Four composers, four fates. The stories of the four composers and their work are exemplary for the fate of Polish music in the first half...

Four composers, four fates. The stories of the four composers and their work are exemplary for the fate of Polish music in the first half of the 20th century, exemplary for a promising new beginning after the First World War following 123 years of political and cultural oppression and foreign domination by the Russian, Prussian and Austrian empires, exemplary for the unimaginable suffering and indescribable destruction that befell Poland with the Nazi terror on 1 September 1939, exemplary, however, also for the tremendous vigor and vitality that is so typical of Polish music as an expression of an indomitable will to live and survive. The biographies of Szymon Laks (1901-1983), Aleksander Tansman (1897-1986) and Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) also confront us with questions about the "identity" of music, about the perspectives of cultural historiography, about the mechanisms of repression, forgetting and rediscovery. Even though we are dealing with composers who never questioned their Polish identity, the centrifugal forces that affected their biographies through persecution, expulsion and exile were so strong that their national "adhesion" was lost. For decades, they found themselves in a kind of limbo from which only a transnational perspective on cultural history could free them. The fate of Ludomir Rozycki (1883-1953) was just as difficult. In 1904 he left Poland for Berlin to perfect his craft with Engelbert Humperdinck at the Royal Academy. During the 19th century and even at the beginning of the 20th century, Polish music was overshadowed by the Russian and, above all, the German "schools". For decades, training at a German academy was a must, with the Berlin institutions being of particular importance. Stanislaw Moniuszko studied at the Berlin Academy of Arts, Mieczyslaw Karlowicz at the New Academy of Music, and Zygmunt Noskowski, Feliks Nowowiejski and Ignacy Jan Paderewski at the Stern Conservatory. In 1906 in Berlin, Rozycki together with Karol Szymanowski, Apolinary Szeluto and Grzegorz Fitelberg - all of whom were students of Noskowski - founded the Spolka Nakladowa Mlodych Kompozytorow Polskich (Publishing Society of Young Polish Composers) with the aim of promoting contemporary, progressive Polish music, which was having a difficult time at home, and publicising it with editions and concerts. Rozycki enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, even beyond Poland's borders. He made substantial contributions to Polish symphonic poems with 'Stanczyk', 'Anhelli' and 'Boleslaw Smialy', and to Polish opera with 'Amor and Psyche', 'Casanova', 'Medusa' and 'Beatrix Cenci'. His ballet 'Pan Twardowski' (a Polish version of the Faust story), which premiered in 1921, was the most popular Polish ballet of the interwar period, with over 500 performances in Warsaw alone until 1939. Rozycki, who also played a central role in Polish musical life as a teacher with professorships in Lviv, Warsaw and Katowice, survived the Second World War in Warsaw, where he was active as a pianist in underground concerts. When the capital was destroyed by the German Wehrmacht in 1944, some of his previously unpublished works fell victim to the flames. 'Sonata for cello and piano' op. 10, written in Berlin in 1906, is Rozycki's first chamber music work. Alongside Zygmunt Stojowski's virtuosically expansive Sonata for cello and piano, premiered a few years earlier, it is one of the first contributions to the genre by Polish composers after Fryderyk Chopin's work written in 1847. Rozycki dedicated it to the cellist Konstanty Sarnecki, with whom he premiered the work. The three-movement work is surprising in many respects. On the surface, it appears to follow an ad aspera ad astra dramaturgy. On closer inspection, however, the relationship between the dark and light aspects proves to be extremely ambivalent in a fascinating way. The tumultuous opening with virtuoso arpeggios and urging appoggiaturas in the piano transports us to a dramatic, ominous night scene. However, the catastrophic climax is already reached in the final group of the 1st theme, a wild outburst in triple