Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska

Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska was a Polish composer born and died in Warsaw, in 1834 and 1861 respectively. Without formal musical training, she cultivated composition as an amateur in the Warsaw of the mid-nineteenth century, an era in which salon music enjoyed great demand.

Her best-known work, Modlitwa dziewicy, which appeared in French as La prière d'une vierge, was originally published in Warsaw in 1856. Later, the piece was issued as a supplement to the Paris-based Revue et gazette musicale in 1859 and was published by more than eighty publishers in France, Germany, Italy, England, Australia and the United States. Arrangements existed for piano duet and piano eight hands, for other instruments and for voice.

Although its commercial success was remarkable, critics regard it as a work without artistic merit, representative of nineteenth-century salon music. Her later pieces, such as Seconde prière d'une vierge or Słodkie marzenia, met with less fortune, although some achieved a degree of popularity. Her legacy is associated above all with the mass dissemination of that piece.