The Power of Family Memory: An Interview With Felix Yaniewicz’s Descendant – Josie Dixon | Article

The Power of Family Memory: An Interview With Felix Yaniewicz’s Descendant – Josie Dixon

josie-dixon-s.jpg, default, Josie Dixon, photo: private archive

A conversation with the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Felix Yaniewicz, the famous violinist and composer, co-founder of the first Edinburgh Music Festival. What can this family’s memory of Yaniewicz reveal to us?

From 25 June to 22 October 2022, the Georgian House in Edinburgh will present the exhibition 'Music and Migration in Georgian Edinburgh: The Story of Felix Yaniewicz'. Josie Dixon, the exhibition's curator and a personal descendant of this legendary musician, tells the story of the exhibition's commencement.

Filip Lech: Do you remember the first time you heard about Felix Yaniewicz?

Josie Dixon: He was there, a visible presence in my grandmother’s cottage where I spent a lot of time while growing up – the lovely oval portrait we are showing in the exhibition hung near the piano in her sitting room. I also recall some silver forks with his crest and motto in her cutlery drawer. I remember she told me that he was a celebrated violinist, and that he was involved in founding the first Edinburgh Music Festival.

FL: Did your family talk about him often?

JD: During my childhood – from time to time. But a great deal more since I embarked on the project for the exhibition nearly 3 years ago.

FL: Are there any anecdotes you could share? Was his wife, Eliza, mentioned in those stories?

JD: There was quite a bit of family mythology surrounding Yaniewicz. The empty double violin case which had come down the family and was known to have contained a Stradivarius and an Amati was one intriguing story, for which there is real evidence. Other legends are more doubtful – one of my uncles told me that he was thought to have been an illegitimate son of King Stanislaw August Poniatowski. I have since discovered that those rumours were circulating in Poland during his time, possibly generated by public resentment at the King’s use of royal funds to send Yaniewicz to Vienna.

A cousin of my mother’s tells a story that he was visited in the early 19^th century by a mysterious group of men in fur hats, who tried to persuade him to return to his homeland to take up an important role – was this linked to the royal illegitimacy story, and were there moves to resist Russian rule and restore the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth? It’s not altogether credible, but Eliza comes into that story, because she is said to have forbidden the family to speak of it ever again – which seems to have guaranteed the opposite!

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A plaque commemorating Felix Yaniewicz, located on the wall of his Edinburgh house. Written: 'Felix Yaniewicz. Polish composer and musician, co-founder of the first Edinburgh Festival, lived and died in this building, 1823-1848'. Photo: http://twitter.com/bordersjourneys

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FL: The exhibition will present many of Yaniewicz’s personal items. How do you remember them? Do you have a particular bond with any of them?

JD: Yes. First of all – the portrait, because it is such a beautiful and intriguing image, and vividly remembered from my childhood. Also, the little oval portrait of Eliza, which hung next to the fireplace inside my grandmother’s house.

There is a family autograph book, which contains fragments of letters from Yaniewicz’s musical associates – the greatest violinist of his age, Niccolò Paganini, and the celebrated opera singer Angelica Catalani, whose story comes into the exhibition, since she had a long musical partnership with Yaniewicz. I remember seeing the book some decades ago, without fully appreciating the story behind those signatures.

We have many everyday objects that belonged to Yaniewicz – they are decorated with the crest and motto ‘Pro Lithuania’: his seal on a gold fob, silver cutlery, which I have already mentioned. Some of this cutlery is hallmarked as late as 1832, when he had been in Britain for 40 years – it speaks volumes that he was still having this made with the stamp of his loyalty and nostalgia for the vanished Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It is very striking to think that every letter he sent would have gone out sealed with this message, and that every dinner guest on Great King Street in Edinburgh would have eaten from cutlery bearing the mark of his enduring patriotism.

Also, of course the instruments: the Yaniewicz & Green square piano will always be special, because its discovery was the start of this project, and it led me on a path of discovery about my ancestor and his musical legacy. The beautiful Apollo lyre guitar (bearing the label ‘Yaniewicz & Co’) was another revelation when it turned up in a museum in Exeter – the curators there had no idea who Yaniewicz was, so it is wonderful to be able to restore its historical context and significance in this exhibition.

FL: Why did you choose to commemorate him?

