Research history

Sentenced to death on the basis of an NKVD indictment and shot by a firing squad on the midnight of 20 January 1938 at a Kyiv prison, Konstanty Kazimierz Régamey was, like all those victimised by the Stalin regime, removed from public memory, and all the traces of his life and work were purposefully obliterated. Such bans were rigorous and duly observed for fear of retribution (more strictly so than censorship in communist Poland). All memory of persons branded in this manner was simply wiped out. Even after their public rehabilitation, which in the case of Régamey Sr took place in 1957, they were not talked or written about for many years afterwards. For this reason, there were no papers on the life and work of those condemned by the regime, not to mention any systematic studies.

This is true, most of all, about Régamey Sr long-time activity as organiser (with his wife Lydia) of his own music school and later a distinguished piano teacher at the Mykola Lysenko Music and Drama Institute and at Kyiv Conservatory. The only episode that remained on record was the project he implemented at the orders of the Soviet authorities. After the start of his work on the organisation of a Polish Song-and-Dance ensemble, Régamey Sr managed to publish reports on the beginnings of that ensemble’s operations, printed in Radyanska Muzyka in 1936 and 1937.

For the next half-a-century, those sentenced to death were a forbidden subject, and, for fear of being punished, no one dared to undertake such research. Like the memory of the Katyn massacres, such events only lived on in people’s memories, but without any public source of reference.

A new opening came with Ukraine gaining independence in 1991. First harbingers of interest in the banned composers and their music soon followed, as confirmed by the inclusion of Régamey Sr’s name, among many other victimised musicians and composers, in Istorya ukrainskoi Muzyki, Vol. 4 (1917–1941), Liu Oleksandrivna Parkhomenko (ed.) (Naukova Dumka: Kyiv, 1992), 18. In her edition of Dmitro Revutskyi’s (a Lysenko Institute professor like Régamey) Ukrainski dumy ta pisni istorychni [Ukrainian Dumas and Historical Songs]. 1919 (Ethnologists’ Association Centre, Instytut mystetsvoznavstva, folklorystyky ta etnolohiyi imeni M. T. Ryl’s’koho: Kyiv, 2002, 21), the Kyiv-based musicologist Valentina Kuzyk twice mentions ‘Kostya’ Regame as accompanist to singers in 1923–1928. She writes this mainly in the context of her discussion of solo song development at the Institute then run by Revutskyi.

2004 saw the publication of Régamey Sr’s first biographical entry, of my authorship, in the original edition of Encyklopedia muzyczna PWM [PWM Edition’s Music Encyclopaedia] (ed. Elżbieta Dziębowska). Also in Ukraine, first editions of lexicons and dictionaries dedicated to twentieth-century composers began to appear, making up for the lack of such publications in the Soviet Ukraine. In his catalogue Kompozitory Ukrainy i ukrainskoy diaspory: spravochnik [The Composers of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Diaspora. A Directory] (Kyiv, 2004), Anton Mukha published the first Ukrainian-language entry on Regamey Sr, in which he writes about Konstanty Rudolfovich (a patronymic the musician declined to use) that he was ‘a Pole by origin’ [sic!], a pianist, composer, and teacher, as well as co-organiser and head of a ‘Polish centre’ (not a folk ensemble), quoting an incorrect date for that project (1927 rather than 1936). Mukha specifies that Régamey Sr composed piano pieces, chamber and vocal music, songs to texts by Aleksei Apukhtin, Semen Nadson, and others.

The same year 2004 also brought the first concert dedicated to Régamey Sr’s music, held as part of the 16th Days of Music by Kraków Composers (DMKC) to mark the 125th birth anniversary of the forgotten composer K. K. Rudolfovich Régamey. The programme included world premieres of rediscovered songs such as ‘To Asters’ (text by A. Apukhtin), ‘Into the Dark Night of My Grief’ (text by L. Andruson), ‘Again I’m Alone’ (text by A. Apukhtin), ‘In my dreams I saw heavens bespangled…’ (text by S. Nadson in Polish transl. by H. Zelenay), as well as his piano pieces (Improvisation, Op. 10, Berceuse, Op. 6, Chanson triste, Op. 11, the suite Un coin paisible, and educational études). The concert’s programme booklet included the first published biography and commentary. Many unknown facts concerning Régamey Sr’s life and work were first announced in the programme books of the International Days of Music by Kraków Composers (in 2004–2013), in the context of premiere performances of his rediscovered works at the festival concerts.

