Małgorzata Sokalska

The notions of melodeclamation and melorecitation are almost synonymous with the genre definition of a song understood as multi-code unity of textual and musical components, for which the appropriate existence form is an audio realisation. Meanwhile, a broader academic research on the phenomenon of melorecitation is lacking, aside from short dictionary descriptions as well as relatively recent connection with the performance style characteristic for rap music. It seems that only there the expression of recitation is treated as something inspiring in connection with the musical element, as in other styles and genres the recitation with music in the background has become synonymous with being kitschy, vocally unskilled and characteristic for school as well as amateur performances of poetry. However, the historical tradition of melodeclamation and the modern examples of introducing recitation and melorecitation to songs with high art aspirations encourage us to looks at such practices more closely. Melorecitation can become a more widely used artistic choice amongst the professional performers (actor song, poetry song) but also a unobvious experiment by the artists using other’s voices – of the poet reciting his own poems – in their own projects. 

The map of the Polish interdisciplinary music-literary research has been enriched during the last years with significant theoretical and analytic-interpretative publications. Researchers from various disciplines attempt to specify the types of relations that can interconnect the literary text and music – focusing not only on the problem of interference between two systems using different signs but also more and more emphasizing the cultural meaning of the phenomena of this kind. The article comments on the horizons of the Polish research devoted to these issues. It situates in this context the book by Małgorzata Sułek Stanisław Moniuszko and other composers and poetry by Adam Mickiewicz, published in 2016. This study offers also a methodological proposal, organizing the reflections on certain aspects of comparative studies (in the introductory treatise). In the second part it collects the rich analytical material. The musical arrangements of poetry by Mickiewicz, created during 19th to 21th centuries, allow to systematically know a non-obvious aspect of the reception of the heritage of the most famous Polish romantic, various ways of approaching his works and interpreting them – with the use of music.

The article which treats about the portraits of woman-spinners is devoted to a comparison of verbal-musical works, which are partly united by the common text (fragment of J.W. Goethe’s Faustus – and in particular the song sung by Margaret at the spinningwheel), and which in part refer to the common image – namely that of a spinning woman. In contemporary theories, the image of a spinning woman is often used as a handy symbol of creativity, and particularly female creativity. However the 19th century popularity of this motif, especially in the numerous songs, points to the fact that it has a much more primeval and broader significance. As a monotonous and typically female activity, spinning served successive composers (F. Schubert, R. Wagner, G. Verdi, S. Moniuszko) to create a more profound characteristic of woman-spinners. Reaching out to similar means of musical expression points to the fact that in spite of resorting to various texts, and in spite of the time interval dividing the analyzed works, the woman spinner from the songs has been permanently associated with onomatopoeic imitation of the sound of the spinning wheel and with the meditative nature of the performed activity which becomes a useful background for a more profound female self-reflection.

Beginning with the novel Król w Nieświeżu. 1784. Obrazki z przeszłości [The King in Neśwież. 1784. Images of the past] by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, the author of the article focuses on selected aspects of the 18th-century Polish opera culture and its infl uence on shaping the contemporary artistic and social worldview. Embodied by two main characters of the novel, Prince Karol Radziwiłł and King Stanisław August Poniatowski, the contrast between, on the one hand, the centre – the enlightened Warsaw and the vision of a new type of government and culture following Western patterns – and on the other hand, the periphery – the eastern borderline, lawless aristocracy and relics of the Sarmatian culture – allows us to take a closer look at the contemporary Polish opera from these two perspectives. This genre, transplanted as early as in the 17th century from the Italian tradition, and symbolizing the presence of Western infl uences in Poland and the Polish theatre being part of the European culture, becomes, at the end of the 18th century, the nucleus of the national theatre and the dramatic genre – not only in the offi cial, Enlightenment version, practised in the Varsovian centre, but also, due to its popularity, in the peripheral centres of culture of the gentry, including numerous aristocratic courts. The presence of the opera within Radziwiłł’s cultural horizon, as documented in  Kraszewski’s novel (Agatka, czyli przyjazd pana [Agatka, i.e. the Arrival of the Lord], staged on the occasion of the king’s visit), constitutes one of the elements of the dialogue conducted by the two cultural circles and representatives of the antagonistic milieus depicted in the novel. It also turns out that the Polish culture of the epoch, considered from the opera perspective, displays surprising thematic, aesthetic, and ideological similarities between its centre and periphery.