JD: The project to commemorate him came about after the discovery of the Yaniewicz & Green square piano. That happened after a chance conversation in 2019 reminded me about my ancestor and the story of the lost Stradivarius and it prompted me to try an internet search in the hopes of finding out who is playing it now. That is a mystery still to be solved, but what I found instead, was an advertisement for this beautifully restored square piano. I contacted the restorer, Douglas Hollick, and he sent me an article he had written about Yaniewicz for a specialist music journal, researched while he was restoring the piano. This account of his musical career was a revelation, and a story waiting to be told: it gave me the idea for an exhibition, putting this together with the more personal story witnessed by the portraits, letters and personal possessions that had remained in the family. So I ran a crowdfunding campaign, with the help of the Scottish Polish Cultural Association, to buy the piano and bring it to Scotland as the centrepiece of an exhibition to celebrate his musical legacy.

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Poster for 'Music and Migration in Georgian Edinburgh: The Story of Felix Yaniewicz', photo: press materials

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FL: Your mother, Ailsa Dixon, was a composer, and your grandmother, Pat Harrison, founded a music festival. Has it affected your life in any way? Has your family played music together? Where there any other music-related habits?

JD: Music is in our DNA. My parents were music teachers and gave concerts together; we all learned how to play instruments when I was growing up and played together at my grandmother’s family parties. We went to concerts at an early age and heard some wonderful performers at the festival founded by my grandmother in Little Missenden. Singing has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember. I think we have also inherited an entrepreneurial streak from our ancestor to add to the music-making. My grandmother’s vision and determination brought into being a festival that is still going more than 60 years later. While growing up, my mother produced a Handel opera, and later an opera of her own, which marked the beginning of her composing career. In the last year of her life, I found an opportunity for a performance of an anthem she had written 30 years earlier, and she heard it sung for the first time five weeks before she died. That concert set off a revival of interest in her music as part of the increasing attention being paid to women composers, and it became a project to go through her archive and find opportunities to have more of her music performed. A number of her works were premiered after she died, and this project became my way of keeping her alive. When the pandemic arrived and concert life was suspended, the Yaniewicz project filled that gap, and it’s very exciting that this is now coming to fruition.

FL: Do you like listening to Yaniewicz’s music? What do you think about it?

JD: I do! It has been very enjoyable encountering some of his keyboard music for the concerts on the Yaniewicz & Green square piano, but his soul is in the violin concertos, and that is where his real claim to fame as a composer lies. They speak very directly of his cosmopolitan career, combining a recognizably Mozartian style from his time in Vienna with Polish folk dances in the last movements. Two of them have been recorded by Zbigniew Pilch, who came to Edinburgh in May with his quartet and played chamber versions of the concertos – it was wonderful to hear Yaniewicz’s solo violin part soaring up into the vaulting of St Giles’ Cathedral. Later this year, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra will be giving three concerts featuring Yaniewicz’s third violin concerto. This will be the first full-scale orchestral performance in Britain since Yaniewicz himself was the soloist, so that is very exciting.

I also love the Elegie for violin and piano – my uncle had a copy of this in an arrangement by Alfred Moffat which was dedicated to Yaniewicz’s grandson. He sent me the music and I had it recorded for the Yaniewicz website – you can hear it on www.yaniewicz.org/music. It makes me wonder what or who he was sorrowing for in this elegy – perhaps those of his children who died in infancy, or the loss of his homeland in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

FL: Were the ties with Polish and Lithuanian history significant to your family?

JD: I think that music in my family was more of a bond with our ancestor than any sense of national identity, but in the course of this project I have developed new affinities for Poland and Lithuania. I have never been there and am now very eager to visit. I have made some wonderful friends in the Scottish Polish community, and they have become great allies on this project, together with our wonderful partners at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw.

As for the historical question, I am very struck by the parallels between his time and ours. Yaniewicz was essentially a refugee when he arrived in Britain, having fled the violence of the French Revolution, at a time when his homeland in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was on a path to dissolution and annexation by Russia. I have called the exhibition ‘Music and Migration’ to highlight the valuable heritage of cultural cross-fertilisation, illustrated in the role played by a Polish-Lithuanian migrant in founding the first Edinburgh Music Festival. Against the background of Britain’s unsettled relationship with Europe, this feels a very important story to tell – above all now that a new refugee crisis has been unleashed by events in Ukraine. Seeing refugees pouring over the border into Poland with their salvaged possessions makes me think of Yaniewicz arriving in Britain with little more than his violins and starting a new life as a self-made performer and musical entrepreneur. Our culture has benefited greatly from migrants such as Yaniewicz, and we owe something in return.

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