Marcin Mielczewski I

The first album by Andrzej Kosendiak and the Wrocław Baroque Ensemble with music by Marcin Mielczewski, the most popular Polish composer of the 17th century. The album contains, among other items: vespers by this composer, in a reconstructed form in which they could have been played in the past – the instrumental line-up being enriched with cornets and trombones. Some of the pieces come from the collection of the church of St. Mary Magdalene in Wrocław.

Price: 49 zł

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Album premiere: 2017

Publishers: National Forum of Music, CD Accord

Conductor: Andrzej Kosendiak

Performers: Wrocław Baroque Ensemble

Marcin Mielczewski was the most widely known Polish composer of the Baroque era in Europe. In the 17th century, his works were popular not only among Roman Catholic circles, for which they were originally composed, but also among Lutherans, and Greek and Orthodox Catholics. (…)

The largest currently known corpus of this composer’s works was created thanks to the interest in the legacy of the Roman Catholic bishop’s Kapellmeister of musicians from the circle of the Lutheran Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Wrocław. It was they who, mainly in the 1650s, made copies of over 30 of Mielczewski’s works, signing them in their manuscripts with the monogram ‘M.M.’, which, incidentally, also appears in the vast majority of records of this author’s compositions of various origins.

Compositions by the monogrammer ‘M.M.’, along with the entire collection of musical items from the church of St. Mary Magdalene, as well as from other Wrocław churches, were found in the local City Library in the 19th century. They have been catalogued and researched by German and other European musicologists, but their author has not been identified. For almost 50 years from 1945 onwards, the entire collection of musical manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries belonging to the Wrocław City Library was considered lost. We now know that it was taken to Moscow after World War II and then, in the 1950s, handed over to the German Democratic Republic and deposited in the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz in the former East Berlin, where it was not made available until the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was only in the 1990s that it was possible to continue research on these fortunately recovered valuable Silesian manuscripts. They made it possible to attribute authorship of the monogrammer’s ‘M.M.’ compositions included in this collection to Marcin Mielczewski.

Barbara Jarmińska-Przybyszewska