Grażyna Bacewicz (1909–1969) was a Polish composer and violinist born in Łódź into a musical family of Polish-Lithuanian background. She began studying violin, piano and theory at the age of five and later studied at the Warsaw Conservatory, where she worked with Józef Jarzębski and Kazimierz Sikorski. In Paris she studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and Vincent d’Indy and violin with Carl Flesch, while also developing an international career as a concert violinist. She performed widely in Europe and frequently premiered her own works, often with her brother Kiejstut Bacewicz as pianist. Her early compositions were strongly influenced by French neoclassicism. Among her important early works were the Quintet for Wind Instruments (1932), which won a Paris competition in 1933, the Trio for Oboe, Violin and Cello (1935), and Violin Concerto No. 1 (1937). Her String Quartet No. 1 dates from 1938. After the Second World War, she developed a more individual and vigorous neoclassical style, producing major works including String Quartet No. 3 (1947), Violin Concerto No. 3 (1948), the Olympic Cantata (1948), Concerto for String Orchestra (1948), Piano Concerto (1949), and Violin Sonata No. 4 (1949). The Concerto for String Orchestra became one of her best-known compositions and won the Polish National Prize in 1950. During the 1950s Bacewicz gradually moved beyond conventional neoclassicism toward a more modernist language. Important works from this period include String Quartet No. 5 (1955), Symphony No. 3 (1952), Symphony No. 4 (1953), Piano Sonata No. 2 (1953), and Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion (1958). The last, premiered at the 1959 Warsaw Autumn Festival, marked a significant development in her use of modern sonorities and won third prize at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in 1960. Her final decade brought increasingly experimental and sonoristic writing while retaining her characteristic rhythmic energy and formal clarity. Major late works include String Quartet No. 6 (1960), Pensieri notturni (1961), Cello Concerto No. 2 (1963), the cantata Acropolis (1964), the ballet Esik in Ostend (1964), Violin Concerto No. 7 (1965), Piano Quintet No. 2 (1965), Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1966), and the opera Desire (1968–69). She also wrote Four Caprices for solo violin (1968) and a Viola Concerto (1968). From the later 1950s she concentrated increasingly on composition and teaching, and from 1966 she taught composition at the State Higher Music School in Warsaw, becoming a professor in 1967. She also served as vice-president of the Polish Composers’ Union and sat on international competition juries. Bacewicz died in Warsaw on January 17, 1969, aged 59, leaving more than 200 works.
