Simon Laks and his songs 

To be, or not to be: that is the question.

Due to his descent, the Polish-Jewish composer Simon Laks (1901–1983)¹ was long denied international recognition. His shared this fate with a number of other notable composers. They have the same origins and belong to the same generation, were born around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Although Laks was not without success during his lifetime, a systematic reappraisal of his works has taken place only in recent years, including the publication of unpublished works and the reissue of long out-of-print editions as the basis for their active reception. The recognition of the Polish musicians who were victims of the Nazi terror between 1939 and 1945 stood and still stands in the shadow of the rediscovery of the so-called "Theresienstadt composers," of the elite musicians of Czech descent who attained posthumous prominence through their activities in the Nazi's "showcase" concentration camp, and whose works play a role in today’s musical life. Mieczysław (Moishe) Weinberg emerged from out of this shadow. His case would appear to be the proverbial exception to the rule. However, he is considered a Soviet rather than a Polish composer, which certainly can be justified in terms of biography and style. But Laks shares the fate with Waghalter, Tansman, Strasfogel, Fitelberg (father and son), Rathaus, and Kletzki, who were able to save themselves into American exile; shares it with Mendelson and Koffler, who died in the Shoah; with Szpilman, Kassern, and Tchaikowsky, who were saved through an infinite series of miracles and through the courage of their fellow countrymen; fate means: being nearly completely ignored in today's musical life.

Laks believed that if anything from his compositional oeuvre had the potential to survive, it would be his songs. Ironically, it was his songs² whose rediscovery took the longest³ (perhaps with the exception of the Eight Jewish Folk Songs, which have enjoyed a sustained popularity since they were written in 1947). This is partly attributable to the fact that for several decades the genre has been increasingly neglected by concert organizers; on the other hand, to the fact that Polish, the language of the majority of his songs, is not a lingua franca of international musical life. Thus, it took many years until, with Ania Vegry and Katarzyna Wasiak, the ideal interpreters for this fascinating corpus of songs were found; a cycle that one can without doubt count among the most important of the twentieth century – by virtue of the outstanding quality of the music and texts (the poets set by Laks rank among the most prominent Polish-language poets in the twentieth century). But important above all before the background of experiences that flowed into these songs are the experiences that make them a testimony to a deeply moving humanism.

We owe Laks's songs above all to his acquaintance and intensive collaborations with two outstanding Polish singers: with Tola Korian (he composed for her mainly in the years immediately before the Second World War in Paris; after the Second World War, she became internationally famous as an actress, singer, and diseuse), and with Halina Szymulska. The latter inspired and animated him in the early 1960s to a significant number of settings of primarily contemporary Polish poetry. Between these two creative periods stands the experience of Auschwitz. In the songs composed after 1945, this is reflected in various ways – directly, but also hidden.

Laks's biography has not yet been written, fundamental research not yet undertaken, and, in the case of several songs, it is impossible to provide precise information concerning the composition and reception history. Between 1941 and 1945,⁴ during the time of his incarceration in French and German concentration camps, numerous documents and also compositions were lost. We know of their existence through Laks's correspondence or through his texts, such as that about Tola Korian (of which excerpts are quoted in this booklet). Laks indeed had a habit of writing the names of the text authors on the title pages of his manuscripts. But many songs are not dated. One is easily lead astray even in the cases of songs published during his lifetime. Thus, the first three of the Five Songs on Poems by Julian Tuwim were probably written in 1938, the last two, however, only in 1961. The cycle was published another seven years later by the Polish state publishing house PWM. In the cases of those songs of which only the manuscript is preserved (about half of them), the manuscript provides information about whether it is a work from before or after the war. But here, too, caution has to be exercised. Many particulars concerning dates in various existing catalogues of works could not be verified yet, and thus for the time being remain in the realm of speculation. The authorship of several texts is still unclear. Jednego całowałam z miłości/One I Kissed out of Love is presumably by Tola Korian. Concerning the problematic nature of Aniołowe lica, see footnote 6. Pożegnanie/The Farewell was long attributed to Ludwik Żuk-Skarszewski. Recently, however, it was discovered that Zygmunt Rózicky was the author, and that the poem stems from a 1911 edition.

