W. Z. Zych, A. Chłopecki, T. Wielecki, M. Szoka, K. Szwajgier, K. Droba, O. Pisarenko, K. Baculewski, Radziejowice 2007, fot. 'Warsaw Autumn' archive
Tadeusz Wielecki
Krzysztof Droba’s Essential ‘Warsaw Autumn’ Concepts
Krzysztof Droba served on the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ programme board uninterruptedly for 20 years, from 1997, at the invitation of the then festival director Krzysztof Knittel, and later of myself when I took over that function. He continued his work on that body until the end of my tenure in 2016.
This, however, was not the beginning of Krzysztof’s links to the ‘Warsaw Autumn’. He began to attend the festival as a young student of music theory. In the 1960s the avant-garde continued to flourish, and new music experienced its heyday. The ‘Warsaw Autumn’ changed the ways of thinking about art in Poland, and sparked debates. What is particularly important for thinking about new music, a critical discourse describing that phenomenon was born. Krzysztof referred to his trips to ‘Warsaw Autumn’ concerts as pilgrimages, or as musical and intellectual ‘retreat’ (this word, in Polish rekolekcje, normally associated with Lenten meditations and religious teaching, he would frequently use with reference to music, art, and thought).
In later years Droba wrote about the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ as a music critic and was its deeply committed habitué. He shared his musical discoveries and fascinations with persons responsible for the festival’s artistic shape, and used his experience as founder of the festival ‘Young Musicians to the Young City’ in Stalowa Wola to recommend specific artists and works. This is how Lithuanian composers found their way to the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ and became a regular element of its history. It was also thanks to Krzysztof’s enthusiasm that the festival audience became acquainted with the oeuvres of such composers as Charles Ives and Giya Kancheli.
Already as a member of the festival’s programme board, Droba significantly contributed to programming the memorable 1998 edition of the ‘Warsaw Autumn’, dedicated to the wide spectrum of Scandinavian music. He was one of the five persons exclusively responsible for its preparation. Andrzej Chłopecki hailed that edition as ‘historic’; its unique character was also reflected by its modified name: ‘Warsaw Autumn –North’.
Who was Krzysztof for the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ and what impact did he have on the Festival? He was a creative force. Naturally, this force manifested itself first and foremost through his initiatives, ideas and comments presented in the context of his work on the programme board. He spoke with passion and gusto, with a sense of humour, in colourful sentences which evoked plenty of associations. He influenced the course of debates and changed the hierarchy of problems through his bearing and his way of speaking. Naturally, Krzysztof’s interpretations of reality, art and its functions were not the only ones possible. His way of thinking was conservative, but also unorthodox and open.
Here we come against a difficulty, since attempts to distinguish any board member’s individual contribution to the festival are rather artificial. The programme board is by definition a collective body; the festival programme is the joint work and responsibility of a team. The event has its artistic director, and specific ideas are not born all of a sudden in all the members’ heads, but put forward individually. Still, the festival’s head is a coordinator, not a ‘ruler’, and ideas are not presented to him privately, but discussed and minuted in an open forum. They are developed collectively and provide an impulse for further proposals. In this way, they become a common cause, since all the members contribute to their transformations.
There are, however, some initiatives whose author can be defined from the start, and it is in this kind of projects that Krzysztof Droba excelled. What he proposed was usually not so much individual works or performers, but whole comprehensively thought-out topics.
In the Lutosławski Year of 2004 (the 10th anniversary of the composer’s death) he suggested that all of Lutosławski’s four symphonies be performed at one final concert. We hesitated since we feared the audience might find such a programme challenging, and, admittedly, we were not sure whether the compositions themselves would work. We did not want to harm the Maestro by overloading the listeners. Lutosławski himself spoke of his Symphony No. 2 with a distance, after all. Painter and art critic Jerzy Stajuda, who was the composer’s friend, used to say that artists enter purgatory after death… Still, Droba always aimed at a complete experience which provides essential knowledge, and so he wanted to invite the audience to this Lutosławski ‘retreat’, convinced that listeners need to be treated seriously, as subjects who are capable of judging for themselves. Dorota Szwarcman wrote after this concert (in ‘Polityka’ 2004, No. 41):
But the culmination of the entire year and of the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ was the festival’s last concert at Warsaw Philharmonic, at which the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of two alternating conductors, Gabriel Chmura and Jacek Kaspszyk, performed (to a packed concert hall!) all of Lutosławski’s four symphonies, while the composer’s own commentaries were played back from the loudspeakers in the intervals. The programme board members had apparently taken a long time debating this concept before they decided to take the risk. It turned out that they had designed a magic event, after which the standing ovation seemed endless. We can now rest assured that the memory of Lutosławski is bound to last.
