Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern's American Years

The object of this chapter is to recall the personality of a forgotten composer and his music. Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern is one of the most neglected Polish composers of the twentieth century. The only substantial source of information about him is Violetta Kostka's Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern, on which most of this chapter is directly based.¹ Kostka's book will, I hope, soon be translated into English and lead to further research on this fascinating and unjustly forgotten composer. Kassern's music can be heard on several YouTube channels, but most of it remains in manuscript and is inaccessible to ordinary musicians.²

Zygfryd Kassern was born on 19 March 1904 in Lwów (Lviv) into an assimilated Jewish family. His father was a local judge and his mother, Maria Baumann, came from an old merchant family. As a teenager, Zygfryd studied music at the Lwów Music Institute. He spent the First World War in Vienna. After Lwów became part of the newly independent Poland, Kassern became a student at the conservatory, where he studied piano with Jerzy Lalewicz and theory and composition with Mieczysław Sołtys. In 1920 the entire Kassern family moved to Poznań.

At that time, Zygfryd and his brother Maksymilian accepted Roman Catholicism and received new first names, Tadeusz and Stanisław. The reasons for their conversion remain unclear. Tadeusz returned briefly to Lwów to complete his high school studies and settled permanently in Poznań in 1922. He enrolled as a law student at Poznań University, while at the same time he was a student at Poznań Conservatory, where he registered in piano and theory classes. He graduated from the university in 1929 and, after several promotions, became a high functionary in the state government office in Poznań. In 1932 he married Longina Turkowska, who later became a faithful copyist of his music.

While in Poznań, Tadeusz Kassern was very active as a music promoter, music critic, and radio presenter. His first compositions show the influence of the late Romantic style of Karol Szymanowski, the composers of the Młoda Polska group, and the folklore-inspired music of Béla Bartók. Before the Second World War Kassern gradually built up a reputation as a composer. His most significant success was second prize in the Society of Young Polish Musicians in Paris composition contest in 1928. He received the prize for his Concerto for voice and orchestra. The work became a concert standard and was performed dozens of times in Poland and abroad.

In 1930 Kassern undertook a trip to Paris in order to learn more about the contemporary musical scene. He developed professional relationships and friendships with musicians from the Society of Young Polish Musicians, such as Tadeusz Szeligowski, Henryk Sztompka, Piotr Perkowski, Feliks Łabuński, and Irena Dubiska. These Parisian contacts later became a very important source of support for Kassern and his family.

The years of the Second World War were extremely challenging. Initially, the family moved to Lwów, which fell under Soviet control. However, in October 1940 the Kasserns settled in Kraków, in Nazi-occupied Poland. The father, Adolf, died in August 1942: he received a burial with Catholic rites, but the circumstances of his conversion to Catholicism remain unknown. At the end of 1942 Tadeusz Kassern had to quickly move to Warsaw, where he lived under false identity papers with the name of his wife's deceased brother-in-law, Teodor Sroczyński, as someone had informed the Gestapo in Kraków of the Jewish roots of the Kassern family. In Warsaw, Kassern was unable to participate in underground musical life, but he continued composing in the privacy of his apartment. Shocked by the cruelty of the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, he undertook the composition of an opera based on Jerzy Żuławski's drama Koniec Mesjasza about the life of Shabetai Tsevi. He would work on this opera later in New York. After the evacuation of the entire population of Warsaw at the end of October 1944, Kassern moved to Zakopane.

In the final months of...