Różycki, Ludomir (EN)

Różycki Ludomir Aleksander, *18 September 1883 Warsaw, †1 January 1953 Katowice, Polish composer, conductor and teacher, son of Aleksander. Raised in a home with rich musical traditions, frequented by, among others, I.J. Paderewski, A. Michałowski and S. Barcewicz; he studied at the Institute of Music in Warsaw with A. Michałowski (piano), G. Roguski and M. Biernacki (theory), and Z. Noskowski (composition). He made his debut as a composer with the symphonic scherzo Stańczyk, performed on 26 February 1904 under the baton of E. Młynarski at the Warsaw Philharmonic. In the spring of that year, he graduated from the Institute of Music with a gold medal for Ballad for piano and orchestra. In 1905–07, he studied in the composition master class of E. Humperdinck at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. At the turn of 1906–1907, he went on a concert tour around Germany, visiting, among others, Leipzig and Dresden, where he presented his own piano pieces and songs. In 1905, together with K. Szymanowski, G. Fitelberg and A. Szeluto, he founded the Publishing Company of Young Polish Composers – a group operating until 1912 to promote new Polish music abroad. He spent the summer of 1905 in Zakopane, where, staying in the Witkiewicz villa, he met M. Karłowicz, S. Żeromski, T. Miciński and the most outstanding representative of Young Poland bohemia – S. Przybyszewski. During his studies in Berlin, he became acquainted with the works of R. Wagner, R. Strauss and H. Wolf, which had a significant influence on his own work. At that time, symphonic poems Bolesław Śmiały and Pan Twardowski were created, as well as a number of songs written for the singer Stefania Mławska, whom Ludomir Różycki married on 14 October 1905.

In 1907, having rejected an offer to become a professor at the conservatory in Oslo, he moved to Lviv, where for 4 years he worked as an opera conductor and piano professor at the conservatory of the Galician Musical Society. Further symphonic poems come from this period: Anhelli (performed in 1910 in Lviv as part of the celebration of the 100^th anniversary of J. Słowacki’s birth), Mona Lisa Gioconda, Warszawianka and Król Kofetua (awarded in 1912 at a composition competition celebrating the 10^th anniversary of the Warsaw Philharmonic) and Ludomir Różycki’s first opera, Bolesław Śmiały, which premiere on 11 February 1909 at the Lviv Opera was considered a great success for the young composer. In October 1910, Ludomir Różycki actively participated in a congress of Polish musicians organised as part of the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of F. Chopin’s birth; he then met with I. J. Paderewski. In 1912, he lived for a short time in Warsaw, where he devoted himself exclusively to composing. On 26 October the Grand Theater staged his new opera Medusa with a fantasy theme, based – similarly to the poem Mona Lisa Gioconda – around the figure of Leonardo da Vinci. In 1913–18, Ludomir Różycki again stayed in Berlin, from where he made numerous concert trips, including: to Italy and France. It was a period of exceptionally intense creative work and, at the same time, the composer’s constantly growing fame. Różycki’s position in the international arena was strengthened by his composer’s concert on 26 December 1915 in Berlin, during which he performed his latest chamber works, Piano Quintet and String Quartet, as well as Polish Dances for piano. The composer spent the summer of 1916 at the estate of his friend, the painter J. Hulewicz, in Kościanki near Września, where he met S. Przybyszewski. In 1913, Ludomir Różycki met G. Puccini, who came to Berlin for the premiere of his opera The Girl of the West; both composers intended to write a stage work together based on J. Żuławski’s drama Eros and Psyche, but when Puccini abandoned this project, Ludomir Różycki wrote the opera himself, which is still considered his greatest work. He worked on the score mainly in the spring of 1914 in Dziwnów on the Baltic Sea (then Ost Dievenov). After the success of the premiere on 10 March 1917 in Wrocław, Eros and Psyche was performed in Mannheim, Bremen, Poznań and Stuttgart, and on 20 March 1918 at the Grand Theater in Warsaw.

