Franciszek Ksawery Brzeziński

His small surviving output, mostly for piano, belongs to the late Romantic tradition.

• Name — Franciszek Brzeziński • Birth Name — Franciszek Ksawery Brzeziński • Born — 6 September 1867 • Birthplace — Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire • Died — 6 August 1944 • Place of death — Warsaw, German-occupied Poland • Education — Leipzig Conservatory • Occupation — * Composer • music critic • lawyer • consular official • Years Active — 1890–1944

Brzeziński was born in 1867 in Warsaw, the capital of Congress Poland in the Russian Empire, the son of Walentyna (Suchorzewska) and Kazimierz Brzeziński. He was a grandson of the pianist and composer Filipina Brzezińska-Szymanowska, through whom the family was connected by marriage to Maria Szymanowska. He took his first piano lessons in Warsaw with the composer Jan Kleczyński. He studied law in Dresden and at the Imperial University of Dorpat, graduating in 1890, and then studied musicology at Leipzig from 1893 to 1896 under Hugo Riemann and Arnold Schering. He practiced as a lawyer in Warsaw until 1903 while continuing to study music privately. Afterwards, he devoted himself entirely to music, spending a year in Paris before enrolling at the Royal Conservatory in Leipzig from 1904 to 1907, where he studied composition with Max Reger and Stephan Krehl,and conducting with Arthur Nikisch. In the 1907–08 season, he was second conductor at the municipal opera in Elberfeld.

From 1921 to 1927 Brzeziński served as consul of the Republic of Poland in Breslau, and afterward briefly in Berlin, where around 1928 he acted as correspondent for the Warsaw monthly Muzyka. He returned to Poland in 1931. Brzeziński died in Warsaw on August 6, 1944, during the opening week of the Warsaw Uprising. He was buried in the family grave at Powązki Cemetery.

Brzeziński's music is rooted in the late nineteenth-century tradition—he particularly admired Brahms—though he was not hostile to modernism; his critical writings are considered a source for the study of Polish musical life of the period. Reviewing the first recordings of his surviving works, the critic Byzantion described the Tryptyk as a set of preludes and fugues paying homage to Bach, and found in the Tema con variazioni and the Suita polska a preference for conservative forms combined with a feeling for lyrical nostalgia and native dance rhythms, comparing the effect to that of Sergei Bortkiewicz. The same review judged the violin sonata his strongest work, singling out the expressive weight of its central slow movement. The musicologist Maryla Renat included the Sonata in D major among the twentieth-century Polish violin sonatas in which native folklore is absorbed into the musical language, grouping it with what she termed the current of "forgotten Polish music."

Unless otherwise noted, dates are those of publication. • Śpiewnik studencki (Student songbook), for voice and piano (c. 1890) • Waltz, for piano (c. 1901); also orchestrated as Konzertwalzer • Kołysanka and Serenada-Matinata, songs to the composer's own texts, for voice and piano (1904) • Stimmungsbilder in Variationenform (Tema con variazioni), Op. 3, for piano • Suita polska (Polish Suite) in G major, Op. 4, for piano (1908) • Tryptyk (Triptique), three preludes and fugues, Op. 5, for piano (1911) • Sonata in D major, Op. 6, for violin and piano • Toccata in F major, Op. 7, for piano (1912) • Piano Concerto in G minor, Op. 9 (1914–15; manuscript lost) • Polonez-Ballada, for piano (1917); also in an orchestral version