Prince Joseph Poniatowski suffered from the misfortune of many talented men: he had a surfeit of gifts. Contemporaries were so bemused about how to sum him up that it seemed easier to remain silent. But it does not seem fanciful to suggest that if he had died last week, instead of 142 years ago, he would have been a candidate for an obituary in national papers; not just the long account of his obsequies and mourners which appeared in The Daily Telegraph at his death.
Although a Pole, he was born in exile at Rome in 1816, the illegitimate kinsman of Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last King of Poland. He was brought up in Florence, where he won a prize for mathematics at 17 and was trained in music. Entering the diplomatic service of the Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, who legitimated him with the title Prince of Monte Rotondo, he served as ambassador to Brussels, London and Paris while enjoying an exotic reputation as a composer.
Beginning with his first opera, Giovanni da Procida in Florence in 1838, when he sang the tenor part, he went on to compose some dozen other works in the Italian and French traditions, demonstrating melodic inventiveness and effective orchestration in styles reminiscent of Rossini and Donizetti.
Poniatowski’s problem was that he never put down permanent roots. As so often with those on the move and working in different styles and different countries, his work was never gathered together for consideration as a whole, and was too easily forgotten. His admired four-act Pierre de Médicis earned no permanent place in the canon of any country any more than his comic Don Desiderio; and his fellow Poles saw no reason to follow the career of a countryman who lived most of his life abroad.
Ironically, the exception were the English who long remembered his fast-paced composition The Yeoman’s Wedding Song, the fruit of his first sojourn here in the 1850s, which remained a popular favourite long after his death. Today the tenor Frank Titterton can be seen vigorously singing it on the internet, and PG Wodehouse referred to it in six novels, written between 1926 and 1973; his character Bertie Wooster claimed that it was guaranteed to earn calls for at least two encores whenever he sang it at village concerts.
In his later years Poniatowski moved to Paris, where he became director of the Théâtre-Italien and caught the eye of Emperor Napoleon III, who gave him French citizenship and appointed him an honorary senator. But after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, Poniatowski followed Napoleon into exile in England. He was preparing to move to the United States when they both died within a short time of each other and were buried in the Catholic cemetery at Chislehurst. The Emperor’s coffin was later removed by the Empress Eugénie to his splendid mausoleum at Farnborough Abbey, but Poniatowski’s grave lay long neglected and overgrown until it was restored three years ago.
Today the age of princes has faded, but it has not entirely vanished. We can never hear the quality of his acclaimed voice, but there are manuscripts and libretti of some of his operas, as well as his seven-part Mass in F, written in 1867, which was rediscovered after the restoration of his grave. Dedicated to King Louis I of Portugal, this was given its British premiere at Westminster Cathedral Hall last June to raise money for the Polish Knights of Malta’s hospital in Barczewo for those suffering from strokes and recovering from car crashes.
The concert was a great event. The audience included Cardinal Vincent Nichols and some 12 Poniatowski kinsmen from France, America and elsewhere, as well as the Polish ambassador Witold Sobków. All listened to the Australian soprano Justine Viani, the Polish mezzo soprano Violetta Gawara, the Portuguese tenor Alberto Sousa, the Italian bass Feruccio Finetti and the Polish pianist Grzegorz Biegas, along with a mixed choir entirely made up of Polish Catholics.
Under the baton of Stephen Ellery they gave an uplifting performance which, as Cardinal Nichols said afterwards, was filled with love and faith, most strikingly in the Incarnatus est of the Creed and the Agnus Dei. Although no expert, I have found the echo of the Kyrie haunting my memory after listening to the recording on CD.
Coming out of the performance afterwards one could feel the confident, joyous spirit of the score. It exuded the assurance of those Poles in the audience descended from the first and most successful post-war wave to Britain and also of the Latin liturgy which is steadily reviving in this country.
Mass in F by Prince Joseph Poniatowski, a double album with CD and DVD film, is available from MSS Consulting, Widecombe Lodge, 2 Brentham Way, London W5 1BJ or [email protected]; £15.95 plus p&p
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