Zdzisław Jachimecki

Zdzisław Jachimecki played piano and violin from his childhood. He then studied music at the Conservatory of the Galician Music Society in Lviv (Lemberg), and later musicology at the University of Wien (Vienna). In 1906 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the psalms of Mikolaj Gomolka, a Polish Renaissance composer.

Jachimecki also studied composition in Wien, with Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) and others. In 1911, he completed his habilitation at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków working on “Italian Influences on Polish Music, Part 1, 1540-1560”. There, he was first a lecturer in music history and was appointed full professor in 1921. An eminent musicologist, he was also a visiting lecturer at many European universities. Between the world wars, he prepared numerous radio and music broadcasts, lectures and nearly 400 concerts for Polish Radio.

After Germany invaded Poland, Jachimecki was arrested and imprisoned for several months in 1939-40. After that he gave secret lectures in the underground. After the war he returned to the university, but also wrote for numerous newspapers and magazines. He composed a number of orchestral pieces and songs and translated the libretto of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. In his scholarly work he dealt with the history of modern music, the history of Polish Renaissance music, and biographies of, among others, Josef Haydn and Richard Wagner.

Jachimecki was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. His wife Zofia (1886-1973) was a Polish translator from French and Italian. She translated, for instance, the book “Pinocchio” into Polish.