Who is composer Szymon Laks?

It didn’t save him from experiencing the horrors of the Second World War concentration camps at Auschwitz and Dachau, but it spared him from the assault of physical labour within them that killed so many of his fellow inmates.

A Polish composer who spent most of his professional life in Paris, Laks – in part due to his own memoirs on his experience – is often only spoken of in relation to the Second World War, but he was much more than those three years of his long and fruitful life. A talented musician, a respected arranger, a noted linguist and a key figure in the evolution of French classical music in the interwar years; here we offer an introduction to the composer who owed his life to music, but eventually found himself unable to face it.

He was born a Russian citizen

The man who would go on to be a celebrated Polish composer was actually born a Russian citizen; Warsaw in 1901, the year of his birth there, being part of the Russian Empire’s Congress of Poland. Laks grew up in the city before moving to Vilnius to study mathematics at the University of Stefan Batory, but in 1921 he changed his mind about the direction of his studies. Opting instead for music he returned to Warsaw, now the capital of the newly independent Poland, to enter the city’s Conservatoire. Here he studied harmony, counterpoint and composition under Roman Statkowski, Henryk Melcer and Piotr Rytel, but also kept his hand in mathematics too by attending lectures on this, and philosophy, at the Warsaw University. 

His music studies took him to Paris

Laks saw the shoots of success in Warsaw – in 1924 the Warsaw Philharmonic played one of his works, the symphonic poem Farys, in public for the first time – but in 1926 he elected to further his studies in France. He completed his compositional studies with Pierre Vidal and Henry Rabaud at the Conservatoire de Paris, before developing as a conductor with the Conservatoire National de Musique. During this time he also became a founder member of the Association of Young Polish Musicians in Paris alongside contemporaries such as Grażyna Bacewicz and Roman Palester.

His time in Paris wasn’t always easy

In order to support himself during his early years in Paris, Laks took on a number of jobs. He earned money as a music teacher and also found work playing the violin, initially in the city’s cafes and then on an ocean liner, travelling the world. For a time Laks even found employment playing the piano for silent films. He also wrote a number of more commercial pieces to help pay the bills, including tangos and scores for films, doing so under a number pseudonyms.

But he was beginning to make waves 

Even before completing his studies in 1929, Laks’ work was starting to earn plaudits. In 1928 he received an honourable mention for his jazz fantasy for orchestra and saxophone, Blues Symphonique, and he wrote a number of works for Parisian concerts including his quintet for wind instruments, his second string quartet and, influenced by Ravel and jazz, his Cello  Sonata. During the 1930s he also began a successful collaboration with the singer, and later actress, Tola Korian, writing for her in Polish and French.

Only for the Second World War to dramatically intervene

Laks was Jewish, and in 1941 he was arrested by the German authorities in Paris. Initially interned at a camp close to Orléans, he was then deported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942. On his arrival at the camp, Laks was given some hope by the sight of music stands, as he later reflected in his book Mélodies d’Auschwitz; ‘…music stand, music stands! … where there are music stands, there must be musicians. You can’t have one without the other. Who plays music here? The executioner, or his victims? What type of music do they play? Danses macabres? Funeral songs? Hitlerian chants?’ The stands belonged to the camp’s orchestra, however it would be a month before Laks would see them again as he was initially assigned to physical labour before finally being allowed to audition to join his fellow musicians.

He became a key figure in the orchestra at Auschwitz

Able to speak Polish, Russian, French, English and German, Laks quickly became a key part of the orchestra as he served as translator for a number of musicians who did not speak the Polish of their conductor. Laks’ skills as a copyist and an arranger also became of practical use in an orchestra in such grim circumstances, where they would often need to substitute soloists as their members were deported or killed. In time Laks was appointed as the orchestra’s conductor and in this role he was able to make positive changes for its members; improved rations, decreased work hours, permission to practice indoors during poor weather. But Laks was also fully aware of the unfairness of these privileges against the experience of other prisoners in the camp, as he would later reflect.

But he refused to romanticise the existence of music in the camps

Laks survived the Second World War, and shortly afterwards wrote of his experiences in the book, Musiques d’un Autre Monde (Music From Another World). At the time of its release it was a controversial memoir, chiefly because Laks refused to romanticise the role music played for those incarcerated and was instead insistent on the irrelevance of art in the values-wasteland of the concentration camps. Reflecting on the book for Musicologie, François Coadou draws on Laks’ observation that ‘the orchestra played twice a day; they accompanied the Kommandos when they entered and exited the camp gates. And so far from being a medium of resistance, music was a supplementary torture instrument, an instrument of total domination’. Indeed Laks himself is quoted as saying that ‘in no case did I ever meet a prisoner who found courage in our music, whose life our music helped save’.

After the war he returned to Paris

In October 1944 Laks was transferred from Auschwitz to the Dachau and was mercifully still there and alive when the camp was liberated by the United States army in April 1945. The following month he returned to Paris and became a French citizen. He penned his aforementioned memoirs of the war, but his return to composition was a slow one, as his fellow Polish composer Aleksander Tansman explained in a letter to the Polish institute. ‘After returning from Auschwitz, it took a few years before Szymon Laks was able to return completely to composition. One does not recover one’s creative equilibrium easily after such a harrowing experience’.

He found his compositional voice again in the 1960s

After a relatively silent decade, Laks returned to composition in the 1960s, inspired largely by a collaboration with the singer Halina Szymulska. It proved to be one of Laks’ most fruitful creative periods; he found public success with his Fourth String Quartet, which earned the grand prize at the Quatuor de Liege Competition in 1962, and with Concerto da Camera, for which he received the grand prize at Divonne-les-Bains in 1964. He also wrote his only opera, 1966’s one-act comic opera L’hirondelle inattendue (The Unexpected Swallow).

But it proved to be a short-lived return

Despite this acclaim, Laks’ return to composition was short-lived. When the Six Day War broke out in 1967, Laks stopped working, reportedly telling his son ‘there is no reason to write music any more… aggression made the music quiesce’. Instead Laks, who had long held a passion for linguistic problems, dedicated the final decade of his life to translation. The author of several books, he died in Paris, in 1983.

His music drew upon many influences

Laks’ musical output is often described as neo-classical; he worked in the baroque and classical genres and has been praised for his mastery of polyphonic technique and a simple and pure style. Within his compositions there is evidence of the lyrical romantic traditions of Polish lieds, as well as the progressive intonations of the French interwar style.

But the extent to which is war experience influenced his music remains a source of debate

Biographies of Laks often suggest the presence of references to genocide and his time in the concentration camps within his later music. However others argue that this is merely backshadowing, that listeners are taking what they know of Laks’ experiences and imposing that onto the music. A leader of this argument is Simon Wynberg, Artistic Director of Canada’s ARC Ensemble. Writing for Gramophone in 2017, Wynberg stated that ‘very little [in Laks’ music] alludes to, or dwells on this dreadful period. Rather Laks’s music reflects the best qualities of a loose group of foreign-born musicians which made up the cosmopolitan École de Paris. It is elegant, witty, beautifully crafted, propulsively rhythmic, occasionally even jazzy, and generally optimistic in character. And although Laks’s language evolved and developed, it never deserted these essential qualities’