Badarzewska, Thekla
Badarzewska, Thekla
Badarzewska, Thekla, Polish composer of salon music; b. Warsaw, 1834; d. there, Sept. 29, 1861. At the age of 17 she publ. in Warsaw a piano piece, Molitiva dziewicy (A Maiden’s Prayer), which was republ. as a supplement to the Paris Revue et Gazette Musicale in 1859, and unaccountably seized the imagination not only of inhibited virgins, but of sentimental amateur pianists all over the world. More than 100 eds. of this unique piece of salon pianism, dripping maudlin arpeggios, were publ. in the 19th century, and the thing was still widely sold even in the 20th century. Badarzewska wrote 34 more piano pieces in the salon style, but none of them matched A Maiden’s Prayer. An ungentlemanly German critic opined in an obituary that “Badarzews-ka’s early death saved the musical world from a veritable inundation of intolerable lachrymosity.”
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire