Abstract

Albert Sowiński, Essayist, Anthologist, and Lexicographer If there was one musician in mid-nineteenth Paris who diligently promoted Polish accomplishments, it was Albert Sowinski (Wojciech Sowiński). From his arrival in France in 1828 until his death in 1880, he championed the Polish cause as a performer, composer, and scholar. Sowinski was a prolific writer, but with the exception of his Les musiciens polonais et slaves, anciens et modernes: dictionnaire (1857), his studies of Polish repertoire rarely receive more than passing attention in modern scholarship. In this essay, I investigate Sowinski’s developing paradigms of Polish nationalism and Polish identity across the entirety of his major writings about and collections of Polish music: Chants polonais nationaux et populaires (1830), Souvenirs de Pologne. Chants de la révolution du 29 novembre 1830 (1830), Mélodies polonaises: album lyrique (1833), “Chants populaires de l’Ukraine” (1842), “De l’état actuel de la musique en Pologne” (1842), Dictionnaire (1857), and Chants religieux de la Pologne, op. 93 (1859). The four works from the 1830s, which focused on Polish folk music and revolutionary songs, were closely tied to Sowinski’s work with Léonard Chodzko (Leonard Chodźko) and his circle in Paris. Especially in the Chants polonais, Sowinski followed Chodzko and Joachim Lelewel in emphasizing the exceptional geographic, linguistic, and even ethnic diversity of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, viewing this diversity as the basis for a glorious musical and political future. By the time of his Dictionnaire and Chants religieux de la Pologne, Sowinski deemphasized Poland’s musical exceptionality in favor of delineating its long tradition of exchange with Western Europe, facilitated particularly through courts and the Roman Catholic Church.