In 1919, Ludomir Różycki returned permanently to Warsaw, where for a short time he was a conductor at the Grand Theatre. The premieres of his subsequent works, which enjoyed great popularity, took place on this stage; these were: the ballet Pan Twardowski (performed regularly from 1921, reaching a record number of 300 performances in 1929) and the operas Casanova and Beatrix Cenci. In the 1920s, Pan Twardowski had several foreign premieres – in Copenhagen, Prague, Zagreb, Brno and Moravian Ostrava. The opera Casanova gained a similarly wide reception and was performed in Lviv, Katowice, Poznań, Belgrade, Antwerp and Bratislava until the mid-1930s.

In the summer of 1921, Różycki stayed in Paris. There he met A. Tansman, who published an article in “La Revue musicale” promoting the work of composers under the banner of “Young Poland in Music.” He came to Paris again in 1925; intensive efforts to exhibit Pan Twardowski in the French capital turned out to be unsuccessful. On his way back to Warsaw, he stopped briefly in Milan, where he visited the Verdi Museum, and in Venice. In 1926, Ludomir Różycki participated in the founding meeting of the Polish Composers’ Association and became the first president of this organisation. He spoke on its behalf many times, also as a music publicist, demanding the rightful place of new Polish music in domestic and world culture. In November this year, he spoke during the unveiling ceremony of the Chopin monument in the Royal Łazienki Park in Warsaw.

At the turn of 1929–1930, Ludomir Różycki stayed in Vienna for several months, staying in the Schönbrunn imperial palace; he met J. Kiepura there. In 1930, he composed music for the first Polish sound film entitled The Morality of Mrs. Dulska, which he recorded with an orchestra for Syrena Record. In September of that year, at the suggestion of K. Szymanowski, he took up the position of professor at the Higher School of Music of the State Conservatory of Music in Warsaw. However, he taught there only for less than two years; in February 1932, it was cancelled as a result of intrigues that plagued Warsaw University at that time. At the end of 1933, he stayed in London, where on 18 December a composer’s concert was held, during which, among others, Piano Concerto No. 1 (version for two pianos) was performed.

In 1937, Ludomir Różycki received a gold medal from the French government for the ballet Apollo i dziewczyna, written for the newly established Polish Ballet by Arnold Szyfman and performed during the World Exhibition of Art and Technology in Paris. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the composer began a campaign to establish the World Federation for Art – an international organisation bringing together artists and people of culture; published a programme brochure, established contacts with potential partners, and planned to convene a conference.

During the war, Ludomir Różycki took part in underground concerts as a pianist and accompanist. The symphonic poem Pietà, the cantata Dzwony, the Piano Concerto No. 2 and the Violin Concerto come from this period. After the defeat of the Warsaw Uprising, during which many manuscripts of unpublished works were burned, Ludomir Różycki took refuge in the house of his friend J. Targowski in Osieczany near Kraków. After the end of the war, he lived in Katowice, where he took up teaching work at the State Higher School of Music as a lecturer in harmony, instrumentation and score reading; in 1945–47, he was dean of the Faculty of Theory, Composition and Conducting of this university. He ceased his teaching activities at the end of the academic year 1947/1948 when the Ministry of Culture and Art awarded him a lifetime honorary salary. In January and February 1951, he celebrated the 50^th anniversary of his creative work, organised by the Social Civic Committee under the patronage of the state authorities; these celebrations included: a performance of Casanova at the Silesian Opera in Bytom (15 January), a composer’s concert at the Silesian Philharmonic (19 January) and the first post-war premiere of Pan Twardowski at the Roma Hall in Warsaw (16 February).

Ludomir Różycki spent the last years of his life in a villa in Zachełmie in Lower Silesia, which he received from the government for life, where he worked on the reconstruction of scores destroyed during the war. He received many state awards and decorations: in 1925 the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, in 1937 the State Music Award for the opera Eros and Psyche, in 1946 the Golden Cross of Merit, in 1950 the Order of the Banner of Labor, 1^st class, in 1951 the Commander’s Cross with the Star of Polonia Restituta, in 1952 State Award of the 1^st degree for lifetime achievement. From December 1951, he was an honorary member of ZKP. In 1959–71, there was a Society named after Ludomir Różycki in Katowice, which undertook activities related to the promotion of the composer’s music and documentation of his life and work.

