In defence of Podbielski’s ‘Praeludium’

Marcin Szelest

Abstract

Praeludium Joh. Podbielsky was the only attributed composition in the organ tablature known as the Warsaw Tablature, destroyed in 1944. Performed during ‘historical’ concerts in 1903 and 1910, it gained great popularity after the Second World War, thanks to editions prepared by Adolf Chybiński and jerzy Gołos. In recent years, Rostislaw Wygranienko has questioned the work’s authenticity, concluding that it is a twentieth-century forgery. The present article represents an attempt to verify the conclusions concerning the source base and the style of the Praeludium.

The only surviving copy of the work is held in the Chybiński Archive in Poznań University Library. It was made by Jarosław Leszczyński in Lviv, in 1910, from a copy owned by Aleksander Poliński, who was then the owner of the Warsaw Tablature. This copy formed the basis for Chybiński’s edition. Gołos’s editions were based on Poliński’s copy, which in the 1960s was the property of Janina Rzeszewicz. It remains unclear what has happened to this copy since that time. We may presume that it was the same copy which Leszczyński used and which is listed in the catalogue of Poliński’s music-related documents and books. The composer’s first name is written on the copy as ‘Józef’.

Although the availability and state of preservation of the sources related to this composition are far from satisfactory, we find evidence for its authenticity in works by Chybiński, who in 1924 studied the Warsaw Tablature and noted the presence of the Praeludium, interpreting the abbreviation of the composer’s name as ‘Joh.’. Chybiński’s well-documented critical attitude regarding Poliński’s competence as a researcher and his vast experience in investigating old sources of music make it all but impossible that he could have failed to recognise or reveal a forgery committed by Poliński.

Today, it is impossible to establish the identity of the composer of the Praeludium or to verify Chybiński’s hypotheses that joh. Podbielski was related to a family of musicians active in Königsberg and that the Warsaw Tablature originated somewhere close to the border with East Prussia. Nevertheless, all the stylistic elements present in the Praeludium which Wygranienko considered foreign to late seventeenth-century music (the opening one-part figuration, the extensive use of figuration moving across broken chords, the use of motoric rhythm combined with the absence of polyphonic techniques, the advanced harmonic phrases and the use of a chord with doubled third in the ending) do appear in works for keyboard instruments written during the last two decades of the seventeenth century, especially by composers in central and southern Germany (e.g. J.C.F. Fischer, J.H. Kittel, J. Kuhnau, G. Muffat, F.X.A. Murschhauser and J. Pachelbel). That was a period in which small-scale preludes, based on a limited range of techniques or on the principle of varying the techniques a great deal within a small space, were a popular genre.

A critical analysis of the available sources of the Praeludium, apart from concluding that Leszczyński’s copy was of relatively high quality and excluding the possibility that Chybiński’s pencil annotations might reflect variants from the lost tablature, leads to the identification of at least nine errors in the extant text involving a note placed in the wrong octave. Those errors indicate that the Praeludium might have circulated earlier in German tablature notation, which in turn suggests a link to the German-speaking environment of Northern Europe. The fact that organist-composers by the name of Podbielski known today lived and worked only in Königsberg makes it most likely that the Praeludium originated in Ducal Prussia, whose contacts with southern Germany are confirmed in the sources.