Roman Palester as a pioneer of Polish film music

Iwona Lindstedt

Abstract

Roman Palester’s film music has left a lasting trace on Polish cinematography, even though the composer himself did not attach much importance to this aspect of his work. The present paper is dedicated to the first stage of his work for the film industry (until 1939). On the basis of surviving audio-visual materials and indirect sources, I aim to sketch a panorama of the reception of Palester’s film music in the cultural environment between the two world wars, to analyse the principles of his collaboration with other composers in the case of co-authorship, and briefly to characterise the function, significance and qualities of Palester’s soundtracks, with particular reference to the film Zabawka (Toy). Palester’s most productive collaboration was that with film director Józef Lejtes (1901–83). The composer wrote music for five of Lejtes’s films: Dzikie pola (Wild Fields, 1932), Młody las (The Young Forest, 1934), Dzień wielkiej przygody (The Day of Great Adventure, 1935), Róża (Red Rose, 1936), and Dziewczęta z Nowolipek (Girls of Nowolipki, 1937). On each of these pictures, Palester worked together with Marian Neuteich, with whom he also composed music for Ludzie Wisły (People of the Vistula, 1938, dir. Aleksander Ford and Aleksander Zarzycki). On the soundtrack for August Mocny (King August the Strong, 1936), Palester collaborated with Leon Schiller, and for Halka (based on the libretto of Stanisław Moniuszko’s opera) – with Feliks Rybicki. The music illustration for Ja tu rządzę (I Am the Boss Here, 1939) he co-authored with Władysław Dan-Daniłowski. Since the scores are lost, and the film subtitles are very general, it is hard to determine what the actual division of tasks and competences looked like in the case of each of these two-composer teams, but (apart from the last of the above listed films), it was most certainly not a simple split between one composer contributing the ‘light’, and the other – ‘serious classical’ pieces. What is more, in Lejtes’s films the music soundtrack is a response to the director’s idea of combining mutually independent visual and acoustic elements into the so-called ‘third dimension’, and the music carries numerous symbolic associations. Palester’s individual contributions are the soundtracks for Michał Waszyński’s Zabawka (Toy, 1933) and for two 1939 productions: Jerzy Zarzycki’s Żołnierz Królowej Madagaskaru (The Soldier of the Queen of Madagascar) and Wanda Jakubowska’s / Karol Szołowski’s Nad Niemnem (On the Niemen River), which have not been preserved to our day. The music for Toy is a refined example of how popular songs can be used to integrate dramatic structure and how they can be combined with music maintained in the typical early sound film style. In the period that ended in 1939, Palester also composed – according to existing research – music for two documentaries (though other such commissions may possibly still be discovered). Overall, his output of film music testifies, on the one hand, to his distanced approach to this subject, and on the other – to his diligent and technically competent attitude to his commissions for film music. His soundtracks are an indelible part of his artistic image and are most certainly worth presenting in more detail.