'Are you lost? This is a composition class, miss.'
The year was 1928. Grażyna Bacewicz was 18 years old and no stranger to rigorous musical training. But, at the first meeting of a composition seminar at Warsaw Conservatory, her fellow students, all male, greeted her with the words above. How did she react?
'The jokes and snide remarks about me didn’t last long, three weeks at most,' she wrote later. 'Instinctively — because this wasn’t deliberate — I adopted an attitude which must have restrained them. I simply paid no attention to their cutting remarks. Thus I took the wind out of their sails. We became great friends.'
Grażyna was soon to prove the most gifted of her cohort and became a hugely significant cultural figure in mid-20th century Poland. She was a talented violinist and concertmistress of the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in the years before WWII. However, her fiercest drive was for creation, not performance.
'This fascinating figure remains somewhat in the shadows'
Bacewicz’s music — marked by a discipline honed under Nadia Boulanger, with whom she studied in 1930s Paris — has its own distinctive character: harmonically neoclassical, rhythmically fresh and propulsive. She was prolific, universally respected, and as decorated in her lifetime, it seems, as any European female composer before Kaija Saariaho.
And yet this fascinating figure remains somewhat in the shadows. I only started seriously listening to Bacewicz while researching repertoire for a song programme I was developing. The programme (which became an album entitled Forget This Night) was centered around Clairières dans le ciel, a stunning, infrequently-performed cycle by Lili Boulanger, and it had widened to include the passionate music of Karol Szymanowski.
When I bumped up against Bacewicz, I knew I’d found the third compositional voice the programme needed — direct, expressive, fluidly vocal. Despite growing name recognition, her collected songs for voice and piano (all in Polish) were recorded for the first time only in 2022. Why are they so little known?
'Neutrality was impossible'
Bacewicz destroyed much of her vocal music in middle age. She was ruthlessly critical of her youthful songs and seemed to associate the genre with dusty aesthetic trappings of femininity. Instrumental pieces allowed more scope for development (artistically and professionally), so she focused on those until her death.
When I compared her professional choices to Lili Boulanger’s, I was struck anew by the conundrum faced by female creators of the 20th century. In addition to the normal artistic challenges their male peers also faced, they had to grapple with the creation of a public persona relative to the patriarchal expectations of their time. Neutrality was impossible.
Lili came of age in Paris as the French cultural establishment was reluctantly opening up to female contributors; she chose to play up her gender for professional gain. Grażyna, equipped with some advantages Lili lacked — strong health and several decades of social progress already behind her — responded to chauvinism with a posture of indifference that masked an ongoing inner struggle.
What was the 'Pink Peril'?
In 1912, the French critic Emile Vuillermoz published an article entitled Le Péril Rose — the 'Pink Peril'. It’s a pungent read, full of breathless predictions about how ambitious women would topple the cultural status quo. “The Conservatoire, where they already hold the majority, will end by becoming their personal property. (...) In the director's office, Gabriel Fauré will be chased from his position by Hélène Fleury or Nadia Boulanger” — two of the first female finalists for the Prix de Rome, France’s most prestigious composition competition.
One irony here is that Nadia Boulanger, who gave up her own compositional aspirations early, did indeed become the most revered musical pedagogue of the 20th century, nurturing the talents of innumerable composers (mostly men) who are now household names. Another is that the first woman to win the Premier Grand Prix — Nadia’s younger sister Lili, in 1913 — would be denied by her early death the long career that could have changed the establishment’s attitude for good.
Lili Boulanger: genius curtailed
Still, her achievements were astonishing. Lili Boulanger lived, developed, and composed as vividly as possible in her 24 years. In public, she and her family cultivated her image as 'petite Lili': a delicate, unthreatening child-genius. This image persists today (to the long-term detriment of her legacy instead of to its advantage).
However, her letters reveal a savvy, hardworking professional capable of calculating the exact impact she would make with her dress, deportment, and words, as well as her actual music, to disarm cultural gatekeepers and win opportunities.
In any case, no one argued with the assurance and vision of her compositions: contemporary reviews, even when they dwell on Lili’s frail physique or express paternalistic surprise at her music’s muscularity, universally praise their high quality.
Of course, she was still a young composer whose most fertile creative years coincided with the horrors and curtailments of WWI. If cultural life had been as normal, she would have benefited from hearing her pieces rehearsed and performed regularly.
Clairières dans le ciel is a major work, traversing a vast emotional landscape in music of great beauty and psychological insight. However, the songs contain some interpretive and technical puzzles that an older composer might have reworked before the piece reached proof state.
Why do we distinguish between male and female composers?
Is this the reason that many later critics dismissed Lili Boulanger’s oeuvre as mere juvenilia? Although Nadia tirelessly championed her sister’s legacy, Lili’s name was absent from the concert hall until recently—around the same time that Bacewicz’s name began to pop up more regularly outside Poland.
'The fact that commentators constantly distinguished between male and female composers immensely irritated Grażyna,' said Witold Lutosławski, one of her great admirers. 'She believed that it made no sense.'
Still, Bacewicz didn’t have the luxury of entirely ignoring patriarchal expectations. A generation earlier, Lili Boulanger had to walk an even thinner line between achievement and presentation; she managed this with remarkable skill and precise calculation. Both women’s works were highly praised in their lifetimes, but are only now finding a foothold in international programming.
'Misogynistic rhetoric' that lives on today
The misogynistic rhetoric of the 'Pink Peril' has been repackaged again and again. It lives on nowadays in tired debates about whether there have actually been any good female composers, or whether recent attention to marginalized voices is just opportunistic wokery.
How can we hope to make a balanced assessment until more women’s work is performed at the highest possible level? We hope that Forget This Night can make a contribution toward the broader re-evaluation of the works of Boulanger and Bacewicz on their own merits—and can help push against absurd polemics like the Pink Peril and its modern equivalents.
Forget This Night, featuring works by Lili Boulanger, Karol Szymanowski, and Grażyna Bacewicz, recorded by Katharine Dain (soprano) and Sam Armstrong (piano), is out now on 7 Mountain Records.
You can stream, download and purchase the album at https://lnk.to/KatharineDainRegardsSurLInfini