A Warsaw Bricklayer, cantata for solo baritone, mixed choir and orchestra (1951)

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Andrzej Hiolski - baryton, Chorus and Orchestra of the Polish Radio in Kraków, cond. Jerzy Gert, Warsaw 1951

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The work is one of the most characteristic examples of Polish panegyrical cantatas of the socialist realism era and represents ideologically engaged early works composed by Serocki. The structure of the piece is determined both by generic models – represented by musical works composed in the USSR – and by the text, the author of which is the Warsaw bricklayer and poet Włodzimierz Domaradzki. The cantata, comprising three parts (Rough Hands, A Night in the Krasiński Square, Daily March), has been preserved only in a recording. This is how it was analysed by Maciej Gołąb in his book:

A pompous introduction is a stylistic cross between Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto and a march-like, banal mass songs sung a cappella. After the introduction, as the requirements of the genre would have it, the soloist, in a solid operatic tessitura, presents himself to – as we could suspect – a “class enemy”. He sings sotto voce: “I know that my hands are rough – as you see – perhaps you’d be ashamed of them, but I am proud. [...] My hands are rough, bronzed by the wind, cracked is their skin” in a act of self-presentation. “Bricklayer!” – chants the choir fortissimo, increasing tension and as a result we hear an unexpected “go, go, go” chanted in a march-like manner by the male part of the choir. Then comes “The bricklayer creates songs” in a convention of kitschy-lyrical musical reverie. Several bars later the whole choir transports the listener from a metaphoric to a literal mode, singing: “we are building new houses for Warsaw”. After this musically animated fragment, the narrator again strikes a note of reflection and, turning to a personified Warsaw, he ardently sings a minor key melody, similar in its expression to the aria Sighing Firs from Moniuszko’s opera Halka: “I follow your voice every day, laying bricks, writing a mini-poem with them on high walls, to you, my beloved capital”. Yet there is no room for permanent sentiments in the new reality. In a reprise-like fragment, the Warsaw bricklayer regains the vigour of a representative of the working people and – again focusing on his upper limbs reified by the poet – confesses: “What more should one want than for these hands to build a home for all. A new home”.

In the second part of the composition, though Serocki also uses sections alternating both aesthetic elements: the sentimental and the energetic, there is nevertheless [...] a “silent night” when it comes to expression. We know, however, that this is by no means some shabby barn but a great socialist construction site among “stumps of ruins”. In the meantime, however, “the capital is resting”.

Part three of the cantata begins with a unison string motif, quite unceremoniously borrowed from the finale of Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Brass instruments heard from afar are waking the capital up; we can hear a clock (quite near this time), while a sprightly male choir intones in unison: “the clock strikes seven, everyone has come to work as they do every day, the work is starting, bring on the bricks!”. The snare drums are growling and the female choir comments: “against the sky the bricks are blossoming like poppy flowers, like wild roses, the sun sifts gold like a farmer sifting wheat with his sieve”.  The snare drums again beat out a marching rhythm: “One brick follows another, the first one is followed by the second, the second by the third, the third by the fourth... The work is in full swing... We are happily toiling away”. The bricklayer is not, however, an ordinary hired worker, but a co-host of his beloved city. The snare drums, this time discreetly, announce his earlier marching confession with a poetic phrase: “When I walk the streets of Warsaw, it seems to me I have wings instead of hands and I fly like a bird among early spring meadows, while houses grow in the meadows”. And where does this good mood after the daily toil come from?, the listeners would ask today. [...] The bricklayer explains it himself in a song: “In front, behind, on the left and on the right stand new houses with white plaster on the walls, I feel proud as I pass by”. In the last verses of the cantata, the bricklaying hero, devoid of any pro-environmental sentiments, chants enthusiastically: “Smoke belches from the city’s chimneys, ten, fifty, two hundred! [...] One from a steelworks, one from a big paper mill, guarding the city” etc. Thus a contemplation of the landscape of the smoke-filled city closes the work.

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• Maciej Gołąb, Muzyczna moderna w XX wieku [Musical Modernism in the 20th Century], Wrocław 2011.

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