Happy birthday, Bacewicz!

Today—February 5, 2022—is Grażyna Bacewicz’s 113th birthday. Over the last few years, I’ve become utterly enamored with her life and works; what better way to celebrate her birthday than to offer a “beginner’s guide” to her music! Please join me in saying a hearty wszystkiego najlepszego z okazji urodzin, Grażyna Bacewicz!

A Brief Biography

Grażyna Bacewicz was born in Łódź in 1909, the third child in a family of Lithuanian-Polish descent. Her elder brothers—Kiejstut and Vytautas (Witold)—were musicians in their own right; their younger sister, Wanda, was a poet. While Grażyna, Kiejstut, and Wanda felt strong ties to their Polish nationality, Vytautas much more strongly identified as Lithuanian, spelling his surname Bacevičius instead. Both Kiejstut and Vytautas were accomplished musicians in their own right, though neither achieved the acclaim that Grażyna would eventually.

Bacewicz began her musical life as a precocious violinist and pianist. Very soon after starting serious studies in performance, she began composition lessons with Kazimierz Sikorski and immediately knew that her life’s focus would be writing music. At the age of 19, she began studies at the Warsaw Conservatory studying all three of composition, violin, and piano. Ultimately, she was forced to pick two of the three, and limited her focus to composition and violin.

Her compositional precocity led her to Paris, where in 1932 she began studying with the world-renowned teacher Nadia Boulanger. Among other triumphs in Paris, Grażyna won joint first prize in a competition for women composers with her Wind Quintet (1933).

As her compositional career took form, so too did her work as a violinist. In 1935, she entered the first iteration of the International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition. Though her performance in the first round was exemplary, her second round performance suffered after her flat was burgled and she had to spend a night at the police station. She ended up winning no prizes; that year, David Oistrakh won second prize.

Her work both as a violinist and a composer was influenced heavily by her collaboration with Polish conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg, who appointed Bacewicz to play first violin with the Polish Radio Orchestra. With Fitelberg and his orchestra, Bacewicz premiered her first violin concerto (composer as soloist) in 1938. She would go on to premiere her next 3 violin concerti as solist with the orchestra; only by her fifth would she give the honor of soloist to someone else.

During the Second World War, Bacewicz and her family left and then returned to Warsaw, where they lived through the Warsaw Uprising. Amidst the chaos, Bacewicz was able to compose, producing works such as her Suite for two violins (1942), Overture (1943), string quartet no. 2 (1943). The years immediately following the war proved incredibly prolific for her, giving rise to: Sonata da Camera and sonata no. 2 for violin and piano, symphony no. 1 (since withdrawn), string quartet no. 3, violin concerto no. 2, and Symphony for string orchestra (an orchestration and reworking of Sonata no. 1 for solo violin, 1941).

Soon, the cultural scene in Poland was overtaken with the doctrine of Socialist Realism, which—depending on whom you asked—liberated or stifled creative expression in the newly-formed Polish People’s Republic. Nonetheless, Bacewicz composed some of her most beloved and long-lasting works during this time: the Concerto for String Orchestra, Violin Concerto no. 3, and String Quartet no. 4. The Concerto for String Orchestra remains by far her most performed work (as of right now, more than 80% of all performances of her music in the last 20 years have been of the Concerto; another 10-15% is of the Overture).

The 1950s found Bacewicz in the most prolific compositional periods of her life—with her 2nd, 3rd, and 4th symphonies, Violin Concerto no. 4, Piano Quintet no. 1, Piano Sonata no. 2, Violin Concerto no. 5, and Partita for both violin and piano and then for orchestra—until a horrific car accident in 1954 kept her in the hospital for over half a year. In the hospital, with ample time to evaluate what was most important to her, Bacewicz had somewhat of an aesthetic shift, away from the “formalist” confines of Socialist Realism. Instead, she would turn toward the school of composition known as “sonorism”, a focus on colors and sounds rather than harmony, melody, or regular rhythm. This school is one that her younger colleagues Witold Lutosławski and Krzysztof Penderecki (both of whom greatly admired Grażyna) would become known for.

In 1956, the Polish Composers’ Union established a festival of contemporary music, to take place in Warsaw in the autumn. The Warsaw Autumn Festival became a haven for contemporary composers, and has persisted as such even to this day. Bacewicz became a familiar face (so to speak) at Warsaw Autumn; for over a decade, her work was played every year at the festival; it saw performances of her 6th and 7th string quartets, her 7th violin concerto, her Music for Strings, Trumpets, and Percussion (which I—Reuben—consider to be among her magna opera), In Una Parte for orchestra, and the Divertimento for string orchestra.

