The decade from 1945 to 1955 is a highly interesting era in the history of Polish culture. The first postwar years were a period of relative creative freedom. In 1948, when a campaign inspired by the so-called Zhdanov Doctrine and targeted against ‘Western formalism’ was unleashed in the USSR, the Communist authorities in Poland, which at the time were tightening their grip on the country, initiated the gradual process of subjecting all cultural activity to the dominant Marxist-Stalinist ideology. The breakthrough came in 1949, when during the Fourth Convention of the Polish Writers’ Trade Union held in Szczecin, the Conference of Composers and Music Critics in Łagów and the Convention of Visual Artists in Nieborów Socialist realism was imposed by force as the only acceptable artistic doctrine. At the same time, in order to control and stifle literature and art, all cultural institutions were nationalized, including private art schools and publishing houses.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the first symptoms of thaw appeared, only to develop fully during the next two years. In the summer of 1955, the Polish National Exhibition by Young Visual Artists was launched in the former Warsaw Arsenal. The exhibition is regarded as a milestone event and a manifesto rejecting Socialist realism. In the same year, Polish Composers’ Union put forward the idea of the International Festival of Contemporary Music ‘Warsaw Autumn’, aimed at presenting Western and Polish avant-garde music. In 1956, an audience of many thousands attended the First Jazz Music Festival organized in Sopot.

The hereby presented covers of publications containing Polish mass songs as well as popular songs reflect the developments described above. Several samples from the USSR and the so-called Socialist democracies are also included for comparison.

Until the early 1950s, state publishers competed with private establishments, while the overall output of musical prints consisted for the most part of popular dance music devoid of propaganda and sacred music. Other publications included patriotic songs, poetic songs about the revival of war-torn Warsaw and wartime music such as soldiers’ and guerilla songs, including even the songs from the Warsaw Uprising, the memory of which had not yet been suppressed by the authorities. The most active publishers included private establishments, most of which had resumed their prewar activities (Gebethner & Wolff, E. Kuthan, A.J. Markiewicz, and others). They made efforts to maintain attractive layout of the covers, which frequently drew on the style prevalent before 1939.

In 1949, the market was flooded with mass songs composed to propaganda poems. Among the most eminent Polish composers and poets of the period, only few can be found without such works in their oeuvre. Soviet mass songs were the obvious model, and therefore as early as in 1949, a series of Soviet songs and cantatas whose authors kowtowed to Stalin was published. The series was edited by Professor Zofia Lissa, from 1947 onwards the Deputy Director of the Department of Music in the Ministry of Culture and Art, a particularly adamant advocate of the restrictions imposed by Socialist realism on Polish music and musicology. However, the layout of the series was very modest and uniform, like in the case of most propaganda songs printed until about 1953. The state-owned publishers, whose rapid mass production of run-of-the-mill songs was intended for performance during various competitions, recitals and festivals (especially the Festival of Polish Music), usually relied on a small number of uniform and simple cover templates. Their modest layout was usually limited to several simple bordures or frames. Only occasionally did the various editions differ in lettering or colours. An exception were the propaganda songs for young readers published in the series Drużyna Śpiewa [Our Pack is Singing] by the Nasza Księgarnia publishing house in the years 1949-1950, provided with colourful covers that represented Socialist realism in its pure form.

A significant change occurred in 1954, when a Cracow-based, state-owned publisher Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne (Polish Music Publishers) published over twenty propaganda songs, each of them carefully provided with a uniquely designed cover. Young designers (Janusz Bruchnalski, Tadeusz Jodłowski, Witold Skulicz, Kazimierz Wojdanowicz and Andrzej Darkow among others), using very simple means and up to three or four colours, created compositions that were effortless, polished, amusing, appealing to the viewer with its offhand execution and capricious strokes – as if the artists wanted to challenge the plainness ubiquitous in the period extolled by the songs themselves. The playful lettering and the designers’ original flair attracted attention. The covers run in the face of Socialist realism – uninspiring, literal and bound by coarse didacticism, but still the mandatory doctrine in the USSR and its satellite countries. By contrast, the design of the covers represented Polish functional graphics at its best, a field in which Polish artists were to gain international renown in the years to come. Several publications of this type appeared later in 1955, but by that time the genre had already declined.

In 1956, when at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev delivered his address denouncing the Stalinist cult of personality, mass songs were no longer printed, with few exceptions. The offer of the Polish Music Publishers (PWM) was again dominated by popular dance music (waltz, tango, but also foxtrot and swing), editions of folk songs, and even Christmas carols and sacred music by ancient Polish composers. In January 1957, the first piece of music to be officially labeled as ‘rock & roll’ (Tańcz i śpiewaj by Romuald Żyliński) was released.

 

Marcin Zgliński