6 - Expanding Horizons: Paris and London

Summary

Back home my family situation was much the same, my mother still unwell, my father dividing his time as ever between constructing violins and trying to make enough money to live. Now, though, I had an adorable baby niece, Ewa: at least in my brother's household everyone was happy.

In Warsaw I found that the storm-clouds over Europe were watched merely with detached disapproval; no one seemed seriously to imagine that Poland might be directly affected. The Colonels who governed our country indulged in occasional bouts of sabre-rattling to demonstrate our unconquerable might, and the general public apparently were fully reassured by these hollow gestures. Certainly I was not. After witnessing the demagogic power of Hitler in Vienna and the almost complete devotion of the German-speaking nations to their Führer – one of the greatest crowd-hypnotisers that mankind has ever known – I was convinced that he would not be easily satisfied with ideological victories, and I fretted that my fellow-countrymen seemed so unaware of the threat to the rest of Europe posed by his dangerous expansionism.

But I did not allow these anxieties to deter me from making my plans for my own life, which meant, as ever, for my music. I wanted to continue my studies abroad. Though Weingartner had passed on to me so much of his great knowledge of classical music, he had never touched on the music of the early twentieth century. For him, Bruckner was almost too modern; Richard Strauss was never discussed (they were said to have quarrelled); and Debussy, in his eyes, was an avant-garde ‘experimentalist’, an adventurer not to be considered. I still longed to experience in live performance the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern; also other composers with fresh ideas, such as Stravinsky, Bartók, the French Groupe des Six, and a great many others who were still just names to me. Of course, I also urgently wanted to tackle some serious composition of my own, my creative impulses having temporarily dried up in the painfully disturbing atmosphere of Vienna.