Tadeusz Baird

Baird was a leader in the second wave of twentieth-century Polish composers prior to World War II: the first group starred Witold Lutoslawski (1913 - 1994), Grazyna Bacewicz (1913 - 1969), Witold Rudzinski (b. 1913), and Andrzej Panufnik (1914 - 1991). Baird was joined five years later by Krzysztof Penderecki and Henryk Górecki (both b. 1933), who -- despite their initial avant-gardism -- retrograded stylistically in the post-modern backlash: Penderecki into Reger mortis, Górecki into minimalism. Baird had three postwar epiphanies, but serialism came second, then neo-Romanticism in his late works (by way of Penderecki's "aleatoric glossolalia," in Slonimsky's words). Despite Communist domination, the Polish thaw began earlier than elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Movie-star handsome Tadeusz Baird became an early activist in 1949 when he formed Group 49 with two transitional countrymen, Kazimierz Sikorski (1922 - 1981) and Jan Krenz (b. 1926), although their purpose was not to break rules but to conform to socio-musical orthodoxy. By 1956, however, with the return to power of Wladislaw Gomulka (following Khrushchev's "secret" denunciation of Stalinism, Poland's artistic gates opened, ... Read more >>