‘All Day Long I Am Absorbed by Some Musical Sentence…’ Music as Anna Iwaszkiewicz’s Lifelong Passion and a Leitmotiv of her Writings
Abstract
This article discusses the role of music in the life and work of writer and translator Anna Iwaszkiewicz, who was first and foremost a music connoisseur and amateur pianist, a person for whom contact with music was the essence of her everyday life. Though she was educated at home and never attended school, she grew up to become a person of unusually broad intellectual horizons and great musical culture. In music historiography, she is remembered mostly as the person who discovered for Poland the music of Alexander Scriabin, whose Poem of Ecstasy, heard in Moscow in 1917, she hailed as an artistic and spiritual revelation; on her return to Poland a year later, she became a fervent promoter of the Russian composer’s music.
Anna Iwaszkiewicz’s diaries and memoirs contain many thoughts on music, which she listened to every day, as well as frequently playing piano, often four handed with Karol Szymanowski, her husband’s cousin, with whom she maintained very warm relations. Her comments quoted in this article confirm her profound sensitivity to the music of great composers from the past, particularly Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Wagner. There are also critical remarks, aimed mostly at the music of the so-called French impressionists, Debussy and Ravel.
Iwaszkiewicz also emerges from her diaries and memoirs as an expert on musical interpretation. Her private reviews of numerous concerts and operas contribute to the history of Warsaw’s musical life during the first half of the twentieth century.
Keywords:
diaries and memoires, musical life in Warsaw, musical culture in the first half of the 20th century, Alexander Scriabin, Karol Szymanowski, Jarosław IwaszkiewiczReferences
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