Music in the Polish-Jewish Theatre in the First Decades of the 20^th Century in the Light of Surviving Sources

The article presents the few surviving documents concerning the incidental music to Polish-Jewish plays performed on the Polish stages in the first decades of the 20^th century (until 1939). This kind of theatre was to constitute a space for the dialogue between the Jewish and Polish communities. The idea of its creators was to reject the existing, usually negative, way of presenting Jews in Polish theatre as well as to show authentic Jewish life — customs, rituals, music and dances — on stage. A breakthrough in both of these areas came with the so-called Jewish plays of Gabriela Zapolska — Małka Szwarcenkopf and Jojne Firułkes. The idea of the Polish-Jewish theatre was then developed by Marek Arnsztajn (Andrzej Marek). Referring to the surviving sources (scores as well as press reviews and notes in directors’ copies of the scripts), the author analyses music to two performances of Małka Szwarcenkopf, and presents the musical appendix to the Polish version of An-ski’s Dybbuk published in 1922. The analysis seeks to capture the composers’ specific ideas of Jewish music and to discover the sources of their inspiration. The second objective of the article was to present the cultural background against which the Polish-Jewish theatre evolved.