Zygmunt Mycielski

Zygmunt Mycielski (Przeworsk, 1907 – Warsaw, 1987) was one of the central figures of Polish musical life in the post-war period, both as a critic and as a composer. His career combines writing on music with creative output that spanned the most strained years of socialist realism in Poland.

He was trained first in Kraków and then in Paris, where he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and Paul Dukas between 1928 and 1936. In those years he joined the Association of Young Polish Musicians and formed a close friendship with Karol Szymanowski. During the Second World War he served actively in Poland and France, and was later interned as a prisoner of war. After repatriation he became a prominent music critic, although his political and aesthetic positions did not always coincide with those of the state. He edited the journal Ruch muzyczny from 1946 to 1948, and again as editor-in-chief from 1962 to 1968. From 1948 to 1950 he presided over the Polish Composers' Union, and he played a visible role at the 1949 Łagów conference on socialist realism in music.

As a composer, his language owes much to the late period of Szymanowski, to whom he dedicated his Lamento di Tristano. His Polish Symphony (1951), which was awarded a prize, recalls in its freshness Panufnik's Sinfonia rustica, although the latter was banned at the time. Faced with the avant-garde of the late 1950s, he responded with restraint: his later symphonies, despite some dodecaphonic elements, remain dominated by neoclassical and folk-inspired impulses.

His legacy endures above all in his writings, collected in several volumes, which are a valuable testimony to Polish musical life after the war.