10 years in Łódź

For the next ten years, I worked as a pedagogue at the State Higher Music School in Łódź. At this point, I should go back to 1944, when I was offered a job as an organist in Ursus near Warsaw. I took this job because it provided better financial conditions and because I wanted to shelter my family: the Warsaw Uprising was just about to break out. At that time we had a daughter Antonina and we were expecting another baby. Although Ursus is just eight kilometres away from Warsaw, we managed to avoid all the atrocities of the Uprising and we even offered refuge to many of our friends and acquaintances who had escaped from transports to the Reich.

In 1949, I was invited by the rector of the State Higher Music School in Łódź Prof. Kazimierz Sikorski and the dean Kazimierz Jurdziński to co-operate with them as a professor of harmony, counterpoint and other theoretical subjects. Together with my family, which at that time included my wife and three children (Antonina, Artur and Paweł) we left Płock and went to Łódź. We had a very difficult start in the new place, but gradually our situation improved. In 1954 I took a parallel job as a pedagogue at the Higher State School of Music in Warsaw, where I commuted twice a week.

In 1959, Prof. Kazimierz Sikorski, at that time already the rector of the Higher State  School of Music in Warsaw appointed me a lecturer of theoretical subjects at that School. So, we moved house once again, this time from Łódź to Warsaw, our final destination. The stay in Łódź took a round ten years. We did not feel attached to that place. Those ten years were an episode in our life. Throughout that period, we never gave up the thought of returning to Warsaw. On the other hand, from the point of view of my artistic development, the stay in Łódź was very fruitful. It was in Łódź that I composed two symphonies, two concertos for the piano, a violin concerto and numerous chamber, choir and didactic works. It was here that I was first recognised as a composer. In consultation with the Łódź pedagogues, I created many didactic works. In particular, I mean the works created in co-operation with Prof. Emma Altberg, Prof. Zofia Romaszkowa and Prof. Franciszek Jamry, whose advice I used when composing the violin concerto. It was very important for my artistic development that all the new works were performed immediately.

…back in Warsaw

/Written by the composer in Warsaw, Poland, on November 20, 1995/