How Sung Poetry Became an Integral Part of Polish Musical Culture

zakazane_piosenki_pap_1981_jpg.jpg, default, I Przegląd Piosenki Prawdziwej (1st True Song Review) 'Zakazane Piosenki' (Forbidden Songs), 20-22 August 1981, Gdańsk, photo: M. Hołyński/PAP, How Sung Poetry Became an Integral Part of Polish Musical Culture

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Part beguiling, part baleful, and part balladic, sung poetry is one of the most recognisable styles of post-war Polish music. Rising to prominence in the 1960s as a mainstay of literary cabarets, and performed by artists including Ewa Demarczyk, Marek Grechuta and Czesław Niemen, the genre took on an important role as part of Polish counterculture and continues to fascinate audiences today. But what exactly is sung poetry? And why has the genre had such a longstanding impact on Polish musical history?

Two parts poetry, one part music

Although it might be fairly self-explanatory, sung poetry is, in fact, a wide-ranging genre, which is difficult to completely define. Popular across Europe, as well as in the Middle East, sung poetry mainly refers to songs comprised of a poem or ballad, with an accompaniment of light music (guitar or piano) is written for the text.

Krajewski defies sung poetry as:

A genre in which a poem (frequently longer in form, such as a ballad or a narrative poem) is set to specially composed music. It draws on many traditions: romantic songs, cabaret, and urban folklore, but especially on street ballads and songs […] It is often related to poetic song and to the works of folk and folk rock artists.

However, there are no hard or fast rules – across the 20th century, both professional and amateur musicians have drawn from a variety of poetic works, interpreting texts in innovative and expressive ways. Some examples of sung poetry can also be defined through their approach to musical production and reception. Mariella C. Gronenthal suggests that the genre traditionally emphasises the musician over the author of the text, who is ‘often totally unknown to the general public and therefore the poet’s personality is completely hidden […] sung poetry transforms poetry through its musical interpretation into a consumer product’.

Sung poetry has had considerable influence in global musical culture, and several prominent musicians can be considered within the genre, or producing works relating to it. These include artists who worked as both poets and musicians, such as Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, whose songs – whilst their own compositions – bear the hallmarks of deft poetic composition singer-songwriters who have interpreted existing works, such as fashion model Carla Bruni, who has re-imagined WH Auden, Emily Dickinson and Walter de la Mare.

The genre had a particularly formidable influence in Poland, especially during the postwar period. As Ewa Mazierska and Xawery Stańczyk claim, sung poetry was also part of a wider trend in Polish culture, which saw an ‘importance attributed to lyrics in Polish pop-rock music’. They note that international artists who blended poetry with song saw immense popularity in post-war Poland, especially Cohen. Although there were only limited translations of Cohen’s poems, his songs were reprinted and translated in songbooks, and garnered widespread attention:

Music seemed to pale into insignificance in comparison with stories about people lost and lonely in the landscape of hotels and cheap bars of great cities, conveyed by the lyrics.

Notable artists who can be considered within the sung poetry genre in Poland are:

Ewa Demarczyk – or, Poland’s Edith Piaf

Thumbnail — Ewa Demarczyk, 1964, 4th International Song Festival in Sopot, photo: Janusz Uklejewski/CAF/PAP

With her heavily-winged eyes, trademark block fringe, melodramatic expressions and haunting vocals, Demarczyk was possibly the queen of Polish sung poetry, although she recorded only three studio albums and – for the last few decades of her life – lived outside the public eye. Trained at a drama school and a conservatory, Demarczyk quickly rose to fame, performing across the world to rapt audiences. Her sung poetry included interpretations of poems by Polish poets Julian Tuwim, Miron Białoszewski, Bolesław Leśmian, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, and Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, as well as poems by German language poets, including Goethe and Rilke.

Marek Grechuta

Singer-songwriter and progressive-psychedelic rock artist, Grechuta might have been on the edge of Polish mainstream culture at the height of his career, but is now one of the most renowned artists of the post-war period. Grechuta recorded songs written to poems by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and Tadeusz Nowak, in his distinctive style, which blended elements of rock, jazz, ethnic and classical music. Both within and beyond the sung poetry genre, several of his songs have achieved legendary status in Poland – particularly his pensive Dni ktorych nie znamy (Days, that we don’t know yet), which is one of the most well-known songs in the history of Polish popular music.

