Musical life in Slutsk during the years 1733-1760 in the light of archive materials

• Authors: Irena Bieńkowska
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

This article represents the very first attempt at reconstructing musical life in Slutsk (Pol. Sluck) during the first half of the eighteenth century, and it merely outlines the issues involved. Slutsk was a typical private town - a multicultural centre inhabited by Jews, Orthodox Ruthenians, Lithuanians and Poles of the Protestant and Roman-Catholic faiths. Among the representatives of the Roman-Catholic faith, the Jesuits were the main animators of the town’s cultural and educational life, alongside the court of Prince Hieronim Florian Radziwiłł. A medium-sized music boarding school attached to the Jesuit College in Slutsk existed from around 1713. Musical instruments were purchased for the school quite regularly, often in faraway Koenigsberg. The contacts between the boarding school and the prince’s court were relatively frequent and good, and some school leavers found jobs at the court, chiefly in the garrison or janissary band, and sporadically also in Prince Radziwill’s music ensemble. The court was the main centre of the town’s cultural life. Among its numerous artistic ventures, stage shows seem to have been the most spectacular. For the purposes of such performances, a free-standing theatre was built in the centre of Slutsk at the turn of 1753. This building is worth mentioning because of the rarity of such projects in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania during the 1750s. The repertoire of the Slutsk theatre was initially dominated by commedia dell’arte in German and the occasional dramma per música, but during the second half of the 1750s, one-act ballets began to dominate. Among the instrumental works performed in Slutsk were compositions by Carl Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb Graun, Georg Christoph Wagenseil, and musicians active at the Radziwiłł court (Andreas Wappler, Joseph Kohaut and Johannes Battista Hochbrucker), as well as improvisations by Georg Noelli. The town’s artistic heyday ended with the death of Prince Hieronim Florian Radziwiłł, in 1760, and the dissolution of the Society of Jesus, a decade or so later.

Keywords

PL

Slutsk; musical culture; 1733-1760; Hieronim Florian Radziwiłł; Jesuit music boarding school; Jesuit school theatre; aristocratic theatre

• Publisher: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
• Journal: Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
• Year: 2012
• Issue: 11
• Pages: 235-248

Dates

published

2018-10-17

Contributors

author

Irena Bieńkowska

• PhD graduated from the Institute of Musicology of Warsaw University (1994), where she received her master’s degree based on a thesis on musical culture at the court of Michał Kazimierz (‘Rybeńko’) Radziwiłł (1702-1762) in Nesvizh, written under the supervision of Professor Mirosław Perz. She broadened her musicological studies on the Department of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London (1994-1995), and at the Lithuanian Conservatory in Vilnius (1995). Between 1995 and 1997, she worked with Polish Radio 2 and presented the original programmes ‘The Medici of Polish Music’, ‘The Music of Warsaw’, ‘Music at the Time of the Vasas’ and ‘Musical Wandering’. Between 1994 and 1998, she pursued doctoral studies at Warsaw University’s Institute of Musicology (IMUW), and in 1999 she was awarded her PhD (diss. on the music of Giovanni Battista Cocciola). Since 2000, she has been a lecturer with the IMUW’s Polish Music History Unit, of which she was deputy director from 2002 to 2007. Her scholarly interests encompass Renaissance music, Polish music of the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries and musical patronage in the eastern borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At present, Irena Bieńkowska is working on a reconstruction of musical life at the court of one of the most powerful eighteenth-century Lithuanian magnates, Hieronim Florian Radziwiłł (1715-1760), at his residences in Slutsk and Biała (Podlaska).