Henryk Melcer-Szczawiński

Henryk Melcer-Szczawiński (born at Marcelin, near Warsaw, 25 July 1869; died in Warsaw, 18 April 1928) was a Polish composer, pianist, teacher and conductor whose career unfolded between Warsaw, Vienna and the leading centres of musical life in Central Europe in his time. The son of the violinist Karol Melcer, director of the Kalisz Musical Society, he made his debut as a pianist in Kalisz in 1878 and in Warsaw in 1882.

His academic training was irregular. He studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw from 1887 and, from 1892, continued in Vienna, where he refined his piano technique with Leschetizky. Earlier, he had obtained his piano diploma at the Warsaw Institute of Music under R. Strobl, and there he received composition lessons from Z. Noskowski. He may reportedly have been a pupil of A. Michałowski, although this is not known for certain.

In 1895 he won the first prize for composition at the second Anton Rubinstein Competition in Berlin with his Piano Concerto in E minor, a piano trio in G minor and two of the three Morceaux caractéristiques that he later published as Op. 5; he also received a third prize in the piano performance category. Between 1895 and 1899 he taught piano at the conservatoires of Helsinki and Lviv, and in 1898 he won the first prize in the Paderewski Composition Competition in Leipzig with his Second Piano Concerto. He directed the Łódź Musical Society from 1899 to 1902, and in 1902 he made his debut as a conductor at the head of the Lviv Philharmonic Orchestra. From 1903 to 1906 he was professor of advanced piano at the Vienna Conservatory, where he performed frequently, for example with Max Reger in the Variations and Fugue for two pianos, Op. 86.

From autumn 1907 he settled in Warsaw, where he served as artistic director of the Philharmonic in 1908–1909 and subsequently as its director and choir director. Between 1912 and 1916 his greatest successes came as a pianist, with extended recitals devoted to Chopin. He directed the Warsaw Opera (1915–1916) and the city's Conservatoire (1922–1927); during this final period he raised the educational and artistic standard of the institution, until a disagreement with the Ministry of Education led him to resign. He died suddenly in the middle of a class at the Conservatoire.

As a performer he was remembered for impeccable technique, a prodigious memory and iron discipline, and his repertoire ranged from Bach to Prokofiev. As a composer, his work began in the Romantic tradition and later moved towards Modernism, with expressionist traits in its dramatic writing and an impressionistic sense of colour in his songs and piano pieces. His opera Maria, strongly influenced by Wagner, is perhaps his most ambitious work, although its success was limited, a fact partly attributed to the shortcomings of the libretto. His legacy is sustained chiefly through his pupils, among them Mieczysław Horszowski and Aleksander Tansman.