic
Council of Ministers).
The festival usually takes place in
the second week of September, and lasts eight days. This
year's Festival will take place from the 21st to the
29th of September 2001. The main composer exposed this
year is Galina Ustwolskaya. All of her symphonies will
be presented: at the inaugural concert, the Moscow
Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Yuri Simonov, will
play the first symphony, for two solo voices and
orchestra. The other four will be performed by Jadwiga
Rappé (mezzo-soprano) and the orchestra of the Silesian
Philharmonic, conducted by Jacek Błaszczyk, at
Ustwolskaya's monographic concert on September 26th. As
part of the Dutch Polder, the Nieuw Ensemble will
perform with the group Loos from Amsterdam, and a new
opera will be premiered. The multimedia opera Tattooed
Tongues by Martijn Padding with libretto by Friso
Haverkamp was commissioned by the "Warsaw Autumn",
and is based on the work of Emmanuel Swedenborg. This is
a broader project: next year, two further operas
commissioned by the Festival will be premiered - one by
Barbara Zawadzka (using texts by William Blake) and one
by Osvaldas Balakauskas (based on poetry by Oscar Miłosz).
Together, these three operas constitute a kind of
metaphysical triptych, entitled The Land of Ulro
and inspired by the ideas of the Polish Nobel Prize
laureate Czesław Miłosz in his book of the same name,
in which he describes the need for an unorthodox
spirituality. An innovation of the program this year is Continuum
- a kind of marathon where every composition will be
presented autonomically, unrelated to the other works,
differently than in a normal concert situation. There
will be two events of this type. In terms of Polish
music, the most important event will certainly be the
performance by the National Polish Radio Orchestra from
Katowice, in which it will present new pieces by leading
middle-aged composers: Paweł Szymański, Elżbieta
Sikora and Eugeniusz Knapik.
Tadeusz Wielecki
Director of the Festival
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