Ludomir Różycki’s creative path led from the assimilation of contemporary compositional techniques to a gradual regression of his style. His work can be divided into three stages: the first – until 1916, culminating in the opera Eros and Psyche, characterised by the acquisition of modern compositional techniques of Western European music, characterised by a synthesis of the styles of late romanticism, impressionism and expressionism, and the predominance of instrumental music; the second – to 1930, the year in which the opera Młyn diabelski was written, is characterised by a clear turn towards the traditionalism of the musical language and the predominance of stage music; in the third stage, the composer completely shifts to the position of a conservative, writing with a wide audience in mind, and his creative efficiency significantly decreases (the only opera from this period – Pani Walewska – remained unfinished). The accessibility of Ludomir Różycki’s works meant that his music enjoyed full approval from the state authorities in the years of promoting socialist realism.

The style of Ludomir Różycki’s works is characterised by a traditional approach to musical form, tonal harmony, the primacy of melody – of a vocal nature, usually diatonic, and formed from short motifs – and rich and colourful instrumentation serving illustrative and dramatic purposes. The face of the work – especially from the later period – is also determined by the use of elements of Polish folk and national music (Pan Twardowski, Dance Suite, Piano Concerto No. 2, Solemn Polonaise, Polish Dances). Particular innovation of musical means, expressed, among others, by the dissonance of chords and original colour effects, characterises the composer’s early works written in the Young Poland circle.

In Ludomir Różycki’s orchestral work, symphonic poems are of primary importance. Almost all of them were created in the first period of the composer’s activity, constituting a kind of preparation for undertakings in the field of opera – three of them found direct continuation in stage works (Bolesław Śmiały, Mona Lisa Gioconda and Pan Twardowski). In this genre, Ludomir Różycki’s connection with modernism is most pronounced, both in the aesthetic and technical-compositional spheres. After the youthful Stańczyk, inspired by J. Matejko’s painting, based on the classic sonata allegro pattern with three contrasting themes of dance provenance (referring to the mazur, kujawiak and Italian barcarolle), and Bolesław Śmiały, which harmony, instrumentation and treatment of the thematic material on the basis of leading motifs clearly indicate the adoption of Wagnerian patterns, it was time for more innovative solutions, consisting in an attempt to synthesise the neo-romantic technique with a more modern style. The most ambitious works include the poem Anhelli, which shows the influence of impressionism (the appearance of athematic structures, chamberisation of the orchestral texture, differentiation of articulation), as well as even expressionism in its Scriabin version (the use of fourth chords and a new type of melody with a characteristic upward direction of the melodic line, juxtaposed on the principle of alternating a small interval and a jump while frequently breaking the rhythm). Signs of the impressionistic style are also visible in the next two poems from the Lviv times: Mona Lisa Gioconda and Król Kofetua. The programmatic character of Ludomir Różycki’s poems is similar to Liszt’s – rather ideological, and to a lesser extent illustrative. Individual musical themes or thematic groups of songs do not so much illustrate their plot threads, but symbolise certain universal categories, characteristic of the literature of Romanticism and Young Poland, such as themes of tragic love and longing (Król Kofetua), martyrdom and death (Anhelli), fighting and crime (Bolesław Śmiały).

Both piano concertos, in the neo-Romantic style, are characterised by great pianistic qualities and very extensive orchestral accompaniment, bringing these works closer in texture to a symphony concertante. Among the numerous piano miniatures, Polish Dances stand out, in which Ludomir Różycki, referring to Chopin’s mazurkas, gave an example of modern stylization of folk material. A valuable chamber piece is the Piano Quintet in C minor, characterised by the logic of its formal structure, transparency of texture and rich use of polyphonic means; this piece, highly appreciated by Polish and German critics, has found a permanent place in the repertoire of many famous bands, including A. Rose and O. Ševčík. In the field of vocal lyricism, represented by over 30 songs, Ludomir Różycki’s achievements are significantly inferior to those of other representatives of Young Poland, primarily K. Szymanowski; it often lacks coherence between musical and poetic expression. Ludomir Różycki’s songs, the vast majority of which were written in his early period, are, however, an important testimony to the composer’s modernist inspirations from literature (F. Nietzsche, H. Ibsen, S. Wyspiański, T. Miciński).

