Today marks the 81st anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising and Warsaw Remembrance Day. In last year’s post on this occasion, we mentioned the photographs of post-war Warsaw in our collection, as well as representatives of the music world who participated in the uprising. Today, we would like to introduce one of these figures, who went down in the annals of PWM Edition as the long-time editor-in-chief of all volumes of the PWM Music Encyclopaedia.
Elżbieta Dziębowska (1929–2016) was a member of the Grey Ranks scouting organisation during World War II, when she was a teenager, and then a liaison officer in the “Parasol” battalion (pseudonym “Dewajtis”); she participated in important combat operations during the Warsaw Uprising, including the “Kutschera” operation, commemorated in 2007 with a plaque in Aleje Ujazdowskie. She was later honoured with the Order of Virtuti Militari and the Cross of Valour for her combat activities.
After the war, Dziębowska completed high school and later studied musicology at the University of Warsaw, after which she obtained her doctorate at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1966). She lectured at universities in Warsaw (University of Warsaw, Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences) and later joined the Department of History and Theory of Music at the Jagiellonian University. Between 1971 and 2012, she supervised work on the PWM Music Encyclopaedia. She herself was the author of numerous encyclopaedia entries, such as Stanisław Moniuszko (biography), Hector Berlioz, Johann Sebastian Bach (biography), Daniel Auber and Domenico Scarlatti. In 2006, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the Polish music community, she was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.
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