Re-premiering Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern’s Mourning Triptych

J. Mackenzie Pierce traces a work by composer Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern from archives in Warsaw to US concert halls, illuminating both WWII-era performance practice and the process of reinterpreting lost sound worlds.

I first stumbled on the name Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern in a compact dictionary devoted to Polish-Jewish musicians. Among the names of forgotten figures from Poland’s classical music scene in the 1930s and 1940s, his entry struck me because of his vast accomplishments and the ultimate tragedy of his career. He was born in 1904 and converted from Judaism to Catholicism as a teenager. His education and professional life encompassed music composition and law in equal measures. Professionally, he was a lawyer in the Polish prosecutor general’s office in Poznań, and also became a music critic for the city’s leading newspaper, authoring dozens of reviews. Early attention as a composer came from his highly expressive and romantic Concerto for Voice and Orchestra (1928), based on Tadeusz Miciński’s Orland Szalony (Orlando Furioso). Frequently performed by the renowned soprano Ewa Bandrowska-Turska during the 1930s, Kassern’s Concerto for Voice was presented by the Orchestre Pasdeloup in Paris and the Cleveland Orchestra, and saw additional performances in Poznań, Warsaw, Moscow, Stockholm, and Antwerp.

A 1928 page from Tadeusz Kassern's press clippings, describing a prize he received from the Association of Young Musician-Poles in Paris. Scan by author.

Kassern’s relatively comfortable life was derailed first by World War II and then by the installation of communist rule in Poland after the war. He managed to survive under German occupation by pretending to be a dead relative. After the war concluded, he took a diplomatic post in the Polish consulate in New York, where he helped to organize cultural events and promote Polish music in the United States. In 1948, however, he defected to the United States after seeing the extent of Sovietization in Poland on a brief visit home. Although he continued to be active as a composer of pedagogical works and operas in exile, he was largely forgotten following his premature death from cancer in 1957.

Often, such a biographical sketch is where our knowledge about composers like Kassern abruptly falls off. The compositions, letters, and diaries of émigré composers can be easily lost, disappearing into the void of attics or discarded over the decades. Kassern was more fortunate: his widow, Longina, preserved his papers and made the auspicious decision to have them returned to Poland, where they were taken by the University of Warsaw Library. Thanks to this donation, the materials—including his letters, press-clippings, and manuscripts—were more accessible to scholars with the language skill to begin making sense of them. Intrigued by these documents, and by what little I knew of Kassern’s biography, I made my way to his archive.

Exterior of the University of Warsaw Library, where Kassern’s papers are housed. Photo by the author.

Of the long list of compositions that the archivist handed me at the library, one stood out: the Tryptyk Żałobny, or Mourning Triptych, a set of three songs for soprano and piano that Kassern wrote in fall 1945. This date would make it one of his earliest postwar compositions, completed shortly after he had survived the war and the Holocaust. It was completed at a time when the future of Poland—in political, cultural, and musical terms—was still uncertain. But most intriguing to me was how the title seemed to point to a work that directly acknowledged the losses of war through the intimacy of song, during a time when most composers in Poland were writing grand, large-scale symphonic works that attempted to abruptly move on from the utter destruction their country had faced. So I ordered the manuscript and waited.

No other aspect of musicological research rivals the emotional highs and lows of visiting an archive. As the container for the material traces of a life, a composer’s archive dangles the tantalizing possibility of providing clear-cut answers, promising to unearth the piece of evidence that finally clarifies a work or key period in a composer’s biography. But as one opens each folder, untying the twine that holds the cover shut, this excitement dissolves when the documents reveal more questions and lead to frustration. The papers that remain are often uninteresting and capriciously preserved, since, after all, an archive is nothing more than a massive pile of papers, and most of the papers each of us save have little historical value.

But the manuscript of the Mourning Triptych was immediately intriguing. As I slid the score—in Kassern’s minute, rounded handwriting—out of the folder, the mysteries multiplied with each new page I examined. The dedication “to the memory of Roman Padlewski” jumped off the page, raising the most basic questions of who Padlewski was, how he had died, and why Kassern had wished to memorialize him. Turning the pages, and beginning to decipher the Polish language, also revealed a text of great weight and darkness: Why had Kassern chosen to set sixteenth-century texts that described the pain of Jesus’s crucifixion and the Virgin Mary’s agony to frame his own loss? But the most burning question, as I sat in the archive’s quiet reading room with no piano in sight, was a simple one: how do these songs sound?