Czesław Niemen

If you only know a handful of Polish songs, chances are Niemen’s Sen o Warszawie (A Dream of Warsaw) is one of them. But did you know that the singer – one of Poland’s greatest and most popular musicians of the 20th century – also performed songs which can be considered as part of the sung poetry genre? Many of Niemen’s compositions were based on poetic works, including texts by Cyprian Kamil Norwid.

Jacek Kaczmarski

Known for his protest songs against Communist rule – particularly the song Mury (Walls), which became an unofficial anthem of the Solidarity movement – Kaczmarski was one of the bastions of sung poetry in Poland. His songs, including ballads about classic literary texts, such as Homer’s Odyssey and Bolesław Prus’s, were infused by historical references and allegory, and performed in a bold and animated style. Mury, an example of sung poetry, was written to the melody of a Catalan independence song, L’Estaca, by singer Lluís Llach. Although Kaczmarski claimed the song was about ‘distrust of all mass movements’, Mury was adopted by the Solidarity movement, and performed at meetings and protests, with its evocative lyrics:

He was young and inspired, they were numberless.

He gave them strength with his song, singing of the nearing dawn.

Thousands of candles they lit for him, smoke rose over their heads,

He sang: it’s time for the wall to fall down…

Most recently, it was adapted into the Belarusian language, and sung at last year’s protests in the country.

Maciej Pietrzyk

An artist, poet and actor, Pietrzyk’s songs, according to Klaus Dirscherl, merged ‘the ballad, the protest song, and folk elements’. As Andrea F. Bohlman notes, his Piosenka dla córki (Song for my Daughter), composed during the strikes at the Gdańsk Shipyard in 1980, is an example of sung poetry, and ‘a far cry from the ambition of communal anthems’, with ‘basic strumming as an accompaniment […] and humming to encourage only muted participation’.

Tadeusz Chyła

A cabaret singer and painter whose songs often had satiric bite, Chyła performed across the postwar cabaret circuit – from student theatres to artistic venues – with his parodist output reflecting ‘the thaw’ post-1956. He composed ballads to works by Jerzy Afanasjew, Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński and Ludwik Jerzy Kern.

Wolna Grupa Bukowina

A folk rock and sung poetry band founded in 1970, Wolna Grupa Bukowina initially performed at student clubs and festivals across Poland. Throughout its history, the band has been associated with several renowned musicians and cultural figures, including Elżbieta Adamiak – who has also had a successful career as an individual performer of sung poetry – Michał Lorenc and Mieczysław Jurecki. The band’s songs, a mixture of sung poetry numbers, ballads and folk about nature and city life, are Polish favourites.

Other performers linked to the sung poetry genre include Wojciech Mlynarski, Grzegorz Turnau, Anna Szałapak, Wojciech Belon, Magda Umer and Przemysław Gintrowski.

Counter culture

The roots of sung poetry in Poland were even more complex than we could have imagined. As Marek Krajewski writes:

An interesting current in Polish popular culture, especially postwar, was ambitious entertainment ('ambitna rozrywka'). It was used to counter mass culture, which was viewed as a Western product. Ambitious entertainment was a form of critique of popular culture undertaken from elite positions yet at the same time integral to that culture. This double-logic perfectly reflected the authorities’ ambivalent attitude towards leisure, entertainment, and consumerism. These were seen as distancing the individual from issues of importance to the system, and as diminishing their engagement in building that system […] within the framework of ambitious entertainment fell literary cabarets that consciously referenced prewar traditions; pop music with poetic aspirations […] texts of well-known poets […] and sung poetry.

The Interwar period was particularly renowned for its embrace of both highbrow and lowbrow entertainment. Notably, literary cabarets like Warsaw’s Qui Pro Quo saw poets or professionally-trained artists (like Julian Tuwim and the Gold brothers) adopt forms of popular culture – from infectious hits to comic skits – had broad appeal.

