LOCAL HERO

David Kettle examines the history of the 18th-century Polish–Lithuanian immigrant Felix Yaniewicz: a resourceful violin virtuoso, composer and impresario who co-founded the first Edinburgh Music Festival in 1815

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The chance discovery in November 2019 of an 18th-century square piano, recently restored, up for sale online, led to the unearthing of a little-known but compelling figure in European music – violinist and composer Felix Yaniewicz. Just as importantly, however, it also shone a bright new light not only on Edinburgh as a vibrant musical centre around 1800, but also on the pivotal role that immigrant European musicians have long played in British musical life.

But let’s start at the beginning. Publishing and research training consultant Josie Dixon – who happens to be Yaniewicz’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter – had known about the existence of her illustrious forebear since she was a child. ‘There was a beautiful portrait of him hanging in my grandmother’s cottage,’ she remembers, ‘which was where my mother grew up, so somehow it was as if he was overseeing our family’s music making.’

Another artefact she remembers is an elaborately decorated double violin case, which had been part of the family’s possessions for some time. ‘There’s a family legend that it had contained a Stradivari violin, and since looking more into Yaniewicz’s life, I’ve discovered documentation indicating that the instrument was sold around 1845, just three years before he died. I suspect he was settling his affairs, aiming to leave his wife and children comfortably off. The documentation says that the Stradivari was sold for £60, that it was an instrument “well known to Mr Hill”, and that it was now in the possession of a New York collector. But beyond that, we don’t know much more – Isuspect we never will.’

But there was, she admits, plenty she was unaware of. ‘All I really knew was that he’d been a celebrated violinist, and that he’d had a hand in founding Edinburgh’s first music festival. I had no idea he was also a composer, nor that he had a business dealing in musical instruments. And I didn’t know anything about his travels around Europe.’

It was purely by chance that Dixon stumbled across a square piano bearing Yaniewicz’s name (indicating that he’d sold it rather than made it). ‘It was an advert for a beautifully restored instrument that I found on a website called Friends of Square Pianos. It had been posted by the restorer Douglas Hollick, who’d finished work on it but hadn’t yet found a buyer.’

For Dixon, it felt like a sign. She resolved to buy the piano and to find it a permanent home in Edinburgh (Yaniewicz’s final residence – we’ll come to that), in the process bringing to light much more about this rather ghostly family figure. The end result was an exhibition, recitals and talks celebrating Yaniewicz’s achievements at the Georgian House, Edinburgh, and there are concerts this December given by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (SCO) that explicitly set out to recreate an event that Yaniewicz himself might have directed in the Scottish capital at the start of the 19th century.

Indeed, Yaniewicz’s life was really quite remarkable – not just in terms of his own far-flung travels and wide-ranging activities, but also in the way that it encapsulates so much about musical performance, composition and entrepreneurship at the turn of the 19th century (even if many details remain rather sketchy).

He was born in 1762 in Vilnius, at that time part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and first found work as a 15-year-old violinist at the Polish royal chapel, where he so impressed his arts-loving patron, King Stanisław August Poniatowski, that the monarch paid for him to travel and develop his skills. First he went to the bright musical lights of Vienna, where he’s known to have encountered Haydn and Mozart. It’s even been suggested – in fact, stated as fact by Mozart’s 19th-century biographer Otto Jahn – that Mozart composed the (now lost) Andante in A major K470 specifically for Yaniewicz. ‘It’s a great story,’ admits Dixon, ‘and we know that the work existed, because it’s got a Knumber. But as far as I can tell, the only source of the idea that it was written for Yaniewicz is Jahn’s biography. There doesn’t appear to be any primary evidence, so we’ll never know for sure.’ As with so much to do with Yaniewicz’s life, it’s conjecture: Dixon points to the many Polish archives that were destroyed during the Second World War, meaning a dearth of concrete facts about his early activities.

VIOLIN CASE PHOTO UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH/ST CECILIA’S HALL, JONATHAN SANTA MARIA BOUQUET

Let’s go back to Yaniewicz’s story, which has only just begun. From Vienna, he continued his travels to Italy – Milan, Florence and Rome – and then in 1787 to Paris, where he made his debut as a soloist with the Concert Spirituel at the Tuileries Palace, also finding himself a patron in the Duke of Orléans. But being just two years before the Revolution, this was a turbulent time in the French capital, and Yaniewicz quickly fled across the Channel to Britain. During his London years, he befriended Muzio Clementi, launched himself into instrument dealing, published many of his own works and performed alongside Haydn during the composer’s sojourns; and in 1813, alongside Clementi, he was among the founding members of the Royal Philharmonic Society. He then moved to Liverpool, where in 1799 he married Eliza Breeze, and around 1810 sold the ‘Yaniewicz and Green’ square piano. And in 1815 he finally settled in Edinburgh.

