Łobaczewska, Stefania (EN)

Łobaczewska Stefania, née Festenburg, *31 July 1888 Lwów (present-day Lviv), †16 January 1963 Krakow, She was the daughter of the doctor Gerard de Festenburg (of Belgian origin) and Helena née Sawicka (from an Armenian family). She received her general education privately and, until 1914, studied piano with V. Kurz at the conservatory in Lviv. She studied musicology as an audit student: from 1912–14 at the University of Lviv under A. Chybiński, from 1914–18 in Vienna under G. Adler, and from 1925 again in Lviv; there, in 1929 — after passing the secondary-school leaving examination — she obtained a master’s degree in musicology, and in 1930 a doctoral degree with her thesis on Debussy’s harmony. From 1931 to 1939, she lectured in music history at the conservatory in Lviv. In 1911, she published her first article, and in 1938 her first book, Ogólny zarys estetyki muzycznej. During the interwar period, she collaborated with numerous music and cultural-social journals and was a regular reviewer for “Gazeta Lwowska”. She was active in the Polish Section of the ISCM in Lviv, travelled abroad frequently, and maintained contacts with many artists, including K. Szymanowski and his sisters. In the early years of the Second World War, she remained in Lviv; from 1939 to 1941 she taught music history and theory at the Ukrainian Conservatory. After the Nazi army entered Lviv, she had to leave her hometown and stayed in Łańcut, Rudnik nad Sanem, and at the Iwaszkiewicz family home in Stawiski near Warsaw. In 1944 she settled permanently in Kraków, where in 1945 she co-organised the State Higher School of Music (PWSM). There she began her pedagogical career and held the following positions: rector (1952–55), vice-rector (1955–57), dean of Faculty I—Composition, Theory, and Conducting (1946–49), and head of the Department of Music Theory (1957–62). After obtaining her habilitation in 1949 at the University of Poznań, Łobaczewska was employed in 1951 as an associate professor in the Department of Music History and Theory at the Jagiellonian University, which she directed from 1954 until the end of her life; there, in 1954, she obtained the title of associate professor, and in 1959 – full professor; in 1958–59, she was vice-dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and History at the Jagiellonian University. Łobaczewska’s principal scholarly works were written during her time in Krakow. She worked closely with PWM Editions, undertaking editorial work and performing advisory functions; she was also active in the Frederic Chopin Society (TIFC). She participated in international congresses, including: 1947 and 1948 — Prague, 1952 — Copenhagen, 1953 — Berlin, Sofia, 1956 — Vienna, 1959 — Paris. She was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta; in 1953, she received a third-class state award (for her monograph on Szymanowski), and in 1955 — an award from the city of Krakow.

Łobaczewska’s academic career was not a typical one; her youthful interest in music, expressed through her piano and musicology studies, first manifested itself in intensive reviewing and journalistic activity; in the press, Łobaczewska reported on ISCM congresses and musical life in Lviv, and took an interest in contemporary music. It was only after she turned 40, following her PhD, that she became professionally involved in music as a teacher and undertook systematic research work, becoming a significant figure in Polish musicology after the Second World War.

Łobaczewska’s scholarly work focused primarily on music history and musical aesthetics; in both fields she displayed a tendency toward broad synthesis (as in (Ogólny zarys estetyki muzycznej [General Outline of Music Aesthetics], Tablice do historii muzyki…[Tables for the History of Music…], Zarys historii form muzycznych… [Outline of the History of Musical Forms…]), as well as meticulous analytical rigour (notably in Karol Szymanowski and Style muzyczne). As a historian, she focused on music from the Baroque period, with particular emphasis on Romantic music. In addition to numerous dissertations on Chopin, she initiated and led a valuable series entitled «Dokumentacja warszawskiego okresu życia i twórczości Fryderyka Chopina» [Documentation of the Warsaw period of Fryderyk Chopin’s life and work] presenting the state of Polish music in the years 1800–30 (solo song, piano waltz, opera librettos), which featured master’s theses written under her supervision were published; she presented a comprehensive synthesis of Chopin’s work in Z dziejów polskiej kultury muzycznej (vol. 2). However, Łobaczewska’s research focused on modernism; she was particularly interested in the tonal and harmonic changes that occurred in music at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (Debussy) and dodecaphony (A. Berg). Łobaczewska produced the first complete study of the music of composers active during the Young Poland period (Z dziejów polskiej kultury muzycznej, vol. 2). She was fascinated by Szymanowski’s work, which she followed closely in the 1920s and 1930s and discussed in numerous dissertations; her vast, indeed monumental monograph (1950) is the first scholarly monograph devoted to Szymanowski. Łobaczewska consistently carried out the methodological assumptions formulated in the introductory chapter (O zadaniach i metodzie monografii muzycznej): a description of the period and milieu in which the artist worked, a characterisation of his personality (“psychological type”), and an account of the development of his creative predispositions as determined by the “life line” and revealed in the musical work. This work reveals the research approach characteristic of all of Łobaczewska’s work: placing Polish music in the context of European music, presenting musical works and the composer’s personality against the backdrop of the general cultural and social context, and highlighting harmonic and structural issues supported by a meticulous, detailed analysis of the composition.

