Biography
Known for her dramatic neoclassical approach, Grazyna Bacewicz ranked among the most influential Polish composers of her era. Although she launched her professional path as a violinist, her creative output soon overshadowed those early performances. Born into a musical household in Łódź in 1909, she received her earliest lessons from her father. Between 1919 and 1923 she studied at Helena Kijenska-Dobkiewiczowa's Musical Conservatory in Łódź, after which her family relocated to Warsaw in 1924. Four years later she entered the Warsaw Conservatory, where she pursued composition under Kazimierz Sikorski, violin with Józef Jarzębski, and piano with Józef Turczyński. Despite her pianistic gifts, she abandoned those lessons midway through her studies to devote greater time to violin practice and composition. Her initial works, scored for violin and piano, were frequently performed by the composer herself, with her older brother Kiejstut at the keyboard. She completed her conservatory training in 1932 and promptly moved to Paris for further composition study with Nadia Boulanger at the Ecole Normale de Musique, also receiving violin instruction from Andre Touret and, in 1934, from Carl Flesch. In 1936 she was appointed principal violinist of the Polish Radio Orchestra under Grzegorz Fitelberg and married Andrzej Biernacki, later a professor at the Warsaw Academy of Medicine. She remained with the orchestra through 1938 while also appearing as a soloist across Europe until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. During the occupation she persisted in composing and participated in clandestine concerts held in Warsaw. Once the war concluded in 1945, Bacewicz resumed her activities as a composer and touring violinist while joining the faculty of the National Conservatory in Łódź. Her musical language gradually turned toward a more personal idiom that placed less emphasis on formal structure than her earlier pieces; she simultaneously grew absorbed in counterpoint and began refining her handling of melody and harmony. Among the major scores from this phase are String Quartet No. 4, Violin Concerto No. 4, and Piano Sonata No. 2. A severe car accident in 1953 left her hospitalized for several months, yet she returned immediately afterward to composing and teaching in Łódź. Over time she shifted her energies almost entirely to creation, ceasing public performance altogether by 1955. From that point into the mid-1960s she explored 12-tone serialism and later incorporated folk melody, an influence audible in her Viola Concerto. Beginning in 1966 she taught composition at the Warsaw Conservatory and maintained her creative work until her death from a heart attack in 1969.