Exploring a composition like Kassern’s Triptych feels much like premiering a work by a living composer. In both cases, we have little idea what the music will sound like until it is performed, and our perception of the work depends largely on the quality of the performance. Whereas new music grows out of the professional collaborations and friendships that bring composers and musicians together, the composer is wholly missing when “re-premiering” an archival score. We cannot ask Kassern about questionable notes or expressive markings, and there is no critical edition or prior recording to consult. But, we are also missing the musicians he worked with and the friends with whom he talked about music, art, and life—and with them, a sense for this music’s significance.

The Mourning Triptych contains several clues about this now-vanished musical world, clues that as I followed them brought into focus these now-lost musical relations. To begin unraveling them, let’s return to my earlier question about the work’s dedication: who was Roman Padlewski and why did he receive this dedication? Padlewski and Kassern knew each other from 1930s Poznań, where they had frequented the same musical circles, and Padlewski even took over Kassern’s position as the music critic at the Poznań Daily in 1938. Padlewski had shown considerable talent as a composer and violinist from a young age. During WWII, he performed at clandestine concerts that took place in apartments in occupied Warsaw, premiering in this manner several of his own compositions, including his sonata for solo violin and second string quartet. This latter composition was even smuggled out of the country on microfilm and published in London under a pseudonym, all part of an effort to demonstrate the continued vitality of Poland’s composers despite the German occupation.

Roman Padlewski in a pre-1939 portrait. National Digital Archive of Poland, Public Domain.

Then came fall 1944: Padlewski was a soldier in the Warsaw Uprising, an ill-fated attempt by the Polish resistance to wrest control of the capital from German rule in the closing days of the war. Wounded in the fighting in central Warsaw, he spent two days dying in agony in a makeshift hospital, all the while grasping a small portrait of the Virgin Mary and fearing that his mother would be devastated to learn of his injury. The details of his demise spread at first through rumor among musicians who had known him. Eventually these details became so widely discussed that letters concerning his death were published in Poland’s main music periodical, The Musical Movement.

As I learned these details, it became clear that Kassern’s commemoration of Padlewski went beyond the dedicatory text, as he sprinkled details of Padlewski’s life and death in the composition itself. For example, the first song of the Triptych, “She stood under the cross (Stabat Mater),” is based on the Stabat Mater sequence, which Padlewski had himself set in a large-scale choral a cappella work in 1939. The Triptych’s obsession with the Virgin Mary also calls to mind several of Padlewski’s earlier compositions, including his 1933 song, “Ryngraf” (“The Gorget”), which depicts prayer to the Virgin Mary in a quasi-liturgical manner. Most strikingly, the narration in the songs of Mary’s grief at the death of Jesus echoes Padlewski’s situation rather directly: both Mary and Padlewski’s mother grieve the loss of their sons, sacrificed for a greater cause. Kassern wove the dedication into the fabric of the music, creating a web of allusions that those who had known Padlewski would have likely grasped. Perhaps the musicians who attended the work’s premiere on September 3, 1945, heard these details in the performance by soprano Stanisława Zawadzka and Kassern on piano.

Listen to how Kassern sets the text of the first song, which pivots between describing Mary’s grief and the poetic speaker’s own desire to participate in her loss—moving between mourning as an individual act and a collective one:

I. Stała pod krzyżem (Stabat Mater) I. She Stood under the Cross (Stabat Mater)

Stała pod krzyżem troskliwa Under the cross stood the grieving
Matka z płaczu ledwie żywa, Mother hardly alive from weeping,
A Syn wisząc krwią spływa. And her hanging son flows with blood.

Cna matko, źródło miłości, Oh mother of virtue, source of love,
Niech czuję gwałt twej miłości, May I feel the force of your love,
dozwól mi z Tobą płakać. Allow me to weep with You.

Jaki ból wziął serce onej What suffering seized the heart of that
rodzice błogosławionej Blessed parent,
Jednym synem wsławionej By her only son made renowned.

Pragnę stać pod krzyżem z Tobą I desire to stand under the cross with you
dzielić się z Twoją osobą To share with Your person,
tak surowym płaczem, Such severe lament
dzielić z Tobą płaczem. To share with you your lament.

