Grazyna Bacewicz
Grazyna Bacewicz was a Polish violinist and composer, and the first Polish woman composer to gain international recognition. She was born in Lodz on February 5, 1909, into a Polish-Lithuanian family. Her father, a music teacher, gave her and her brothers their first music lessons.
She studied at Helena Kijenska’s private conservatory in Lodz from 1919 to 1923, then continued her education in Warsaw. In 1932 she graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory, where she studied composition with Kazimierz Sikorski and violin with Jozef Jarzebski; she also studied piano with Jozef Turczynski and attended philosophy lectures at the University of Warsaw. A scholarship from Ignacy Jan Paderewski enabled her to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in 1932–33. She later studied violin with Carl Flesch. In 1935 the jury of the first Wieniawski International Violin Competition gave her an honorable mention.
From 1936 to 1938 she played first violin in the Polish Radio Orchestra, led by Grzegorz Fitelberg. She made her solo debut with the orchestra in March 1938, performing her First Violin Concerto, and also began a career in chamber music, often performing with her brother Kiejstut. During the Second World War she lived in Warsaw and gave underground concerts; in 1944 she moved to Lublin, where she remained until the war ended. Afterward she toured as a violinist in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, France, and Belgium. A car accident in 1954 forced her to end her performing career.
Bacewicz began teaching violin and music theory at the State Conservatory in Lodz in 1945, returning to Warsaw later that year. She taught composition at the Warsaw Conservatory from 1966 and became a professor in 1967. She was also a music educator, pianist, accompanist, choreographer, musicologist, and writer. She served as deputy chair of the Polish Composers’ Union from 1955 to 1957 and again from 1960 until her death.
She began composing in the 1920s and attracted wider attention in 1933, when her Wind Quintet won first prize at an international competition for women composers in Paris. Her output included more than 200 works, spanning orchestral, chamber, vocal, and stage music. Among them are four symphonies, a String Concerto, seven violin concertos, two cello concertos, seven string quartets, and two piano quintets. Her Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion received third prize from UNESCO in 1960, and her Seventh Violin Concerto won a gold medal at the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition in 1965. Her works also received Polish national prizes and other international awards.
From the wartime years onward, Bacewicz also wrote prose and plays. Her comic miniature play “Swifts, or I Am Not a Bird” was staged on Polish television in 1968. A collection of autobiographical prose, “A Distinguishing Feature,” appeared in 1970; her autobiographical novel “With Fire” and crime novel “The Trap” were published in 2018. She was married to physician Andrzej Bernacki from 1936. She died of a heart attack in Warsaw on January 17, 1969, and was buried at Powazki Military Cemetery.