Vistula, cantata for reciting voice, mixed choir and instrumental ensemble, 1948–1949, 1979

In his cantata Vistula composed at the turn of 1948 and 1949 Palester tackles a great patriotic subject, making no concessions to the aesthetics of socialist realism that was being enforced in Poland at the time. His friend, Tadeusz Ochlewski’s, the then head of the PWM, suggested to him the use of some folk melodies, but Palester followed decidedly his own way. The cantataVistula contains no folklore references whatsoever and is a far cry from the Neo-classical stylistics. Palester explores the territories of atonal music; his themes tend to make use of all the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, but it would be difficult to talk of the application of the serial technique. In the narrator’s part, Palester introduces the effect of Sprechgesang. There are also some interesting timbral effects, like the piano and harp glissandi running across the entire scale or musical enhancement of the phonetic properties of the text.

The text comes from Stefan Żeromski’s poem Wisła (Vistula). The work consists of three movements joined by common themes. The first movement describes the birth of the river and is called Poczęcie Wisły (The Conception of the Vistula) marked Lento miserioso - Allegretto leggiero. The second movement, Z nizinnych błot (From the Lowland Swamps) is in Largo grave tempo. The climax comes in the last movement, Suchy wiatr (Dry Wind), which is marked Allegretto moderato.

The composition was first performed in Brussels on 27 June 1950 under Franz André’s baton. The Polish premiere took place in Bydgoszcz in 1957. In 1979 the composer, typically for him, made a new version of the cantata. The new version was premiered in Cracow on 9 April 1995.