The Origins of the Gorczycki Myth

Abstract

Grzegorz Gerwazy Gorczycki is among the best-known composers of early Polish music. In accounts intended for a wider audience, he is often called the ‘Polish Handel’, and less frequently the ‘Polish Bach’. In the early nineteenth century he was hailed as ‘an outstanding composer’ (Kurpiński, 1819), whose ‘compositions, in a beautiful ecclesiastical style, […] can hold their own alongside the finest works of modern masters’ (Grabowski, 1830). Throughout that century, enthusiastic assessments of the Wawel chapel master’s achievement recurred in encyclopaedias, music editions, and scholarly and popular articles, although little of his music was known. These accounts established and perpetuated the myth of Gorczycki as an outstanding, perhaps the foremost, late Baroque composer in Poland. This article examines their contribution to the myth and traces the stages of its formation. Its origins lie in the oral tradition of the Rorantists’ ensemble. An epitaph commissioned after Gorczycki’s death, most probably by his fellow canons of Skalbmierz reinforced his reputation as an exemplary priest. During the partitions of Poland, Gorczycki, the ‘Polish Handel’ (Surzyński, 1887), readily lent himself to the construction of a national musical identity and the establishment of a stylistic canon for church music.