jazztalk.net

Ewa Wyszogrodzka is grateful for the unknown builders who, after discovering a suitcase in the garden of a destroyed house in Warsaw at the end of the second world war, handed it to authorities.

Its contents – pages of musical composition – were placed in the Polish national library for safekeeping, where they lay forgotten for years.

The manuscripts had been buried by Wyszogrodzka’s great-grandfather, the composer Ludomir Różycki, before he fled the war-torn city.

On a recent afternoon, Wyszogrodzka wiped tears from her face as she listened to a Polish virtuoso violinist bring the works to life.

“Listening to the music, it’s like getting to know my great-grandfather for the first time,” said Wyszogrodzka, an economist, sitting in the foyer of the Philharmonic Hall in Szczecin, north-west Poland after a concert of Różycki’s works. “To think, these pieces might have been lost forever.”