Another major ‘Warsaw Autumn’ project introduced by Droba was the 2006 marathon of string quartets by Polish composers. String quartets are ‘the salt of Polish music’, as Krzysztof would call them. It is in this genre that Polish composers have fully expressed themselves. Droba therefore aimed to create a whole-day-long mystery of listening to these works, a kind of ‘quartet retreat’.
On the eve of the 50th jubilee ‘Warsaw Autumn’ to be held in 2007, Droba put forward the idea of collecting and publishing in a book the key critical writings dedicated to the festival, texts penned in direct response to its events over the period of 50 years from 1956 (the 1st) till 2006 (the 50th ‘Warsaw Autumn’). This led to the publication (in Polish) of The Warsaw Autumn in the Mirror of Polish Music Criticism. An Anthology of Texts from 1956-2006. Droba wrote in the preface that the collected texts reflect in a way the festival’s life, and speak of its condition in the last half a century, as well as of the state of Polish music criticism, which has striven to meet the challenge of new music as best it could. It was the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ that provoked the search for a new language of description, a new axiology, and a new type of music criticism specifically designed for new music.
The 50th edition occasioned Droba’s two other original projects, Faces of the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ as well as the debate The ‘Warsaw Autumn’ – The Past, the Present, and the Future. The former project consisted of video recordings of Polish composers whose music was presented at the Festival. They talked about the ‘Warsaw Autumn’, sharing their personal memories as well as more general comments. The videos, featuring such eminent composers as Zygmunt Krauze, Krzysztof Meyer, Paweł Szymański, Paweł Mykietyn, and Eugeniusz Rudnik, could be accessed on the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ website, and are still available on YouTube.
The other project aimed to discover how the festival was perceived by the members of its programme board from the perspective of its past, present, and future; what was remembered, what proved significant, and how the future aims of the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ were envisaged. Representatives of many generations and standpoints presented their views; the participants were Krzysztof Baculewski, Zbigniew Bargielski, Andrzej Chłopecki, Magda Długosz, Olgierd Pisarenko, Marta Szoka, Krzysztof Szwajgier, Wojciech Ziemowit Zych, myself, and Krzysztof Droba. The part of the project dedicated to the past was published in ‘Ruch Muzyczny’ magazine; I can recall a vivid response from the readers.
In the context of the oncoming Chopin Year, we decided that the 2010 ‘Warsaw Autumn’ would be dedicated to the (broadly conceived) keyboard, and Krzysztof suggested we should inquire Polish composers about Chopin: Was he important to them, and in what ways, if at all? He did not mean the impact of Chopin’s music itself, but the psychological fact that both Romanticism and Chopin continue to be important aspects of the Polish cultural identity. Composers were requested to respond in writing and to “give testimony of their artistic conscience.” This was the origin of the text collection Chopinspira, published under the auspices of the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ as a complement to the festival programme. Professor Mieczysław Tomaszewski, an eminent Chopin expert and author of a similar anthology compiled in 1959, spoke about Chopinspira during its presentation, which took place on 24th February 2010 at the Historical Museum of the City of Warsaw:
This booklet is fundamentally a document, and thus represents a value that cannot be overestimated; it provides excellent material for the study of responses to, and reception of, Chopin. Some of the statements could well be etched into stone as ‘winged words’, epea pteroenta, or thoughts to ponder on.
When we complained about the lack of honest and comprehensive commentaries on the festival in the media, Krzysztof came up with the idea of seminars for young critics, during which gifted young persons invited to the festival would listen to and comment on music together, under the guidance of an experienced mentor. These meetings and debates were to be held ‘in the manner of a retreat’ (the same keyword again). The discussions were genuinely to involve their participants and make profound insights into the presented topics possible. Four such seminars were held, and their proceedings were published (in Polish), among others, in two volumes entitled Conversations about the Festival, naturally under Droba’s personal supervision.
Krzysztof lived and breathed the ‘Warsaw Autumn’. He persuaded Eva Maria Jensen, Copenhagen-based organist and musicologist whom he had known from his school years, to attend the festival, which inspired her in turn to promote the event among the Danish audience. Music journalists from that country turned up at the festival, grew enthusiastic, and returned to the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ for several years in succession, presenting radio and press reports from the event and explaining the phenomenon to their compatriots.