The subject of Łobaczewska’s research – perhaps influenced by her studies with G. Adler – was musical style, a theme that runs through almost all of her work. Łobaczewska considered the study of musical styles to be part of musical aesthetics, and although she did not equate the history of music with the history of musical styles, she viewed the history of music through the prism of style and musical forms as its determinants. This issue, already signalled in Zarys historii form muzycznych… (1950), is the subject of Łobaczewska’s second major work (after her monograph on Szymanowski), Style muzyczne [Musical Styles], which she did not manage to complete. Volume 1 presents Classical style (part 1) and styles from Baroque to early medieval (Part 2), Volume 2 was to contain a description of styles from the Romantic era to modernism, while Volume 3 was to cover general issues: historical, national and individual styles, musical genres, psychological and aesthetic categories, and evaluative categories. According to Łobaczewska, the concept of musical style consists of the following determinants: the social function of a musical work, its content and form in mutual relation, and the technical means through which content and form are realised. The author considered these determinants when describing musical style in particular eras. She also carried out a threefold classification of musical genres based on three different criteria: 1. the social function of music, 2. the use of sound as a “self-sufficient means of expression or in synthesis with other types of art”, 3. material characteristics (according to means of performance), textural characteristics (monophony, polyphony, homophony) and structural characteristics (tonality). Łobaczewska’s work, which is an attempt to create a theory of musical style, demonstrates her broad, general knowledge and at the same time provides excellent material for discussion on topics that are still relevant in musicology; it reflects a tendency characteristic of all of Łobaczewska’s work to combine the history of music not only with musical aesthetics, but also with psychology and sociology.

Already in her Ogólny zarys estetyki muzycznej (1938), Łobaczewska presented herself as a proponent of heteronomous aesthetics; combining aesthetic issues with the psychology of creativity and music reception (impression, auditory representation, aesthetic experience), she introduced the concept of the “emotional content” of a piece. She thus referred to 19th-century aesthetics of musical expression, but emphasised the relationship between content and form, using the theoretical terminology of Mersmann and Kurth; later, from the position of so-called Marxist aesthetics, she interpreted Lenin’s thesis on the reflection of reality in art as a reflection of the “world of human feelings” (Próba zbadania realizmu socjalistycznego…), and treated musical works as a “subjective reflection of the objective reality” of human experiences (Problem analizy muzykologicznej). In Style Muzyczne, the content of a musical work was defined as “the emotions expressed in it and the thematic and ideological elements that form the psychological basis of these emotions”. Consequently, Łobaczewska postulated that the analysis of a musical work should include both the study of its emotional content (also known as expressive content) and its socio-ideological conditions, as well as the form through which this content is realised (Z zagadnień analizy muzykologicznej); she considered the detection of connections between content elements and formal elements to be the fundamental task of musicological analysis.

Łobaczewska advocated socialist realism, but in 1954 she wrote a dissertation entitled Próba zbadania realizmu socjalistycznego… [An Attempt to Examine Socialist Realism…] published in 1956, in which she was the only Polish musicologist to criticise the dogmatic, postulative nature of this movement, which vulgarised art in the name of making it accessible to a wide audience. She was not among the leading advocates of Socialist Realism during the years when it was the prevailing doctrine, but neither did she completely condemn it in the changed political circumstances. Instead, she treated Socialist Realism as a historical phenomenon and sought to justify it theoretically, highlighting the ideological and artistic stance of realist creators from earlier periods and the tradition of drawing inspiration from folk music. Łobaczewska’s study illustrates the turning point that occurred in Polish musicological thought in the 1950s. While she continued to emphasise folk elements and programmatic content, she opposed the devaluation of purely instrumental music. By drawing attention to values that transcend social classes, she stressed the necessity of fully utilising contemporary technical achievements in compositional practice.

Łobaczewska was deeply committed to music education and took a keen interest in the reform of music schooling. In collaboration with H. Feicht and K. Wiłkomirski, she developed guidelines for teaching the methodology of music history and musical forms in music schools, and her Tablice do historii muzyki… and Zarys historii form muzycznych… [served for many years as textbooks. Thanks to her knowledge and demeanour, she was highly respected within the university and the higher school for music, as reflected in the senior leadership positions entrusted to her. She inspired her students with a spirit of scholarly inquiry and a broad range of interests in the humanities. Łobaczewska’s psychologically oriented scholarly concepts did not find direct successors, but they contributed to broadening the subject matter of musicology and to moving away from treating the musical work as an autonomous entity. They also had an inspiring influence on researchers using structural methods to interpret music, musical culture, and individual musical works.

Literature: Z. Lissa Wspomnienie o Stefanii Łobaczewskiej and T. Kaczyński Młoda do ostatnich dni, “Ruch Muzyczny” 1963 No. 5; L. Polony Polski kształt sporu o istotę muzyki, Krakow 1991.