Bacewicz died of a heart attack in January, 1969, just weeks before her 60th birthday. The decade leading up to her tragically early death was unbelievably productive. She completed some of her most sonoristically intricate, dynamic, and creative works in this time period: her final two string quartets and violin concerti, a second cello concerto, a viola concerto, a concerto for two pianos, the Concerto for Large Orchestra, Musica Sinfonica in Tre Movimenti, and In Una Parte. Her final work, left with all but the last five minutes completed, was a large-scale ballet called Desire, based on a play written by Pablo Picasso (yes, a play that was written by Picasso).

A Guide to Her Works

As far as performed works are concerned, Bacewicz leaves us with 4 symphonies, 7 violin concerti, 2 cello concerti, a viola concerto, a piano concerto, a concerto for two pianos, 6 miscellaneous works for large orchestra, 4 major works for string orchestra, 3 works for various chamber orchestras, 7 string quartets, 5 sonatas for violin and piano, 3 ballets, a radio opera, two cantatas, and dozens of other chamber works. It can be a lot to penetrate at a first encounter, so I wanted to provide a kind of “syllabus” for getting into her works, highlighting major pieces chronologically that showcase her artistic development over the course of her tragically short compositional career. These are, essentially, the “Greatest Hits” I would recommend to someone getting into her music for the first time, in chronological order.

Sheet music for nearly all of these works is available through the subscription service nkoda. Scores can be purchased through the publisher PWM Edition, and large ensemble music can be rented (if you are in North America) through Schott Music/EAMDC.

  • Wind Quintet (1932)

  • Violin Concerto no. 1 (1937)

  • String Quartet no. 2 (1942)

  • Overture (1943) [for orchestra]

  • Sonata da Camera for violin and piano (1945)

  • Concerto for String Orchestra (1948)

  • Violin Concerto no. 3 (1948)

  • Piano Concerto (1949)

  • Sonata no. 4 for violin and piano (1949)

  • String Quartet no. 4 (1951)

  • Cello Concerto no. 1 (1951)

  • Piano Quintet no. 1 (1952)

  • Symphony no. 4 (1953)

  • Sonata no. 2 for piano (1953)

  • Violin Concerto no. 5 (1954)

  • Partita for violin and piano, and later orchestrated (1955, orch. 1955)

  • Ten Concert Etudes for piano (1956)

  • Sonata no. 2 for violin (1958)

  • Music for Strings, Trumpets, and Percussion (1958)

  • Pensieri Notturni for chamber orchestra (1961)

  • Quartet for 4 Cellos (1964)

  • Incrustations for horn and chamber ensemble (1965)

  • Violin Concerto no. 7 (1965)

  • Piano Quintet no. 2 (1965)

  • String Quartet no. 7 (1965)

  • Trio for Oboe, Harp, and Percussion (1965)

  • Concerto for Two Pianos (1966)

  • Contradizione for chamber orchestra (1966)

  • Viola Concerto (1968)

  • Desire, ballet in 2 acts (1969, unfinished)

Suggested Listening

More and more recordings of Bacewicz’s works are coming out each year, but some pieces haven’t received recordings in a very long time. Here are some recordings I particularly recommend.

Further Reading

For those of you who read Polish, the analytical biography by Małgorzata Gąsiorowska simply titled “Grażyna Bacewicz” is unmatched in its comprehensiveness and depth of analysis. For those of you who, like me, do not read Polish, there is relatively little written in English with the same analytical approach, and even less that I have been able to find still available in print.

Gąsiorowska has written a great article in English entitled "Grażyna Bacewicz — The Polish Sappho.” In addition to a fascinating discussion about ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits in absolute music, the article is a great biographical resource. https://sciendo.com/downloadpdf/journals/muso/16/1/article-p65.pdf

The Polish Music Information Center has put together a phenomenal website dedicated to Bacewicz, complete with biography, archival recordings, manuscripts, and more: https://bacewicz.polmic.pl/en/

Judith Rosen has written a book called Grażyna Bacewicz: Her Life and Works, which features a preface by Witold Lutosławski. This is reprinted online through the Polish Music Center at USC: https://polishmusic.usc.edu/research/publications/polish-music-journal/vol5no1/grazyna-bacewicz-life-and-works/

The Polish Music Center also has an independent entry on Bacewicz — https://polishmusic.usc.edu/research/composers/grazyna-bacewicz/ — as well as a long bibliography, mostly containing entries in Polish — https://polishmusic.usc.edu/research/publications/polish-music-journal/vol5no1/grazyna-bacewicz-bibliography/

Reuben Stern