Arriving in the Scottish capital, Yaniewicz found an active music scene already up and running. Brianna Robertson-Kirkland is a lecturer in historical musicology at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland who has carried out extensive research into this period in Scottish music, and is planning a book on the subject. ‘Italian impresario Domenico Corri had been in Edinburgh since 1771, when he was invited to organise the Edinburgh Musical Society’s concerts at St Cecilia’s Hall, just off the Royal Mile in the Old Town,’ she explains. That older concert hall still exists, and is now back in use as a venue following extensive restoration. It counts as Scotland’s oldest purpose-built concert hall, constructed in 1762 by the Edinburgh Musical Society (its instrument museum, incidentally, now houses Yaniewicz’s elaborately inlaid double violin case).

Top A 1799 portrait of Felix Yaniewicz Opposite A watercolour of the 1819 Edinburgh Festival by James Skene (1775–1864) Above Detail from the square piano bearing Yaniewicz’s name Right Felix Yaniewicz’s double violin case, on display at the instrument museum at St Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh

Eliza Breeze, wife of Yaniewicz

‘Domenico’s brother Natale arrived in 1785,’ Robertson-Kirkland continues, ‘and had his own concert series: he owned Corri’s Rooms, which was another performance space, at the top of Broughton Street in the New Town.’

Some Edinburgh history and geography might not go amiss here. The Old Town, clustered around the Royal Mile running down from Edinburgh Castle to Holyrood Palace, has existed since medieval times, whereas the city’s New Town, famed for its elegant Georgian architecture, was designed and built in stages between 1767 and around 1850, to ease its older neighbour’s congestion and unsanitary conditions – particularly for the city’s wealthier residents. ‘Corri’s Rooms was where all the New Town folk would go for their concerts,’ Robertson-Kirkland says. ‘Natale Corri had set it up when residents were moving into the newer, more fashionable part of the city.’

Yaniewicz had first visited Edinburgh as early as 1804, where he played three subscription concerts at Corri’s Rooms, including one of his own concertos described in a review of the time as ‘a perfect masterpiece of the art. In fire, spirit, elegance and finish, Mr Yaniewicz’s violin concerto cannot be excelled by any performance in Europe.’ When he arrived for good in 1815, it was amid a thriving Edinburgh music scene, one into which he could incorporate himself as a violinist and composer, and also take in new directions, introducing Edinburgh audiences to the newest music of Haydn, Mozart and especially Beethoven.

It was in Edinburgh that Yaniewicz made what was probably his most distinctive mark, as one of the founder members of the very first Edinburgh Musical Festival, forerunner of today’s gargantuan summer festival in the city. That inaugural event took place between 30 October and 5 November 1815, involving elaborate morning concerts at the imposing Parliament House (bringing together Haydn’s Creation and Handel’s Messiah with Haydn symphonies and violin concertos by Yaniewicz himself ) and also wide-ranging orchestral evening concerts directed by Yaniewicz at Corri’s Rooms.

It’s precisely the kind of Edinburgh Musical Festival concert that Yaniewicz would have directed that the SCO will recreate this December, under conductor Peter Whelan. They bring together a surprisingly broad mix of music that says much about the richness of musical activity going on in Edinburgh at the time. Alongside mainstream classical works by Handel and Haydn (the ‘Military’ Symphony, which would have been unveiled during Haydn’s second visit to London a couple of decades earlier), there’s an overture by Fife-based Thomas Erskine, Earl of Kellie; some arrangements of Scottish traditional tunes; and, of course, a violin concerto by Yaniewicz himself, no.3 in A, intended to showcase both his performance prowess and his compositional sophistication.

‘The first two movements of the concerto at least are very Mozartean,’ explains Edinburghborn violinist Colin Scobie, who performs the solo part with the SCO. ‘Yaniewicz clearly had an affinity with Haydn and Mozart, and he’d studied and performed their music. You can tell it’s written by a violinist, though, because there’s a lot of virtuosity in the piece, but nothing falls outside the hands. I know that when I’m practising myself, I love to just fiddle around on the violin, improvising and generally mucking about. In some ways it feels like Yaniewicz might have been the same: it sounds like he probably improvised quite a lot of it and then wrote it out – which, of course, was the style of the times. We know that Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were all fantastic improvisers. And that makes it great fun to play.’

We’ve traced Yaniewicz’s life from Lithuania to his final stop in Edinburgh – where he’s buried in the city’s Warriston Cemetery, and commemorated by a plaque in Great King Street in the New Town, where he lived. But the big question is: why is any of this still relevant to us now? It’s not only because of the new research that’s been carried out into a rather overlooked violinist, fascinating though Yaniewicz is. A greater awareness of his varied activities also reflects on some broader issues that are very much still with us today.

