Dates of life and work
1840 Settlement in Vilnius (then in the Russian Empire) of Konstanty Kazimierz’s grandfather Louis Régamey (1817–1900), a Protestant from a patrician family stemming from Lausanne and the Canton of Vaud. In 1843 he obtains a licence to teach French. On 20 September 1846 he marries a Pole, Kazimiera Bogdanowicz, and then moves to Kyiv, where the family undergoes intense Polonization. Louis becomes a professor of French at Kyiv’s Gymnasium [secondary school] No. 1, and on 3 December 1883 – the tsar’s subject. He retires in 1884, receiving the Imperial Russian Order of Saint Vladimir.
1879, 21 July Konstanty Kazimierz Régamey is born in Zhmerynka near Vinnytsia (Podolia), in the family estate of his father Rudolf Felix Gabriel Régamey (1852–1891) and his mother Maria Zelenay-Regamey-Bucholz (of mixed Hungarian and Italian descent). Konstanty Kazimierz had three siblings: sister Helena (moved to Warsaw with her husband Aleksander Dobrowolski, where she died in 1958) and two brothers: Leon and Ludwik Stanisław Marian (the latter lived and worked as an engineer in Bydgoszcz, became the city’s president in 1920, then emigrated to Toulouse, where he resided till his death in 1967).
1891 Following his father Rudolf Felix’s untimely death in Odessa, twelve-year-old Konstanty Kazimierz is brought up in the home of his mother Maria Zelenay, who, after Rudolf’s death, marries Stanisław Bucholz, a stationmaster in Odessa. Konstanty Kazimierz attends a secondary school in that city (completed in 1897) and improves his knowledge of the Polish language and traditions, which dominate at his family home. With time, those traditions would become most important to him, and he would also instil them in his son Konstanty Regamey Jr, educated in Warsaw.
Since there is no music conservatory in Kyiv at that time, Konstanty Kazimierz travels to Saint Petersburg, where he obtains a piano diploma from the class of Anna Nikolaevna Esipova at St Petersburg Conservatory. He returns to Kyiv with Lidya Nikolaevna Brailoff-Slavitch (1883–1964), later a graduate from Esipova’s class like himself, who would become his wife. In order to obtain permission to open a music school, Konstanty Kazimierz is forced to accept the official status of tsar’s subject.
Konstanty Kazimierz is listed among the students of Kyiv’s Imperial University of St Vladimir (from which he graduates in 1905).
He becomes a teacher at Mykola Tutkovsky’s prestigious music school, which employed many Polish musicians and teachers.
9 April in Kyiv – marriage to Lidya Slavitch.
The Slavitch-Régamey Music School is established in the palace at 32 Pushkinskaya St. (now the seat of the National Union of Composers of Ukraine).
15/28 December Their only son Konstanty is born on the same floor of the palace where the music school was located.
The ‘Music School of Spouses [Rus. suprugov] K.K. Régamey and L.N. Slavitch-Regame’ moves to its new seat at 36 Bibikovsky (now Tarasa Shevchenka) Boulevard.
Petersburg, Lidya Slavitch graduates from Anna Esipova’s class, obtaining an external student diploma in 1909/1910.
The school charter titled Ustav shkoly Lidyi Nikolaevny Slavitch-Regame in Kyiv is passed.
The school regulations Pravila shkoly Slavitch-Regame in Kyiv are published.
G. I. Indzhishek publishing house (Kyiv-Baku), supplying materials for the Imperial Music Society, prints Konstanty Kazimierz Régamey’s songs to texts by Russian poets as well as his solo and chamber pieces, educational studies and arrangements.
The school moves to 44 Funduklyevska (later Lenina) Street. Regamey Sr prepares series of educational collections for G. I. Indzhishek, arranging the music and writing prefaces. These editions include, among others, Sobranye progressivo-raspredlyennykh etyudov, Vols 1-12, which contains ca 10 études composed by Regamey Sr. himself.