Only two pieces by Régamey Sr have been found in Polish collections to date: Chanson triste for piano (now kept at the Library of the Katowice Academy of Music, score originally from the ‘Symfonia’ music lending library at 23 Sławkowska St. in Cracow!) and the song ‘Serenade to Inesilla’ (at the Main Library of the Gdańsk Academy of Music). In the music collections of the National Library of Poland, one finds a large set of Régamey Sr’s educational editions, published in separate fascicles, including twelve volumes of classical études by various composers titled Sobranye progressivo-raspredlyennykh etyudov (publ. by G.I. Indzhishek, Kyiv-Baku – some of those pieces are of his own authorship) and a popular works series ‘Le Progrès Artistique’ (publ. by Leon Idzikowski, Kyiv-Warsaw).

Growing awareness of the subject, as well as the need to promote further research, inspired the first concert performances of the rediscovered works. The first presentation of the newfound scores by Régamey Sr took place on 1 October 2004 at the Mykola Lysenko Music Room (in the House-Museum of his name). It took the form of a concert held as part of the 15th Kyiv Music Fest (international music festival) and my paper on Régamey Sr delivered at a conference that accompanied the festival. Numerous Cracow performances followed at the 2004 DMKC and the Klezmer-Hois in 2005. Another Kyiv concert (including my presentation) was held in January 2008 at the Foundation for the Support of Fine Arts in Kyiv, marking the 70th anniversary of the Régamey Sr’s death (the programme was then repeated in May at the Cracow DMKC).

Concerning Konstanty Regamey Jr, one should note what is probably the only music composition dedicated to him by a Polish composer: Ryszard Gabryś’s Syrinx de Lausanne ‘À Constantin’ for solo flute (1979, revised in 2009).

The programme of the 2007 DMKC, for the celebrations of Konstanty Regamey Jr’s birth centenary and 25th death anniversary, included the Polish premiere of his last work, Visions, accompanied by a musicological conference titled The Phenomenon of Konstanty Regamey Jr and His Personality, held at the Institute of Musicology of the Jagiellonian University and attended, among others, by the composer’s Swiss family (Magdalena Högl-Arkuszewska, Jacek Arkuszewski), his Polish relatives (Teresa Maciejasz, Bogdan Galiński), Ukrainian scholars (Larisa Yvchenko, Valentina Kuzyk, Lena Taranchenko), researchers from Bratislava (Lubomir Chalupka) and Moscow (Levon Hakopyan) as well as Polish experts (Katarzyna Naliwajek, Ryszard Gabryś, Alicja Jarzębska, Małgorzata Woźna-Stankiewicz, Adam Kaczyński, and the conference organiser Jerzy Stankiewicz).

In Ukraine, the greatest contributions to the study of Régamey Sr’s oeuvre come from Larisa Yvchenko, PhD, who (with Evgeniya Kozhushko) prepared for print the monumental catalogue of Henryk Indzhishek’s music publishing house (Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine: Kyiv, 2021). Work on this catalogue was inspired, among others, by my search for Régamey Sr’s works, as Yvchenko’s paper delivered during the 2007 Cracow conference already indicated. The catalogue attempts to date his published songs and piano works as well as to systematise our knowledge of Régamey Sr’s output and establish its chronology.

A recent major step in the Régamey research was the publication in 2023, already during the war with Russia, of the sixth volume of Ukrainska muzichna entsiklopedia [Ukrainian Music Encyclopaedia], which includes entries for Régamey father and son, translated and edited in Ukrainian on the basis of updated versions of my Polish-language entries published in Encyklopedia muzyczna PWM [PWM Edition’s Music Encyclopaedia] (ed. Elżbieta Dziębowska).

I should finally list the persons to whom the study of Konstanty Kazimierz Régamey Sr’s life and work owes the most in Ukraine:

Svetlana Regame, the composer’s daughter, a retired engineer living in Moscow,
Larisa Yvchenko, elder custodian at the Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv,
Ivan Hamkalo, distinguished conductor at the Taras Shevchenko National Opera and Ballet Theatre of Ukraine in Kyiv,
Valentina Kuzyk, music historian from the M. F. Rilskyi Institute of Art, Folklore, and Ethnology, an editor of Ukrainska muzichna entsiklopedia,
Ihor Shcherbakov, composer, ex-president of the National Union of Composers of Ukraine,
Olena Taranchenko, music theorist at the Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music in Kyiv,
Oleksandr Shamonin from Radio Kyiv,
Svitlana Polyakovska from the State Conservatory in Vinnytsia.

We also owe our sincere gratitude to Ms Bożena Ziółkowska (Wrocław) for her frequent assistance in elucidating the complexities of the Régamey family tree and for allowing us to use the family photographs, representing three or more recent generations.

Jerzy Stankiewicz