Another example of Droba’s innovations: He phoned me once and enthusiastically put forward the idea of brief radio scenes promoting the festival in a playful manner. It was to take the form of a street survey in which a well-known journalist would ask the passers-by whether they attended the festival concerts, and they would reply most zealously that indeed they did. The joke was that the respondents were to represent various walks of life that one could hardly suspect of a passion for contemporary music. A radio production unfortunately proved impossible, but we posted this series of scenes, which Krzysztof titled ‘A Poll on the Warsaw Autumn’, in text form on the festival’s Facebook profile.
We all lived and breathed the festival and its subjects; they were a point of reference and the regular context of our relations, even in situations when we made contact in contexts unrelated to the ‘Warsaw Autumn’. This was true about all the members of the programme board, and about Droba in particular. To him, the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ was not merely one or another piece of music, composer, performer, or concert programme. The festival was for him an issue involving Polish culture, tradition, identity, historical continuity, and art as a field free of any particular interests, in which independence and truth are sought and found.
Krzysztof frequently stressed that the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ is a ‘festival with memory’, which demonstrates our roots, and fulfils the duty of representing the Polish point of view, not that of Berlin or Paris. It is to express ourselves and our situation. These notions of memory, identity, and tradition as a mirror of modernity, were introduced in our discourse about the festival by Droba himself.
Our conversations, taking place during the regular board sessions, frequently went beyond the current programming issues and turned into philosophical debates. This led Droba, partly inspired by Krzysztof Szwajgier, to initiate the programme board panel discussions in Radziejowice. The aim was to take important joint decisions in an atmosphere more conducive to the exchange of ideas, listening, commenting on music, etc. It was in Radziejowice that we discussed the festival’s identity and obligations in the face of transformations taking place in cultural realities, social life, and art (including music) worldwide.
These, then, were the main elements of Droba’s impact on the ‘Warsaw Autumn’. I could also quote his other contributions here, such as his texts and commentaries printed in the festival’s programme books, but the importance of his personality is much greater than that of any individual projects. His significance lay in the essential debates that he initiated, the standards that he set for them, in his impact on the views and attitudes of his interlocutors within the programme board. His own term ‘wise listening’ meant, apart from many other things, also looking for and recognising the author, the human being behind the work. For this reason, some styles and stances on composition were not attractive to him. He approached minimalism with reserve, as he did any kind of music that was based on sheer speculation and games, on possibly highly spectacular concepts, but devoid of what could be called existential experience. Experience was for him an essential category in art.
In this context, of fundamental importance to us and to me personally was Droba’s ongoing polemic with Krzysztof Szwajgier. The latter advocates experimentation and innovation in art, and is a sceptical thinker who approaches neo-Romantic ideas with distrust.
Szwajgier:
All that counts is the acousmatic perception of the music work.
Droba:
What counts most of all is the composer’s sincere intention.
I listened to those polemics and was glad that I could side now with one, now with the other in their viewpoints. The ‘Warsaw Autumn’ is a pluralist project, a survey of everything that is essential in the mainstream of contemporary music. The festival therefore holds a place for both these attitudes, as well as for many other views. The only condition is, as Droba once said, for the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ “not to indulge in too much frolicking, since its great tradition does not allow this.”
This having been said, Droba did approve of some more civilised forms of ‘frolicking’. In the context of our debates, which depended on the freedom of opinions and mutual inspirations, Krzysztof changed too, as we all did over the years, along with the changes in art and culture. His stance, rather conservative and ‘neo-Romantic’ at first, became slightly more radical and avant-garde later. During one of our last meetings, he confessed, to everyone’s surprise, that his most valuable experience related to work on the programme board was that it gave him the opportunity to revise his own attitude to, and understanding of music.
“Serving for many years on the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ programme board has been a great adventure for me, and a lesson in conversing (often in a refreshingly stormy manner) and thinking about music.”
Krzysztof had the gift of grasping the gist and value of each piece he listened to. His usually unerring judgment was accompanied by an impressive ability to characterise the music. His opinions were enriched by a philosophical dimension, and had a moral direction. He aimed at truth and at an affirmation of good. He could perfectly tell authenticity from falsehood in both the music and humans to whom he dedicated his attention. He valued sincerity and purity of intentions highly, while steering clear of games, pretence, and hypocrisy. His arguments were pertinent and convincing. He was the source of fantastic and unforgettable sayings, maxims, and one-liners. Most of all, he advocated the belief in the importance of music and art at large, and in their moral significance.
Tadeusz Wielecki, October 2020