The school is elevated to a higher status as the L.N. Slavitch-Regame Musical and Pedagogical Institute’ and becomes a four-year professional music school in 1920. At that time, Lidya and Konstanty Kazimierz’s marriage is in crisis, and the seriously ill Regamey Sr. is planning to leave Kyiv.
Lidya Slavitch decides to part from her husband and flee from the post-Revolution Ukraine to Poland with their son (via Crimea, Bulgaria, Romania, and Lviv – they reach Warsaw in May 1920).
The ailing Konstanty Kazimierz leaves for Taganrog in Russia (on the Sea of Azov), where he receives help and care at the house of one of his pupils. During his recovery, he takes up short-time employment at the Music Conservatory in Taganrog. He is unable to return to Kyiv since the Russian border has been closed during Symon Petliura’s rule in Ukraine while the civil war and post-Revolutionary unrest continues.
Regamey Sr decides to return to Kyiv and continue his musical and teaching career at his and his wife’s former school, which the Soviet authorities converted into the Vocational Music School No. 3. This decision means he will never meet his wife and son again, though he strives to maintain correspondence with his son at all costs, sending letters via the Polish consulate for lack of an operational mail service (a solution that proved fatal to him).
Regamey Sr marries his pupil Natalya Makharina of Taganrog, twenty two years his junior, who had taken care of him (with her mother) when he was ill. Their daughter Svetlana Konstantinovna is born in Kyiv.
Regamey Sr works at the Ukrainian radio (the Kyiv Radio Broadcasting Committee) as kontsertmaister, i.e. leader of a group of five accompanists. He creates orchestral arrangements, appears solo on the air, and accompanies singers in concert cycles presenting vocal music of different periods (directed by Levko Mykolaiovych Revutsky and broadcast live from the Kyiv Radio studio).
Regamey Sr is appointed professor of piano studies at the Mykola Lysenko Music and Drama Institute. He is one of many outstanding musicians working there. He also accompanies eminent singers Mykola Filimonov, Dmitry Revutsky, and Mikhail Bocharov during their solo concerts. He gives many performances in that period and is a member of Kyiv’s cultural and artistic elite. He uses Polish in both speech and writing. He belongs to the exclusive Mykola Leontovych Music Society.
The Mykola Lysenko Music and Drama Institute is closed down by the Soviet authorities. Many of its lecturers and associated musicians are arrested.
The Ukrainian Soviet authorities order Regamey Sr to organise a Polish Song-and-Dance Ensemble in Kyiv, of which he is appointed head. He recruits young Poles from the Zhytomyr region. After an initial period of training, the ensemble under the direction of Regamey Sr gives its first public performances (cf. notes on the ensemble’s establishment and the beginnings of its operations in Radyanska Muzyka, 1936 and 1937).
The NKVD takes possession of the lists of ensemble members of Polish nationality and arrests many of the ensemble’s singers, dancers, and instrumentalists.
Regamey Sr is also arrested by the NKVD, put in its Kyiv prison, and accused of espionage for ‘bourgeois Poland’. During the interrogation, he openly admits to visiting the Polish consulate.
His indictment is issued.
Regamey Sr is sentenced to death. This sentence is approved of by the highest Soviet authorities.
Regamey Sr is shot by firing squad at Kyiv prison. His place of burial is unknown to this day, but it is likely to be located at Bykivnia, i.e. a special NKVD zone on the outskirts of Kyiv (where the fourth Katyn Polish War Cemetery is also now situated).
godzina 24:00
After a long period of wandering following her escape from Kyiv, Lidya Slavitch settles in Warsaw, where she takes care of her son Konstanty and performs on the piano on some occasions.
Lidya is engaged by her son, the composer and pianist Konstanty Regamey Jr, to play the second piano part in the world premiere performance of his Persian Songs at a clandestine concert at the private home of the Wiśniewski family in Boduena Street, and later – at the official premiere at the Woytowicz Café.
