Marta Mirska & Ork. M. Paszkieta – Letnia przygoda (A Summer Love Affair) Tango (Jerzy Boczkowski – Janusz Odrowąż), Melodje 1948 (Polish)
NOTES:
1. During the Golden Years of the Polish Tango (+ - 1929-1949: I’m countiong between the appearance of the best compositions by the Warsaw tango moguls: Arthur Gold, Jerzy Petrersburski and Henryk Wars presented by the best Warsaw performers (Hanka Ordonówna, Chór Dana, Stanisława Nowicka, Karol Hanusz, Zofia Terne, Tadeusz Faliszewski etc.) in cabarets Qui pro Quo, Banda or Morskie Oko in the late 1920s and early 1930s – then, through the whole 1930s during the Golden Years of Radio (with singers like Mieczysław Fogg, Adam Aston, Janusz Popałwski, Stefan Witas, Wiera Gran) and including the 2nd WW – when the beautiful Polish songs, also tangos were still composed an performed in cafes and restaurants; although not published because of the German occupation of Poland – then from 1945 on after the war, through several postwar tango-years, when a lot of beautiful songs were composed by those artists who survived the war, until the Stalinist regime was fully installed in Poland in 1949 and all this ended.
2. However, during a short period of 1945-49 a lot still happened in Polish pop-music: the good jazz big bands appeared like The Łopatowski Brothers, the Charles Bovery or the Jan Cajmer’s Bands, as well as some excellent new talents in singing, like Tadeusz Miller, Marta Mirska, Halina Kowalewska, Do-Re-Mi Sisters, to mention only a few. Yet, lacking the professional promotion in the communist occupied state, their talents were in large part just wasted. Tadeusz Miller – whose wonderful baritone was considered as the noble follower of greatest Polish prewar pop-singer Mieczysław Fogg – died in 1947 during a motorbike crash, colliding with the Soviet tank on his ride from city of Szczecin where Tadeusz Miller lived to Poznań, for a recording session in Melodje Records.
3. Marta MIRSKA: she was a winner of the singing contest in 1940 in Wilno – then a Polish city free from German occupation - where she run away from the occupied Warsaw after the outbreak of the WW2 (Sept. 1939). Her warm lovely alt was compared by her Polish fans with that of the French diseuse Leo Marjane or the German star Greta Keller. Marta Mirska, who successfully debuted back in Warsaw in 1945 on radio and on records and continued her progress until 1949. She managed to return to a fame in 1950s, after the Stalinism was over, to be even called for some time the “queen of a Polish song”. Unfortunately, she withdrew from performing in the 1960s when the beat era started - feeling unable to fight with her growing alcoholism as well as to compete with the young wave of Polish rock-singers. She died in Warsaw, completely forgotten and in extreme poverty, in 1991.
4. This beautiful tango was composed by Jerzy Boczkowski – a legendary director of Qui pro Quo, the most famous Warsaw cabaret on the interwar years, who also launched careers of several front line stars of Polish song in the 1920s-30s: Hanka Ordonówna, Mira Ziminska, Zula Pogorzelska or Eugeniusz Bodo. After 1945, he used his composing talents to release several nice songs, among which tango “Letnia Przygoda” (A Summer Love Affair; 1947) recorded soon by Marta Mirska, joined the list of Polish song evergreens. This warm farewell between a couple of summer holiday lovers is full of a melancholy warmth and mood of passing away of time & love.
5. Therefore, a slideshow for this moody melody are several shots from two Polish “fading summer” classic movies: “Pożegnania” (Farewells; 1958) with beautiful – and similar in atmosphere – roles of two “summertime lovers” (performed by Tadeusz Janczar & Maria Wachowiak) who have their love affair in a small suburban resort, just a few days before the bombardment of Warsaw on 1st Sept 1939. The second movie, filmed by celebrated Polish writer Tadeusz Konwicki “Ostatni dzień lata” (The Last Day Of Summer; 1958) is a melancholic psychological study of loneliness and helplessness of two people incapable of attempting to live together, performed on an empty Baltic beach by Jan Machulski and Irena Laskowska during the title “last day of a summer”.
6. This “tango of a fading summer” I am dedicating to all of us, who – just as I, today – have in these days their farewell to this year’s summer. Yesterday I returned from my holidays and I am in a pensive mood, just like the performer of this farewell song or the melancholic lovers from the fading photographs from the old movies.
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