But post-war cabarets were particularly important as meeting places for the Polish youth, where cultural innovation blended with political subversion. Patryk Galuszka notes that student culture, from cabaret to poetry and song, played an ‘important role in undermining the system’s legitimacy […] igniting the careers of many future professional artists’. And of all the post-war cabarets, Piwnica pod Baranami (The Cellar Under the Rams) was probably the most famous. Nights at the Piwnica pod Baranami were packed with non-conformist fun, with actors drawing on avant-garde, Dada and surrealist culture. As Nicholas W. Reyland writes, the cabaret saw artistic conventions upended through impromptu performances experimented with staging and set design, whilst inspiration came from figures from all walks of life.

Sung poetry at the post-war cabaret

Anna Szałapak, lata 90., fot. Marek Szymczak, zdjęcie z książki Janusza R. Kowalczyka "Wracając do moich Baranów", wyd. Trio, Warszawa 2012 — Anna Szałapak, 1990s, photo by Marek Szymczak, photo from Janusz R. Kowalczyk's book 'Wracając do moich Baranów' (Returning to my Rams), photo published by Trio, Warsaw 2012

According to Galuszka:

Students’ culture […] embraced two specifically Polish phenomena: sung poetry […] and tourists’ song […] hey demonstrate that popular music is contingent neither on dissemination via mass media nor on marketing and sales on a mass commodity basis.

He adds that artists like Demarczyk and Grechuta ‘were widely popular at the official level and the change of the regime did not significantly alter their status’, although others, like Wolna Grupa Bukowina, ‘move[d] back and forth between the official and unofficial levels'. Taking Demarczyk as an example: she was one of the most prominent performers at the Piwnica pod Baranami, and performed versions of Polish poetry alongside musician Zygmunt Konieczny. Through the cabaret, Demarczyk shot to fame for her sung poetry renditions:

According to one account, it was Piotr Skrzynecki, the founder of the Cellar under the Rams, who in 1961 gave a copy of Tuwim’s Grande Valse Brilliante to the composer Zygmunt Konieczny and asked him to set the text to music. Konieczny did so, saying that the musicality of Tuwim’s words guided his composition, that the words of the poet had determined the rhythm […] Demarczyk decided to include Valse in her repertoire for the Sopot Festival in 1964 […it] immediately became a hit […] Demarczyk’s powerful voice reinvigorated Tuwim’s text, shifting its focus from a man’s self-ironizing recollection to a woman’s ironic view of her dancing partner and his poverty.

The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry

As Kremer adds, Demarczyk and Tuwim’s recordings of the song bear strange similarities:

The poem’s irregular anapestic meter; the questions and enumerations included in the text; the many short lines followed by meaningful pauses; the rhymes; and the emotions described by the speaker – all this was evocative enough to create a similar impression, a similar interplay of accents and intonations.

But Demarczyk’s rendition, she notes, ‘became the canonical performance of Valse in the collective memory of Poles – and for it, Demarczyk won second place at the 1964 Sopot Festival. Three years later, her first album was released.

Continued influence

But sung poetry was not only popular in the 1960s – the genre had a continued influence on Polish culture through the fall of Communist rule. Whilst new performers began to filter into the Piwnica pod Baranami, sung poetry remained a popular feature of performances, and was later adopted by the bards of Solidarity, including Kaczmarski and Pietrzyk. In 1981, the Solidarity movement organised a First Review of Genuine Song, or ‘Forbidden Songs’, in which sung poetry played a large role:

Most of the songs from the festival upheld the tradition of ‘sung poetry’ – complex, carefully constructed lyrics and music that fit the Arnoldian cultural uplift model, but complemented by Solidarity’s trademark nationalist and religious accents. For instance, Jacek Kaczmarski’s ‘Rejtan’ told an elaborate tale of an ambassador lamenting the partition of Poland by Russia […] the festival also had a few lighter moments […it] focused on the singer-songwriter cabaret tradition and emphasised themes of truth, honour, anticommunism, Polish nationalism, and Catholic piety.

Eighteen thousand people turned up to the festival, which saw over fifty artists take to the stage – and many of the songs performed there became classics of the Solidarity movement, and are still listened to with pride today.

Encompassing both international and distinctly Polish influences, and straddling the boundaries of high and low culture, sung poetry might be difficult to define – but its importance for Polish culture and society is undeniable. And even now, festivals and reviews of sung poetry continue to take place across Poland, attracting younger performers to the style, and continuing what is now a significant genre of Polish musical culture.

Sources

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