The first of them is the way in which Yaniewicz and his contemporaries established, almost by chance, the kinds of musical performances we still experience today. This was very much a British invention, according to Robertson-Kirkland. ‘At this time, Britain didn’t have musical activities supported by the court – in fact, the monarch didn’t have a court that employed musicians. That’s quite different from other European models. And particularly in Italy, many musicians would be employed by the Catholic church – in Britain, the Protestant churches at the time really didn’t like a lot of the music that was being produced. So it was secular music that was driving Britain’s emerging music industry, and there were a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs in setting up concert series, composing and publishing music.’ All of which Yaniewicz explored in his wide-ranging activities.

‘YOU CAN TELL HIS CONCERTO IS WRITTEN BY A V IOLINIST, BEC AUSE THERE’S A LOT OF V IRTUOSIT Y, BUT NOTHING FALLS OUTSIDE THE HANDS’ – COLIN SCOBIE, VIOLIN

Yaniewicz and wife Eliza’s grave in Warriston Cemetery

Commemorative plaque in Great King Street, Edinburgh

PHOTOS STEPHEN C DICKSON

Although similar activities were taking place – and on a far larger scale – in London, there was something about Edinburgh’s smaller size, denser population and, it has to be said, generally quite wealthy patrons that gave it a particular advantage. ‘In London,’ explains Robertson-Kirkland, ‘musicians from mainland Europe would come over, usually stay for a season or two, and then go back again or travel on elsewhere. The difference in Edinburgh is that musicians would settle and stay in the city for a long time.’ It’s true of Yaniewicz himself, who lived and worked in the city from 1815 until his death in 1848. It’s true, too, of the Corri family, who were already long established in the city’s music making by the time of Yaniewicz’s arrival.

In addition, it’s an unavoidable fact that much of Edinburgh’s rich musical culture was established by immigrant musicians. ‘I was very mindful of the fact that I was researching Yaniewicz at just the time we were leaving the European Union,’ admits Dixon, ‘and that what enabled him to come to Britain and do everything he did was what we’d now call freedom of movement. They didn’t have passports then, of course, but music was Yaniewicz’s passport, and it’s what enabled him to come here and be entrepreneurial, and to create something important.’

‘Anybody could have started an Edinburgh festival at any point in time,’ Robertson-Kirkland points out. ‘All of the Scottish noblemen and wealthy landowners had the money to do it. But it took European – Italian, Polish–Lithuanian and some German – musicians to do it. I think it’s partly because they could see the potential for a bigger music event in Edinburgh, and partly because, frankly, after they’d travelled thousands of miles across Europe, they were willing to put in the creative and administrative work to take the plunge. They were also welcomed into the city and integrated into the city’s musical life.’

There’s an interesting side effect, too, in terms of the music itself that was performed and created. Not only did Yaniewicz and his fellow immigrant musicians reinvigorate musical performances, but also they injected new ideas and new forms into the very music they were performing. ‘Audiences were experiencing a particularly rich mix at that time,’ explains Robertson-Kirkland, a fact borne out by the SCO’s eclectic, Yaniewicz-inspired programme.

‘HE OBV IOUSLY WANTS TO PUT HIS OWN POLISH STAMP ON HIS MUSIC’ – COLIN SCOBIE

‘There was a lot of Scottish music being performed, for example, but these immigrant musicians began to change how it sounded. The Italians in particular put in a lot more Italianstyle ornamentation, and took much more of an Italianate approach to it. This inspired Edinburgh publisher George Thomson to curate his own set of publications, which is almost a kind of Italian–Scottish music, and he went on to commission a whole bunch of European composers, including Haydn, Beethoven and Weber, to compose settings of Scottish songs.’ In the case of his Third Violin Concerto (featured in the SCO’s programme), Yaniewicz turned to his own background for inspiration. ‘He’s looking back to his own Polish roots in the final movement of the concerto, which is a kind of mazurka,’ explains Scobie. ‘I’ve looked at a few of his other violin concertos, and it seems to be a theme in the way he writes. He obviously wants to put his own Polish stamp on the music.’

Scratch the surface of Yaniewicz’s life and activities in Britain, and you quickly discover a remarkable musical and cultural richness, one that’s reflected in the style-straddling music that he both composed and incorporated in his own concerts. And, as Robertson-Kirkland reminds us, it’s a richness that can be all too easily lost. ‘If we stop the kind of movement between countries that Yaniewicz enjoyed, the issue is what it means for us in the future. It’s a question of where that kind of vibrancy and richness in cultural and civic life comes from, and how fragile it is – and, in many ways, how it can all too easily be simply switched off.’

The SCO presents Felix Yaniewicz and the Scottish Enlightenment, 7–9 December, in Dumfries, Edinburgh and Glasgow respectively