‘With deepest respect and gratitude…’. On the early years of Myroslaw Antonowycz’s musicological path, from his letters to Adolf Chybiński

Abstract

Myroslaw Antonowycz (1917–2006) was a musicologist, conductor and composer, a Ukrainian whose entire career in musicology was associated with his work at Utrecht University. He is well known primarily among musicologists studying the music of Josquin des Prez, and more generally – of Franko-Flemish composers, as well as among Byzantinists. He was an alumnus of the Faculty of Musicology at Lviv’s (then Lwów’s) Jan Kazimierz University, where he studied for three years in the last period of Adolf Chybiński’s (1880–1952) academic work in Lviv. Chybiński was the founder and head of the chair, as well as one of the founding fathers of Polish musicology. The history of Lviv musicology and the representation of the Ukrainian minority in this milieu has already been studied by such Polish and Ukrainian musicologists as Ulyana Hrab, Vasyl Vitvitskyi, Luba Kijanowska, Leszek and Teresa Mazepa, Yuri Yasinovskyi, Michał Piekarski, and Małgorzata Sieradz. Since unfortunately most of their works have been published in either Polish or Ukrainian, that is, languages less common in international research, the present paper is an attempt to present the figure of this eminent scholar to a wider audience. This biographical sketch concerning Antonowycz’s early years as a musicologist was directly inspired by a set of forty-one letters and nine postcards sent by this researcher to Adolf Chybiński in 1939–52. This correspondence is now kept at the Poznań University Library, the Adolf Chybiński Archive at the Music Collections Studio, Special Collections Department, shelf mark 803 III/1, c. 4–58). These sources in this publication they have been printed in full and with commentary (see the Appendix). Their presentation is complementary to Yuri Yasinovskyi’s edition of Chybiński’s letters to Antonowycz (Musica Humana [Lviv] I 2003 pp. 67–110). Antonowycz spent World War II in Vienna, Linz, and Łódź, where he focused first and foremost on his singing skills (appearing in opera houses, on concert stages, and in radio broadcasts). He also continued his musicological studies at the University of Vienna. Having settled in the Netherlands after the war, he started work under Professor Albertus Smijers, founder and long-time head (from 1930 till his death in 1957) of the chair of musicology at De Universiteit Utrecht, who is universally recognised at the founder of the Dutch school of musicology. Having obtained his doctorate, he became Smijers’s assistant and co-editor of the Werken van Josquin des Prez, initiated and edited from 1922 by Smijers. After Smijers’s death Antonowycz undertook to complete work on the successive volumes in this series, first on his own and later with Willem Elders. In this way he made a name for himself in history of the world musicology. The surviving letters by Myroslaw Antynowycz offer direct proof of his strong attachment to the Lviv university circles and his first mentor, Professor Adolf Chybiński. Though Antynowycz was associated from the late 1940s and throughout his professional career with Utrecht University, where he obtained his PhD, it needs to be emphatically stated that his scholarly attitude had been shaped during his studies at the Faculty of Musicology of Lviv’s Jan Kazimierz University, and he frequently declared that Chybiński, a founding father of the Polish musicology and its Lviv centre, was his model as a scholar.