Ludomir Różycki’s talent was most fully revealed in his stage works, which brought him fame as the most outstanding opera composer after Moniuszko and at the same time the creator of the Polish national ballet. The operas show great diversity in genres – from musical drama (Bolesław Śmiały), through romantic opera (Medusa, Eros and Psyche), historical (Mrs. Walewska), comic (Casanova) and tragic (Beatrix Cenci), to modern film opera (Młyn diabelski). Encouraged by the success of Casanova and Młyn diabelski, Ludomir Różycki also composed an operetta (Lili chce śpiewać), which, however – after a devastating attack of criticism – he removed from the official list of his works. The ease with which Ludomir Różycki absorbed various conventions of the opera theatre resulted primarily from his sense of drama, as well as the wealth of melodic inventiveness and musical means of characterising characters or stage situations. His starting point was the concept of musical drama by R. Wagner, which was reflected in the use of the technique of leitmotifs, dense instrumentation and deldamant melody of vocal parts (Bolesław Śmiały). In subsequent works, Ludomir Różycki uses the stylization of the Italian bel canto (Medusa) and is influenced by impressionism and Italian verismo (especially Puccini); composes melodious arias and ensembles (Eros and Psyche, Casanova). The last completed opera – Młyn diabelski – contains elements of avant-garde musical theatre; it contains spoken parts, jazz elements and additional acoustic effects (sounds of typewriters and radio loudspeakers).

The greatest variety of means of operatic style is characterised by Eros and Psyche, the action of which takes place in various eras, places and social environments – from mythical Arcadia through Alexandria at the end of the ancient world, a medieval monastery and a Parisian café during the French Revolution, to the contemporary salon of a wealthy banker (Puccini was to define this libretto as five operas in one evening). The contrasts in the roles of Psyche and Blaks, the pair of main characters wandering through history, combined with the variability of stage situations are reflected in the polystylistics of music (medieval knight’s monody, La Marseillaise, waltz) and the variety of means of musical characterization, especially visible in the sphere of harmonics (dissonant chords, whole-tone scale, chord parallelisms) and instrumentation. The vocal part is characterised by a large participation of the choir and the predominance of arioso and accompanied recitative over the traditional aria. A special place in the stage work is occupied by the ballet Pan Twardowski as the most popular work by Ludomir Różycki, based on Polish folk and national dances, such as krakowiak (Albośmy to jacy tacy), polonaise, oberek, highlander dances, as well as on dance music of other nations (czardasz, waltz , stylized oriental dances). The importance of Ludomir Różycki for Polish music lies in the modernization of the musical language at the beginning of the 20^th century. Moreover, the wide reception of his works (especially stage works) in the interwar period contributed to the promotion of Polish culture abroad.

Literature: A. Wieniawski Ludomir Różycki, Warsaw 1928; Ł. Kamieński “Eros i Psyche” Ludomira Różyckiego, “Muzyka” 1930 No. 2; J. Kański Ludomir Różycki, Kraków 1955, 3^rd ed. 1985; I. Turska “Pan Twardowski” Ludomira Różyckiego, Kraków 1959; S. Łobaczewska Ludomir Różycki, in: Z dziejów polskiej kultury muzycznej, vol. 2, Kraków 1966; J. Kański Poematy symfoniczne Ludomira Różyckiego – melodyka i problemy treści, “Muzyka” 1971 No. 1; I. Bias Katalog tematyczny dziel Ludomira Różyckiego, master’s thesis, typescript, Library of the Academy of Music in Katowice, 1976; T. Chylińska Młoda Polska w muzyce – mit czy rzeczywistość, in: Muzyka polska a modernizm, collective work, Kraków 1981; J. Paja Znamiona modernizmu w poematach symfonicznych Ludomira Różyckiego, in: Muzyka polska  a modernizm, collective work, Kraków 1981; M. Kamiński Ludomir Różycki. Opowieść o życiu i twórczości, Bydgoszcz 1987; E. Jasińska-Jędrosz Rękopisy kompozytorów Młodej Polski. Katalog 2, Warsaw 1997; M. Gmys Harmonie i dysonanse. Muzyka Młodej Polski wobec innych sztuk, Poznań 2012; T. Baranowski Inspiracje plastyczne w twórczości Ludomira Różyckiego, in: Ars inter disciplinis. Korespondencja. Na styku sztuk, ed. J. Cieślik-Klauza, M. Gajl and T. Baranowski, Białystok 2018.