Reconstructing the map of 19th-century music traditions among Polish-speaking Protestants

Arleta Nawrocka-Wysocka

Abstract

The category of the frontier is very helpful and popular in the study of the Polish Protestant music traditions. Owing to their geographic location and political dependencies, these communities – though striving to cultivate their local traditions – were under the strong influence of official culture. The map of Polish 19th-century Protestant music traditions shows many such communities, though several of them later disintegrated and disappeared.

On the basis of most recent research undertaken by historians, ethnographers and specialists in religious studies, as well as information collected during source surveys, the author attempts to draw a map of Polish 19th-century Protestant traditions. Apart from well-known communities, such as those found in the Těšín (Pol. Cieszyn) region in Silesia and in Masuria (part of Prussia at that time), the map also includes Western Pomerania (the so-called Slowinzen in German, Słowińcy in Polish), the ‘forgotten folk’ of southern
Greater Poland, the Protestants of the Lower and Upper Silesia, as well as of the (Congress) Kingdom of Poland. The article discusses such issues as the interpenetration of national cultures (especially German and Czech with the local one), mutual influences among the widely scattered Protestant communities, and the perception of those communities by the clergy and by the Church authorities. Music traditions are understood here as the customs that accompany religious song performances and the repertoire promoted in the local hymnbooks. I discuss these topics (as well as local performance styles) in very general terms, since a detailed analysis of the hymnbook contents and comparison of the preserved (notated) melodies calls for a separate study. The sources have been preserved to a different extent in different places, which makes a precise reconstruction of the map of traditions largely impossible. What this paper therefore attempts to do is to provide a synthetic picture of the various Lutheran communities, their universal as well as specifically local qualities.