The collaboration between Tola Korian and Simon Laks on the eve of the Second World War seems to have been limited to France and Poland. This appears to be confirmed by the fact that songs which were composed in Polish in the original, were later or contemporaneously translated into French (see the typed text of Walczyk from Laks's estate with an added handwritten translation into French). Singable translations in English are first found in printed editions from after the war.

In general, the order of the songs on the present CDs is chronological, in as far as a clear chronology is possible owing to the abovementioned difficulties. CD 1 primarily documents the songs written up to 1939; CD 2, those after 1945. For a few songs, above all on CD 1, this system is abandoned in favor of thematic interrelationships.

As a bonus track, we document on CD 1 the chanson Alkoholik in a historical recording from 1939 with the legendary chansonnier and actor Miecysław Fogg. The chanson stems from the music that Laks wrote for Aleksander Ford's film Przebudzenie/The Awakening from 1934. It is an important document of Laks's success beyond his Parisian sphere of activity in the 1930s. For the interpretation of the anti-war melodrama Le Général, we were able to engage the chansonnier and actor Dominique Horwitz. We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks for his participation in this project.

An important key to understanding Laks's songs is naturally the choice of his poets. His character as well as his aspiration as a composer are reflected in his preferences. It is conspicuous that a large number of the texts set to music come from authors who belonged to the Skamander group, which was founded in Warsaw in 1918. The first and foremost of these is their doyen Julian Tuwim. We have fourteen settings of his works alone. He is followed by Słonimski, Baliński, Iwaszkiewicz and Jastrun with one text each. The aesthetic direction of these poets can be compared to that of similar artists' associations of the time in other countries. In the area of music, for example, with the "Groupe des Six" (Poulenc, Honegger, Milhaud, Tailleferre, Auric, and Durey) active in France. They represented, alongside the protagonists of the "École de Paris" (Tansman, Martinů, Mihalovici, Beck, Tscherepnin), tendencies with which Laks was able to identify – he, who was not able to feel at home in Vienna, settled in Paris in 1926. The "Groupe des Six," like the protagonists of the "École de Paris," were in turn affiliated with the "Association des jeunes musiciens polonais," which was founded in Paris in 1926 by Szymanowski's pupil Piotr Perkowski. Laks was to play an important role in this association. What united all of them was the renunciation of all late-romantic, impressionistic, and expressionistic tendencies, but also of any kind of academicism. Whereas for the composers, playing with baroque and classical forms and styles became the source of inspiration, the poets sharpened their quills on classical meters and verse forms. A trivialization due to the choice of themes dealing with simple life was counteracted on the technical level by their virtuosity. Characteristic of both areas, the linguistic as well as the musical, was the lifting of the borders between "serious" and "light." The "classical" musical language of trained composers was infiltrated by jazz harmonies and rhythms. The chanson was no longer the undignified little sister of the art song. Its composition required another, but not a lesser artistry. No other Polish-speaking poet of the first half of the twentieth century celebrated the reconciliation of these two artistic hemispheres with such dedication and mastery as Tuwim. Precisely because of this, Laks was bound to him through an artistic affinity.⁵ We owe to texts by Tuwin the most "spiritual" as well as the most "humoristic" settings from Laks's pen. Compare, for example, Modlitwa/Prayer and Przymierze/Covenant from the cycle of Five Songs with Walczyk/Little Waltz or Alkoholik/The Drunkard. The former are clearly to be attributed to the "serious," the latter to the "light" sphere. In addition, in the Laks-Tuwim catalogue we find examples of successful synthesis, for example, of a conscious playing with ambivalence. Tuwim's great popularity beyond Poland can certainly be explained by a special talent for bringing out the serious in the humorous, and the humorous in the serious. Laks finds congenial musical equivalents for these. Some of Tuwin's texts "function" like a joke. They build up tension. Then, their sudden denouement in a completely unexpected point makes us laugh; and in the echo of our laugh we recognize the philosophical underground of the parable. In Dyzio marzyciel/Dyzio the Dreamer, the wishful condition of our existence of our existence resounds. In Bezdomna/The Homeless, the homelessness of all earthly life; and in the melancholy of the Little Waltz, the sorrow permeates the lost "good old days" that, as one knows, were never so good as our memory leads us to believe. The perception of the "human, all too human" pervades Tuwim's texts. And Laks draws his touching tones from this emotionality "between the lines." Time and again he finds astonishing artifices, like, to give but one example, the relentlessly canonic voices in the right and left hand of the piano part in Staruszkowie, the Old People. In this way, the supposedly introspective text attains its incisiveness. Particularly the relentlessly running time is experienced with nearly physical intensity – a musical "translation" of Tuwim's image of the torn-off calendar sheets. With the litany-like repetition of a simple phrase, the melody finds a manifest analogy for the monotony of the couple’s days, which pass invariably following the same pattern.

