The reception of songs by Father Tymoteusz Szczurowski in the catholic environments of 19th-century Warsaw

Oksana Shkurgan

Abstract

Held in the Archive of the Congregation of the Mission, in Kraków’s Stradom district (shelf-mark Muzyka 15) are two sheets of a nineteenth-century music manuscript containing Uniate (Eastern Catholic) songs. The source probably originates from the collection belonging to the house of the Congregation of the Mission at the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, which was sent from the capital to the Kraków missionaries’ archive most likely following the dissolution of this congregation in the Kingdom of Poland, which took place in 1864. Inscribed anonymously in this source are the melodies and Polish-language texts of the first stanzas of seven religious songs (Marian songs, songs to the cult of saints, and przygodne songs for the Ordinary Time in the liturgical year) composed by the Basilian missionary Father Tymoteusz Szczurowski (1740–1812).

Thanks to inscriptions preserved in the source, we know that Szczurowski’s songs were performed in the late 1830s and early 1840s by Warsaw’s Basilian monks as well as by the Uniate clergyman Father Paweł Szymański (1782–1852), when he was a professor of the Imperial Roman Catholic Theological Academy in Warsaw (1837–41).

The melodic lines of Szczurowski’s seven songs from the handwritten sheets of Muzyka 15 are the same as those printed by Father Michał Marcin Mioduszewski, CM (1787–1868) in Dodatek do Śpiewnika kościelnego [Supplement to the church songbook] (Kraków 1842) and Dodatek III do Śpiewnika kościelnego [Third supplement to the church songbook] (Leipzig 1853). The manuscript discussed in this paper, containing the music and words of Polish-language songs from the Uniate repertoire, is very likely to have been compiled in the environment of the Warsaw Congregation of the Mission. The surviving missionary manuscript Muzyka 15 enables us to confirm the reception of the Uniate Father Szczurowski’s output in the Roman Catholic environments of nineteenth-century Warsaw. It also provides us with new information concerning the performers of Szczurowski’s songs in the then capital of the (Congress) Kingdom of Poland.