Warsaw Autumn Festival
The first International Festival of Contemporary Music in Warsaw, referred to as “Warsaw Autumn”, was held on 10–21 October 1956. Its founding fathers included Kazimierz Serocki, who in 1955, during the General Assembly of the Polish Composers’ Union, signed a document, together with Tadeusz Baird, launching the efforts to organize the event. The task was not easy, but the time of political thaw was propitious. Eventually, the Polish authorities gave their consent and Warsaw could hear contemporary music, which has since kept coming back there in its varied forms and all possible shapes.
The goal of the Festival was to introduce the audience to contemporary music from all over the world and to promote new Polish music. It was the Festival that launched the outstanding careers of many leading Polish composers, e.g. Krzysztof Penderecki. Thanks to the works presented at the Warsaw Autumn music critics recognized a phenomenon they came to call the “Polish school of composition” of the 1960s and its characteristic musical style known as sonorism. On the other hand, the Festival audiences had a unique opportunity to get to know the most important works of Western composers as well as stylistic trends and techniques, including those of the avant-garde, of new music. The Warsaw Autumn served as a “window onto the world” not only for Poles. There were numerous Festival guests from the former USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries, who came to Warsaw not only to discover the unfamiliar world of new music, but also to demonstrate their own achievements, which often launched their careers in the West.
The programme of the Warsaw Autumn featured works by each of the composers represented in the Music in Movement project. Kazimierz Serocki’s pieces were played there almost every year, beginning with Sinfonietta for two string orchestras (1956) and ending with Pianophonie for piano, electronics and orchestra (1979), and almost always were enthusiastically received by the audience. Pierre Boulez’s first works heard by the Warsaw Autumn audiences were Sonatine pour flûte et piano, Piano Sonata No. 2 and Livre pour quatuor, performed during the Festival’s third edition in 1959. Boulez’s music was featured regularly in the Warsaw Autumn programme, although the composer himself never came to the Festival. Unlike Louis Andriessen, whose first work presented at the Festival was Paintings for flute and piano (in 1967). He visited the Warsaw Autumn for the first time in 1977, when De Staat had its Polish premiere, and most recently in 2010, presenting his Haags Hakkûh. For Arvo Pärt the visit to the 1963 Warsaw Autumn was an impulse to intensify his avant-garde experiments, manifested, for example, in his Perpetuum mobile, presented in Warsaw in 1965 and encored at the audience’s request. The music of Pärt, who decided to emigrate from the USSR, was prevented from becoming a greater presence at the Festival in the 1980s by politics. A performance of Fratres planned for 1985 was cancelled after protests from the Soviet embassy. However, the piece was performed in 1987 and in 1989 the Hilliard Ensemble gave a concert in Warsaw entirely devoted to his music (see: Cindy Bylander, Music and Politics in Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival (1956-1961)).
Although after the fall of the Iron Curtain the Festival lost its impressive “power” to attract composers and audiences from both its sides, it lost none of its organizational panache and international prestige. The Warsaw Autumn has remained an event during which new world and Polish music is presented in the context of works that are “contemporary classics”. It is a mission and, at the same time, an example of unity in diversity. As Tadeusz Wielecki, director of the Warsaw Autumn in 1999–2016, says,