The most moving Tuwim settings by Laks are doubtlessly those in which earthly and heavenly existences are juxtaposed. In them, the creative ego converses with and judges God, the creator: Przymierze/Covenant, Aniołowe lica/Angel Faces,⁶ Modlitwa/Prayer, Prośba o piosenkę/Request for a Song. The latter two are written and composed from the perspective of the artist who sees his place and his function in a cruel world. God must answer for this world. Tuwim experienced firsthand the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Poland after the restoration of national sovereignty in 1918. Fierce hostility on the part of the right-wing press hurt him deeply – that is what Erratum is about. After Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939, Tuwim was able to flee into exile. But he lost members of his family in the Shoah.⁷ The parallels to Laks's biography are striking. The fortieth year of life, to which Tuwim alludes in Erratum regarding events in his own life, is the year 1941. In that year, Laks was imprisoned by the Vichy authorities on account of his Jewish descent. There his ordeal began. Laks would paraphrase both Erratum as well as Request for a Song in his only opera L'Hirondelle inattendue/The Unexpected Swallow, and, like a palimpsest, provide them with a new text.⁸ While in the opera the music of Erratum accompanies the beginning of a court hearing – or rather actually that of a selection process – the melody of Request for a Song receives an entirely new interpretation. The imploring request of an artist, who wants to fight against the tyrants of this world with his "weapons," that is to say, with his art, becomes a hymn to the immortality of the melody. It exists in its immateriality, whereas all things material must pass.

Laks dealt with the experience of Auschwitz in a number of songs, from the first compositions written after Auschwitz and Dachau up to his last – unsystematically to be sure, but consistently. His Third String Quartet, the first work created in his regained freedom,⁹ is based on a series of Polish folk songs "without words." One could interpret the Passacaille from 1946 as a kind of "elegy without words," and the Eight Jewish Folks Songs provide the portrait of the annihilated world of the shtetl en miniature (see the text by Antoni Buchner). With the Elegia żydowskich miasteczek/Elegy for the Jewish Villages after Antoni Słonimski, Laks created in 1961 one of the most poignant artistic documents about the destruction of Jewish and Polish life by Nazi Germany. The work concludes with an appeal for the brotherly reconciliation of these two peoples, "who were nourished by the same suffering."

We find a specific reference to Auschwitz in Pogrzeb/The Funeral by Mieczysław Jastrun. Likewise of Jewish descent, Jastrun survived World War 2 under a false identity in the Warsaw underground. Ania Vegry und Katarzyna Wasiak performed the song, together with Gdybyś/If You Only on a text by Ludwik Żuk-Skarszewski, on 29 January 2020 on the occasion of the memorial hour in the German parliament for the victims of National Socialism. Żuk numbered among the people who saved Laks's life in Auschwitz.¹⁰ It is Laks’s last composition, written in 1974, seven years after he had officially stopped composing. He had quit in view of the renewed existential threat to the Jewish people in the Six-Day War, the anti-Israel alliance of communist Poland with the Arabic countries, and the anti-Semitic climate in his native land.

Laks's collaboration with Tola Korian continued after the war. The internationally acclaimed star always had songs, chansons, and melodramas by Laks in her program. A new creative chapter was then opened by the acquaintance with soprano Halina Szymulska. She became his muse in the early 1960s. From the poetry that she sent him on a regular basis from Warsaw to Paris, he sought out suitable texts. But he also set of his own choice. Among these were songs on texts by Wanda Maya Berezowska, the two last Tuwim songs from the Five Songs, the Request for a Song, and the Elegy for the Jewish Villages after Antoni Słonimski. Szymulska performed everything that he gave her. One exception was Pogrzeb/The Funeral, which she literally could not bring herself to utter, due to the harshness of the text. Laks composed for the singer's enormous vocal possibilities. Compared to most of the songs composed before the war, those written for her are characterized by greater complexity and an advanced harmonic language. The melodic line is frequently broken by expressive leaps. The piano part time and again leads a rigorous life of its own with respect to the voice.

