The question of the authorship of ballet music, on the example of a 'Wedding in Ojców'

Adam Tomasz Kukla

Abstract

Despite broad research potential, the number of academic publications concerning Polish 19th-century ballet is still small. Nor has any researcher to date studied the topic of how ballet music came to be composed, and the related question of its authorship. This has persuaded me to illustrate this research problem with the example of the then most popular ballet, A Wedding in Ojców, whose world premiere took place on 14 March 1823 at Warsaw’s Narodowy [National] Theatre, and which still continues to be staged.

The present paper has been divided into two parts, the first of which examines the man­ner in which music for ballets was composed. The author refers here to press articles, the most important of which was printed in 1820 in Tygodnik Muzyczny [Music Weekly] and entitled O muzyce do baletów pantomicznych [On music for pantomime ballets]. Its author, Karol Kurpiński, co-creator of A Wedding in Ojców, describes two ways in which ballet music can come into being. It can be a new, independent piece of music, or a compilation of previously existing fragments of music by this or some other artist(s). For the ballet composers, that latter method is well justified in that it allows them to transfer contexts already known to the audience from other works into the ballet, and thus makes it easier for the spectators to follow the action. From this article it transpires that in the field of ballet, the word ‘composer’ may refer to the au­thor of the music and/or to the person who compiled the numbers and programmed the piece.

In the second part of my paper, I have illustrated Kurpiński’s music-theoretical thought on the example of A Wedding in Ojców. Music sources have been examined in order to attribute the various musical numbers to specific composers. The sources mention such names as: Jan Stefani, Karol Kurpiński, Józef Damse, Józef Elsner, Józef Stefani, J. Borzysławski, and Leopold Lewandowski. In this section of my article I have continued to make use of 19th-century press notes, which mostly focus on the persons of the programmers. The names of Kurpiński and Damse, less frequently – that of Stefani the Elder are mentioned. Despite such media attributions, it is difficult to establish who in fact programmed this ballet. My paper ends with a catalogue of musical numbers included in A Wedding in Ojców in the first c.50 years after its premiere.