Zofia Lissa’s participation in attempts to define formalism and realism in music in the 1940s and 1950s. Using the category of musical expression to create patterns of division

During the famous 1949 conference in Łagów Lubuski Zofia Lissa called for the creation of music that would be rich in expression. Her argument reveals an interesting affinity between Marxism and the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his attempt to “historically” (“objectively”) establish the primacy of emotion in art over pure form. At the same time, however, emotions were divided in Łagów into desirable and detrimental, which manifested itself in the most shocking way when three critics – Włodzimierz Sokorski, Józef Chomiński and Zofia Lissa – surprisingly unanimously, or similarly, judged Zbigniew Turski’s Symphony No. 2 “Olympic”.

What is surprising in the context of the Łagów conference is not just the collective, ruthless attack on Turski, but also the fact that very little effort was made to explain the nature of the emotional impact of music. Lissa’s attempt at theoretical analysis did not elicit any response; moreover, as the minutes show, she did not present the entire material she had prepared. How much and for how long this subject had been on her mind is evident from her pre-Łagów paper, published in Myśl Współczesna in 1948, in which she mentioned her lost work from before the Second World War. After the Łagów conference she continued to study the problem and included the results of her investigations in a paper that brought her notoriety, because she invoked the name of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in the title. In the present article I take a small step – through an analysis of selected contributions by Lissa – towards reconstructing her way of thinking in order to understand what priorities guided her and what goals she set for herself.