Poetry of the twentieth century dominates in Laks's oeuvre to an astonishing degree. There are merely two songs on texts by nineteenth-century authors. Because of this particularity, they should be mentioned. The texts could not be more different: Jules Laforgue's C'est d'un' maladie d'cœur, in which the young poet yearns for the reunion with his deceased mother in the jargon of a Parisian street urchin (he lost her at the age of seventeen; he himself died at the age of twenty-seven). Laks brings out the erotic ambivalence of the text in the nonchalant chanson style of the 1930s; and, in contrast, Adam Mickiewicz's Polały się łzy me/My Tears Fell, a text that evokes in a few lines the broken biography of the refugees of the 1830 Revolution. Laks composed it on the occasion of the Polish national poet's 150th birthday.¹¹ The autobiographical connection to his own fate is evident.

Laks experienced in Auschwitz the change from a life for music to a survival through the music. The question of "to be or not to be" did not hang only by the thread of chance. Owing to the role of the orchestras in the structure of the camp, musicians simply had significantly better chances of survival. A possibility of dealing with this traumatic experience was doubtlessly irony.¹² Against this backdrop, the setting of Claude Aveline's legendary poem about the Bird-That-Does-Not-Exist receives special importance among Laks's songs. After its publication, the poem curiously caused a flood of pictorial realizations – a collection of some 120 drawings, graphics, and oil paintings is today found in Centre Pompidou in Paris. The surreal aspect, which gets lost in many illustrations in the attempt to depict the nonexistent, receives, on the other hand, additional intensification through the musical realization. The first acquaintance with Aveline in 1964 resulted in the collaboration on Laks's opera The Unexpected Swallow. It is based on a radio play by Aveline, and carries the ontological game with ornithology to the extreme. Behind the witty plot, the main role of which is a chanson – L'Hirondelle du Faubourg/The Swallow of the Suburb, a French evergreen from 1912 – is hidden a profound reflection on reality and appearance, material and spiritual existence, mortality and immortality. After Monteverdi's Orfeo, a more beautiful apologia for music has perhaps never been written, most definitely none that is wittier.

This recording is dedicated to the memory of Antoni Buchner (1941–2014), musicologist, philosopher, and bridge builder between the cultures, who contributed significantly to the continued effect of Simon Laks's musical and intellectual legacy.

Frank Harders-Wuthenow, September 2020

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¹ Szymon Laks Frenchified his first name in France to Simon. Concerning his biography, see the documents compiled in the appendix of the new French complete edition of Laks's writings about the role of music in Auschwitz (Simon Laks, Mélodies d’Auschwitz et autres écrits sur les camps, Éditions du Cerf, Paris 2018). Information in German about the life and works are found in the new edition of Laks's book Musik in Auschwitz, Boosey & Hawkes, Berlin 2014/2018; an English edition of Laks's book, under the title Music of Another World, was published by Northwestern University Press in 1989, with a paperback edition in 2000. The booklet texts of all the recordings of works by Laks that have appeared on eda records since 2006 are available on the website. Concerning Laks's songs, see also the dissertation by Molly McCoy, "The Polish songs of Szymon Laks," University of Texas at Austin, 1987. McCoy received valuable information from Laks's widow Paulina, from Laks's brother Henry, and from André Laks.

² The present production encompasses all of Laks's songs, chansons, and melodramas accessible at the present time, with the exception of a cycle of twenty songs: Z Mroków i Świtów/Ombres et lumières (Shadow and Light), antifascist "workers and peasants" songs. They appeared in 1948 in Paris in Polish and French as an echo of the horrors of the Second World War, but in terms of genre do not belong in the context of Laks's art songs and chansons. It cannot be ruled out that further songs, which are currently considered to be lost, will crop up during future research.