Following the fall of the Warsaw Uprising, Lidya leaves Warsaw with her son and his wife Anna (from Cracow, daughter of former government minister Władysław Kucharski; she died in 1991 in Lausanne). With other expelled Warsaw inhabitants, they are marched to the transit camp in Pruszków, whence they are taken to Stutthof concentration camp. They are saved from death by Konstanty Regamey Jr’s Swiss papers, which confirm his descent. Taken to another camp near Hamburg and then relocated to other labour camps, where they experience hunger, they manage to reach Lausanne at the end of November 1944, and they settle there permanently.
Lidya Slavitch arrives in Lausanne, where she resides till her death in 1964. She lives with her son and daughter-in-law, working as a repetiteur and accompanist at Lausanne Opera.
Svetlana Konstantinovna Regame, Konstanty Kazimierz’s daughter from his second marriage, settles in Moscow with her husband Boris Sergeevich Markus, a WWII veteran and author of published memoirs. In Moscow, Svetlana graduates from university and takes up work as an engineer. She takes part in specialised projects and publishes books on urban planning and the reconstruction of historical cities (Tallin 1988, Moskwa 1989).
Konstanty Kazimierz Régamey is officially vindicated thanks to the efforts of his second wife, Natalya Makharina, who petitions the highest Soviet authorities to grant him posthumous rehabilitation.
Natalya Makharina, Konstanty Kazimierz’s second wife, dies soon after her late husband’s vindication.
Konstanty Regamey Jr (living and working in Lausanne) tours the Soviet Union as a pianist with the Swiss violinist Anne-Marie Gründer. His half-sister Svetlana learns about the concert tour from posters, which leads to an establishment of previously non-existent family ties. Svetlana visits the Regameys in Lausanne a couple of times.
Konstanty Kazimierz Régamey Sr is mentioned in musicological literature for the first time since the democratic transformation in Ukraine (among other composers and musicians victimised by the Beria regime under the Great Purge). Cf. Liu Oleksandrivna Parkhomenko (ed.), Istorya ukrainskoi Muzyki, Vol. 4 (Kyiv, 1992).
The first brief entry in a Ukrainian lexicon, describing Régamey Sr as ‘a pianist, composer, and teacher, a Pole by origin’ [sic!]. Cf. Anton Mukha, Kompozitory Ukrainy ta ukrainskoi diaspory. Dobidnik (Kyiv, 2004).
The first source-based entry on Régamey Sr appears in PWM Edition’s Music Encyclopaedia (Kraków, 2004), the result of many years of Jerzy Stankiewicz’s library and archival research in Ukraine, Russia, Switzerland, and Poland. This is also the world’s first musicological biography of this pianist and composer, made possible by the recognition of, and support for his research provided by the Encyclopaedia’s editor-in-chief Elżbieta Dziębowska, PhD.
The Ukrainian website Natsionalnyi istoryko-memorialnyi zapovidnyk ‘Bykivnianski mohyly’ [The National Historic Memorial ‘Bykivnia Graves’] publicly presents for the first time the key documents concerning the arrest, interrogation, and death sentence passed on Régamey Sr (along with a paper by Olena Polidovych).
The first Ukrainian-language entry in the new Ukrainian Music Encyclopaedia, written by Jerzy Stankiewicz, with a supplement on the Ukrainian literature by Valentina Kuzyk. Cf. Jerzy Stankiewicz and Valentina Kuzyk, ‘Regamey Konstanty Kazimierz’ in Українська музична енциклопедія, Hanna Skripnyk (ed.), Vol. 6, Raab-Syatelskyi (M. F. Rilskyi Institute of Art, Folklore, and Ethnology at the National. Academy of Sciences, Ukraine: Kyiv, 2023,), col. 55–56, and entry for ‘Regamey Konstanty’, col. 56–57.
Copyright by Jerzy Stankiewicz
Cracow, 17 October 2024