As you heard in this 2019 performance by soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, Kassern sets the text with understated piano writing and a slowly unfolding melody. It is as if the music brings us through the grieving process, never really arriving at a moment of harmonic clarity, as the audience is asked to relive the facts of loss. If the songs embed details of Padlewski’s life and death, they also gesture toward the generality—even universality—of grief.

Although I hope this interpretation is clear to you as you listen, as I think it might have been to audience members over seventy years ago, it was not obvious to us when we first began working on performing these songs. As I was writing this essay, I listened again to some of our earliest recordings of the Triptych, remembering all the stages the project had gone through. Early on, it was a challenge to decode many words in Kassern’s handwriting, and then to render the poetry, some of it rather archaic, into English. Later, Lucy asked about every nuance of the Polish pronunciation, drawing my own ear to how the sounds of the language and of the music strengthened one another. I followed many clues in the score that ultimately did not shed much light on the songs, such as spending weeks tracking down some of the historical source materials that Kassern had used as the basis for the songs. In the end, sound and cultural interpretation began to converge: what I learned from reading in the archives strengthened the musical interpretation, just as the performance clarified why the archival stories mattered.

After he defected from Poland in 1948, Kassern attempted to piece together a living in the United States, teaching piano and music history in New York City. At first, “I had absolutely no security nor possibilities for work, not even as a music copyist,” he explained in a letter to Roman Palester, another composer considering defecting. In addition to losing the security of his government position, he had also given up his connections to Polish performers, conductors, publishing houses, and state financing. What he had lost through his defection proved difficult to recreate in the United States, despite receiving a Koussevitzky Foundation commission for his opera The Anointed. When his long-pending application for citizenship was rejected in September 1955, he attempted to commit suicide. Although the publicity from this event helped him to gain permanent entry in 1956, he died from cancer the following year.

Kassern’s fall into obscurity was extreme, but it followed a pattern common to many neglected composers. While a small minority of composers are so famous that continued posthumous performances are ensured, many more composers face perilous prospects when they die. Often, composers are the most powerful advocates for their music. After a composer is gone, friends and colleagues can help by advocating for continued performances or recordings, and even begin examining compositions in scholarship. With time, such support helps to create momentum, but without it, the music more often than not falls out of the concert repertoire. For every Stravinsky or Bernstein, there are a dozen Kasserns.

While there has been much progress recently in rehabilitating the works of once-forgotten composers, such as Julius Eastman or Mieczysław Weinberg, we still routinely overlook countless beautiful works like Kassern’s Triptych. More worryingly, we don’t know what we are missing. What lies beyond the canon remains largely unheard.

Musicologists have spent the last two decades critiquing this state of affairs. Through careful research they have shown how membership in the canon is not a validation of a composer’s genius, but rather reflects the contingencies and serendipities of history. By and large, however, these critiques have not addressed the pragmatic role played by the canon: as a socially sanctioned list of worthwhile compositions, the canon guarantees that the countless hours spent learning a composition will be worth the effort and that programming the work will pique audience interest. To move a neglected work back into the concert hall requires more than understanding the reasons for its demise; it requires proving that the work is worth a considerable investment of resources.

Explorations of neglected repertoire, including our performances of Kassern’s Triptych, often begin at universities, where grant funding can provide a cushion against the commercial pressures that influence programming decisions. The educational setting is also vital to fostering the collaboration between scholars, performers, and students that is needed to explore such older repertoires. Few individuals have the combination of language skills, time, and performance acumen to find and premiere new pieces alone, but working together can help connect works with performers. Indeed, students have had an outsized impact on disseminating works that few others have mastered, bringing fresh repertoire—and fresh perspectives—to the concert hall. But perhaps most importantly, re-premiering old music reiterates one of the most essential musical and scholarly skills teachers and students seek to cultivate: to create meaning from ambiguous and incomplete traces, whether a composer’s letters in the archive or notes on a page.

Further Reading:
Dobrzański, Sławomir. “Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern’s American Years.” Polin Studies in Polish Jewry 32 (2020): 387–91.
Kostka, Violetta. Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern: indywidualne odmiany stylów muzycznych XX wieku. Poznań: Rhytmos, 2011.
Pierce, J. Mackenzie. Life and Death for Music: A Polish Generation’s Journey across War and Reconstruction, 1926–53. Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 2019.
Thomas, Adrian. Polish Music since Szymanowski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

May 21, 2020