Henryk Opieński
Henryk Opieński (1870–1942) was a Polish composer, violinist, teacher, administrator and musicologist. He became an important figure in Chopin studies because of his writings and the letters about Chopin that he collected.
He was born in Kraków and began playing the violin with Vincent Singer. When he was 12, he took part in a playful moment involving tolling the Sigismund Bell with three other boys, Stanisław Wyspiański, Józef Mehoffer and Stanisław Estreicher.
From 1888 to 1892 he studied chemistry at a university in Prague to please his parents, while continuing violin study with Ferdinand Lachner. Between 1892 and 1894 he returned to Kraków and worked in the chemical industry, eventually becoming the controller of distilleries at Żółkiew and Rzeszów. He then resumed composing with Władysław Żeleński.
In 1895 he moved to Paris, where he studied violin with Władysław Gorski and composition with Zygmunt Stojowski and Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who became a close friend. In 1897–1898 he studied composition with Heinrich Urban in Berlin while still working as a violinist. He returned to Paris in 1898 to study with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum. He also played violin with the orchestra of Édouard Colonne from 1899 to 1901.
Back in Poland from 1901, he continued as a violinist and founded the choir of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. From 1904 to 1906 he worked with conductor Arthur Nikisch and musicologist Hugo Riemann in Leipzig. His operatic conducting debut came in 1906 at the Municipal Theatre in Lviv. From 1908 to 1911 he conducted in Warsaw’s theatre orchestra and was an assistant conductor to Grzegorz Fitelberg at the Warsaw Philharmonic. Starting in 1909, he taught at the Warsaw Musical Society.
In January 1910, to mark the centenary of Chopin’s birth, he conducted the Polish premiere of Paderewski’s Symphony in B minor, “Polonia” (1908). In 1911 he founded the first Polish magazine devoted to musicology, Musical Quarterly (Kwartalnik musyczny), which he edited until 1914. He also edited Echo muzyczne. In 1913–14 he was the musical director of the newly opened Polish Theatre in Warsaw. In 1914 he earned a Doctor of Music degree from the University of Leipzig, writing a dissertation on the Hungarian lutenist Balint Bakfark.
During World War I he lived in Switzerland. In 1917 he founded a mixed choir in Lausanne called “Motet et Madrigal,” which specialized in early music from the 16th and 17th centuries. After the war he directed the National Conservatory of Music in Poznań from 1920 to 1926, while holding various other administrative roles. His students there included Stanislas Niedzielski and Stefan Bolesław Poradowski.
In 1926 he moved permanently to Morges, Switzerland, after marrying his second wife, Lydia Barblan (later known as Lydia Barblan-Opieńska), a singing teacher and composer. He resumed leading Motet et Madrigal and took the group on tours across Europe. Although he was invited to join the jury of the 1927 International Chopin Piano Competition, he could not participate. His collected Chopin letters, edited and translated by E. L. Voynich, were published in 1931. From 1932 to 1936 he served as president of the Société de Musique Vaudois in Lausanne.
Henryk Opieński died in Morges in 1942 at the age of 72. A street in Morges, Allée Henryk Opieński, is named in his honor. His own compositions are not well known today.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 08:39 (CET).