Czarnecki Kazimierz, born Władysław Marszałek, *10 December 1882 Kraków, †3 May 1964 Poznań, Polish singer (tenor). The son of a civil servant, he studied law at the Jagiellonian University; before completing his studies, he was forced to leave the country for political reasons; to this end, he used the passport of his friend Kazimierz Czarnecki, and following the latter’s death in 1916, he permanently adopted his name. In 1911, he began vocal studies in Paris with J. Reszke; in 1914, he made his opera debut in San Remo as the Prince in Verdi’s Rigoletto. He subsequently sang at various Italian theatres (Pesaro, Ferrara, Modena, Verona); in 1918 he performed at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo and at the opera house in Rome, singing mainly tenor roles in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Verdi’s Rigoletto and Aida. In 1923 he returned to Poland and settled in Poznań, where, between 1923–29 and 1933–37, and subsequently also between 1945–48, he was a permanent soloist at the opera house, performing 35 different roles on its stage, including those from the “heroic” repertoire: Raoul in Les Huguenots by G. Meyerbeer, Enzo in La Gioconda by A. Ponchielli, Radames in Aida and Otello in Otello by Verdi, Samson in Samson and Delilah by C. Saint-Saëns, and Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Siegfried in Wagner’s operas, as well as the title roles in B. Smetana’s Dalibor and U. Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, Nemorino in G. Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, and a number of roles in Polish operas (the title role in T. Joteyko’s Zygmunt August, Kirkor in W. Żeleński’s Goplana, and Doman in F. Nowowiejski’s Legenda Bałtyku, which had its world premiere in 1924). He also took part in the Polish premieres of Ariadne auf Naxos by R. Strauss and La Festa dei Meschini by Giordano. In 1925 he performed in Buenos Aires with the La Scala company; in 1929 he sang the role of Dmitri the Pretender in M. Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov in Barcelona; and in 1931 he sang Calaf in Puccini’s Turandot in Belgrade. Between 1931 and 1939, he also performed frequently at the opera houses in Lviv and Warsaw. Czarnecki translated opera librettos into Polish, including those for Puccini’s Turandot, Verdi’s Otello, Ponchielli’s Gioconda, and Mozart’s Bastien und Bastienne. In the history of vocal music, he earned his place as one of the most outstanding Polish heroic tenors, particularly prized for his performances of the great Wagnerian roles.
