Ignacy Feliks Dobrzynski and Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Poland

"Dobrzynski (1807-1867) makes an especially fascinating study because his career and Chopin's ran so close together for a while. They were only three years apart in age, both were pianists, and both studied composition with Jósef Elsner in Warsaw in the late 1920s . . . .both composers were publishing piano solo music, much of it in the same genres, especially nocturnes and mazurkas. . . . and his [Dobrzynki's] compositions include symphonies, chamber music, sacred choral music, operas, songs, and pedagogical works, as well as piano music. The principal merit of Smialek's book is its thoughtful appraisal of all this music, published and unpublished, which resides in the National Library in Warsaw. . . . Smialek's strengths here are his command of nineteenth-century Polish cultural and political history and his ease in moving between history and musical analysis." -- Notes