From Emil Młynarski’s correspondence. His letters of 1905–1906 in the collection of the Theatre Museum in Warsaw

Elżbieta Szczepańska-Lange

Abstract

The article is an edition (with introduction and commentaries) of Emil Młynarski’s twelve letters to his wife Anna, who in 1905–1906 resided in Lausanne. At that time, Młynarski took his wife and four (still small) children away from the revolution-ridden Warsaw to the safety of Switzerland. He remained in the city, but visited his family at times. He was not present at the birth of his youngest daughter Anna (in the night of 31 December 1905 / 1 January 1906). ‘[She is] a Swiss, so a citizen of a free country’, he wrote in one of the letters, ‘unlike us, who remain perpetually under the [Russian] knout’. He could write openly, since he sent those letters courtesy of private travellers (the Warsaw post was then on strike). The letters bear valuable testimony to Młynarski’s political attitudes, and retain the value of free sincere statements, not subjected to self-censorship. They also happen to be the only part of his cor­respondence (scattered throughout the world) that is known to researchers today. They are a document of a time of crisis in his professional work, accompanied by financial problems, resulting from the fact that from the moment he hadbroken his ties with Warsaw Philhar­monic (in April 1905), which he had headed, his only employment was now in Warsaw Music Institute. Despite holding the post of the Institute’s director, he still felt frustrated in his personal ambitions as a talented conductor.

The letters also present Młynarski as a caring husband and lover, genuinely in love with his wife, torn between missing her and hopes for a return to his profession. Nevertheless, even his connections and contacts at the governor-general’s office did not restore to him either a place at Warsaw Opera, where he wished to return, or in the city’s music life in general. His conflict with Aleksander Rajchman, the Philharmonic’s administrative director, which was the reason for Młynarski leaving the conductor’s pulpit – continued. Młynarski hated his op­ponent, but did not see him in ethnic categories as a Jew, which was very rare in those times, when anti-Semitism was virtually the norm.

My edition has been supplemented with an afterword concerning the dramatic fates of Młynarski’s family during WWII, when one of Anna Młynarska’s sisters, Henryka, was de­ported with her three children to Siberia as ‘a socially alien element’, as also were two children of another sister, Wanda. Anna herself avoided the deportation most likely by hiding in a little cabin in the orchard. Her son Bronisław, found himself in Soviet POW camps after the invasion of 17 September 1939, and was one of the small group of (395) Polish army officers who survived the Katyn massacre – as one of those whose release from the camp was due to the efforts of the German embassy. I believe that those efforts may have been inspired by Richard Strauss, the first head of the Reichsmusikkammer, who had been a close acquaintance of Bronisław’s father, Emil Młynarski.